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I've decided that I'll start posting little articles and essays of mine here as a minimal form of my long-gone Hatrack community activity. This article wasn't accepted as Op-Ed in any of the papers I offered it to last winter; too intellectual. Sounds perfect for Hatrack! No? ;-)
The Russian School / Jonathan Howard
Laches: Well but, Socrates; did you never observe that some persons, who have had no teachers, are more skilful than those who have, in some things? Socrates: Yes, Laches, I have observed that; but you would not be very willing to trust them if they only professed to be masters of their art, unless they could show some proof of their skill or excellence in one or more works. —Plato, Laches
There is a Russian school. I do not mean by this any specific school, educating its pupils in the Russian language; I mean that when one learns about composers, painters or writers coming from a ‘school of music’, a ‘school of art’ or a ‘school of writing’ – there is the Russian high-romantic approach to these artistic matters. This is noticeable in the common themes and structures underlying the novels of the likes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as well as the stylistics in the orchestral works of ‘The Five’, and similar concepts arise in the works and performances of the contemporary fine-artists and performer-artists of that era.
There is something about the methods of education common in 19th century Russia that have held out through the years to the very end of the Communist era. It is with reason that many Russian maths, physics and computer students know what the top curriculum in Israel offers in twelfth grade by the time they are perhaps fourteen. There is something about the obsession with academic mastery and a thorough and extensive knowledge and understanding of certain fields that is grounded in the way that Czarist (and later on Soviet) Russia educated its students. I studied recorder and musical theory as a toddler, with a fine Israeli recorder-teacher and a Russian theory-teacher, and it is perhaps little wonder that I bit the tip of my recorder for half a year yet sustained my level of theoretical understanding to that which makes an excellent conversation with someone after twelve years of musical study. A friend of mine, studying both piano and guitar, noted a clear difference between her Russian piano teacher – small woman who can tell whether or not her pupil has been practicing – and her Israeli guitar teacher who couldn’t care less so long as he gets his income. Likewise, when I phoned an organist in Jerusalem to ask her whether she would be willing to tutor a baroque-lover interested in learning how to play Bach on the pipe-organ, she replied in her thick Russian accent that ‘one must have had a thorough grounding in piano technique prior to even thinking about the organ’. For my own reasons, I had refrained from studying piano specifically in order not to hinder any technically conflicting musical education I sought, thereby making the organ inaccessible to me for many years to come.
A German friend of mine who heard this story cursed the Russian method of education: the historical conflict of the pedagogy of arts and sciences, no doubt. Yet I am very thankful to the hi-tech and medicine that throve in Israel following mass Russian immigration, and no less thankful to the new wealth of performer-artists, musicians and fine-artists that have in part made it to the forefront of the Israeli cultural scene. I am thankful for the fact that going to hear a concert, I hear world-class oboists, violinists and conductors performing locally and affordably.
Yet I have long-since had a quibble to do with this philosophy of education. I shall set an example: let there be a topic of the arts, be it scientific methodology, musicianship or any other, and let there be a child learning this topic the ‘Russian’ way – umpteen rehearsals where one is required time and again to rehearse the same exercises until technique has been mastered. The pupil is frowned upon and even scolded, in an unforgiving manner, if he does not remember all relevant details when writing down the conclusions of his experiment – and God forbid his hand should sway out of line! Likewise he is understood to be able to play that horribly difficult arpeggio on the violin without moving his finger by as much as two cents of a semitone. If he fails, the pupil is to do it once and twice more, again and again, before having mastered the necessary mechanics with his eyes closed; and only subsequently proceed to the next lesson, one of many dozens he is to encounter in those years of study, and be motivated to absolute excellence and perfection of the necessary techniques. Yet all that is but a side-matter to the real importance of that study, which is the artistic understanding through the mechanics. And yet, in order to perform the art with the best interpretation, one is required not to be bottle-necked or limited by mechanical laziness or ineptitude. The corollary of this pedagogic paradigm is that there is little point in technical mastery if the form does not come to serve the meaning, as undoubtedly would be confirmed by any traditional poet.
One must wonder, though, at whether an eight-year-old treble who’s already recording for fancy labels, or a fourteen-year-old prodigy solving complex problems in linear algebra and advanced number theory giving Bertrand Russell a run for his money, is able to understand the full emotional meaning of the challenge being tackled. Even Pablo Casals, the lauded cellist, said that he never fully understood the greatness of Bach’s six cello suites; and he – being arguably the greatest scholar and performer of them – who would be better qualified to understand the full greatness of the suites? One must wonder at the claim of being able at the age of ten to be know all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas by heart, including the finger-torturing Appassionata and Hammerklavier (as Camille Saint-Saëns claimed to be able to), when one would probably have only limited understanding of them, no matter how great a prodigy he was.
I was once told that the reason one never hears of child-prodigy writers is because it takes a certain level of experience and understanding before one is fully able to express himself upon the page in text – a medium of art where mechanical fireworks are of no use, and where content and form are not physically limiting. One might be a prodigy, able to dance as Billy Elliot did at the age of twelve, but lacking the understanding. I have heard on a TV show an eight-year old prodigy play a Mozart piano sonata ‘as if Beethoven had written it’, instantly, upon request; but did he really understand the emotional meaning of what he was playing as Yeats understood the emotional meaning of what he was writing as ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man’?
The answer is a no, at least in some of the above cases. But why should one spend five years, ten years or even fifteen years, labouring at eternal mechanics before comprehending the amazing depth of what is being done? Why should one be able to calculate difficult mathematical equations, when he only understands the meaningful application of them ten years later? I only recently discovered what I regard as rarely parallelled brilliance in the violins’ part in the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Had I been a violinist, prodigy or not, able to play that part, or having played it umpteen times throughout those five, ten or even fifteen years of a musical education, would I have been happier? Would I be satisfied when suddenly struck by the music’s brilliance and being able to perform it on my violin so intuitively and natively with the techniques ‘Russaically’ drilled into me for umpteen years by unforgiving teachers who expected me to understand one day what the meaning of all that work was? Or would I be horribly dissatisfied having studied for so many years, ruthlessly mastering the piano, being able to play Liszt’s extravaganzas flawlessly while blindfolded, only to then discover that in fact I couldn’t care less and my true love is the classical oboe?
It may be argued that children ought to be trained at the time when their brains and bodies are most malleable, and that those skills will come perhaps as a shocking surprise when interpretation and understanding come at a later age. The Russian school of pedagogy argues this way. Yet the Socratic question stands: is it of nobler and wiser virtue to study in the hope of understanding the meaning in the future through skill, or would one be better off only studying through the skilled understanding, and pleasure thereat, of that which is being studied?
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I believe schools should teach younger and faster! Languages should be taught young, it should be a law for every school to have at least a majority of bi-lingual students (should give 'em a tax break, and some grants for every 15% of bi-lingual students!)
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Thank ye! And T:man, I completely agree. I am bilingual (English, Hebrew). I have spent the past 8 years studying the fundamental book of Jewish law which is written chiefly in ancient Aramaic, and had spent the past year striving to converse with my grandmother in Yiddish (we met normally three days a week). To this day I struggle with both languages, though I am relatively skilled in grasping new grammatic material.
Had I been weaned on Latin weekly since second grade, and not just grabbed a random book in 9th or so, I would have been able to translate Milton's Latin works into English by now; but unfortunately that never happened. Likewise, my friends who took 6 years of Arabic in school are barely able to read short articles in the newspaper...
I agree, languages, including the language of visual art, and the language of music, should be taught early. But they should be taught well, less students get turned off it the way I had as a child.
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Excellent article, Jonathan! I don't know the answer. My own preference is for going where the meaning is and doing it for joy, not as a chore. I think you can hear the chore of repeating over and over and over in the expression of the music. But the techniques drilled into your fingers or brain as a child, perhaps that really does give you the tools you need later on when you have something to apply them to. I just don't know.
I know that Dostoyevsky had no kind of discipline at all about his writing. And his output was quite variable as well. Some of his stuff utterly stinks. Yet he is sublime when he hits his peaks. I'm amazed at him and awed by him.
My son was raised on the Russian method of doing a thing over and over again until it's 100% perfect. I'm so glad for your article because it makes me aware that this is more than OCD, it's probably also that cultural difference. I didn't know that about Russian teaching until just now. I keep telling him to loosen up and enjoy the doing, but now I understand where he's coming from.
Anyway, please do post more such articles here! This one was wonderful.
By the way, are you the Israeli kid who started posting when you were 12 or 13 as smallbigcityguy or something like that? Or have you always been Jonathan Howard here? I may be mixing the two of you up.
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Tante, I've been doing quite well. Yeshiva's amazing, so different from the rigid, disciplined system of school; they're much more into responsibility there (and I went to a school that focuses on 'values' rather than 'excellence'). It's intensive study, which makes the spiritual moments (Thursday night's spontaneous dancing at 22:00 SHARP) and celebrations (Shabbat in yeshiva) overwhelmingly powerful. Only problem is the food - I spent all of chag with two instances of food-poisoning in my Kishkes. Food's unhygenic and problematic; registered a complaint. If that fails, my mother will start shouting at them quite stereotypically...
Tatiana, indeed you're right that the question stands. I only fear that this might be a Socratic argument that is never really determined... I have always seemed to advocate the Russian system: I believe that before one writes post-modern, "out-of-the-box" literature, that they be acquainted *with* the box. That's why I sometimes consider Yeats and Thomas as the pinnacle of English literature, yet Billy Collins's poetry I lament as the pages are too glossy to be used as toilet paper. Transferred to musical education - before you hover off with spirit, you need to have the mechanical ("box") background. I've had Russian teachers, and they've done wonders to my knowledge, education and understanding; and one can often only be truly great when starting early. But there's a setback, and one can get turned off by the Russian method, giving up the treasures of music (as I had for many years) or art, or physics, or anything else.
I am Israeli, and I started posting at 14. However, I've (almost) always used my name, never used smallbigcityguy...
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quote:Originally posted by Jonathan Howard: I've been doing quite well. Yeshiva's amazing
Sorry to hear about the food poisoning. One of my brothers solved the problems with his yeshiva's food supply by volunteering in the kitchens . . . Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Get that food situation fixed! The other students will benefit greatly too, so you can do it for them as well as yourself.
I'd love more description of the spiritual moments in yeshiva, too, along with your essays and articles.
Thanks for setting me straight about you and smallbigcityguy. I remember now that when you came I wondered if you were him come back under a new name, then I realized you weren't.
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I am a classically trained bassoonist, and at least as I am understanding your discription of the "russian" education, it seems to be what I would have called kinetic training. It is a powerful method. I find my body responding in a trained way (fingering melodys from background music that I'm not even listening to) even though it has been decades since I have practiced in any real way. I have a similar facility with English. It takes some "shifting of gears" to have it in Spanish, which I learned as a young adult. I can appriciate your differentation between skill and art. I believe that I play piano more musically than my son although he has greater keyboard skills than I do. But, without an underlying kinetic knowledge I wouldn't be able to play at all. My early bassoon teachers used to speak of a "german" teaching method. Basically it was that a concept was explained once and you were expected to have command of it from that point on. An example that I remember painfully, was playing music written in the tenor cleff. I was using a German text or method book when that concept was presented. (my recollection was that it was a translated method by J. Wisenborn) There was a paragraph of text, five or six lines of notated examples and I was expected to have command of the skill. I always had to transpose in my head. And with my head that was a barrier to art, I can tell you.
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Ah, yes, the German method! I've seen that one plenty. =) I like the "slacker method" meaning practice this new concept as long as you like until you feel like you have it down, or get bored, whichever comes first.
It's true that the slacker method produces very few true virtuosos (virtuosi?).
But when I try the Russian method I tend to burn out quickly and never want to touch the instrument or game or skill or whateveritis again. You know?
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One of my brothers solved the problems with his yeshiva's food supply by volunteering in the kitchens . . . ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
