When you play tennis, it’s natural to search out someone that plays much better than you. Ability seems to rise to the occasion, and you surprise yourself how much your technique has improved if you find that your opponent is someone to reckon with. Similarly, playing someone less able than you will occasion simple embarrassing flubs, mistakes not worthy of even a beginner, and you will be left wondering why you ever took up the game.
I advise my students that when they go off to college and beyond they should make friends with all their new musical genius friends, but most particularly all the most proficient players from around the country and the world, so that their piano technique and musicality will be challenged to keep up when there are opportunities to play together. It’s a general principle that hanging around worse players makes you worse, and hanging around better players makes you better. So, hang around better players. D’uh.
One of my school friends had a profound influence on me. Vincent was a gifted piano player, gifted far beyond his years. He had a casual competence and a complete mastery of his material, his knowledge of which was wise and deep. I was astonished at his proficiency, how my tastes were dwarfed by his eclecticism, how my small town experience was overshadowed by his worldly musical wisdom. (At 15 he was also the piano player in the National Youth Orchestra.) I mistook his precociousness for failings on my own part, and raced along behind him to keep up with his genius. If he played some Shostakovitch, so did I (in private.) If he played some Ravel, so did I (in private.) This accelerated my education to embrace risky repertoire, Debussy Etudes and Rachmaninov Preludes, pieces that I had no business attempting, but which I assumed were bread and butter to students my age, because Vincent, a year younger than me, made them look so easy. I am indebted to him for raising my game and teaching me a broad vocabulary of musical expression. Because of him I learned to widen my intake, to listen hungrily, and to try for what was beyond my reach.
Just as spending time around your talent-superiors is a habit to cultivate, spending time around your talent-inferiors brings its own consequences. I curse my enduring love for the novels of Agatha Christie, whose plots are unbeatable but whose writing style is generally appalling. In my boyhood I absorbed them eagerly, without understanding the author’s idiosyncratic style.
In her chatty flood of consciousness Christie will often use and reuse particularly chosen words, circling around them and returning to pick at them like a vulture at a carcass. Her monotony forces the reader to notice THIS and not that. Again, THIS and not that, which produces characters of astonishing thinness, who seem to have very few traits except THIS and not that, who lack the depth, the complexity, and the contradictions that make real people worth knowing. In Dead Man’s Mirror, a story of 23,500 words, Lady Chevenix-Gore is referred to as ‘vague’ eleven times. I doubt that there is a mention of the noble lady in which her leitmotif does not appear, wound around her like her ‘purple and orange oriental-looking silk garments.’ Many of those mentions cluster together inside neighboring paragraphs; within a passage of 200 words, the term appears three times.
Christie had a sticky brain, one that does not let go of a word that has outlived its usefulness, a repetitive tic that is death to truthful characterization. Novels teach us about other people, how they think, how they make their way in the multi-color world; dismissing them as worth only a single adjective reduces them to drab and shallow caricatures.
So my youthful habits were a mixed bag – on the one hand, wide and appreciative listening and playing habits that taught my ears the language of experience as expressed through all kinds of music, and on the other an underestimation of the human condition, absorbing AC’s personally propagandized view of the world, vaguely expecting to meet monochrome, vague people who speak vaguely with vague vagueness.
Thank you Vincent. Thank you, Agatha.