Receiving some unexpectedly heartfelt thanks from a couple of my students over the Christmas break reminded me of my own school days.
When I was 14 my high school music teacher Erica introduced me to recordings of the recent 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard. In six talks called The Unanswered Question, Leonard Bernstein addressed a group of linguistics students about how to approach an understanding of music through the structures of spoken language. It was a sophisticated mix, using sentence structure, syntactical and grammatical universals, and poetic and rhetorical techniques as springboards from which to understand the structure and the meaning of music. My teacher could see that I was hungry for musical knowledge, so she took me aside to watch at least the first two lectures together on her VCR, and she patiently tried to explain some of the material I didn’t understand. Which was most of it.
On so many levels I was astonished and amazed
- that music was so beautifully complicated and explainable, a science and an art simultaneously. I really had no idea.
- that education meant spending time thinking and talking about these things.
- that I could actually catch a glimpse of some of the truths he was talking about.
- that there were books about these ideas that I could read.
- that someone was kind enough to take the time to introduce me to something she thought I would enjoy and that might be important to me.
Sitting through these lectures was one of the most significant events of my life, one for which I cannot express enough gratitude, one that has had profound effects on what I think, how I think, and what I do. It has shaped my love for inquiry, my cross-disciplinary approach, and my insistence on informed musical intelligence in my teaching practice.
I have watched all of the lectures many times, and I return to them fondly, for the nostalgia factor, for their perceptive insight, and most importantly to re-experience the passion that Bernstein demonstrates so infectiously and with such earnest and sober excitement.
On my latest viewing I have been astonished and amazed
- how my teaching style clearly evolved from Bernstein’s informal paracletic technique.
- how much the foundation of what I teach is based on Bernstein’s ideas.
- how wide his sphere of interest was, and his spotting of similarities across disciplines.
- how fearless he was in expecting understanding from his audience.
Although Bernstein plays a little fast and loose with his material in order to reinforce his beliefs and to sell some occasionally questionable ideas, the talks were enough to plant in me the spirit of broad investigation, and to make permissible wide ranging and risky inquiry from which greater truths are allowed to emerge. I don’t agree with him on certain structural linguistic parallels, for example, but at least it opens up and explores a new road for research that might lead to something helpful and significant.
Erica’s kindness in introducing me to these lectures is also not to be underestimated. She was a misfit foreign teacher, at the school for a short time, who took a risk on a bright boy from an unpromising background, on whom she spent a lot of time and effort because she believed in the power of education. She was succeeded by a string of teachers, place-holders really, one of whom thought that Music Education meant bellowing along to Wagner and reminiscing about his operatic career. Erica was far more selfless in grappling with the subject itself, and not for the benefit of her own ego. She expected me to rise to the occasion and at least try to absorb some of the subject matter, she wished for great things both from me and for me beyond my environment, and she showed me how it could be done. I am forever grateful, and I am sorry that I will never be able to tell her; we lost touch, and then she died while still young.
So, three things to take away.
- When you teach, teach widely and thankfully. When you learn, learn widely and thankfully.
- Expect the best of your students and of yourself.
- Say thank you to your teachers while you still can. They may have changed your life.