Musical Illiteracy – Part 1

| Dec 16, 2014 |

I recently had an experience with a student that was shocking. This student asked to take a lesson in preparation for an upcoming orchestral trumpet audition the following week. One of the pieces on the audition list was a standard piece from the orchestral repertoire, although not a standard audition piece. It was immediately obvious that the student had never heard the piece and therefore the interpretation of the specific excerpt was uninformed and simply wrong for the passage involved. I have experienced this so many times in  Europe, and so while this was upsetting it certainly came as no surprise.

Later that night I mentioned this to my wife, who was formerly a nurse and now teaches KUMON, which is a learning system out of Japan. Cathy is not a professional musician but loves classical music. She said, “A musician who doesn’t know that piece? Unbelievable.” Sadly, my shock was that I didn’t find it unbelievable but rather all too believable.

A few months earlier I had a meeting with all of the brass students at the Norwegian Music Academy, where I now teach. Over the course of an hour I played a short excerpt from 10 standard audition pieces and asked the students to identify the pieces. Only I didn’t play the excerpts asked on auditions but instead other important (and recognizable) selections from the same piece. The results were profoundly depressing. From a total of around 30 students, not one student was able to recognize the beginning of either Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Petroushka, or a rousing passage from Also Sprach Zarathustra, for example.

To me this indicates that although the vast majority of brass students in the U.S. have a better and deeper knowledge of orchestral repertoire than students in Europe. After all, Germany as an example has an incredibly rich and long classical music tradition, especially when compared with the U.S. – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Hindemith, and so forth. With such a rich tradition, one would think that the great masterpieces would be a daily part of life for a music student. But that is simply not the case – one trombone student in Freiburg admitted never having heard a Mahler Symphony. As my wife Cathy would say – unbelievable.

Perhaps one solution would be that conservatories could require all students to take a musical history survey course. This would not be a normal music history course, but rather would be for students who want to be professionals and who should know the standard orchestral repertoire. As simplistic as this seems it might possibly be a beginning.

The greater hope is that students would begin their conservatory study knowing a certain amount of repertoire (meaning an entire piece, not just the required audition excerpt) and would be eager to learn new masterpieces. Unfortunately this just doesn’t seem to be the case, at least among brass playing students. But this is a very important aspect of being a professional musician – love and knowledge of the music we play. Both students and schools must do better.