As events have evolved, it turns out my piano Easter/Spring break is revolving largely around the Department of Music at Oakland University. Last Friday, I was privileged to be invited by Professor Yin Zheng to observe a masterclass conducted by concert pianist Dr. Solungga Fang-Tzu Liu of Bowling Green State University. During the next five nights, there will be four more piano events by way of year-end finals recitals and the annual departmental recital. This is the time of year that Oakland University goes wild with its performance arts offerings. You may be asking what all this has to do with Hitler? Did my headline work? Did it grab your attention? I’m actually not being exploitative here at all; there is a connection between OU and Hitler, but it’s a good connection. (Wow, now I’ve really got your attention!)
But first things first. Last Friday’s masterclass was not my first. Two years ago, shortly after Pam had informed me about all the free piano offerings at OU, I stumbled upon news of a masterclass there to which the public was invited. For those of you not familiar with the concept of a masterclass, they are special two-hour sessions in which the entire department meets to listen to performances by four preselected students followed by a critique from the professor. The student plays for ten to fifteen minutes and a ten to fifteen minute critique follows. Sometimes these critiques are very genteel and encouraging, and sometimes harsh and upsetting. I believe the department holds a masterclass once per week with the faculty, but once or twice a year they bring in a guest, usually a very distingushed guest, to conduct the class. For two hours, four students perform and the rest of the class listens to the performance and the critique.
Two years ago, the class was conducted by a Russian pianist from Grand Valley State, a man who had been a Van Cliburn medalist some years ago. I was already quite familiar with Van Cliburn, which is basically the Oscar of piano competition, an annual event for which the winner is virtually guaranteed a career in concertizing. So I’m listening to this world class pianist from Grand Valley critique these four young students and am astonished at how similar his critiques are to the ones Pam gives me. At this point, I’ve been studying a little more than two years and Pam has been hammering away at me week after week about keeping my eighth-notes even and keeping the left hand light, two things I’m always struggling with, two things Pam on the one hand will not let me get lazy about, but on the other hand offering me steady reassurances that these are issues with which even the most advanced students struggle. So I’m listening to this gentleman gives these extraordinary kids the same comments that Pam gives me. I sort of felt like I had a leg up, that Pam was already on my case about these things. Perhaps by the time I’ve progressed as far as these kids have, I’ll have licked these pesky issues.
So last Friday, I am once again in the company of greatness. These special guest masterclasses are open to the public but I am the only public there. The same was true for the guy from Grand Valley and for virtually all the student recitals. I’m the only one there not from OU. Because of my beard (and I’m sure my age!), I suspect I stick out. I suspect that faculty and students alike are wondering who this bearded gentleman is always hanging around Varner Recital Hall. As I said in a previous post, I finally got up the nerve to introduce myself to Yin Zheng at her Mozart recital last month. At least now the head of the piano program knows why I’m hanging around. Dr. Zheng has had time to get three doctorates and has either just turned 30 or will be sometime in 2012. In her photos she certainly looks very dignified and classy, but in person when I see her on stage, she looks an awful lot like a 16 year old. A person so young and yet so accomplished just leaves me in awe. I’m not saying that in my dreams I may be able to play like her someday. I’m saying that in my dreams she may take me on as a student someday. Years from now, of course. Yes, in my dreams!
So I’m listening to Dr. Liu’s critiques of two young men and two young ladies as they perform. She is genteel in the extreme, unlike the gentleman from Grand Valley who had gotten quite harsh with one of the young ladies for failing to keep her eighth-notes even. He had even said something that I didn’t feel any professor should ever say – he suggested to this young lady that maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a pianist. You could see this kid was crushed. I really felt for her. Of course, it may have just been a technique he was using. One of the key skills any performer must master is keeping one’s composure under severe duress, and sometimes harsh critiques are a teaching tool to help inure students to stress.
But Dr. Liu had nothing but praise for all four students. And again, her critique was familiar. The day before I had had my final lesson with Pam before the break and she’s hammering at me about how far off my technique was but also reassuring me that these are the most technically challenging pieces I’ve ever tackled and I shouldn’t be discouraged. So what is Dr Liu telling this kids? "Your technique needs a great deal of work, but these are very hard pieces. Please don’t get discouraged." Where have I heard that before? Once again, I feel fortunate to have Pam as a teacher. She’s already harping on issues that keep even the most advanced students down.
One thing each of these students had in common was that they had only been studying these very advanced pieces since January. Dr. Liu was amazed. That is a very short time, she said. These types of pieces take at least a year to master so she emphasized that each of these kids had made tremendous progress in a very short time. And then she gave them tips for improving their pieces. She would pick a particular section and say, "Try this." And they would try it and note an immediate improvement. There’s the difference between someone of my stature and someone of theirs. When Pam gives me a tip, I have to go home and practice for hours before I’ve got it. These students are given a tip and instantly understand how to use it and incorporate it in their performance. I am succchhh a long way from being able to do that!
As much as I enjoyed observing the class, it was also bittersweet. The entire piano department was there. I could see their enrollment was roughly 16 students, making it one of the smallest piano programs of a college this size anywhere. That means lots of personal attention, and from what I’ve seen of the OU faculty, they are all pretty big on personal attention. But it was also kind of sad, bringing up all kinds of feelings of melancholy from my own college experience many years ago. This became particularly intense during the two-hour recital Dr. Liu gave immediately following the class. Again, Yin Zheng invited me to attend; I would not have known the public was invited otherwise. Again, I was the only public there. But both before the recital and during the intermission, I was sitting amongst the 16 students in the program and observing their camaredie and listening to their banter. It was obvious they were quite fond of each and held each other in high esteem. It reminded me so much of my film school days, when we would all sit around dreaming about how we would conquer Hollywood and take the world by storm with our films.
I wanted to grab these kids and say, "Treasure this time you have. Treasure these bonds and these relationships. Once you have that diploma, this all ends. You will never have this camaraderie again. Yes, you will go on to form other professional relationships and these will be rewarding in their own way. But this college camaraderie is something special and unique that will never come your way again. Treasure it!"
During the intermission, one of the young ladies couldn’t help but gush about how much in awe she was of Dr. Liu’s performance. "I can only dream that someday I’ll be able to play as well as she does." And I wanted to grab her too and say, "You do realize that I’m looking at you and thinking the same thing? I can only dream that someday I’ll be able to play as well as you. And I give three or four public performances a year. I’m only an early intermediate student but it never fails that some adult beginner, or adult who only fantasizes of taking lessons someday, comes up to me and says they can only dream of someday playing as well as I do. And I always answer them the same way. I say, ‘That’s up to you. How much are you willing to practice? How hard are you willing to work at it?’" Because that commitment is really the only difference between being good and being great. A person who is good inevitably reaches a point where the amount of work to go to the next level is more than they want to do. The critical difference between genuine talents and wistful amateurs is simply this: Amateurs do the work, but under protest; it is a labor for them, and at some point they decide they’ve had enough, that they’re good enough for what they want to do. Genuine talents are not only able to tolerate the massive work that is required, but they actually relish it.
So this young lady can only dream of someday being a pianist of the caliber of Dr. Liu. I want to tell her that that’s completely up to her. How hard is she willing to work at it? Does she understand that Dr. Liu had put in tens of thousands of hours of practice before stepping on that stage this evening? Is she willing to make that same commitment? Is the work something that she will merely tolerate, or will she relish it? Everyone has talent. The trick is figuring out where it lies. You have to find something you’re so passionate about that you literally hate to eat and sleep because it means you have to stop, and you can’t wait to get up every morning so you can start again. Is this the way you feel about your chosen vocation? Is this the way this young lady feels about her piano?
Yes, I was getting very melancholic observing and listening to these kids as I am experiencing this resurgence of memories of these very treasured friendships that I had only in college and never since. But then one of the young men said something that gave me a real renewed hope for the state of higher education in America.
Discussing how beautifully Dr. Liu had played, the young man said, "The one thing Hitler did right was banning atonal music." Yes, Hitler banned not only atonal music but everything that was not classical, not only in music but all the other arts too – painting, sculpture, drama, literature, you name it. Hitler had been trained as a painter in the classical school and thus had developed the very strong bias that classical technique was the only artistic form that was legitimate. Modern forms of artistic expression, in his view, were not only disqualified as real art, they were actually vulgar and obscene. Many of Europe’s finest artists had to flee because their work did not fit his sensibilities; much of the mission of the Resistance was in saving art that Hitler intended to destroy.
So this young piano student at Oakland University agreed with at least that little bit of Nazi philosophy – that the classics are the only legitimate form of artistic expression. Modern art doesn’t count and should be banned. I would have been shocked if not for the fact that, almost immediately, another student challenged him. "What’s wrong with atonal music? I can show you some composers who do fabulous things with atonality. And not just atonal music but all kinds of other modern forms of expression. I like the modern composers. Explain your objection to atonal music."
And so I am treated to this scholarly interchange as two exceptional students debate the merits and demerits of classical versus modern music. (And just for the record, last year I attended a concert hosted by another OU music professor, Dr. Jessica Payette, another young teacher who looks not quite 30, who specializes in modern and – do I dare use this term – "avant-garde" music! I continue to be astonished by how young some college professors are. I have to keep reminding myself that many of the professors when I was in college were also under 30.) Listening to these two young men go at each other, respectfully and knowledgeably, but obviously on totally different wavelengths, one obvious truth blared at me. It was delightfully clear that the OU faculty exposes its students to a wide variety of disciplines and encourages them to form their own independent views, to be free thinkers. Two students with totally opposing ideas of what defines great music, and yet they coexist respectfully. What the young man who felt that Hitler was right about just this one small thing failed to understand was that, along with atonal music, this exchange of ideas that he was so thoroughly enjoying would also have been banned in Nazi Germany. In fact, in many cases it would have resulted in a one-way ticket to a concentration camp.
So that’s the connection between Hitler and Oakland University. And it’s a good one. On Friday night, I observed the sort of academic repartee that Hitler would have detested. No, it wasn’t the one thing Hitler did right. (That would have been the Volkswagen.) But I was delighted to discover that OU was probably exactly the sort of campus that Hitler would have had shuttered. Is it any surprise that, whenever there is a coup and some new tyrant takes power, the first thing they always do is take control of the media and the arts? It is a free press and free artistic expression that poses by far the greatest threat to any dictatorship, moreso than saboteurs, moreso than invading armies.
Thus, in a way, being among these student invoked a lot of melancholia in me, but in another way I found it very encouraging, that this generation is going to make fine leaders. I think our future is in good hands. My feeling the blues was only a consequence of wishing I could be in their company and watch them grow. For another day or so, I continued to feel the blues, knowing what I had witnessed Friday night was for the young alone. My college days were long gone. I have of course had other great pleasures and will continue to have more still, but never again the kind I had in college.
Then on Saturday night, just 24 hours later on TCM, there was a festival of the films of famed Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. One of the offerings was a shockingly powerful drama from 1943 called "Day of Wrath," about the notorious witch hunts that took place in Denmark in the 17th century. The plot revolved around a conspiracy to have a middle-aged woman burned at the stake for witchcraft rather than allow her to expose the corruption of the local clergy, most of whom were having affairs with the young women in the village. This was a thoroughly evil portrayal of 17th century life in Denmark where everyone felt compelled to go along with these brutes for fear of becoming victims themselves. Dreyer made this film right in the middle of the Nazi occupation of his country, and made no bones that the story was really a metaphor for Nazism, much the same way that Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible, would ten years later be a similar critique of McCarthyism. What guts does that take!
But Dreyer wasn’t about to let the Nazis off the hook with the excuse that they had no choice but to go along. Historically, the witch burnings were justified on the rationale of saving souls. Allegedly, the clerics who condoned it believed that the flames cast out the evil demons. Thus, though they knew they were subjecting the victims to a minute or so of sheer agony, they believed they were saving their souls for eternity. To them, that was a reasonable tradeoff.
But Dreyer’s take on it was nothing quite so reasonable. Dreyer’s depiction was clearly that these clergymen knew exactly what they were doing. They knew many of the victims were innocent and were clearly performing these corrupt and evil deeds simply as a way of maintaining their power over the villagers. Some were even shown in the drama as plagued by profoundly guilty consciences, though they were still too cowardly to stand up for what they knew was right for fear of being condemned themselves.
In one evening, I went from feeling blue to feeling profoundly grateful, profoundly thankful that I live in 21st century America rather than 17th century Denmark or, for that matter, Nazi-occupied Europe. So the connection with Hitler had come full circle. I went from feeling blue missing the college experience that places like Oakland University offer, to feeling wonderful that campuses like OU are part of the reason we don’t have more Hitlers in the world.
Excellent commentary, Mike! Marijo
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