Apprenticeship ...

Schönberg

Schönberg was a grandmaster. He was also my first real music teacher, though he died some thirty-four years before I was born. I read and reread all of his books and booklets, even such as were out of print and therefore costly, or which had to be ordered directly from UCLA, where he taught in later years. (I studied and wrote serial works, too, just to make his ghost happy.) And I read very trustingly, attentively, receptively, lovingly. It wasn't such a bad thing to do. He was a very good teacher. Nowadays I strongly disagree with his philosophy of music, nowadays I talk back. But I listened well for years beforehand. And if you're going to criticise something, you might at least know what it is.


(Side-note: We stress 'critical thinking' overmuch today, teaching students to talk back before they've really listened. Result: they criticise chimeras. Damnant quod non intelligunt. Look at the army of undergraduates fighting for 'rights,' human, animal, and even vegetable. Now try to find one among them who knows what a right is. If they'd had any sort of colloquy with tradition then they'd know that most 'human-rights violations' that come before the tribunals violate no human right, and that a brute animal cannot in principle be a rightholder. But they don't want first to listen to tradition. That comes late or never. No, the first thing is to strike! [At what? The chimera.] Well, well. To these weathercocks we may say: Welcome to a conversation that's been going on for thousands of years. Glad you could come. Sit and listen for a time. If you feel the need to speak, listen harder. Then, if you still have something to say, do so, but let the elders go first, the longtime listeners, as did Elihu, and prepare to be corrected, as was Elihu.)

Lately I've been returning to Schönberg's essays. What memories are here! They make me long for another trusting student-teacher relation. Some ask why I don't go back to school for a graduate degree. But college was for me just a long and expensive review that I didn't need (and that I'm still paying for). I'm in no hurry to go back. What I would really like is to find an old master with whom to study, maybe as a live-in. A sort of apprentice-manservant, yes, that's what I'd be. We'd live somewhere out of the way in Europe. Probably I'd have to learn German, elsewise to remember my boyhood French, s'il vous plaît. I'd make his tea, bicycle to the shops for him, feed the cat, do whatever needs doing. And he'd teach me advanced composing ἀρετή: how to deal justly with each note, how temperately to keep away from 'too-ness,' and so on. Most afternoons would find us at the café, going over our present scorework. Then there'd be long walks and longer talks. Cigars. Claret. Sometimes we'd go to church, analysing chorales in the hymnal, 'fixing' them if need be. (This I do already. It's not really vandalism is it? Anyway, I use a pencil. And I leave the book better than it was before.) Sigh. It's a daydream anyhow.