Reflections …

American Music Teacher, August-Sept, 2004 by Guy Duckworth

I am 80 years old. Time magazine has the same number of years with Times Square, only twenty more. I am reminded of my mother's protestations on aging with her frequent paraphrase from Shakespeare's King Lear, "I don't require assistance in walking and rising, my hands don't tremble as if from palsy, and my mouth is not fretfully muttering to invisible companions."

Before all of the above begin to overwhelm me, I feel compelled to forward some shattering thoughts of teaching based upon my career: shattering because they are seldom connected to piano pedagogical practice.

Routing students to perfection seems to be the provenance for all lessons from the first to the most advanced. This is not how we learn to be artists. Rather, it is through passage from hesitation, vagueness and crudeness to psychological certainty and cognitive clarity that compels us toward excellence, a far more agreeable goal than perfection. In all of my years, I have neither heard nor seen anything that is perfect. I think that is a good thing! Is it not through its imperfections sound and stuff become beautiful?

I have, however, been thrilled by artistic behavior every day of my teaching life at all levels of learning with smudging and mucking sounds and activities, which create hives of a vibrating, creative buzz as students tweak, stretch, rearrange, magnify, cut, peel, carve with comments like, "Let's try it this way. No, maybe that way"; to "Make up your mind. No, not yet." Such behavior presages an artistic outcome because itself is artistic. When this mise en scene of self-discovery stabilizes the lesson, it reproduces itself throughout a musical life.

I am most sanguine about this environment. I have created it. I do it. When I don't, I am dyspeptic, and my students mirror my indigestion. It is the lemon problem: you can taste it, savor it, recall it, but really have no words for it. In the same way, notes can never express the feeling of sound. Phrases do. Physical experience does. Now the taste of sound begins. Ultimately, we must debate with ourselves if we can possibly learn to teach the most simple of musical phrase in much the same way as Michelangelo could see a face in a cloud, visualize a landscape in stains on the walls.

At the very least, a teacher is one who is at ease with shades of grey, one who pursues unrest marching toward excellence and one who is more alive than most. Certainly, not one who pursues the neurotic need of perfection. Jane Mayhall, the poet (her latest work Sleeping Late on Judgment Day) was remembered in this week's [March 22, 2004] New Yorker, when she recalled being present as Albert Einstein was interviewed at Black Mountain Experimental Arts College in North Carolina. Einstein was asked by his interviewer, "Which is the most important, art or science?" Einstein said, "No doubt in my mind, it's art. Art must come first, art and feeling." But our profession has not kept art and feeling at the forefront of its philosophy. The lack of curricula in the public schools attests to that.

Upon pulverizing perfection with smudgings, vagueness, unrest, aliveness, excellence, shades of grey, artistic behavior, I turn to what really matters. The people who know, the things we have learned from them and those things that influenced us most deeply and make us who we are.

First among them are my students; or was I the student, you the teachers? How would one know? Thank you. I love you.

Second, are my deans: Paul Oberg, University of Minnesota; George Howerton, Northwestern University; and Warner Imig, University of Colorado. With their vision of education and unfailing support, trust and freedom that each provided me, my courage was emboldened to create programs that were far in advance of the acceptance level of most of the professional mainstream and with some yet to be dreamed. Mary Ann Fleming Bryan reminded me last night that she conceptualized some of these innovations to those "wacky Duckworth things."

Third, are the Board of Directors of the Music Teachers National Association with their full membership. Fourth, are my guests Britt and David; Jeannie from Tranquillity, whose presence rounds the circle of my teaching career beginning in 1953 at Tranquillity Union High School. (Yes, Virginia, people live in Tranquillity.); and then Chuck. We have lifetime bonds with each other. I am grateful. Thank you. I love you.

Fifth, and finally, is Maria Farra, my wife of fifty-five years, international beauty and artist, whose talent and love have been my inspiration. In these late days, each of us can feel reduced to a speck, orbiting a speck in the middle of specklessness. But never, with Maria by my side, do I feel that way. Our mutual love continues to be a "lifetime achievement."

Does this event mean I have been squished into the establishment thing? I asked Becky Shockley that question last Friday at registration. She thought, put her fingers to her lips and mumbled, "That's a big jump."

Whatever! I remain stunned, proud and humbled. Maria and I, deeply grateful to Music Teachers National Association under the very capable direction of Gary Ingle, thank it for the FOUNDATION Fellow and Lifetime Achievement Awards that it has generously bestowed upon me.