Visiting a private music school run by an expatriate Russian
lady, I had a glimpse into the kind of intense musical training which threw up
so many of the iconic musical figures of the 20th century. Some of the most memorable occasions of my
concert-going career were provided by Russians – Oistrakh stunning the Royal
Festival Hall audience with a matchless Beethoven Concerto, Rubinstein leaving
me breathless with a one-in-a-million Rachmaninov 2, Maxim Shostakovich directing
the unforgettable non-Soviet premiere of his father’s 15th Symphony
(with Dmitri there in the Royal Box) – while Rozdhestvensky, Rostropovich and Ashkenazy
are still regarded as great musical heroes by today’s concert-going public. The music of Rachmaninov, Stravinsky,
Prokofiev and Shostakovich was among the most popular written during the 20th
century, and even the “second rate” figures, such as Khachaturian (whose Spartacus was, for a time, the biggest-selling
classical recording of all time) and Kabalevsky (where would young pianists
have been without is music?), won over audiences who baulked at the mere
mention of Schoenberg, Britten and Stockhausen.
Soviet orchestras were about the finest in the world (I recall a visit
of the Leningrad Phil to the Proms which had most of us in ecstasy for the rest
of the season) and only last year the Australian Limelight magazine suggested
that the five “Greatest Pianists of All Time” were all Russians.
How did Russian musicians come to achieve the kind of world
domination of which Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev could only dream? The answer is obvious; the education system
which nurtured promising young musicians from an early age and sent them through
a veritable hothouse of rigorous and unrelenting musical training. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent disbanding of so many musical organisations, musicians who had been brought up under the Soviet system suddenly found themselves not just able to travel to the west, but obliged to do so in search of employment. Would the Malaysian Philharmonic ever have achieved the heights it did without its large contingent of East Germans and other “outcasts” from the Soviet system? How would the Singapore Symphony have developed with out an iconic leader forced by circumstances beyond his control to find a suitable playing position far from his Russian homeland? Indeed, for a time, it seemed that every orchestral chair in Asia was competed for by a product of the Soviet musical education system. And, with the demise of conservatoires and universities in the former Soviet states, a flood of music educators came on to the scene, often finding themselves faced with conditions of employment and a level of student ability they must have found heart-wrenchingly awful after their privileged existence under the Soviet regime.
At Universiti Putra Malaysia, where I lectured for a while
before the establishment of the MPO, we took on as a staff member Zhakid Khaknazarov
who had been Professor of Music at Tashkent Conservatory (where, organists will
be interested to note, his staff included Gyorgy Mushel), and it seemed as if
every other private music school in Malaysia employed a Russian violin
teacher. Indeed it was one of these who
gave me my first taste of just how intense the Soviet system was when she
harangued me with alarming vitriol after an examiner had given one of her grade
8 students a very high distinction. Keen
to defend both my colleague and the examining board from this unusual but
undeniably bitter complainant, I asked for more details and was told that the
teacher had heard from outside the door (don’t they all?) the candidate play a
C natural in a particularly demanding piece.
“Every time I tell her; C SHARP, C SHARP”, she railed at me in heavily accented
Russio-English, “But this girl she so stupid.
She cannot play violin. She cannot
read music. She cannot hear. Why C natural? Always C natural. And this idiot examiner (call himself a
musician?) give her 146 marks!” A
suggestion that one wrong note out of several hundred right ones is no reason
to lower the mark, let alone fail the candidate (as the teacher was demanding)
fell on deaf ears. The fact is that it
had to be perfection or nothing. And under
Soviet training system, who could blame her?
One tiny lapse, one almost unnoticed error, could be the difference
between a career as a musician and one as a factory worker.
On this present occasion I was a little more forewarned and
could sympathise with the teacher who despaired at the quality of students she
was obliged to take. “I much prefer
Asian students. At least they have the
same work ethic as the Russians and are prepared to practice hard. My European students are lazy, but the
Americans are the worst! They do not see
any reason to take it seriously. They
are all told that music is FUN!
Fun! I ask you, what is Fun about
playing everything badly and never getting any better?” I’m not sure I agree totally with her view;
music should be fun, and if you make it too deadly serious as a teacher, you
are likely to put more students off music for life than to open the doors to
one of the greatest avenues of pleasure available to mankind. But she is right
that music is only worthwhile when you put your heart and soul into it and aim
for perfection. In my view perfection is
unattainable, but there’s a huge amount of fun to be had trying to attain it.
The teacher went on to say how much she valued the
examination system as it gave her students a discipline which many were
otherwise unwilling to accept. She
wouldn’t countenance my suggestions that there was sometimes as much to be learnt
from taking the exam as from passing it; for her if the result is not
stratospherically high, the candidate has failed and may as well give up music.
As I listened to her, it dawned on me just how huge a gap
there is between the way music is taught under the western system and how it
was taught in Russia; and I was not sure if, culturally, that gap could easily
be crossed. With a five year old
daughter, I have been determined that her childhood should not be stolen from
her in the single-minded pursuit of excellence.
I want her to become a thoroughly rounded and socially competent human
being, not a total social outcast able to do one thing perfectly and, if not
achieving perfection, destroying herself in the belief that she has become an
abject failure.
But am I right? My
approach denies her the chance ever to become one of the great musicians of the
future; at best she will become a competent musician and an enthusiastic member
of a concert audience (and, goodness knows, the musicians of the future will
need those). As a teacher, I did used to
think that at best my students would appreciate music as an entertainment rather
than see it as a career. But what if
every teacher thought this way? We’d
have lots of knowledgeable people for our audiences, but no great musicians to
perform for them, just a whole load of mediocrities having fun while the
audience drift away aware of, and dissatisfied with, such grim incompetence.
It’s a dilemma, and one which is certainly not solved by the
Chinese method of hothousing its young musical talent in imitation of the
Soviet model; simply put, China does not have any of the musical infrastructure
Russia gave to its Soviet music educators.
Perhaps my old colleague Professor Zhakid as well as my Russian expatriate
are providing the answer, the former by returning to Tashkent and the
newly-reopened Conservatoire and the latter by bringing her Russian standards
to bear on a new generation of non-Russian students.
Most totalitarian regimes, be they of the left or right, care very little about the individuals themselves, but simply for the kudos they can bring to the State - and that is the same whether it be in the realm of music, athletics, gymnastics - you name it. The individual belongs to the State whereas in the 'democracies', the state exists to safeguard and serve the indiviual. Well, that's the theory!
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