(This discussion starts here.)
A robust liberal arts pedagogy must ground the ideal and elevate the praxial. While the private lesson in the university educational situation is often understood as the least utilitarian and/or the least intellectual, it is also the most common starting point for students' experience in academic musical instruction. So, I'd like to consider for a moment at the private lesson in depth, not as a simple transference of tradition from generation to generation, but as a locus of contextual self-examination and ideological critique.
(This discussion continues in part iii.)
the ideal and the praxial
We'll look at lessons in the classical tradition as our primary point of study, for several reasons. The historical precedence of 'classical' study means that the structures of most or all lesson-based courses derive from those pedagogical traditions. In many schools (as in mine) the simple number of 'classical' lessons surpasses the number of lessons labeled as jazz or otherwise. Lastly, in my experience, when administrators and colleagues think of lessons this is the model that enters into their mind. Jazz and other improvisatory traditions engage with these questions, but in different forms; a more thorough consideration would require an examination of those situations, as well as their compositional, theoretical, and musicological environments.
In its most compact form, the private lesson appears to have two participants, the teacher (instructor) and the student. In 'composed' music (like what we find in the classical lessons that we are considering here) there is a third figure present— the composer, or perhaps the ghost of the composer and his unreachable intent, framing much of the lesson through the trace of past action we call a score. It is the baseline for assessment of a student's performance, providing generally a collection of notes and durations whose accurate performance is part of (though not coextensive) with the work. The score is the ground upon which the figure of performance is drawn.
The instructor serves as a proxy for the composer, since a work is always by necessity under-determined by the score itself, which leaves holes in intent that must be filled for a performance to come to pass. If there is any notion of 'fidelity' operative within the lesson, the instructor must model, enable, and assess that fidelity – if a student can't perform a passage, the instructor must teach them how to do it, and in doing so model a particular ideological stance about the relationship of performance to that work. Ideology here is not limiting, it is simply the articulation of an interpretive tradition; the constraint of tradition is actually the foundation of individual expression. (This component of classical musical culture is excellently described and dissected by Lydia Goehr in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works.) As a proxy for the composer that instructor is actually also a proxy for a hermeneutic tradition around a work, a composer, a style, and a genre.
So, the past aesthetic, cultural, and praxial approach is manifest in the lesson not only in the score or work, but in the approach to the score. There are two common points at which this historicity of practice surfaces. The choice of editions and ornamentation are often the first loci for discussions of the insufficiency of a score and the inescapability of interpretation. The selection process of different editions introduce to students the notion of the mediation of a composerly voice by an editorial voice, but can (hopefully) bring a deeper understanding of the distance between the composer and performer that the score mediates. Ornamentation is similarly a persistent reminder of the fact that the score is inadequate; in a literal sense, the notes one must play to play 'correctly' are not on the page; the instrumental and mediating character of the score is brought back into the light, even for those students who can already read music.
So the interpretation of the score is possible only with the careful study of historical aesthetic and practice, and as this historicity and the hermeneutic aspect of performance is engaged with, both students and faculty work actively with the more intricate network of roles and proxies operative in a lesson. The instructor is also a proxy for the audience, a safety buffer before music becomes public – 'prep' for recitals (or any public performance). In the practice room, the student must themselves be a proxy for that audience, and for the instructor, since self-monitoring is required for change to happen from week to week. Writ large, the instructor is a proxy for an understanding of the performing self; an understanding of musicking requires the awareness of the plurality of these performing selves– the technical self; the hearing, interpreting self; the public self; and the awareness of the historical subjectivity of the self in action.
This is then is the goal of lesson in the university context,. Beyond this, the lesson is also a process wherein the instructor acknowledges their own finitude, preparing the student (and themselves) for the time when the student moves on to the next instructor or the next setting, to a point at which the self is sufficiently critical to function either as a practicing musician, a concert attender, or even to manifest on his or her own a desire and plan to return to lesson. It is a process wherein the student acquires agency by increasing not only their technical capacity, but their understanding.
In the liberal arts context, the nature of this ‘understanding’ needs to be broader than the musical or performing self. Ideally, it is an understanding of the self, and of the nature of expressive potential, and an understanding of the conditionality of an expressive potential. This sounds a great deal like Gadamer's 'wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein' or historically informed consciousness, upon which his 'bildung,' discussed earlier, is contingent. He argues that all understanding is historically informed, that every individual and every understanding of every individual is shaped by their conscious embeddedness in culture, by the historicity of their position.
At the root of Gadamer's elaborate arguments (and the arguments of all modern hermeneutics) is that agency is contingent on the self’s ability to understand its own finitude – all knowledge happens in context – and that richness comes from a conscious play between the self and the culture. Individual expression is contingent on the collective aspect of that expression. Finitude is not an aspect of human experience limited to music making. The lesson is not about simply becoming an individual, but about having the critical capacity to understand one's own subjectivity. Such inquiry is not supplementary to critical education, but strikes near the core of it.
(This discussion continues in part iii.)