SIR, — We who teach at the big music schools should be
grateful to David Cairns for attacking our com- placency. May I make further points?
(1) We are in business to teach many students who will never be artists. They arrive with 'Grade 8 Piano,' a GCE, and a local authority grant. Later they will be schoolmistresses teaching doh-ray-me to infants, or schoolmasters wondering whether a harmonica group would arouse interest in teenage sec. mods. Mr. Cairns would like them to know contemporary music. But how? I can lead them to Bach's com- plex fugues by way of the two-part Inventions or to Beethoven's 'Appassionata' by way of Op. 49, No. 2. But what shall they play to approach Schonberg or Webern? It is true that there is some easy Bartok and some not impossible Hindemith, but most of the youngsters don't like it. It is not I who applies the curb : it is they who shy. Youth is often more stick- in-the-mud than middle age.
(2) I agree with Mr. Cairns about our would-be virtuosi, but he fails to recognise the cause of the trouble. We have no schools for musical children. There are ballet schools and theatre schools, but a reincarnated Mozart would be told to get his A-level at grammar school and then go in for music. It is true he might qualify for an Anglican choir school, but suppose he had no voice? This being said, may I warn Mr. Cairns against the complaining student. There is a type that sneers at English teachers and then goes abroad only to com- plain that Vienna isn't what it was and Paris is full of charlatans. My professor was a bit of a Victorian, but he was basically sound, and he enabled me to go forward from where he left me.—Yours faithfully,.
57 Harlington Road, W4
SIDNEY HARRISON
Previous page
