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Guest post by Michael Johnson

Perhaps enough time has passed since the death of the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger to step back and question her musical sainthood. She was, after all, only human.

My elder musician friends recall her as a brilliant analyst of composition yet as a person she tended toward the tyrannical, impatient and cantankerous. Composer Philip Glass, who studied with her for two years, wrote that she tried to be kind but “stayed pretty much in the range between intimidating and terrifying”.

She was like a lot of piano teachers, one might add. Fanny Waterman used to crack the knuckles of her young students with a ruler if they missed a note or dragged a tempo.

Nadia, who died in Paris in 1979, moved in the best circles of 20th century music. Leonard Bernstein often visited her in Paris. On one occasion, when he was already established as a composer and conductor, he recalled being made to feel small when he played one of his compositions for her. She objected to a certain b-flat. He recalled later, “I am 58,” but suddenly “it was like I was a child.…”

One musician friend of mine in Paris who studied with several of her students goes further, accusing her of “castrating” them (especially the males) by constant criticism and tedious exercises that had them “jumping through technical hoops for hours, years, on end”. Some of the exercises she wrote for her charges were “soul-destroying”, he says.

Nadia knew she had a mixed reputation and was comfortable with that. She maintained that musical training without rigor cannot be of value. Virgil Thomson wrote that she had a “no-nonsense approach to musical skills and a no-fooling-around treatment of anyone’s talent or vocation”. She once turned down a young girl applicant, exasperated, saying she would never find the patience to work with her. Fortunately, she added, her father was soon transferred to another country and the family left France.

I have just read an extraordinary collection of Nadia’s opinions and memories as assembled by Bruno Monsaingeon and published in 1980 as ‘Mademoiselle’ (Editions Van de Valde). Long out of print, I found a dog-eared, mildewed French copy in a bookstall and have studied it minutely. It is a portrait of a complex lady who describes herself as “pitiless” in her treatment of students, adding that she was just as rough on herself.

Originally an aspiring composer, she said that “if there is one thing I am sure of … it is that my music is useless”. Some listeners today would agree while others don’t. Her blandness and lack of originality seem evident to me. She admitted that she realized early on that she “had absolutely nothing to say.”

A student of Gabriel Fauré, Nadia gave up composition after the death of her beloved sister Lili, the more talented of the two sisters. Lili died of an affliction now known as Crohn’s disease, at 24, in 1918. Broken by Lili’s death, Nadia threw herself into teaching, inviting students from throughout the world to come to her Paris apartment and be forced into her straightjacket. There she taught conducting, analysis, harmony, counterpoint and composition as well as piano performance.

Some of the most important musicians of the 20th century worked under her harsh regime: Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Walter Piston, Pierre Schaeffer, Igor Markevitch, John-Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Barenboïm, Dinu Lipatti and others. Her list of students has never been completed but I should add the jazz composers Quincy Jones and Donald Byrd. The list goes on – Jean Françaix, Roy Harris, Peter Hill, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Michel Legrand, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jeremy Menuhin, Emile Naoumoff, Soulima Stravinsky.

Nadia was particularly critical of her American students who queued up to suffer under her rigorous demands. About 600 Americans took lessons from her in the 1920s to the 1970s. She found some of them brilliant but many, she said, lacked fundamentals or even a good ear. “The truth is that the study of the basics makes you understand that to be a good musician you must be a good grammarian.”

Conductor Igor Markevitch, who studied with her, recalled that she went out of her way to assert herself, even wearing a pince-nez to appear professorial. This, he said, helped her advance in a world then dominated by men.

She could be so harsh as to leave students stunned. Glass recalled in his recent autobiography ‘Words Without Music’ that while recuperating after a group class studying Bach chorales, the students would sit down at a café for coffee or beer. The Boulanger experience, he remembered, “invariably left us shaken and silent”.

Confused by the contradictory opinions in the air today, I turned to one of my main interests, portraiture, to try to get a better feel for the person behind the mask. Portraits can afford the artist a good opportunity to study a subject up close. In her case, I found nothing but severity — a strong jaw, narrowed eyes, arched eyebrows, a hard, thin mouth, and body language that students such as Glass found intimidating.

Watching her come to life on the page, I had to turn away. I felt fear. As a student, I would not have lasted an hour with her.

The Monsaingeon book is the most comprehensive account of Nadia’s views on music. He directed a television documentary on her 90th birthday and produced a book-length compilation of some five years of meetings and conversations with her. For easy reading, he reordered the material as an interview – inserting questions among her monologues.

I have produced this edited and translated version of Monsaingeon’s work, capturing the most pertinent extracts for a modern audience.

Aaron Copland described you as the most famous professor of composition alive.

Allow me to doubt the veracity of that statement. I believe a professor is dependent on the quality of the students. The professor’s role is less grand, less omnipotent, than one might think.

When did you discover music?

As a child, I could not stand the sound of music. It almost made me sick. I screamed. My sobbing could be heard in the street. The piano was a monster that terrorized me. Then one day I heard a fire truck passing by, siren blaring, and I sat down and found those notes on the keyboard. Suddenly I had discovered music with a passion. I can still hear my father saying, “What a strange little girl we have here.”

Your father was a French music professor and you mother was Russian?

Yes, my father was totally French and my mother Russian (Princess Michesky). We never spoke Russian in the home because she did not want the family language to be one that my father did not understand.

Do you believe your Russian ancestry has been important for you?

It has been very important … but I do not like to talk about personal background. There is no point talking about me all day long because it would interest no one and certainly not me!

Is it true that at the age of twelve you knew Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by heart?

It was an obligation. I was instructed to learn one prelude and one fugue per week. But you know, let’s not exaggerate. One prelude and one fugue per week is not so much… After this kind of training, though, one has a good basis in mind.

It is said that you already had an encyclopedic knowledge of music when you began teaching.

You know, people say all kinds of things, few of which are true.

How did you end up at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau?

Walter Damrosch founded the school and Francis Casadesus was the first director. I was brought in to join the faculty. I spoke two words of English, “Hello” and “Goodbye”. My first student was Aaron Copland. After Robert Casadesus, other directors followed, including Maurice Ravel, Charles-Marie Widor, and I succeeded Casadesus in 1946.

I understand that the conservatory was founded after World War I for American troops but after the war, what happened?

The Fontainebleau school became very important for the Americans. They had brilliant schooling and were very gifted but they lacked fundamentals in many cases; their musical ear was underdeveloped and they had bypassed the everyday details of music education. Why? Because — it was believed — one must not overwork the children.

What were your basics in the curriculum?

I had to insist on the fundamentals – hearing, looking, listening and seeing.

You trained a large number of Americans. There must be hardly a city in North America that doesn’t have one of your students.

Yes indeed, I had a great number of American students. One must remember that fifty years ago there was no such thing as American music. An immense change has happened since – Monsieur Copland, Monsieur Bernstein – their works are performed all over the world. The term “American musician” is no longer something unusual.

Didn’t you bring Aaron Copland to the attention of the American public?

A. Yes, in September 1938 I encouraged Walter Damrosch and Serge Koussevitzky to program his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. Damrosch conducted it in Boston (in 1938) and was probably disturbed by the modernity of it. He turned to the audience as said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if a man of 23 can compose such a work, he will be capable by the age of 30 of murdering his own parents.” He was laughing but he was serious too. Naturally there was a reaction and agitation among the public but Copland’s reputation was made. Copland’s piece seems tame by today’s standards.

Music goes through phases of popularity. Is this a problem?

I am tormented by the phenomenon of fashion in music. Since I am an old fusspot, I don’t much like change. Of course change for reasons of necessity can be marvelous. But change because one does not know where to go next is fatal and destructive.

What about new voices in music?

Rather than deepening one’s understanding, we see too many people chasing discoveries as an end in itself — finding that unknown masterpiece at any cost. The less these people understand, the more enthusiastic they are. I recently heard a piece that made me wonder if the composer was ill, on drugs, or victim of a serious mental disorder.

How important is music in your life?

I am an absolutely mad consumer of music. I call it a sickness because even when I am exhausted after eight or nine hours of teaching, my first move – to the annoyance of the household – is to switch on the radio and listen. I am insatiable. I love listening (to music).

You say you can appreciate the good and bad elements of a work. What are your criteria for a masterpiece?

I have no idea. I don’t say they don’t exist but I have no idea.

And yet listening to a masterpiece you seem to be certain of your judgment.

It comes down to faith, to belief. Just as I accept the existence of God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion and I accept a masterpiece… Exactly what makes up a masterpiece escapes me… I can analyze anything. But a page, a line, a measure of Schubert, I have no idea.

How much training is necessary to appreciate great music?

One can be totally without training and yet feel the senses penetrated by melodic emotion – this is perfectly respectable.

How do you balance rigor and creative freedom?

I hope my teaching has influenced students to appreciate the need for rigor, for order. But in the area of style, I have never intended to exert any influence. If I am working with a foreigner and I try to make him or her into a French person I am sure to fail.

Isn’t it possible to list composers in a hierarchy of importance?

The seems very difficult to me.

Still, one could rank Beethoven against Max Bruch, for example.…

There you are falling into the abyss. You compare the Himalayas with Butte Montmartre. Really, I must say that I honestly almost never think about Max Bruch whereas hardly a day passes that I don’t think about Beethoven.

How would you sum up your role as a professor?

I know my job. I am someone who can help students acquire a basic technique, to listen, to hear, to transpose, to practice, to memorize. The role of the professor seems to me to be modest.

Another version of this essay-interview originally appeared on factsandarts.com

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. He worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his writing career. He is the author of five books and divides his time between Boston and Bordeaux.

 

Illustration by Michael Johnson

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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?

I was born into a family of musicians, all quite normal. I do not remember any particular choice but of course many of my ideas and beliefs on how to live with music come from mutual and significant experiences like the traditional band, which is very important in the south of Italy, or watching the day-to-day activities of my brothers (both brass players) of practicing and much music making with other musicians, and so a great deal of chamber music.

Who or what were the most important influences on your musical life and career?

In the first instance my parents. Later on, having understood the meaning of the word “influence”, it was my guide to many choices. My enthusiasm, my curiosity and my views are a combination of continual searching and outside influences from people, books, events or encounters. That is why I think a young person should be more worried about the things that surround them; a choice that needs great care. The objectives are continually changing and will come naturally. I can only name my teacher Maestro Franco Scala as a major influence; also  the composer Marco Di Bari and the singer Alda Caiello, amongst many other artists.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I do not see my career as a game or a challenge. That does not mean I do not have goals to dedicate myself to or do not set myself challenges. I have many challenges with myself but not with others. For now, I must say that, having understood what I am not and having had to accept it can be very tiring. Where it will take me to is something still to be seen….

Which performance/recordings are you most proud of?

I cannot really say but to have played the two Ravel Concertos in one evening was certainly something to remember.

Which particular works do you think you perform best?

I have a particular penchant for French music of the last century – e.g. Poulenc, Ravel, Debussy, Messiaen etc.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

No precise rule; it just happens that a programme is born from an idea or taking a specific line, but on many occasions it is also the exact opposite. Playing a lot of chamber music, it is easy to discover something new and to include those composers in my solo repertoire.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

Not really. I have played many times in La Fenice Theatre in Venice. I love the city and I feel at home in its theatre.

Who are your favourite musicians?

There are many and a lot are still performing today

What is your most memorable concert experience?

I think my debut at 17 in the Konzerthaus in Berlin. I was very excited.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

To feel your own dreams and your own music as an act of generosity. Not to feel yourself as a “son” or “daughter” of the music awaiting gifts and unconditional love, but on the contrary to be yourself the creator of that sincere love and insight of which music is in much need.

André Gallo performs in Manchester Camerata UpClose: The Next Generation at Stoller Hall, Manchester on 4th October 2018. More information

Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D major K. 448

Schumann Andante and Variations in B flat major WoO 10

Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals

Piano Galla Chistiakova

Piano André Gallo

Manchester Camerata Principal Musicians

 

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Guest post by George Waddell

Mistakes are the bane of every pianist. We spend hours in the practice room trying to prevent them, in the teaching studio deconstructing them, and in post-concert receptions (and sleepless nights) obsessing over them.

At the same time, we pianists are often told that there is more to making music than getting the notes right. That an examiner or a concertgoer will look past a slipup, if they even notice it, and appreciate our musicality as a whole. So which is true? Are mistakes a big deal or not? Answering questions like this is why I became a Performance Scientist. Early in my undergraduate music studies I became fascinated by what psychology could tell us about how we think and behave, and how much it can inform the challenges we face as musicians, whether it be how we learn, teach, memorise, collaborate, execute incredibly complicated skills, or deal with the pressures of a performance or performing career. In particular, I was interested in what psychology could tell us about those who judged our performances, and how their perceptions and decisions may not be as consistent as we might hope. Two of the first studies I conducted with my colleagues in the Royal College of Music’s Centre for Performance Science used mistakes as a way of understanding how judges assess our performances. In the first, we wondered whether the idea that ‘first impressions count’ was true for pianists. Would a mistake in the opening seconds of a performance have the same effect on the overall rating than the exact same mistake part way through? To test this, I started with recordings of Chopin’s Minute Waltz and Black Key Etude performed on an electric keyboard. I edited the recordings to make them sound like live performances on a real instrument, but since they were recorded digitally (i.e. using MIDI) I was able to take a few notes from the opening seconds of each and move them down a semitone, so that they sounded unmistakeably wrong. Then, as the opening material of both the Waltz and the Etude returns part way through each piece, I made a second version of each where the exact same mistake is made later on in the performance. All we needed next was a group of musicians who rated the overall quality of each performance on a 7-point scale from Poor to Excellent. Some heard error-free versions, some heard mistakes at the start, and some heard mistakes at the end.* Crucially, the musicians didn’t just give overall ratings. While listening, they also used a computer to move a slider up and down as their moment-by-moment assessment of the performance changed. This way, we could see how the musicians reacted to each error as they happened. For those who want the detail, you can read the full paper in the journal of Music Perception, where you can also hear the audio recordings.

You can see the results in the image below, and they were dramatic. Before I tell you, and before you look at the legend in the top right corner of the image, try to guess which line represents the error-free performance, which one had the mistake at the start, and which one had the mistake part-way-through.

Waddell1

How did you do? The blue line in each represents the version with no mistake, and in both the Etude (top) and Waltz (bottom) the average judgement was pretty consistent. The red line with squares shows ratings of the piece with the mistake in the opening seconds. It started much lower, and while things improved as the piece went on it never fully recovered, with the final rating still lower (for any statisticians in the audience: significantly lower) than the overall score. The green line with the triangles is the most interesting of all. It represents the mistake part way through each piece, which was quickly penalised, and almost as quickly ‘forgiven’ by the musicians with final scores not meaningfully (i.e. significantly) different from the final score. The final scores on the 7-point scales told the same story. So first impressions really did matter, a result that mirrors what we know from social psychology in that that we make judgements about new people we meet very quickly, and hang on to bad first impressions more strongly than good ones. I also measured how quickly those first impressions were formed. With no mistake at the start, musicians made their first judgements within an average of about fifteen seconds from the first note. With the mistake, that time was cut in half.

In this case, it seemed that musicians did not get over the poor first impression resulting from the initial mistake, or were at least much more willing to forgive the mistake when it occurred over half-way into the performance. So make sure you spend some extra time practising those first few bars, as they truly are important.

In a second study, we wanted to take this result even further. What would amateur and untrained musicians think versus a highly-trained group? What if you could see the performance, not just hear it? And, if we can see the performance, what if the pianist’s facial expression affected how we perceive the error? I was keen to examine this last question as this is something I explicitly thought about as a young pianist. When I made a mistake, I would pull a frustrated face as a way of signalling to the adjudicator or audience that “yeah, I heard it too. Sorry about that, I don’t usually mess up there”. Later on, I heard teachers emphasise the value of the ‘poker face’; after all, maybe the judges didn’t notice. Once again, an experiment was needed to test which approach was better.

Creating the recordings was more difficult in this case, as we wanted the videos to appear as though they came from genuine performances. To do this, we recorded a pianist in the Royal College of Music’s main concert hall playing Chopin’s Aeolian Harp Etude. We used two camera angles between which the recording alternated throughout the performance: one from the side where you can see the pianist’s hands on the keys so that a viewer would think they were watching a genuine, unmanipulated recording; and a shot looking down the length of the piano highlighting the pianist’s face and obscuring his hands, so that when we did splice in different audio or video, it could be done without anyone noticing. Once we had a good performance down, we asked the performer to play a middle section of the piece but make a mistake that caused him to stop playing, search a moment for his place, then start again, all while pulling a frustrated face. With this footage, the wizards in the Royal College of Music Studios helped us create four videos: one without any error, one where you hear the mistake but see the ‘poker face’ from the good recording, one where he makes the mistake and pulls the face, and one where he pulls the face but didn’t make the mistake. We also recorded some stage entrances that were added to the top and spliced in a bit of video and audio from a live audience to give the impression of a real concert.** You can read all of the details and download the videos in our article in Frontiers in Psychology, and you can see clips of the recordings in the video summarising the study below.

We recruited people ranging in musical experience and training to watch and rate the videos (each person saw one version), again asking them to give an overall score out of 7 and a continuous rating on a bit of software I created. Once again, the results were dramatic. You can see them in the chart below, where the blue line represents the highly trained musicians and the red line represents people ranging from little to no musical training.

Waddell2

As you can see, the normal (standard) video at the top showed the same pattern as the musicians rating the no-error version in the first study – fairly even without major reactions. Look now at the third graph (aural): here you see the trained musicians behaving the same as those in the first study, dropping their rating when the mistake happened but then returning to a point not meaningfully different from those rating the performance without any error at all. Interestingly, you can see that the non-musicians (the red line) didn’t react to the mistake in that case. Look a little higher now at the second graph (aural/facial). Here we see something striking: when you give people the same mistake but add the negative facial reaction, the rating drops suddenly regardless of musical experience, and never recovers. You might wonder, then, whether it was the face, not the mistake, that was penalised, but the fourth graph (facial) suggests otherwise. The face alone wasn’t enough to cause a reaction in either of the groups.

So why did pulling a face cause this reaction? A theory from social psychology called facial overgeneralisation may account for it. In short, when you meet a person for the first time, and their face looks sad, your brain doesn’t tend to go “this is a person who, right now, is sad”. Your brain goes “this is a sad person”. In other words, your brain assumes the facial expression represents a permanent trait that they have, rather than a temporary state they are in. So in the case of the musicians, perhaps they didn’t see a pianist who was frustrated because he had made a mistake. Instead, they saw a frustrated mistake-maker and judged him more harshly as a result.

It would seem the 12-year-old me was wrong – pulling faces was a bad idea. As is always the case, more research will be needed to see whether these findings appear in other contexts. What is clear, though, is that there is more to a mistake than a few wrong notes. The context in which they happen matters as, even with decades of musical training, our brains still shape what we see, hear, and think without us realising it. Keep that in mind the next time you’re asked to judge someone’s performance and things don’t go entirely to plan.

To err is human. To err in perceiving errors, doubly so.

*For those keeping score, each of the 42 musicians heard a different combination of mistake/no-mistake between the two pieces, and the order of the two was switched up among other pieces they were listening to for other pieces of the research. This was important as we tend to rate things differently depending on the order in which we hear them and what we heard before. Mixing the recordings up this way counteracts these effects. You can read all of the details in the Music Perception article.

**The stage entrances were part of a different experiment, and a topic for another day. You can read about them in the Frontiers in Psychology article.

Dr George Waddell is a Research Associate in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and a Sessional Lecturer and honorary Research Associate at Imperial College London. His research focusses on the processes of performance evaluation and the development of technologies to enhance performance training in music, medicine, and beyond. He holds a PhD in Performance Science from the Royal College of Music and a BMus and MMus in piano performance from Brandon University, Canada.

PerformanceScience.ac.uk/team/waddell

Twitter: @geordiewaddell