"Quantifiable"

Dear friends, I'm sorry I've been away for so long.  A recent piece for the book; I hope it has meaning for some of you. - MG

QUANTIFIABLE

         Recently I was given the task of putting together a mechanism for assessing the progress of my conducting students.  It was not a suggestion; it was a mandate from my University.  From the State of Ohio.  I attended a nine-hour series of classes on how to construct a curriculum map, on defining program outcomes, on action verbs and Bloom’s Taxonomy.  I thought about everything we try to teach, and everything we hope our students will learn.  Everything that has to be assimilated, from scores to skills; from how to shake a concertmaster’s hand to how to read a painting of Caspar David Friedrich.  I thought about how I learned the craft, and about how I pieced together a career, how long it took; what one might call the “Last man standing” method.  I thought about NASM (National Association of Schools of Music) guidelines, about everything you have to KNOW, and everything you have to be able to DO.  From the languages one must understand and speak, to the physical gestures one must master to the point where they look easy.  About how we assimilate style, and acquire taste.  I told the instructor of the class that such a program assessment for orchestral conducting was not possible; she assured me that it was.

            She asked about our program requirements; I replied that there were few.  She asked about assigned readings; I told her there was only a “book club.”  She asked how I knew if my students read the books; I said that I didn’t.  She asked how I could determine if someone knew a score; I said that I could tell just by watching them conduct.  She was left incredulous at my unsystematic approach to teaching.  But she was no less exasperated than I.  The question I finally asked her was this: “How do you quantify pain?”  According to the Buddhist tradition: “If you seek the great Enlightenment, prepare to sweat hot beads.”

            I thought of a great quote from Bill Buford, one that I use frequently in my teaching.  He wrote about the process of becoming a chef to the effect that one simply does and does and does until one eventually knows more than others and learns the craft. I was never taught specifically how to do my job.  I don’t have a degree in my field of expertise, nor do I have a doctorate in anything.  Yet I have a career.  I have studied music for 51 years and have worked in the field for 33, and ultimately I mastered my craft.  I have just done it longer than anyone else and eventually learned a lot of scores, acquired a lot of tools and picked up a lot of tricks. Never was I called on to quantify what I learned or how I learned it.  My teacher, Gustav Meier, used to say, “You gotta KNOW!”  I put it this way: “Si sa, o non si sa.” 

            If you want a conducting career, it also helps if you don’t really want worldly possessions, or can cope with challenging steady relationships.  A spouse, a child, a car, a house.   It helps is you pack light, as I tell our voice students.  It helps if you are thick-skinned; if you are smart.  It helps if you don’t mind having the crap beaten out of you, emotionally if not physically.  It helps if you understand the language of sound.  If you know how to hold a knife and fork, this is useful.  If you know all of the important symphonic works in the key of E-Flat Major, that is a good thing.  If you can do the diving board, toss the pasta, save vertical space and know how to drift, there is hope for you.  If you understand Schenkerian analysis and like the blues, don’t quit yet.  If you appreciate Barnett Newman and Gerhard Richter, you have a chance.  If you understand soccer and baseball, you will gain insight into orchestral thinking.  If you can predict the future and read a soprano’s mind, you might get through “Mi chiamano Mimi.” If you know how to dress and speak three languages, you might survive.  If you know – and I mean, KNOW – a few hundred scores, there may be a path forward.  Above all, if you are curious, there IS a way forward.  Curiosity is the key to learning.  It too is not quantifiable.

            Back to the assessment plan.  The one thing I couldn’t do is what I was asked to do, and yet I cobbled together a map, a plan that someone from the outside could decipher and assess.  Because ultimately that was my task – to compile an assessment that itself could be assessed.  Please note that we haven’t even used the word “art” yet.  And in some vague sense, that is what my students want; they want to learn how to “make art” with an orchestra.  And of course they want to get paid for it.  They see video of the up-and-comers, of the living masters, of the podium legends.  They don’t want to conduct the pops concerts, the family series, “Tubby the Tuba.”  They watch their YouTube, their Googles, their Bings.  And they think that conducting has something to do with any of what they see online.

            There is nothing “sexy” about mastery of our craft, nor about our career path.  People win competitions and positions; I know neither how or why.  There is little that is quantifiable in terms of progress.  One can test for various skills – sight-singing, score reading, dictation, “drop the needle,” but there are simply too many intangibles.  One cannot assess score study, for even if one knows the score, it doesn’t mean that one understands the language.   Meanwhile, to quantify actual conducting denies a basic premise – I don’t want my students to look like I do when they conduct, even if I want them to have craft tools to use when they need them.  You can’t quantify gesture, particularly gesture that is unrelated to a specific musical event.  And even if the orchestra plays together, there is no way to account for taste or style.

            We can’t quantify taste.  We can’t quantify style.  We can’t quantify knowledge of a score.  We can’t quantify gesture. We can’t quantify the measure of a man or woman.  Above all, we can’t quantify the meaning of sound, or our grasp of it.  In Lao Tse’s words, the Tao that can be explained is not the eternal Tao.

            And yet there is something to be said for assessing the mastery of certain skills, of knowledge of history, be it cultural, artistic or political.  If one knows not just the opus numbers and the dates of Brahms’s oeuvre, but the works themselves; if one has PLAYED or sung them, then that surely must enhance one’s understanding of the composer.  If one can read score at the piano well enough to decipher Mahler 9, one can get one’s fingers dirty with the sounds, the harmonies, the dissonances.  If one knows what was happening in the world when Bizet wrote Carmen in 1875, if one can read and understand the French, if one has read the Merimée novella, one might understand why the work was so unique, so revolutionary.  Why it failed at first, and why it is beloved today.  The more dots of repertoire and craft one has, the more dots one can connect. And that IS quantifiable.  After which, as a former student of mine memorably remarked, when all else is in place, art shows up.

Mark Gibson, copyright 2014