Sleeping in Temples by Susan Tomes

Author:Susan Tomes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Biography
ISBN: 9781782044536
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2014-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Old people

I sometimes teach at ChamberStudio, a London scheme set up to provide high-level coaching for chamber groups who have finished their formal education and have therefore lost their automatic access to teachers. Typically they are in their twenties, and individually they are advanced instrumentalists. But often these chamber groups, who may not have started working together seriously until their post-graduate years or even later, haven’t actually had much time to develop an authentic approach of their own. While they are doing so, they are glad to have coaching from people who’ve been there before and performed the repertoire the younger groups are now learning for the first time. I find the ChamberStudio participants a particularly pleasing group to coach because they are idealistic and not so pressed for time that they are unwilling to try new approaches. They seem to find playing to more ‘senior’ musicians a good way of jumping quickly up the salmon ladder of ideas.

Playing devil’s advocate, a provocative colleague of mine, a tutor on the ChamberStudio team, recently asked, ‘Why do they want to learn from old people? They should be having their own ideas!’ ‘Yeah, good point!’ I felt like replying. ‘And why should they play old music? Why can’t they make up their own music?’

It’s a worthwhile question, however: why don’t people just use their own ideas? For me, the answer is that there is hardly any idea which is entirely your own – how could there be? For ideas are formed from all sorts of information and all manner of observations of things and people around us, and no matter how original our synthesis of particles of information and insight may be, any ‘idea’ worth its salt is likely to have been inspired by something already in existence. I remember reading that the French poet Paul Valéry had once asked Albert Einstein whether he carried a notebook or a scrap of paper around with him to record all his original ideas. Einstein replied that original ideas come so rarely that one is not likely to forget them; therefore there is no need for a notebook, or even a scrap of paper.

As a veteran carrier of scraps of paper, I was mildly offended by Einstein’s assertion, but when I thought about it I realised he must be right. Most of what feel like my own ideas are probably more like (re-)compositions of fragments of thought and experience, not truly deserving the label original idea. Even when you have what feels like a wholly new idea, it often turns out that others have had it too in a different time or place. Does that allow them to qualify as original ideas or not? I remember when I was about seven years old, learning about tones and semitones on the piano, it suddenly struck me that in theory there could be intervals smaller than semitones. Quarter-tones, eighth-tones – a new world of microtones! I was convinced I had had a brainwave until I tentatively put

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