More Theory Thoughts Again

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to "Theory Thoughts."

I'm really enjoying the challenge of the new job - excellent students who are engaged with the material, faculty and administration who are supportive of exellence in our discipline, and an institution that encourages the integration of faith with one's teaching.

I'm particularly feeling at this stage that the teaching of theory is the central aspect of my calling here. I cherish the freshness and joy of gathering with my students at noon and sharing around music. It feels a little like church and also like I am at the pulpit. But the real challenge is this: this is the activity in my current professional life that I can pour my heart into the most. But caring a lot means it hurts more when things don't go so well! How to care? How to do well?...

Bringing one's faith to bear on such work in an intentional fashion takes lots of reflection. Doing the basic job of teaching theory excellently is hard to begin with. One basic of which we need to periodically remind ourselves is that the process is messy. That is, the process of adjusting our consciousness to the logic of the music at hand is a marvelous but messy activity. But I want to articulate that activity in a deeper and broader context. The temptation might be to go for too much - too much aiming for profundity and thereby turning one's self into a cliche. The challenge is to keep a framework that allows us to shift from the highest level of living and the universe and beyond, back to the most local details of the organization of the music and styles studied. Being conscious that this is a continuum or a multilayered endeavor should help to hold it all together for me and the students.

As first year faculty at Southeastern, we're reading Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach, and just in time for me, too, as it addresses the issues of identity and integrity as a person that I am facing in this new classroom setting. Two passages that have sharpened my understanding in our first reading are as follows.

Palmer writes:

Once again, when I seek my identity and integrity, what I find is not always a proud and shining thing. The discoveries I make about myself when I remember the encounters that have shaped and revealed my selfhood are sometimes embarrassing - but they are also real. Whatever the cost in embarrassment, I will know myself better, and thus be a better teacher, when I acknowledge the forces that play within me instead of allowing them to wreak havoc on my work.

Florida Scott-Maxwell, writing in her mid-eighties, made the point powerfully: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done . . . you are fierce with reality."

In the margin, I wrote, "This happens in performance." So many times, I have discovered what was actually within me while performing music. There's such an interplay between self and the work of art and the audience when we perform that we often discover feelings, ideas, and aspects of our identity that have very old roots or may even seem unfamiliar to us because we have tried to plan so much of who we are. This dynamic reminds me of the phrase from Fred Pratt Green's "When in Our Music God is Glorified" - "How often making music we have found a new dimension in the world of sound . . ."

This issue of being performers is something to which we musicians who also teach should be sensitive. A lot of good teaching involves active participation and creation on the part of the students. That has to be good for the majority of students. But we who were trained as performers are accustomed to presenting and developing our own ideas. What's more, as students, we sought out master teachers to give us their input and perspective. In the process, we discovered our own voices, but the process was traditionally designed to teach us the art and expose us to the voices of our teachers.

Here's the other passage that immediately shed light on what I'm doing:

How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? I have no particular methods to suggest, other than the familiar ones: solitude and silence, meditative reading and walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will listen. I simply propose that we find as many ways as we can of "talking to ourselves."

These words made me realize that I might already be developing as the type of teacher Palmer is describing. What's more, since these are all things I do to some extent in my own way as part of my daily routine, maybe I'm actually a contemplative and just don't normally describe myself in that way. Ongoing reflection keeps me moving and refreshed in the midst of work that might seem like a draining activity to those on the outside of it.