Under Instruction

People often ask why I care so passionately about “music for small spaces and faces” as I’ve come to call it. First of all, I think the world is so wide, and now so easily charts significance by number of Internet views or by status of influencer, that it’s increasingly effortful and worthwhile to discuss how and why there’s no space too small for a song, nor person too small for a lullaby.

Also, I realize I’m playing a variation on a theme I’ve heard before, from someone who sees significance in small beginnings:

“People often ask why I care so passionately about the early years. Many mistakenly believe that my interest stems from having children of my own and while, of course, I care hugely about their start in life, this ultimately sells the issue short.”[1] I love this quote from the Duchess of Cambridge as it caringly and concisely discerns what I sometimes discuss and clarify: that though myself a mother of three little ones, my interest in the younger generation, specifically in one of my specialties of music education for children from the youngest ages up, began long before I had children of my own.

Coming together to create and to hear living music in real time and space seems to be a craft more needed than ever at a time when virtual skills, entertainment, and even education can be a default, as we’ve had to realize at the start of the 2020’s. Virtual capabilities surely can be used for good; yet at the same time, physical living and closer-than-computer connections are also essential.

Essential to music performance and education is real performance in real time, bridging generations, connecting bright lights of classical music with budding learners. The focus of this blog is going to be on both performance and education, not one or the other. Naomi Lewin in her vibrant podcast “Classics for Kids” with Cincinnati Public Radio describes a number of stellar composers and performers who found joy including students in their orbits: Holst, who has a plaque at St Paul’s Girls School testifying that he “Wrote The Planets and Taught Here;” Bach, whose Inventions for were written for his students, including his children; Vivaldi, who also taught at a girls’ school and wrote “hundreds of concertos, pieces for solo instruments and orchestra” for his students there; Schumann, who composed his Album for the Young in the course of teaching his daughters to play the piano. “A lot of the pieces in the album are scenes from their family life,” Lewin notes, before remembering how Tchaikovsky composed a children’s album also and remarking in the course of the podcast how “not all students are kids.” Indeed, this resonates with me as I find myself to be still a student of music, with a performance of a piece I’ve not ever played live for an audience before coming up in six evenings; to be still a student-teacher, with wishes that I’d met Charlotte Mason and could apply my last several years of experience to my first students who came years before. I’d had the flame of passion lit long before I had the capacity to educate others. As a student, when I remember musical encounters that stand out, there’s a face and voice that revisits my memory over and over again; a face and voice sadly lost to this world this year, that of Christopher Rex. A face and voice that might have been unremarkable any time, any place…until you heard him play a mere two or through notes of music on his cello, then stood to explain their significance. Then...then, you would have been a captive listener. I’m not sure the first time I heard him play and speak; it may have been at Spivey Hall with some ensemble he introduced with the name Spoleto, since all the musicians onstage at that time had first configured themselves so at the renowned Spoleto Festival USA. His penchant for names and narratives and the meanings thereof recurred throughout his career, throughout his creative power of ensemble upon ensemble, performance upon performance, festival upon festival. And his desire to share all this with his audience made him a standout, at least to me.

While he was a musician extraordinaire, the king of the cello on many a stage, the majority of people with whom he shared music would never be or grow up to be musicians of his caliber. That wasn’t the point. The point was to share as much beauty and understanding as every artist-audience crossroad in time and place allowed.

This point and purpose I’ve lately read and found in the writings of Charlotte Mason—herself not a mother, yet a caring educator whose care extended further as a teacher-of-teachers— “… is not always borne in mind that to listen with discriminating delight is as educative and as ‘happy-making’ as to produce [a student-level instrumental performance]; and that this power might, probably, be developed in everybody, if only as much pains were spent in the cultivation of the musical sense as upon that of musical faculty. Let the young people hear good music as often as possible, and that under instruction.”[2]

I think Christopher Rex’s audiences were made happy by encountering beauty under instruction. Not until recent years was I aware that his early life was formed at first under highly harsh and controlling parental-teacher circumstances. Yet as a performer and educator he communicated the opposite: warmly inviting observation and understanding. I remember him, over and over, taking one more minute, making one more moment, finding one more place, to share small blocks of instruction in beauty with whomever was in front of him, whether great musicians or grade-school students.

I think there is a real, yet oft-unuttered acknowledgement in all profound art that the creator and the beholder both matter. There’s a word dedicated to the painter, yet not to the viewer of his work. There is an insightful Charlotte Mason quotation somewhere, which I am too tired to look up in my paperback books, that country landscapes by a great oil-painter are not fully appreciated by one who has not already seen newly-turned clods of earth. I’ve experienced the truth of this as in my unpredicted experience as a military wife for seven years stationed at various coastlines, I gained a whole new appreciation of Monet and his water-, boat-, and beach scenes; while as a mother I’ve gained the same of kittens and Cassatt…yet my encounter with all of these began when I was a very young child.

Monday mornings is when I’d usually like to plan to post; however, today being a holiday, family took precedence and now on Monday night I’m typing alongside a duet of amber-LED and candlelight while three little ones fall asleep at varying tempos. I’ve got to go now and rest, before I start another day tomorrow watching young ones wake, like Montaigne, to classical music. Let us not sell this issue short: music in our homes, in our society, in our world, is for everyone. Join me here as we journey, one week at a time. Whether you’re here as a student or teacher of music appreciation or performance, let us build strong and tall, from foundations up.

Musically yours, Molly [1] The Duchess of Cambridge gives a Keynote Speech on Landmark Research #5BigInsights | Early Years - YouTube [2] Formation of Character, Part III, section entitled “Aesthetic Culture,” Tyndale House edition, p. 235 (emphasis author’s)