The Training of Musicians

The training of musicians has always been fiercely professional. A rigorous apprenticeship system, prolonged and intensive ear-hand patterning drills (we call it “practicing”), absolute commitment to rehearsal, and supporting studies in the theory, history and primary instruments of our art characterize music curricula at the college level. Musicians generally receive little, if any, Liberal Arts training. They are too busy with the ear-hand drills, the rehearsals, and the preparation for lessons to spend the time and to acquire the broader knowledge of our civilization, let along the skills of scholarship. Further, there is the naive assumption that because they are training to be artists, the cultural values of the arts must be implicit in their training. After all, they are doing art, aren’t they?

My particular discipline within this musical framework is a new one. We are teaching musicians how to make recordings. This turns out to be a highly musical activity, closely related to both musical performance and musical composition. At the same time, the discipline draws on a broad range of curricular offerings in music, mathematics, physics, business and law, in addition to our own recording studio craft. The successful music producer (a visionary organizer who creates the conditions under which composers and performers work) and successful recording engineer are part artist, scientist, businessperson and politician (not to mention technician). Ours is a craft that demands interdisciplinary skills.

Watching my students cope, watching them enter the profession and watching the profession itself evolve has provided some insight into their education and education in general. I’d like to discuss these ideas in light of the notion of Liberal Arts education. Here are a few postulates:

1. By the time training has ended, the technology used in that training is obsolete.
2. By the time training has ended, the specialized technical principles of understanding and knowledge are often outmoded.
3. The memorization of facts should be limited to the most basic and general information.
4. Handwriting is no longer a primary skill; typing has replaced it.
5. Testing should involve real-world problems and solutions in real-world contexts.
6. The most useful things to teach are the methods and tools for analysis and problem-solving. The subject matter, whatever it is, should serve as the vehicle for such teaching – not vice versa.
7. The skills that are emerging as most necessary (aside from the need for talent and creativity) are those related to working successfully with other people.

The first three items above relate to the accelerating rate of change and growth of knowledge today. The period of utility for a particular technology with its incumbent hardware and software has now shrunk to occupy less time than that required to learn said technology. Therefore, it is no longer reasonable or effective to devote extended periods of time and effort in training individuals to use specific hardware and technology. In the computer field, for instance, anyone who takes time to write a book on computer technology runs the serious risk of falling behind the technology due to taking the time to write the book! We are trapped in a condition where the rate of change of operational systems is so rapid, the very processes of the work environment so volatile, that we can no longer assimilate such change into our craft before they are already long gone. It is important to acknowledge this, and to acknowledge also that this volatility is, ironically, a permanent condition.

This means that it is absolutely necessary to set aside concerns for the mastery of the technology itself in deference to the broader professional and/or artistic context. To master the profession means to master those aspects of the profession that transcend the transitory technology. In music, this means that musicians (performers, composers producers, recording engineers) must clearly understand, for instance, the implications of technology, which have a profound impact on the way music is now made. At the same time they cannot become committed to specific technical practices, except as they need to do so for specific artistic projects and purposes.

Facts, data, et cetera are increasingly transitory. They are things we acquire quickly, use and set aside. Memory is useful for other purposes. This has, of course, significant implications for the whole notion of scholarship. Given the rapid rate of growth in our base of knowledge, memorization of factual information is futile and wasteful. Aside from the problems presented by the pervasive erosion of data accuracy and relevance, the requirement that students memorize data as a condition of study curtails the range of topics with which they can successfully cope.,

This brings us to the issue of testing. Tests predicated on memorization neither lead the student to insights nor permit them to grapple with larger issues. Open-book tests permit more challenging questions, greater emphasis on problem-solving, and yield greater insight into what students really know. M ore important, the professional world for which we prepare our students is a data-rich open-book world with a great multiplicity of possible options. Professional and artistic goals are, more than ever, moving targets. The closed-book four-option multiple-choice question does not meaningfully portray that world or prepare our student for it. Further, the sort of information that is amenable to such a question format is not really the sort of material that we should be emphasizing in our teaching.

If there is one technical skill all of us should acquire, it is typing. Typing is to the late 20th century what penmanship was to the 18th and 19th: the portal to interactive communication, research and scholarship. Even given the emergence of the voice-driven word-processor, the alphanumeric keyboard will be the primary instrument for data-handling and communications for the foreseeable future.

So, how do we train artists within a Liberal Arts context? First, we must reassess that context and define it in terms of our objective, which is to educate functionally literate and adaptive individuals who have an enhanced capacity to think. We must be willing to step away from the notion of Liberal Arts as “classicism” and instead treat it as a group of strategies for dealing with subject matter. Then we must teach our students to employ these strategies.

We must teach our students to read, by asking them to read, by reading ourselves, and by discussing with them, in class and out, what we have been reading. We must teach them to write (yes, it can be done!), by asking them to write, by writing ourselves and by teaching them how to edit, revise and use writing as a mode of thinking. My experience implies that it is better to restrict the length of their writing, forcing them to compress what they have to say. The professional world will not reward them for verbosity.

We must teach our students heuristics for solving problems. We must help them see the contexts into which they are thrust, the past forces, recorded by history, that put them where they are and the forces of today and tomorrow that are shaping their futures.

The modern recording studio for which I train my students is a microcosm that accentuates many of the salient features of high-technology professional and artistic life. All the trappings of technology are there. The studio is a volatile and rapidly changing system that today bears little resemblance (in hardware, software or operations) to the studio of even five years ago. The goal of studio work, making music, involves intuitive and creative skills that resist formalization and quantification, and the interactions between people working in the studio are highly stressed by time and fiscal pressures.

Individuals who possess the range of knowledge and the technical, artistic and personal skills to work successfully in this environment can generally do just about anything to which they put their minds. It is the general skills – those communications, adaptive and problem-solving skills that emerge so powerfully from the Liberal Arts curriculum – plus the acquisition of multiple transitory and evolving specialties, that make individuals successful. An epigram attributed to a Balinese musician expresses this idea well:

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