When/how to take advice?
A couple of nights ago, someone asked me how students should react to advice from their teachers. I had to think a bit before replying; but my rather basic answer was that they should listen respectfully, ask questions if necessary – and then go and think about it, and decide whether or not to accept that advice, either in whole or in part. As with most interactions, there is a balance to be struck here between extremes: there are pupils who blindly accept everything their professors say, in a spirit of worship, and end up as mere imitators (often missing the spirit of what they’ve been told, anyway); and students who go to lessons merely to tell their teachers how they’ve decided to play a piece – which seems to me to make the whole enterprise useless. Why bother to go to the lesson at all, if you’re not wanting to learn?
It is a tricky area, though. Young musicians will over the course of their studies, and early careers, be bombarded with advice about their future; and they will have to choose carefully how to react, when to take that advice and when (politely) to reject it. The latter can be difficult, especially when the advice comes from a revered figure. I studied from the ages of 10 to 17 with Jane Cowan, who was an unorthodox, controversial figure, somewhat frowned upon by many members of the musical establishment. She taught technique only as a means to a specific musical goal (that goal always made very clear), not as a ‘method’ divorced from actual pieces. She also insisted that playing the cello should feel easy, not like a struggle. For some her approach was anathema, and I was often advised to leave her immediately.
A real crunch came when I was 15, and was taken to play to Rostropovich, who had recently been exiled from the Soviet Union. The great man was having his breakfast when I arrived (I seem to remember an extraordinary mixture in front of him, including eggs, strawberries and beetroot). He greeted me with his customary irresistible warmth, and bade me unpack my cello and play. I’d chosen to play Prokofiev’s Concertino (which he’d completed). ‘Ah – I know that piece!’ he remarked. I duly played through it – or part of it, anyway. There was a pause, and then he broke into a torrent of Russian. ‘The Maestro says you are very talented,’ translated the interpreter. ‘But – you are ruining yourself. You need to work more at technique! Your day must be like this: start with 2 hours of scales; then 2 hours of etudes – memorise these etudes, first in three days, then two, then one; then you must practise student concertos, such as Goltermann, for the next 2 hours; and then – if you want to play music, maybe 2 hours of Saint-Saens or Lalo concertos. At the end you will be tired – but happy.’I was pretty shattered by this advice – after all, it came from the most famous cellist in the world, a legend who had already inspired more composers to write pieces for him than any other instrumentalist in history. He must be right! So I went home, and spent a couple of rather miserable days trying to follow his instructions. And then – I gave up. I decided it just wasn’t for me, amazingly though it had worked for him. Looking back, I’m so glad I did so! I can honestly say that had I tried to follow his advice for much longer, I would probably have given up the cello. But of course there were times when I wondered – AM I ruining myself?
Later that same year (tricky year), I played for Antonio Janigro, another cellist I admired enormously. (He was a wonderful artist; a gorgeous recording of him playing the first movement of the Beethoven A major sonata with Dinu Lipatti has just been released for the first time – WELL worth hearing.) This time I played the first movement of Brahms’ E minor sonata. Again, a pause after I’d finished – and then a torrent of words, duly translated by an interpreter. ‘The Maestro thinks you’re very talented; but the way you’re taught is completely opposite to everything he believes. For instance – where your teacher says downbow, he’d say upbow. He doesn’t know what to say.’ Still, we got on exceptionally well, and I went back to him for more lessons the next summer. This time, he put heavy pressure on me to leave Jane and go to study with him. I nearly did – but again, in the end I resisted. And again I’m glad I did. Although he was a fine teacher, and I was very fond of him, he’d have made me follow a more circumscribed, methodical route, rather than the individual path that Jane was forging for me. Not that he was entirely wrong, by any means; I was musically extreme in many ways, a large fish in the very small pond of Jane’s pupils (ranging in number between four and twelve, at her residential school in Scotland). It took me many years of life in the ‘real’ musical world to adapt to playing with people from outside that school of thought – as of course I had to do, as, in different ways, virtually everybody has to do.
The point of these stories is that although it can certainly be right and proper to accept advice you are given (and of course I have accepted much advice from other sources, some of which – from Vegh, Rados, Kurtag, for instance – has changed my life); but it must be right for you. Best are those times when, as you listen to suggestions, you feel as if you’ve always known them to be true, somehow – but now you’re hearing them from another voice. There will always be degrees, shades; one can accept certain ideas from one musician, reject others. The only rule, perhaps, is that one should constantly remain alert, constantly ask oneself: ‘Is that true for me? For the music as I feel it inside?’ If the answer is yes, then you’re safe.
