“The way to get the best out of instruction is to put oneself entirely in the hands of one’s instructor, and try to find out all about his method regardless of one’s own personality, keeping of course a secret ‘eppur si muove’ up one’s sleeve. Young students are much too obsessed with the idea of expressing their personalities. In the merest harmony exercises they insist on keeping all their clumsy progressions because that is what they ‘felt,’ forgetting that the art cannot mature unless the craft matures alongside with it.”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography”