Lead with your love

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This past weekend I gave a keynote talk at the Northeast regional conference of the College Music Society. The people in CMS are academics, people who teach music at colleges and universities. And conservatories, too.

And their subject, at this conference, was sustainability. Can these music departments survive, if what they teach is — as of course is the case — largely classical music?

I called my talk “The Road to Survival,” and you can hear it here. I recorded it on my iPhone. Reasonable quality.

But I don’t want to say much about my talk right now. I’ll do it later — tell you what I said, again give you the link to the recording, maybe offer an outline. What I want to say now is that I’ve given many talks, but rarely have I so much enjoyed the other sessions I attended at a conference. I was engaged, sometimes inspired.

One talk I liked was Courtney Miller’s history of the orchestral English horn. Courtney teaches oboe at Boston College, is a DMA candidate at Boston University, is about to become the oboe professor at the University of Iowa, and her enthusiasm is so contagious that I stayed for all her talk, though I hadn’t meant to go to it at all. We ended up bonding over the presence — which I learned about from her talk — of English horn parts in Rossini’s operas, especially early ones like Tancredi.

In those years, early in the 19th century, the English horn wasn’t a standard orchestral instrument. It was an off-the-beaten-track specialty. So what was up with Rossini? Did he put an English Horn only in operas he wrote for certain cities? Cities, that is, where an oboist in the opera orchestra could play an English horn, and had one.

And there’s also a question I’d love someone to answer, about the English Horn solo in the last scene of Bellini’s Il Pirata. Which was also written before English horns became common. When the operaa (Bellini’s first big success) was performed all over Italy, what happened if there wasn’t an English Horn available? What instrument played the solo? (Courtney and I thought the cello might have been the best choice.)

But of course this, for me, was a purely personal delight, because I’m so crazy about Italian opera. For my work, other sessions were important, especially since the conference was wisely planned not to do what I often do, and certainly did in my keynote: Talk about the decline of classical music, and only then unfurl ways to revive it.

Instead, much more lightly, much more happily, the talks I loved simply talked about revival. And without any ideological edge, without any “this is what we have to do to save ourselves.” It was more like, “Hey, here’s something I loved doing! And people who don’t know our music loved it, too.”

And one of them was about the simple — but also profound — joy of loving music. Ronald Sherwin gave this talk, in tones of pure happiness. Sherwin is the chair of the music department at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at U Mass Dartmouth (not to be confused with Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the most remote of the Ivy League schools).

His talk was called “Music Teacher and Student Attrition: Maintaining Your Career, Love of Music, and Ability to Keep Students Engaged.” I think you can see why that would interest me.

And Sherwin’s main idea really was very simple. Don’t forget to enjoy music, he said. To indulge yourself completely in the music you love. Whatever that music might be! He stressed this last point. And here, with a huge smile, he implicitly challenged one key point in the classical music ideology, which is that classical music is serious, and that we demean ourselves by liking other music that’s thought to be empty junk.

Sherwin wasn’t buying that. He celebrated a retired professor who came with his wife to a talk on loving music. What music, Sherwin asked, did the people attending listen to, when they wanted some happy energy? (These are my words, not his. I hope my paraphrase is accurate.)

The retired professor, a man in his 80s, spoke up. “Queen,” he said. “‘Fat Bottomed Girls.’” Wherupon his wife slapped him! She had no idea he liked something so disreputable. (Or, rather, disreuptable in their world.)

Sherwin celebrated our love of whatever music we love. And suggested that we celebrate with him.

Which got me thinking. I can’t say that I see love of music celebated in conservatories. Instead — and of course there exceptions, differences between one school and another, and (very crucially) between one teacher and another — we tend to stress technique, precision, proper style, and of course career paths. Even the current excitement about entrepreneurship comes with furrowed brows. “Better learn this stuff, or else you might not have a career.” Instead of: Learn to do business in an exciting, imaginative, thorough way, and maybe you can make a living playing the music you really, really love.

So after the session, I started to daydream. I daydreamed about Juilliard, because that’s where I teach. Just suppose, I dreamed, that at the start of each academic year, the big colloquium that launches the year was all about loving music. People from the school — faculty, students, staff, top administrators (and why not include the mailroom people, the janitors, and the security guards?) — would come on stage and talk about music they love. Some would perform it. People in the audience could shout out their favorites.

What a change that would be! Lead with your joy. For music professionals, loving music is what started us on the road that got us wherever we are now.

And we should never forget that.