Archive for September, 2008
wow.
What a fun place this is to teach. 10 minutes ago, Kitty just heard her first Dona Nobis Pacem from Bach’s B minor Mass. And I got to be here. It’s a really big fugue, full of truth, honesty, directness and one of the most perfect examples of the use of Timpani for the greater good. Dozens of folks on the stage doing different things(or the same thing all at different times), getting along perfectly well, parts colliding, the collisions of which provide the hope and the joy. Kitty’s playing a fugue too, and now hers just sounds joyous, too, noisy and fun, instead of labored and overthought. Sometimes it’s so much better to let others do the teaching.
1 comment September 26, 2008
Eco Day!
Eco day was Monday! In order to help build community, encourage the students from different majors and faculty to intermix, focus attention on a topic or issue that doesn’t get much attention in our arts/academic centric community, and give a mental break from our routine, we have days interspersed throughout the year called “theme days.”
The first was Monday, providing a revisitation of a topic we first explored last February. We rehabilitated the nature trail, built a raptor perch, planted trees, worked on the greenhouse, studied recycling. These events provide such an opportunity: it’s so instructive to a faculty member to see a young lady who so willing wields a bow or pen absolutely refuse to wield a rake or shovel. On the other hand, how fun to see a young actor revel in being the ONE person in the group who has experience in pouring concrete, take charge of the situation, and lead the others in replacing the signs on the nature trail.
One might ask, what does the Eco topic have to do with an arts school? Well, to borrow from Al Gore, if we don’t take care of our planet, we’re really not going to have much use for art, are we?
Our next theme day is November 4, with activities surrounding the election. What does that have to do with art? Well…
1 comment September 23, 2008
More on preprofessional training.
I thought that after that last blog it might be good to include some concrete examples of how a pianist might practice in such a way as to make sure he “cannot go wrong.” Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to prevail upon one of my other performing colleagues in theatre or dance to address this in relation to their disciplines, but for now I have to stick to the piano because it’s what I know best.
First, we have to determine whether or not we’re talking about chamber music or solo repertoire. Why? Because of memory. Solo music is played from memory. Yes, there are a few great artists that put the music up, but the rest of us just don’t really have the option of walking out on the stage carrying the book. Playing from memory catapults performance stress into the stratosphere.
So let’s start with chamber music. No memory and you get to sit on the stage with people you like! It’s all good. You still have to be fast, slow, accurate, confident, poetic. So. You decipher the notes on the page, you determine which fingers play which notes, you play slowly and accurately, moving up the speed little by little until you can play accurately at the right speed. You learn the piece. Someone not planning on being a professional pianist or performing the piece publicly might stop there. But I wouldn’t. I would then take the piece apart again, practicing–not learning now, but practicing–in different ways. For a long passage of fast notes I might want to make sure that I’m playing every single note confidently and accurately. So I might practice a few times playing the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc note louder than the others. Then I might go back and play the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc notes louder. Then I might want to make sure that my arm is putting my hand in the optimal place: so I play the passage with minimal finger movement, relying on rotation (think twisting a door knob) to slap my fingers down, trusting that my arm will retain a subtle version of that motion when my fingers are reactivated. Then I might switch it, using only my fingers, being sure to raise each one before it goes down—if a finger consistently doesn’t press a key down at the right time it’s a good bet that it’s already down! So you have to practice lifting each one, ensuring that each finger is ready to make good on the adage “what goes up has to come down.” Or more accurately in this case, “what needs to go down must first come up!”
I play the piece slower than I imagine it should go. I practice it faster than it should go. I play louder, developing a very distinct impression on my muscles for the location and order of every key. I turn the metronome on (almost always) to make sure that no inconsistencies of speed creep in. I practice the first movement first and the first movement last. I practice the last movement first and the last movement last. I practice the last movement at the end of a long practice session so that I know I’ll be able to do it when I’m tired, as I will be when the last movement comes at its rightful place at the end of the piece.
Oh, and then there’s the problem of those other players! You have to be together when you play chamber music. In order to do that you have to know their part(s). So, I practice playing my part while singing their parts. No laughing please. I practice playing my part while keeping my eyes focused on their parts. I practice playing my part while looking away from the piano.
So this is a little glimpse into what one pianist does in order to feel confident that every performance is going to be good. Did you ever wonder why piano players practice so much? And we haven’t even talked about memory yet! Another day.
1 comment September 22, 2008
What is preprofessional?
Our mission statement at Idyllwild Arts says that we provide preprofessional training in the arts. It also says we provide college prep academic training in an atmosphere conducive to positive personal growth. Recently, at our beginning of the year faculty orientation, we asked each other to consider that mission statement. Not in a judgmental, revisionist way, but more in a “what does that thing mean to me?” kind of way. We broke into small groups to discuss and I would imagine that the answers to that question were as varied as our colorful faculty is.
I had already pondered this question during the summer, more specifically, the preprofessional part of the question. What is preprofessional training? I felt like I did it everyday, but really didn’t know how to define it. Does it mean that I’m providing the last bit of training that a person gets before they become a professional? No, because most of my piano students go on to college or conservatory music training. But when they go on to that other training does it make my training NOT preprofessional? I don’t think so. I think of the word professional as an adjective, not a noun. I’m training my students in a preprofessional way. Or even more accurately, a professional way.
As I was considering this topic I also happened to be reading the new Julie Andrews memoir, Home. She recounted her early singing training in her teen years, with Madame Stiles-Allen. Her teacher said, “Julie, remember: The amateur works until he can get it right. The professional works until he cannot go wrong.” It was like the sun suddenly came out. That’s it! I thought immediately of the number of hours I’ve spent practicing a passage on the piano, one that I can play perfectly well, repeating over and over and in different ways, making sure that it will not go wrong in front of an audience. It’s about building-in redundant systems. It’s like an airplane. Don’t we trust that the plane has redundant systems so that it absolutely won’t fall out of the sky? I wouldn’t say that a failing artistic performance is like a crashing plane, but it certainly feels that way when you’re the one on the stage experiencing it. You want your training to have supported an overabundance of perfection, not just enough.
It’s really all about the relationship between the vocational and avocational. For example, I love to cook. (My students are groaning now, they LOVE my food analogies) I whip up something in the kitchen and it’s usually pretty good, occasionally great or okay. Sometimes bad. I move on. But Julia Child made beurre blanc a million times until she knew American cooks could make the recipe perfectly every single time using American ingredients. She had a different goal than most people.
So do our students.
2 comments September 19, 2008
September in Valencia
September in Valencia. I spent the afternoon up here at CalArts, participating in a discussion with colleagues from both CalArts and Dartington, which is in the southwest of the UK. The topic of the afternoon was sustainability, not of resources or artistic ideals, but of careers. Specifically, how do we train young people to prepare for a career in the arts, in ways beyond giving them the art specific skills they need? What’s more, what IS a successful career in the arts these days?
In my first blog entry I mentioned the fascinating careers that our students make for themselves. Today, while sitting and listening to my colleagues talk about the ways they are teaching career and profession-building and incorporating that into their curriculum, I started to wonder about the ways that that happens organically at our school. I mean, at a regular school I would imagine that a dancer might spend 6-8 hours a day in the dance studio in addition to normal school. Probably he has some friends at school but interacts mostly with the dancers at the studio. In the normal world he goes home at night to his parents and then starts again the next day. But at our school he goes back to the dorm to his reed-making oboe-playing roommate, and learns first hand of the stress of sitting in one of those principal wind seats in the orchestra. Or a visual artist comes home to hear the 15th recitation of a monologue that was assigned to an actor, desperate to get it right. How does that affect the growth of our students?
I’m convinced that these collisions, mostly accidental, have informed the lives and careers of our grads in ways we don’t realize. It would be fascinating for me to hear from alums for whom this resonates. Do you have a story of an intersection with another art form at our school that has changed you? I’d love to hear from you at dashcraft@idyllwildarts.org!
1 comment September 18, 2008
What a weekend.
What a weekend. Where could you have heard jazz played by a member of Frank Zappa’s band, a member of Miles Davis’s band, a member a Lee Ritenour’s band, along with the Dean of Students, the Director of the Academy and the Director of Residential Life; heard the world premiere of a new work for violin and piano; seen farm animals made from a bullet ridden car door, ladies shoes, and pink feathers; and seen a one-woman show from one of Broadway’s veteran performers?
The answer, of course, is Idyllwild Arts Academy. It was our first weekend of the year, a closed weekend, which means don’t go home this weekend, stay here and be a part of our magnificently rich community and experience what you came here for.
Friday night our jazz faculty played at Café Aroma, a local restaurant operated by one of our parents. Behind them, at a long table, sat virtually our entire group of jazz students, listening, asking questions between sets, learning to play by learning to hear.
But before that we had the opening of the Visual Arts Faculty Show. This was not a place to see pretty photos of mountains, nice vases of flowers, or pottery you might use on the dining table. These people challenge us to appreciate or at least consider that panty hose might have some sort of symbolic meaning beyond warmth or beauty, that the structure of cars and animals might have some spiritual relationship, that there really is a bee farm on the way to Hemet…
Saturday night’s Faculty Concert was provocative in different ways: who would have expected that the opportunity to see teachers on the stage (some in unexpected roles– administrators on percussion, academic faculty reading original poetry and fiction) would have inspired such enthusiasm! I felt like a rock star! Even so, I was reminded that we have many jobs here: it’s just not okay to get up and walk out of a concert even if your friends ARE expecting you in Pierson commons. They should have been at the concert, too! It’s part of why they came here. And besides, you’re being rude to the performers. It’s a little weird, accepting congratulations and thanks for your performance and then immediately telling that same congratulatory student to be considerate and get back in their seat. But it’s what we do here every day. We have educating to do about being a respectful consumer of art as well as being a good producer of art. More on that later.
Singer/Actress Teri Ralston shared songs and stories on Sunday afternoon as only a true first lady of theatre can: an original Broadway cast member of Company and A Little Night Music, she can deliver her Sondheim with complete authority. Why not? She got it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. How many performers can say that? Since she taught a class on Saturday as well, all of our kids can now say they got it straight from her. She told stories about Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold. And boy can she belt. I think they heard her in Banning(!)
I officially moved into my new Dean’s office today. I have a desk, filing cabinets, microwave, Steinway, and an excellent Italian espresso maker. Stop by and I’ll make you a cup.
1 comment September 16, 2008
Actors Wear Black
Actors wear black. That’s just an observation. They also stand around in groups talking at the same time, not to each other and to no one in particular. To the air really, as they practice their monologues, hanging out by the bookstore or on the steps up into IAF, preparing to face the theatre faculty, auditioning for their place in the theatre department for the year.
Dancers wear black, too. So would I if I had to bear the scrutiny of those 6 dance teachers staring at me with their arms crossed, assessing, judging. Was that a raised eyebrow of surprised happiness? Disapproval? Skepticism? Certainly judgment. Certainly intimidating.
Back to judgment. It’s really all about judgment. An audition that is. What do these young artists have? What do they need? How can we use it? How can we stretch it? How does this combination of talents fit together best, in order to produce a Beethoven Symphony, a series of plays that Howard won’t let me announce yet, or a balanced dance concert that won’t require every dancer to rehearse until 9:30 every day?
A string quartet requires 2 violins, 1 viola and a cello. But there are only 4 violas and 13 violinists. 5 cellists. That means 4 string quartets leaves 5 violinists and one cello with nothing to do. A piano trio puts a pianist to work and requires a cello and violin. Now we’re down to 4 violins in the cold. So buy a teaching piece that has been written for those 4 violins and be done with it. Maybe in a normal school, but not here. We only play concert music. When do four violins play together in the standard concert repertoire? Never. So rethink. Maybe a couple of quartets, a couple of trios, Bartok wrote some violin duos that are always useful…
By tomorrow this time, these decisions will be made. Of course they’ll be tweaked and refined, quartet members will be certain they should play Brahms and not Haydn, dancers will be confident they’ve been placed in the wrong class, and actors will be know they’ve been miscast. They’d be wrong. You grow by doing what makes you uncomfortable, by doing what you thought you couldn’t, by facing your fear, and proving wrong those who’ve said you can’t or shouldn’t.
It’s what we do here every day. I may stick my head into an Algebra class this fall…
Now THERE’S some discomfort…
2 comments September 10, 2008
Welcome to Art In 3D
Welcome to the Dean of the Arts blog! I’m the new Dean of the Arts, having spent the last five as Chair of the Music Department. I thought that I’d start this blog in order to provide information, commentary, thoughts, ideas and questions for our parents, prospective students and interested observers. I may even occasionally invite a guest blogger to join in.
The campus is a little electric with the anticipation of the arrival of the students for 2008-2009. The floor in Wayne Music Hall (the Wengers) was stripped and waxed today, I spent an hour learning Peter Askim’s new violin and piano piece for the opening faculty concert, and an ENORMOUS leather sectional was delivered to the Fireside Room, ready to host innumerable student loungefests. Prefects and student government members have already arrived, looking rested, energetic and ready to attack the year.
As we begin, I’m thinking a lot about our alums and the careers and lives they’ve built for themselves. Of course we have the expected results of training we started here on the mountain: principal oboe of the New York Philharmonic, Dancer in the Trisha Brown Dance company, lead in Wicked on Broadway…. But then there are the others…. Piano major turned Art History Grad Student at NYU now curator at San Francisco Art Gallery… Writer turned musician now touring in her own rock band… violinist now studying law in San Diego, Visual artist turned social commentator who designed the HOPE poster of Barack Obama…
My point is this: Our students make fascinating careers for themselves. I can’t wait to see what entrepreneurial, exciting, innovative things the students entering Idyllwild Arts Academy in the fall of 2008 create. An actor wins the Oscar, a dancer gets the Kennedy Center Honor, a musician teaches 75 inner city school kids how to play the violin, a writer writes the best State of the Union speech ever. For herself.
Let’s just see what happens.
Dr. Douglas Ashcraft, Dean of the Arts
(Dean Dr. Doug, 3D…get it?..)
3 comments September 8, 2008
