Music school will beat you into shape
… and beat music right out of you
Note from Riri: the following essay describes my experience as a Russian-music-school drop-out. If you had a positive experience with formal music education elsewhere, I would love to read your story in the comments:
Some would probably say: but Rita, you just wrote a whole essay glorifying music theory and yapping about how it’s uncool to reject music education! Now you’re trying to sell the take that music schools suck? You can’t have your cake and eat it, too!
So let’s go ahead and make the distinction right away: music education is great but music schools are often not.
Artistic education in the post-Soviet block in general is tragically known for its senseless rigidity bordering on cruelty. And while that could be - maybe, possibly - somewhat justified for the top tier talent exported worldwide, the approach is not much different for people who don’t strive for superhuman success. And this is a big problem with post-Soviet music schools - one that sucks out all the joy from making music and conditions “survivors” to bury their instrument in the furthest drawer of their storage space where it could live out its days partying with spiders.
I generally have the impression that this particular type of music schools is slowly drifting away into the past. It seems like private lessons and YouTube tutorials are gradually taking over the niche of music education and doing so in a beautifully non-traumatic manner. Yet when I was a kid, music education was highly institutionalised.
Music schools enjoyed particular popularity, among other reasons, because a lot of parents in the early 2000s Russia didn’t have the disposable income to afford private lessons for their kids. The same parents, for the same reason, often both had to work a full-time job and music school was an excellent place to tuck away your kid for the after-school hours.
However, as hinted before, every children’s culture centre in the post-Soviet area tends to think they’re brining up world-class stars, and for one case where this ends up being true, they traumatise 999.999 kids who just wanted to play an instrument for their own enjoyment - or maybe, more often than not, their parents wanted them to.
Now, I was the kind of kid who wanted it for myself - duh! But the problems began right at my first interview. I still remember the day when my parents first brought me to the small shabby three-storey building. We were received by a middle-aged lady, dressed like she came straight out of the seventies, her hair in a strict tight bun. You would think she’d take us to a classroom or an office of sorts to discuss my enrolment but no! - she found it appropriate to evaluate me right there, in the hall, next to the cloakroom.
For a while she discussed something with my parents - I don’t remember what exactly cause I was busy holding my mom’s hand and taking in the frankly mildly depressing interior of the school. Then the lady looked down to me and asked:
- Well, what instrument do you want to play?
I said: “The flute, obviously”. Already then I thought of the transverse flute as the most beautiful instrument - both optically and sound-wise. There was not a shimmer of a doubt in my mind that once I got that flute I would never let it go.
- How old are you, child?
- I just turned nine.
- Oh, you’re way too old now to play the flute!
Excusez-moi? Too old to play the flute?! At nine?! Trust me, lady, I’m not shooting for a spot at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or what have you in the way of philharmonic orchestras in Moscow? Just let me play the flute for heaven’s sake!
Well, this is not something I could have said to anyone at that age, especially not to a lady with such a scary strict bun. So instead I said:
- The violin, then?
My dad learned how to play the violin when he was a kid. That was my second choice, not as attractive as the flute but still something I could imagine enjoying.
The woman almost laughed in my face.
- Oh, no-o-o, you’re WAY too old to play the violin.
- Piano?
- Absolutely not, you should have started at 4 if you wanted to play the piano.
I was standing there, dumbfounded. No matter what instrument I named the lady had something to object.
- What exactly are my options? - I finally asked.
- The synthesiser! - was the answer. - It’s a new modern class we have just added to our curriculum, we’ve got this brilliant teacher who is a composer himself!
And so I was registered for the class of synthesiser. Not ideal, but surely not so bad, right? Well, depends on how you look at it. Let’s just say that the class came with a whole set of caveats.
First of all, what is a synthesiser? Even today the word “synthesiser” in layman’s terms can refer to a wide variety of instruments. But especially back in the day, everything that was shaped like a keyboard, had buttons and could generate a sound from somewhere within itself was referred to as a synthesiser.
So the music school, not knowing any better, told my parents to get me one of those digital Yamaha keyboards - I think it was the PSR-550, complete with a freaking floppy disk drive that my family then used to blast MIDI versions of Beatles songs.
Looking back, I honestly have no idea if a real synth was even an option in the post-default Russian economy. But as is becoming obvious, there was no actual synthesis involved in the synthesiser class at the music school. I’m even going to go as far as making an assumption: I think the much-advertised “brilliant teacher” didn’t have a shimmer of an idea what on earth synthesis was.
In fact, the “brilliant teacher” along with his “synthesiser” class was so low on the priority list of the school that the management didn’t even bother to give us a separate room. Instead, they put us into a dark, dusty storage space, with shelves full of accordions, saxophones, trumpets, pianos and other “real” instruments. It’s like they were saying: Rita, you’re too old to play any of them, so how about you just look at them for a couple of years?
But then again, can I blame them for not taking this guy seriously? Not at all. He was what I would call a self-proclaimed composer, writing some amorphous je ne sais qoui, which would obviously be ok per se, if only his pieces didn’t constitute the bulk of our study program. I’m serious - it was 90% his stuff and 10% “Fields of Gold”!
Interestingly, starting from year two, it was obligatory for every music school student to frequent piano classes on top of their main instrument. Don’t even get me started on the point of learning the piano in addition to the keyboard… Yet even this didn’t throw me for a loop quite like the thought that it was way too late to start playing the piano at nine but somehow absolutely fine to do so at ten.
Then again, piano being my second instrument, I suppose the teacher had mentally sorted me into the shit pile from the get go. It’s no use with those ancient ten-year-olds - no matter how much you slap their wrists you’re never going to beat the imaginary apple into their palms.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad. I gotta admit I really enjoyed the choir cause it played right into my love for vocal harmonies and was surprisingly non-toxic. The music literature lessons could be pretty boring with all those composer biographies, but the teacher made up for it by combining every second lesson with a pancake-and-tea party. Don’t ask me, it’s Russia, you guys!
The solfege lessons were tolerable at first, I suppose, but only until they started torturing us with ear training that seemed like it was designed exclusively for kids with perfect pitch.
It was at that point, just over one and a half years in, that I mentally sent it all to hell and unofficially (so that my parents wouldn’t find out) gave up on the formal post-Soviet music education. Well, almost. In fact, I was skipping pretty much all classes but still came back every week - sneaking stealthily past the lobby, past the doors of all the teachers I was deceiving - all the way to the music literature class… because pancakes are sacred.
Wtf 😂 wow this is some wild stuff. Didn’t you learn music at high school? That was what I did, and it was pretty good. We got taught the classical stuff which was obviously boring- unless it was Bach of course, I don’t know how I came to the somewhat radical conclusion that all classical music after Bach sucked, and he was the only one who made good stuff. I wasn’t going to get the likes of Stravinsky in this place!
And me and my friend were obsessed with the Beatles so instead of doing any actual work we just wrote random notes down during composition time and sat there struggling over trying to figure out yesterday from memory on the keyboard, and making early punk rock songs with our guitars for our final submissions. I’d love to hear those raw tapes again, obviously ended up in some examiner’s bin and I got a C (which is literally the lowest pass grade) just like every other subject.
I then went on to study music production at college and that was amazing, loved every second. Even getting grilled on a Monday morning hungover and being put on the spot to answer basic music theory knowledge (I didn’t fully get this for many years so this was brutal)
I also finished by doing a degree in music and that was equally fun, very esoteric and was amplified by my wanting to use the ‘recording facilities’ and finding the tech guy in the basement who was tasked with the tech for every degree course, not just music, and so theatre studies was where he spent most of his days. He told me to go ahead and setup the studio myself if I wanted to use it, as he hadn’t even had chance to unbox and wire up the equipment yet, giving me my first real intro into the practicalities of this (luckily we had no less than 7 at college, so I was well versed in the art)
All things considered despite being fairly overwhelmed I got a decent if not essentially worthless eduction, I mean I could’ve probably tried harder to get into music sooner but I never really had the chance due to not being born into a wealthy family. Stupid fate.
Why are so many music teachers so neurotic? It doesn't have to be so. Every culture has music; most cultures teach music alongside everything else they do.
Perhaps it has something to do with what happens when the Middle Class gets hold of art. Suddenly everything gets stiff, formalised, professionally performative, like everyone's trying to join the aristocracy. Instead of being an inclusive cultural activity, it becomes an Accomplishment, to rate you on as part of some dynastic competition that you don't recall ever having enrolled in.
My family are a mix of Scots and Welsh Gypsies. It's not how we do it. If you have instruments, you bring them. If you don't, you pick up something that can make noise and play it. I learned music theory myself later, but just about everyone begins learning music the folk way: by ear. You can get quite good at ear-training that way if you pay attention, and it doesn't hurt your intuitive sense of rhythm at all.