How merciless is your violin teacher
OrchestrasThis is the trailer for the new Nina Hoss film, The Audition(Das Vorspiel), which looks like essential viewing for our readership.
The Guardian says: Not all music teachers are Mr Holland’s Opus-style nurturers for sure, but films such as this one as well as Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and, to an extent, the jazz-angled Whiplash, love to dwell on characters whose minds are contorted into all kinds of perverse, emotionally mangled shapes by their devotion to excellence.
Yet another futile attempt which aims to show the romanticized lives of classical musicians in their training.
Why do writers and directors think that they can make a fast buck/euro on this specific community by conveying such a ridiculous image to the rest of the world of how musicians grow and relate in their field?
You can also add “Mozart in the Jungle”, the 2018 movie “The Perfection”, and the 2006 film “La Tourneuse de Pages” to that list.
I haven’t seen this film yet, but the trailer isn’t promising. Films about classically-trained musicians always seem to fail because the script writer is a writer, not a musician–and their goal is to sensationalize a subculture they really know nothing about. Why not interview classically-trained musician first? I suspect they would describe the process of mastering an instrument as primarily about hard work, isolation and boredom than about manufactured Sturm und Drang.
Have you seen it?
This movie looks like crap.
Have you seen it?
You haven´t seen it,right?….Passing a judgement on something you haven´t seen,it fits the picture of a frustrated,very minor composer trying to carve a niche for himself,simply to stay in the talk by all means….As for the scholarly seriosity and honesty of those endeavours,let´s not even start about it….Zilch.
Your comment looks like crap,absolutely unserious,that´s all Watch the film,and then you have the right to pass a judgement…Nothing new under the sun.
For some people, life is not difficult enough, so they add some of their own.
‘…. looks like’ implies an impression, in the way a cover description of Mein Kampf offers sufficient information about the contents. People who don’t understand the finesses of language will buy such book to find-out whether the cover text is correct in its indications. Or, if they are ignorant enough, they will gleefully read the thing.
A film trailer is meant to invite interest. For professional musicians, the impression that the trailer tries to convey, is filled to the brim with crazy klischées, so for them the effect will be the opposite of what was intended.
It reminds me how people dislike motor racing. And they have never been to see a race .
The film has been available for several months on US Netflix. Fabulous performance, very much of an old school way of teaching. Not for the feint of heart if you are looking for a feel good movie.
Mine was like a female version of Ivan Galamian.
She was world class; I learned a huge amount from her; I was terrified for four days before each lesson. What more to say?
That was old-style musical life, folks!
I had teacher like that too. And I loved her with all my heart
My teacher (composition) had the great talent of unintentionally pointing towards the opposite of the direction where I could find what I needed, and I’m still very grateful for that. To know what you absolutely don’t want, is as helpful as the opposite.
Hmm. Not likely to be “essential” but perhaps interesting.
Music education in general is so out of line with what education in general has become that it is easily made to look cruel and perverse because it is economical with praise, saving it for actual achievement, rather than lavishing it purely for a hoped-for motivational effect. It is made to look even worse because for a variety of rather obvious reasons the music education begins so early.
That sort of relationship between teacher and pupil is just not how things are done in today’s world, even at higher education levels, where the whole notion of a teacher saying harsh truths to a pupil is unthinkable, archaic.
“Faster” “better” “you’re muddying the notes” are all perfectly appropriate things to say when a piece demands things that are not being accomplished. The teacher may seem cruel, but it is the music that makes the demands, which are either met or not met.
Of course many and perhaps most parents are perfectly satisfied if their child can play an approximation of the Beethoven Minuet in G, as you see in the final scene of “The Music Man.” Harold Hill’s “think” method might be enough for them. This film evidently portrays a higher level of musical instruction which to the uninitiated looks like a medieval torture chamber.
Perhaps three years of law school did damage to my sense of empathy.
A teacher of performance can be truthful and in the same time, considerate. There is never need to be cruel, humiliating, etc. Master classes by [redacted] were sensational for its public humiliation and personality destruction, entirely unnecessary. Conductors had often a comparable urge to bury any musical stimulation under loads of offence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBdc7k_RtXw
Former students of Jascha Brodsky at Curtis may not share such fond memories of this “old fashioned” kind of teaching……
Try and make a comment that’s RELEVANT…
My first violin teacher convinced me that I was average. When I found out I was really good , I was astounded. I’m 68 now, still play.. no thanks to her!
There are bad teachers, and exceptional teachers (at all levels), just as there are devoted students and discouraged students. This appears to be a film just to sensationalize a bad teacher and a discouraged student – for the purpose of selling movie tickets. I don’t think it exposes an endemic problem in the music teaching world today, but there certainly are people like this. All teachers need to look deeply (and honestly) at how they teach and relate to students.
I had a violin teacher who was well regarded when I was 10 that would probably have made a good model for this movie. If I did not play it right I was hit with a baton or slapped. I was yelled at and humilated regularly, all in the name (apparently) of serious music learning. At one point the teacher said something like “You will never be able to play the violin properly anyway because you are too small of frame!” (I was a scrawny kid). How do you think theat made me feel for being devoted to practice? I gave up the violin.
Years later I realized she was quite wrong, but her attitude and my fear of her turned me off of playing the violin – which has always been my first musical love. I blame her for my missed opportunities. Just because a person is a great musician does not qualify them to be a great teacher. (I later took up the harp and had a wonderful teacher who turned much of this around, but at the expense of lost early learning).
Is there a movie about ANY subject touched by the cinematic world that doesn’t end up perverting it? A realistic view of the world of power music teaching would be dull box office poison. Anyway, as a music teacher and performer I would say: please leave us alone.
And to viewers: please see it for the cinematic values, and don’t ask me if my life is really like that!
Honestly, she (the teacher) seems like a piece of cake compared to some of the teachers I have experienced! Sadly, I am serious! Looks like a bad movie—I’m sure it’s fun and dramatic for non-music folks!
What a joke. It’s not like this; it’s intense—but can SOMEONE please get a real picture of the life of a performance major at Eastman, Curtis, Juilliard or even the major music schools within Universities where students are at the top of their game and hoping to beat out the conservatory students in the end? Sorry, but this clip doesn’t cut the real life of aspiring professional musicians—especially at the undergrad level!
Students in Asia are experiencing more of this old fashioned teaching because in much of Asia still has old world values. That kind of discipline and respect certainly can contribute to success in this art form. Alas, things are changing in Asia as well now…the world spins.
Traditional discipline can get together with respectful humanism quite easily. I apply it regularly on my PA and it has gradually reduced her number of typos.
May I lighten the mood a little? Sir Thomas Beecham once supposedly said to a female cellist who was presumably producing an awful din: “My dear, you have something between your legs that can give pleasure to thousands, but you just sit there and scratch it!”
Yes, but on one occasion this remark was completely misunderstood and created a scandal on a rehearsel which almost sent Beecham to prison.
This perverted teaching and playing is perfect for the Asians.
They’ll excel at the dumbed expectations, so that the teacher will not be “merciless” at them, since they will fulfill the outward shallow realizations.
(Everything else died a long time ago.)
PS: those asians enjoy cultural appropriation anyway, as long as it is modernist euro-centric. They value it more than their own identity, since they can excel and outwardly shine, and have long realized intuitively, that nobody cares about the mediocre inner truth anyways.
What is this inner truth people are trumpeting about so often? I find outer truth already hard enough.
Sally
I would like to quote a colleague in the classical music profession who attended an internationally renowned music school…”I could have been a much better player than I was (and am now), but I chose not to be” Ahh that’s the spirit!
It’s always better to choose what one is than what one isn’t. You can only be yourself, as any other has already been taken.
My violin teacher wife saw the clip and commented “horrible, bully”. She has a rule that ever pupil should enjoy every lesson and they all work very hard at the same time. She learned the importance of this from the thoroughly unpleasant teacher she has at the RAM.