My wife tells me that I have to stop being so afraid of compliments. So often I feel inadequate and unworthy of the complimentary remarks I am given. It is not a question false modesty, but rather of fear and insecurity, a subject about which I diaried
here yesterday. And as a result of my awkwardness in accepting compliments, I have oft been insufficiently willing to offer them to others.
I know the research. Too much and too indiscriminate offering of praise can be counterproductive in a teaching environment. But I also know that people hunger for acknowledgment, because despite my awkwardness in accepting compliments, I do hunger for it.
And what provokes me to write about compliments? It is because of Bach.
As I have often written, I am by background and training musical. And as much as I love Beethoven and Brahms, Mozart and Sibelius, Schumann and Schubert, the composer to whom I am closest is Bach. I play keyboard, cello, and sing. He is a master in all three domains. You will note the use of the present tense, because for me Bach is not only alive, he is vibrant and present in a way other composers are not. As I sat down to write this, I inserted the next CD in the complete works of Bach that I recent purchased (at an obscenely low price) from Archive. As it happens, the first work on the disk was the First Partita for keyboard, a piece I know and love, and can actually still adequately play. And that invoked this diary. It was my playing of this partita that earned me one of the greatest compliments I have ever received.
Joseph Bloch was my piano teacher for one year, my senior year of High School. For years i had been taught by Oscar Magnussen, a stern taskmaster who rarely smiled. He was a superb technician, and very traditional in his approach, simultaneously teaching me formal musical theory and piano, in the latter case sufficiently that I could have exempted the first year of theory when I became a music major (although because I thought I might someday have to teach it I took anyway). Magnussen was the long-time head of the music department at Uppsala College in New Jersey. And somehow, even as I learned vast amounts of piano repertoire, he turned my previous love of music into toil and drudgery.
I was finally able to persuade my parents that I needed a different teacher. Bloch lived in our community (his daughter was a year behind in my high school and our families both attended Larchmont Temple). He was best known as a teacher of the materials of music at Julliard, where in fact his nickname was the man with the golden ears. He agreed to take me on as a student, even though my technique was sloppy, and during that year we began an eclectic journey through piano literature, ranging from the well known composers like Haydn and Bach, to lesser known such as Poulenc. For the Frenchman, when I was at Bloch's house for lesson I noticed the music for a Suite for the tale of Babar the Elephant, which I had loved as a small child (albeit in translation). As it happens he had just recorded it, and was also going to perform it on a concert tour in Japan. So he allowed me to learn it as well, and as the score included the original text i found my performance in fourth year French also improving (it is amazing, is it not, how quickly students can learn when they have an intrinsic motivation).
I developed a great appreciation for Haydn. But it was at this point my love of Bach deepened. He made me go through much of the the first book of the Well-Tempered Klavier, even though I had done it with Magnussen. Bloch had me listen with my eyes closed as I played. He helped me realize that each piece was a gem in itself, regardless of the particular skill being developed, independent of the progression through the keys. The piece from this set that struck me most profoundly - and thus finally ignited the fire of love of Bach that had been only embers) was the great 5-voice fugue in C-Sharp minor.
Jimmy Bloch then introduced me to the B-flat major Partita. It was an instant love affair. I devoured the piece, learning by memory in two weeks, even though I rarely did all the practicing I was supposed to. And when I say learned it by memory, I took it apart. I could play it through multiple times, each time emphasizing a different voice, or combination of voices. And by the end of that fortnight it was no longer that I was playing the partita. I was now living it, or rather, it was living within me. When I sat down at the keyboard, I surrendered my analytical mind and allowed the music to come alive through me. Each time I played it, the results would be unique, because each time I played it somehow it came through me as new, alive, breathing. I cannot put into words quite what I mean, but if you have seen a great actor in a theater do several performances of the same role you realize that there are subtle difference from performance to performance, and this is part of what makes that performance so effective.
The two weeks were up, and when I arrive at Bloch's house, I announced that I had learned the entire piece. He told me to play it. I sat down, without opening the music, closed my eyes and began. When some minutes later I had finished, I turned to look at Jimmy Bloch, to hear what he had to say to me. He was silent for more than a minute, at first with his eyes closed (for as he later told me he had about 3 measure into the first movement closed them and simply listened, without conscious cogitation). When he opened them he paid me my first great compliment. He said, "within the limits of your technique, you play Bach as well as anyone I have ever heard."
I was blown away. Even at age 16 I realized how deeply imbedded he was in the world of classical music, how many truly great pianists and other keyboardists he had heard play, some surely this very work, and he was, in all seriousness, offering me this compliment.
My very first piano teacher, before Oscar Magnussen, had wanted to put me on the concert stage as a child prodigy, but wisely my mother had refused. The years with Magnussen had almost killed my love of piano, because what I loved had become a chore, a responsibility. But with that one sentence, Jimmy Bloch had liberated me, freed me again to love music. I never developed the technique that would have allowed me to have a career as a pianist - age 16 was far too late to do the serious work I had managed to avoid. But I began to devour Bach, both in playing and in singing and in listening. I rededicated myself on cello to the unaccompanied suites. I began to learn the music of the cantatas. I realized that I could understand and appreciate Bach intuitively in a way I had not previously realized was even possible.
I have dedicated much time during this - my sixtieth - year to reflection, to attempting to put together an understanding of my life so far. And I have from time to time written a piece like this which contains a deeply personal reflection. And in each case when I so share, I attempt to extract form the experience some understanding broader than my own personal experience. To do so it is sometimes necessary to provide a more complete context -- a broad view of the situation in which the particular experience occurred. In the case of the Partita, it was in the depths winter, at a period of time when I was exceedingly unhappy in life, feeling in many ways a failure. Although I was undoubtedly quite bright, I was not a good student. I also was living in a family situation that was almost intolerable. I had actually been enrolled in prep school for my senior year but during the summer had persuaded my father that I preferred staying in the known hell of our dysfunctional family than moving to an unknown for one year before going to college. I had seriously considered skipping my senior year (I had the credits) just to get out of the house, but had been persuaded otherwise. And I was at this very moment, wondering if any college would accept me. The year with Jimmy Bloch had to that point been one of the few bright spots in my otherwise unhappy existence. I had been at times nearly suicidal in my depression, in my sense that I was not doing anything well, even as I had the 2nd highest average in AP US History, the lead dance role in the musical, made all-county choir, and so on. I felt inadequate, and was sure my abject failure would be confirmed when all 7 colleges to which I had applied rejected me.
I remember clearly coming home from school about 10 days later, to find a thick envelope from the University of North Carolina. For some reason they had decided to offer me admission early - the pressure was off, I was in college. Several weeks later I found out I had won a National Merit Scholarship, one of two in my class (the other won by the only person with higher grades in AP History). And then, three weeks before the uniform announcement of admissions date, when I called home to check on the mail, our housekeeper told me I had an envelope from Haverford. That was my first choice. I held my breath and asked "thick or thin?" and got the the response that it was quite fat. I asked her to open it, and I knew where I would head in the fall.
In some way I felt that the turning point had been that performance of the Partita, that when Jimmy Bloch offered me that wonderful affirmation that somehow my life had begun anew. Obviously my struggles with life were far from over, but the clarity of the memory does signify the import of that one event.
And that is also a key part of the larger lesson, one which I am still learning to apply. When I can find a way of affirming something to a student, particularly one who is struggling either with my class or perhaps with some other aspect of her life, I know the power such words can have. Because I am still myself awkward about accepting compliments, I do not offer them as frequently as I perhaps should. But that has ironic effect of increasing the positive power of those that I do offer, whether I do so within the context of a whole class situation, by a comment on a paper that I have read, or if -- as i will often do as the year comes towards an end -- pull a student aside to tell him what I have valued about having him in my class.
I am talking about something far more than simple kindness, itself an important characteristic to which we often give insufficient attention. Remember, Jimmy Bloch closed his eyes and simply listened. He did not think, he did not analyze, he allowed himself to respond. I often have to stop myself as a teacher - or as a reader of many things I encounter - and ask myself am I allowing myself to simply be, to hear, to respond, without running things through the critical facilities of my mind?
My title is in many ways quite insufficient. The word `compliment" is almost too mundane, too polite. I am tempted to play on words, and to combine it with its near duplicate "complement." This latter word has in it the sense of relationship, of the incompleteness of aloneness, of the necessity for most of us of being in relationship with others. As a teacher I realize that all my learning is of little value if its only purpose is self-aggrandizement. How dos it improve my understanding of and my interrelationship with others, with the world around me? Or put more simply, how does what I learn make the world in someway a better place?
On Tuesday I will mark the end of this year. I will continue to ponder things from my past, to reflect on how they shape me as I am, and as I may yet become. Any life is incredibly rich, with lesson and insights that can be derived therefrom. Sometimes these lesson are for us alone, but often when shared may serve a valued purpose for someone else, perhaps someone we have never met and may never encounter. As a teacher I know that the exchanges I have with my students may bear fruit at several degrees of separation, as those students pass on to others to pass on to others. What I would hope that I can still learn - and live - is that is far better that the content of that exchange be something that affirms, that stimulates positive growth.
The CD has finished. I have now restarted it. Thus I will again hear that partita, the one which when I first played for Jimmy Bloch earned me a compliment, but more, an affirmation that enabled me to realize that I COULD have value, that I could surrender myself to the music, to become the music. I know the importance of that moment in my life. And I hope that I have passed on the value of that experience to others, not merely by writing about it here, but in how I attempt to live. I am not always successful, just as even with the Partita sometimes I allow my thinking mind to interfere with the flow of the music through me.
As I listen my fingers feel the urge to move in concert with the sounds. Will my heart and soul be willing to move in concert with the music of those with whom I share my life? Will I be willing to close my thinking eyes and simply be present as others offer me the music of their souls? And will I allow that music to resonate back to them, to compliment as appropriate?
I cannot will that I can live like that, because it is not an achievement of will, but rather of surrender. One is most moved by music when one surrenders to it. And one is most moved by life when one allows the self to be open, to be vulnerable. At that moment all things become possible. More than forty years ago I surrendered to Bach, and in return received the first great compliment of my life, a single sentence that sustained me in one of the darkest periods of my life. One compliment, a simple phrase, expressed without intellectual measurement, totally touching my soul, my very being. A heartfelt an open expression which made an invaluable difference in my life. May the measure of my life, to this point and in the future, reflect back to others the great gift I received from Jimmy Bloch.
