Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

It is likely that for most of us, there was little thought given to this tale beyond the chuckle that followed our first hearing it. But, years after my first acquaintance with it, I was struck by the power of this story as a metaphor for of the kind of contradiction we are discussing here. The rabbit, doing everything it was doing just prior to passing the halfway point, is now performing exactly the opposite action: same woods, same rabbit, same physical behavior, different action. Consider this a metaphor that reveals something about ideas and human circumstances. If we push hard on an idea—take it to its extremes—we discover that it becomes its opposite. It becomes, that is, its own contradiction. We encounter such contradictions almost daily: we desire to protect our children, but those driven by that desire often wreak havoc on their offspring. Patriotism is good, but carried too far it can become one of the most ugly of all political phenomena: fascism. A war to reduce terrorism begets increased terrorist actions. Faith becomes fanaticism. The apparent conveniences of technology become horrendously burdensome (as anyone who copes daily with e-mail can attest!). Technology turns on us.

Erik Satie provided one of the more humorous and paradoxical musical examples of this kind of contradiction. The third piece in the Embryons Desséchés, De Podophthalma, a short, rollicking, disjointed piano piece, ends with numerous “cadences” that follow the rules exactly, but fail to stop—until one is completely unsure of when, or if, the damn thing will ever stop! Satie, using the means of standard cadence patterns, undermined the very meaning of those patterns.⁵

Of special interest for voice teachers is the discovery that they are, largely, not teaching students how to control their voices, but how to stop controlling their voices. Even more striking for all teachers of the classical music tradition is the following: supportive praise can become a burden with which our students cannot cope. Who among us has not had students who become overwhelmed in the face of their own potential? This situation can become serious enough (unless we can somehow help them overcome it) to cause students to radically lower their standards or give up performing altogether because the very potential they exhibit becomes an unbearable weight.