A little while ago, again on dreary old Facebook, I posted – well, no. I shared – a link to an article offering the ten most promising albums through which one might hope, by acquaintance, to get to know jazz. They were solid albums and all worthy of attention, although of course lists like this suck madly and always, inevitably, more than a handful of masterpieces is omitted. I said, yeah, for sure, check these out (and I’ll recommend ten Australian ones as well), then get yourself a good teacher, listen carefully to what s/he tells you, think about it, do some serious practice, and in three years you’ll have done better than anyone who conforms to the uni pattern and slogs along in pursuit of a to-ho-hotally meaningless Bachelor’s degree.

Why did I say this? Is it because the University feels it can manage without moi? Well, possibly. (Because apparently it does, and on evidence it can.) But then, I have to say if it does without moi it does without those things I feel I have to offer, and I believe they’re worth considering. And, of course, its reasons for feeling it can do without moi may have to do with the possibility that I’m offering something it either can’t, or maybe doesn’t want to, or even perhaps feels a teensy bit threatened by because it hadn’t thought of for itself. *blush* Also, let’s let our hair down, I’ve taught a few students in the uni system who found at the end that, even though they’d graduated (because you can’t do anything else, provided you live long enough) the whole thing was tremendously unsatisfying, and they moved on to apparently greener pastures.

Here Donald Trump would probably say: sad. But little Donny is such a ghastly representative of all the stuff we hate that there’s no way we’ll give him any air time whatsoever. Agreed? So please forget I mentioned his deplorable name.

I love, with an undying passion, Bill Readings’s marvellous book The University in Ruins. His manner of deconstructing, taking to the cleaners, and then mercilessly whipping the word ‘excellence’ is a tour de force of solid imagination and good sense. And he knows exactly what is fucked up in contemporary university culture: the pandering to standards that mean nothing (and that refuse to stop declining), the chunking through, year after year, of graduates in whom no further interest is taken, and the merciless courting of the heavenly dollar. His holding up of the ridicularity of any notion that the university is at all related these days to the historical idea of a disinterested pursuit of knowledge is breathtaking in its clarity and causes one such as myself to applaud.

I honestly believe what I said: a good relationship with a knowledgeable teacher who genuinely cares is worth more than hanging around for three years collecting up whatever the uni feels like dropping for you. One-on-one tuition is the basis of all the great musical education for centuries: Beethoven went to Vienna to get the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn, remember? And that worked out okay. What Mozart himself learned from Haydn’s op. 33 quartets was not a matter of sitting in a classroom being given what everyone else got, geared to the most needy. One of the reasons music education funding is always at risk of drying up is that they know that principal study lessons are where it’s at, and yet (sorry, because) they’re so economically unthrilling.

Of course, I went through the uni system; my bachelor’s degree was handy because it permitted me to enter for a master’s, and that was the basis for my doctorate. Admittedly there is no other way to postgraduate study than via undergraduate. But say you just wanted to play your instrument competently and take part in a performing musical culture? Do you need a university degree? I think not. For an age and a half there have been players in the symphony orchestras with no university training – but they could play, and that’s what earned them their chairs. When I did the master’s degree there were candidates of this kind; expert performing musicians who wanted to study in a cohort but who hadn’t previously. To have sent them to an undergraduate degree would have been an insult, and (by rights) they’d not have stood for it.

And anyway, the best instruction I got as an undergraduate was from my first improvising piano teacher, Greg Gear, or from Tony Gould, who even in a class made things so personal and so individual it was like a principal study lesson. Prior to this all I had learnt about the piano came from my classical piano teacher, Patricia Leslie, in weekly lessons where her immense knowledge of repertoire and technique constantly challenged me and kept me inquiring. Is there anything more artistically stimulating than having someone who knows you, knows where you’re at, cares about you and your development, even loves you, taking you a little further in your journey?

Let’s talk about love. It’s a major motivator for me, and one of the things I’d list (as recently I did, in conversation with a close friend) as of supreme importance in charting a situation for artistic endeavour. When I say a teacher loves a student, what I mean is that the teacher has taken that student’s ambitions to heart, and decided to help as much as is humanly possible in assisting the student in reaching his or her goals. The teacher cares. Teaching is motivated by love, I reckon, because it embodies, it demands, it necessitates a kind of care that is deeply personal and accepts the risks of failure. And love is fundamental in music, anyway, so someone who doesn’t get this isn’t of much use.

The university is not motivated by love, you may be sure of that. Stories of senior staff members who make students cry during performance seminars are old news. Competition between researchers over protected fields are kind of funny but also ridiculously sad. The indoctrination of undergraduates with programs of business competency at the expense of creative wonder and enquiry is pathetic, but too real.

Permit yourself to dream. Go for what you envisage as worthy, as necessary. Ask all the questions you can think of. Make sure you’re getting what you need. Resist conformity. Explore. Read poems, see movies, check out the art gallery, meet people. Above all, be yourself. And don’t let any bastard take your stuff from you. Blessings.

4/xi/2018

Last evening, I gave a truly awful performance. I was playing solo piano at the Jazzlab, and the gig was important to me because I had organised it in order to play alongside Meg Morley, whom many years ago I taught, and who was in town from London where she now lives. My playing was quite sensationally dreadful. The gig finished, my family and I went to dinner with Meg, and we drove her home. I came home and started drinking and wrote an overseas friend an email about it that tells the story:

Tonight I played, and it was abominable. I started out okay, except that I’d heard in Meg’s set that there was a really dodgy high C-sharp on the piano and it had an important part in the first piece I performed; I tried to dodge it but it wasn’t always possible and every time I heard it I got a little thrown. I opened with ‘The view from the desk’, which is slow and which people always like, and although it went okay it wasn’t particularly exciting. It wasn’t nearly as good as the version on the record with Shelley, although I finished it feeling that I’d not done anything too ghastly, only managed to stay a bit uninspiring. Then I went to ‘Our little systems’, from Mickets, which is a composition I’m really proud of and which a lot of other musicians find fascinating and compelling and whatever else. After this I played the ‘Probationary Candidacy Blues’, and it seemed to go all right; I got a bit of outside stuff done while (I think) holding on to the form and not overdoing anything. After this I played ‘In angel arms’, from Sudden in a shaft of sunlight, and I was thinking about how when I played it in Sydney shortly after Al died it made Tab cry. At the end I was almost crying myself, because it’s full of all sorts of stuff as you might imagine. Then I played ‘l.s.’ from with whom you can be who you are, and I’m afraid there were some moments of great ordinariness as I fell over myself a bit. I never know what anyone else can hear but when things aren’t going well I imagine they’re counting the moments until they can pelt me with soft fruit. Then – and this was my biggest mistake – I launched into ‘Generating’ from Freehand. It’s in seven, and it’s quick, and it’s tricky. I had been practising it though, and at home it had been travelling really well. This evening I lost it. I could feel it not being quite under my fingers, and then it fell apart completely. I bashed away resembling what I could pull together of the solo form, but I didn’t even attempt another head out as I knew it was going to be hellish. The whole thing was over-loud and random and thoroughly objectionable. I sat there thinking how I was letting Meg down, how everyone could hear that I can’t play, and I was absolutely ashamed. Then I finished with ‘Covert joy’ from King, dude and dunce and because I’ve played that about a million times since I wrote it, and it’s only medium tempo and fairly uncomplicated, it went by without incident. People were pleased with me when I finished and said nice things but I wanted to run away. We’d sort of organised to have dinner with Meg but I seriously wanted to disappear. When I made that crack on fb about giving music away to be a medical practice manager I wrote it like tonight would be my last gig. It seemed desperately appropriate once it was done.

It is true that a little while ago on Facebook I threw a tantrum and announced a change in career – if ‘career’ is what you can call what I’m doing now (I’m not exactly sure). I am working as Sally’s practice manager, and it takes up most of my weekday time; I have been determined to abandon some of the very unproductive thinking I’d been doing that was provoked by certain recent experiences with music and I feel vaguely liberated by the idea that I needn’t go crawling to venues or festivals for jobs only to have my head kicked. But music doesn’t leave you, nor do I really want to leave it behind, of course – I’m quite fond of it and I’ve worked quite hard.

In any case, the sickly feeling that followed this performance is not one with which I want to develop any greater familiarity. It was genuinely monstrous. The feeling of responsibility for something horrid, of having wasted people’s time and shown them only ugliness, of letting everyone down – Meg, the audience, the venue, myself – was overwhelming. It was almost unbearable, and as I say I set to organising myself a good big hangover for this morning.*

At the same time, I had to face it all. So I started thinking, what if it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it was; what if people meant what they said when they thanked and congratulated me afterwards. Surely they couldn’t think that I’d meant to play like that, but what if they did? When previously I’ve heard things that I felt weren’t quite coming off, perhaps I was presuming that the musician was aiming for what I expected, when in fact they weren’t. If I knew how ‘Generating’ is supposed to go, perhaps I was the only one who did. (Except that I know I’m not, because Meg has followed my music closely and often talks with great fondness about Freehand.)

Part of my problem in life is that I think bad stuff first, and I get used to it, and I practise it, so it becomes to a degree habitual. I do have (and I shan’t apologise for this) a high standard for myself and I want to do work that is worthwhile, even good. I am critical of my work, and of my colleagues’, in the sense that I critique it, I assess it – and I am always looking for things that will maintain interest over time. With my recent work with the double trio I have experienced an uncommon professional happiness, and I have been pleased and proud. The reaction to our album has been generally very good, and I hope to make more music with this ensemble in the next year or so. The consequences of a bad performance however are really debilitating and I know I’m not going to forget what happened on Saturday night very quickly.

Ultimately what I have to accept though (and yeah, it’s obvious) is that there are times when things don’t go as well as I’d have liked them to. I need to be a grown up and understand that I am not infallible; I never have been and I never shall be. There have been other times when I played dismally; my last end of year recital for my classical teacher when I was about 18 was one such case. Having stunned everyone at the end of the previous year with the first movement of Beethoven’s op. 111, I turned up to play a couple of Schumann’s Études symphoniques and ploughed them. It felt pretty ordinary. There are recordings of me not quite making it with pieces I’m playing in trios, but I never really think of these. I have actually fucked up ‘Generating’ in performance before, although not as dramatically as the most recent effort, and to a degree this makes me wonder why I thought to present it. Here’s the thing though: we keep going. Since his death I have watched a talk given by Richard Gill in which he alluded to the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ So it must be.

*For some reason, this did not eventuate. I am unable to account for my good fortune.

28/x/2018