Philip Hii – guitarist

A number of years ago, I wrote an article titled “Projection on the Guitar” where I described a stroke called the push-stroke.

I learned the technique from Julian Byzantine. The idea is to push your finger into the string before you pluck it. This produces greater vertical displacement of the string which in turn results in a louder tone.

The technique is made for the concert hall where projection is paramount. But it has its drawbacks, chief among them the resulting tension from the pushing.

It’s for that reason that I don’t use it a lot.

Over the years, I’d also developed another stroke which I call the pull-stroke. Here the idea is to pull at the string slightly and then release it to pluck it. The operative word here is ‘slightly.’ This stroke produces a very relaxed touch much like the feeling of letting go an arrow from a bowstring.

The pull-stroke is diametrically different from the push-stroke. The push-stroke is mostly about applying more tension, the pull-stroke about releasing tension.

I’ve taught the pull-stroke for many years now, and have called it by different names to try to describe the sensation in the fingers. One of them was to call it the snap-stroke.

Here’s an old article describing the snap-stroke aka pull-stroke, buried deep in the dark recesses of my site.

So the push stroke and the pull strokes are two completely different techniques. One is a technique for producing more volume by applying more force (vertically) before plucking, the other is a technique for producing ultra-relaxed strokes.

In the world of providing instrumental music lessons, there’s an unwritten code out there.

Let’s say you’re a musician turned businessperson and you want to start a private music school. You rent the premises, you do the advertising, you pay the bills, and you hire teachers to teach for you and you split the takings with them 50-50.

Fair enough. You have overheads and you also need to make a profit. Without you, the school wouldn’t exist, without the teachers, the school wouldn’t exist either. 50-50 is fair.

It’s amazing how universal this business model is. I’ve taught in music schools in Germany, Malaysia, and New Zealand and 50-50 seems to be the magic number. But there’re exceptions. I’ve even been paid up to 70 percent and I know there’s a music school here that actually pays 75 percent to their teachers.

Now, suppose a businessperson comes along and he decides to change this model to 75-25, in his favor. (Without naming names, I know of at least one establishment that’s doing this.)

Let’s say he’s surveyed the market and he’s discovered that there’re a lot of hungry music students who would take the job even at 25 percent. Especially since some of them are working minimum wage jobs at the local McDonalds.

In his mind, teaching guitar is no different from flipping hamburgers and he reasons he’s doing these hungry music students a favor by offering them a job that pays more than minimum wage.

(For our discussion, let’s say that the going rate for lessons is $40 per hour lesson or $20 per half-hour lesson. 25 percent of $40 is $10, much better than the minimum wage of $7.25.)

Here we come to the basic question of fairness. Which is what the occupy movement is all about.

Fairness depends on who you ask.

If you were to ask the teachers, they would probably say it’s not fair, if you were to ask a businessperson, he would probably say it’s fair, he has a right to make a profit.

As a teacher, you can probably guess where I stand on this issue.

To me, it’s clear that teaching guitar is not the same as flipping hamburgers. It takes years of practice and training for someone to get to the point where he can sit down and teach someone to play guitar. (In some cases, four years of college with all the attached costs.) It takes less than ten minutes to teach a person to flip a hamburger.

You decide if it’s fair to equate teaching guitar with flipping hamburgers.

I agree that the profit motive is important. Businesses exist to make a profit. But how much profit is reasonable profit and how much is greed?

If the only motive in businesses is to make a profit, I would say, why not go all the way? Why stop at 25 percent? Why not zero percent? They did that years ago. It’s called slavery.

I probably have the biggest collection of the Tao Te Ching in Texas. This photo of my bookshelf will attest to that. Twenty-five different versions in the photo with at least one stray version which I couldn’t locate.

What is it about this ancient text that holds such fascination for me?

I had never given it much thought until I found one of my latest additions in a bookstore recently – Chad Hansen’s new translation. (The striking blue book in the photo.)

I normally don’t get excited by new books, especially new translations of the Tao Te Ching. They follow pretty much the same pattern, the same formulaic approach. But Mr. Hansen’s version caught my eye immediately.

The standard procedure for pretty much the past hundred years has been to translate the second character ‘te’ as ‘virtue,’ (some have also translated it as ‘power’) but in his new translation, Mr. Hansen translated it as ‘virtuosity.’

Now you can see why I was so excited.

I suddenly saw my two biggest passions in life – the Tao Te Ching and virtuosity – converging in one place.

I decided to google ‘te’ and ‘virtuosity’ and I found that other authors have also latched on to this new translation of ‘te.’ Mr. Hansen is not so unique after all.

But who started this trend? Who was the first to have the nerve to buck over one hundred years of literary tradition and change the translation of ‘te’ from ‘virtue’ to ‘virtuosity?’ I have yet to find the answer. Perhaps it is Mr. Hansen himself.

It doesn’t matter, but it clarified everything for me.

I suddenly understood why I have been so fascinated with the book since I discovered it years ago in the school library. It’s because it mirrors perfectly my fascination with virtuosity. All these years, I had always intuitively sensed that the TTC is a manual on virtuosity, and not the heavy philosophical tract that it’s made out to be by scholars.

So does that make my AOV obsolete?

No, the AOV deals with the nuts and bolts of achieving virtuosity. It is an eminently practical book.

While the TTC approaches virtuosity from a more philosophical standpoint, and is mostly a collection of aphorisms about achieving virtuosity.

If you’re interested in Mr. Hansen’s translation, here’s a link to one of his earlier versions:

http://terebess.hu/english/tao/hansen.html

The printed version differs slightly from this online version.