Philip Hii – guitarist

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.

My good friend Miguel de Maria asked me if I could write a few words on how to prepare pieces for performance. I really don’t have much to say as I don’t have any fixed system, so I thought I’ll just share some general observations on what I’ve seen others do.

Over the past years, I’ve hired a number of handymen and repairmen and one thing I’ve noticed, they all seem to have different levels of commitment and standards when it comes to their work.

Some take a lot of care in what they do, they would stand back, admire what they’ve done, and they would not stop until they’re fully satisfied with their work, while others would simply slapdash the job together and call it finished and leave.

What do handymen and repairmen have to do with preparing pieces for performance, you ask?

Quite a bit, in fact.

I’ve noticed the same varying levels of dedication and commitment in players when it comes to preparing pieces for commitment.

For instance, some players are just concerned with notes.

They will simply learn the notes and they think they’re ready for prime time. They totally ignore rhythm (and other aspects of music) and they play without any reference to a rhythmic pulse.

If you were to ask them to tap their foot when they play, they will be unable to do so because they have no idea where the beat is. This is the first level of commitment.

At the second level, you find players who are a little more sophisticated. They will faithfully read the notes and rhythms, but they totally ignore fingerings – left-hand or right-hand. In fact, you will see them grabbing the first notes they can find with their fingers when they play.

At the third level, players become aware of the need for good left-hand fingerings so they take time to read them in the score and apply them. Some will even come up with their own fingerings.

But they’re impatient to learn the piece, so they ignore right-hand fingerings because they don’t think it’s important. And because they don’t have any thought-out right-hand fingerings, they often end up playing with the same right-hand finger on consecutive notes.

This may work okay during practice but they quickly find that the repeated use of the same finger on consecutive notes can create havoc during performances.

At the fourth level, players become even more sophisticated. They take care reading the notes and their rhythmic values. They work on fingerings – left hand and right hand – and if you were to look at their working scores, it’s full of penciled-in fingerings for the left hand and right hand.

But there’re no dynamic and expressive markings. They’re so focused on the technicalities of executing the music, they haven’t put much thought into expression. Their playing is stiff and dry and mechanical.

At the fifth level, players have all the fundamentals in place, they make sure they read the notes and rhythmic values carefully. They invest time in finding out the best fingerings that will allow them to execute the notes in the most efficient ways possible.

And they analyze the music and come up with a clear plan of execution. Their scores are full of fingerings, dynamics, and other expressive markings.

And when they play, you feel as if they know exactly what they want to do in the music. Their playing is full of shadings and dynamic contrasts, with clearly defined climaxes and cadences.

But something is missing still. Their music doesn’t sound right. It’s almost as if they have learned all the words but they’re pronouncing them all wrong.

At the sixth level, players take care of all the basics – notes, rhythms, fingerings, dynamics, articulations, sectional contrasts etc.

But they go one step further. They spend time immersing themselves in the music they’re playing. And they do this in a fundamental way – through listening.

If they play South American music, they will listen to all the South American musicians they can find, from popular to folk to classical. If they play Fernando Sor, they will spend time absorbing the music of Mozart and other Classical composers, and if they play Tarrega, they will listen to Chopin and other Romantic composers.

They know music is not just a bunch of dots on a page but a living vibrant thing and to make it come alive, you must immerse yourself in it and feel it at your very core.

So they listen and they practice, and they don’t stop until they’re able to get the music to sound just right, with all its natural inflections and nuances.

To go back to that language analogy, until they’re able to speak it like the natives.

Six very generalized approaches, each one reflecting a different level of commitment and priority.