Kathryn Drake

Suzuki Violin Teacher

My (Revised) Teaching Philosophy

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cape cod

In Book 1 teacher training with Dr. Laurie Scott four years ago I took my first stab at writing a coherent teaching philosophy. It spoke to who I was at the time and how I was developing as a human being. For my Suzuki degree with Carrie Reuning-Hummel at Ithaca College I was again tasked with distilling my teaching philosophy down into words. The following  essay is my response.

In an interview with Mountain Record, composer and singer Meredith Monk states, “The inner voice has both gentleness and clarity.” She continues, “To get to authenticity you really keep going down to the bone. To the inevitability of something.” The deeper I dive into violin playing, the more this feels true. The further I master the instrument, the more playing violin feels like being my authentic self. And the more time I spend focused in a practice room, devoid of orchestra chair ranking anxiety and chamber quartet politics, the more I feel I embody gentleness and clarity. It is not, as far as I can tell, because I have some magical connection to the violin, but because having a deep, authentic connection to anything gets at the truth of what it means to be a human being.

Meredith Monk is not the only artist to recognize that going “down to the bone” of something gets you to an inevitable, clear truth. Experts of chess, martial arts, writing, meditation, surfing, painting, and many other disciplines have shared the same discovery. In The Poetry Writer’s Handbook, poet Mary Oliver describes writing a poem as, “a kind of impossible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” Her daily ritual of writing as she strolls through the natural world of Cape Cod, described in an interview with Krista Tippett, allows her heart and conscious mind to meet and then transcend merely her own experience. She says, “Many of the poems are ‘I did this. I did this. I saw this.’ I wanted them — the ‘I’ to be the possible reader… Rather than about myself. It was about an experience that happened to be mine but could well have been anybody else’s…  It enjoined the reader into the experience of the poem. I became the kind of person who did the walking and the scribbling but shared it.” Like Oliver, chess master Joshua Waitzkin experienced a sort of self transcendence as he transitioned to become a world class Tai-Chi push hands competitor. The deeper he moved into the heart of Tai Chi, the more he realized it was fundamentally the same as chess. In his book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin describes the sensation of performing a Tai Chi meditation while he was actually playing chess, or deconstructing the attacks of his martial arts opponent with chessic analysis. In the last chapter he states, “The real art of learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.”

I began taking Suzuki violin lessons with my mother at the age of four. I don’t remember much about our lessons in the beginning, other than the fact that it was part of what we did as a family. Just like I attended school, brushed my teeth, and read books, I also played the violin. I took a journey with my mother from my first bow hold all the way through college auditions. She attended every lesson and concert, and stayed engaged in my development throughout. My mother negotiated with me the difficult way that is mastery — from violin being something we did as an activity, to something I could do, to something that was annoying, to something that was intriguing, to something that was utterly soul fulfilling. She never doubted playing the violin was something I would continue to do, even when I faced challenges. [Read more…]

How Do I Make Artistic Decisions?

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decision

This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

The readings this week are united not only in subject (early music), but in attitude. Each offers a skeptical, contrarian take on the historical performance movement in classical music.

In Slominsky’s dictionary he defines Urtext as a “magic word” and a “peculiar obsession of 20th century music scholars.” An urtext in music is the original manuscript as set down on paper by the composer (errors and hard-to-read handwriting included).

These urtexts are sought after versions of important works because they supposedly offer bonus insight into what the composer intended. But, as we come to read in Taruskin and Kozinn’s pieces in the New York Times, unveiling and obeying a composer’s intentions might not be as important as we pretend it is.

In “The Spin Doctors of Early Music,” which was published in 1990, Richard Taruskin makes the case that “historical” performances are almost always inaccurate, and reveal far more about the modern performer than they do about performance practice in the time period of the composer being performed. Taruskin claims that our obsession with representing antiquated music and calling it authentic stems from the post modern values of literalism, impersonality, and superficiality. Far from dismissing the movement, Taruskin actually celebrates “early music” performances as a development of the “perfectionist standards” of classical music that has helped introduce new timbres and idioms. Even though it is “historical masquerading,” the result has been innovation that is decidedly modern.

Written twenty years later, “Composer’s Intent? Get Over It” continues the dialogue on “authentic performance practice.” Moving beyond the question of authenticity in Renaissance and Baroque styles, Kozinn questions the importance of authenticity when performing new music written by living composers, especially ones whose “intent” can still be explored via in person discussions and self made recordings. Kozinn suggests that even with unprecedented access to the composer’s wishes, the performer’s interpretation is far more important in order to relay the music to audiences. Rather than performing works by Ravel, Webern, and Glass as they told us to, we should perform the works as we wish for them to be heard (even if that means injecting feeling, contextualizing the work through concert talks, or changing a given number of repetitions).

This sentiment is echoed by Mendelssohn who, according to the Grove Dictionary’s definition on Early Music, “heavily cut, rearranged, and romanticized” a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s passion with a large orchestra and choir of 158 voices. Writing for Grove, Haskell says, “Mendelssohn looked upon early music not as a body of historical artifacts to be painstakingly preserved in their original state but as a repository of living art that each generation could — indeed should — reinterpret in its own stylistic idiom.” Mendelssohn’s approach is just one among centuries of approaches of anachronistic music. The “Early Music” definition in Grove starts with the “concept of a canonical repertory of ‘ancient’ music” in 18th century England, France and Prussia, and accelerates all the way up to the current impact on music education and concert life today. Throughout time living musicians have treated the work of their predecessors with varying degrees of respect and disregard, so much so that the modern understanding of historical performance (with the added complexity of Taruskin and Kozinn’s observations) has almost become an individual performer’s way of personally revealing their feelings on the nature of music itself.

These readings come at an interesting time for me as I prepare Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and a new piece by one of my peers, Jonathan Rainous.

With Stravinsky, our conductor has decided to perform the original music but with the adapted text by Kurt Vonnegut, who brings to light the gruesome side of war. Who knows if Stravinsky would have sanctioned this performance, or was even thinking about this aspect of war while writing the music, but we are choosing to present it in a way that will speak to the Ithaca veteran group who plans to attend the performance.

With the Vivaldi, a small group of string players from the Chamber Orchestra will be reinterpreting the work to be performed in an innovative way (with lighting, staging, and re-orchestration). We are certain that the way we perform this work, on modern instruments and with soloists visible to the audience, would have never happened when Vivaldi was a musical director. However, we are choosing to make artistic decisions about the performance that celebrate Vivaldi’s music by revealing in new ways what we find most interesting about it.

And finally, with Jonathan’s new violin duo, Gabriella and I have had the chance to rehearse the brand new work four times, of which Jonathan was at two. In a truly collaborative way he has marked, edited, and re-written the parts as he hears us play them. We have been able to ask him questions about his inspiration and intention for the work that we would never be able to for the pillar works of our repertory, which I find very exciting. However, it makes me wonder if we are doing his piece a disservice by not interpreting it exclusively on our own. I wonder, if Jonathan weren’t around to answer our questions, how we would interpret his first version of the score compared to his new, edited one. I wonder how Jonathan’s stake in this first performance, and subsequent ones, differ from our own.

How much does an Urtext really matter? How much does Stravinsky or Vivaldi’s original vision of the performance of their pieces matter? I don’t know. My hunch is they matter something, but not everything. And if I follow that hunch (to be as informed as I can about a work without dismissing the contemporary experiences I can bring to it), well I’m really just making a unique, artistic decision after all.

All of our decisions, whether historically informed or not, are merely individual, artistic ones. This, to me, is liberating in a terrifying sort of way.

Dr. Duke’s Advice to the Novice Researcher

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A casual, but not so casual, interest of mine is to do academic music research. I was browsing the online library, as I do, and stumbled upon Dr. Robert Duke’s 2010 “Senior Researcher Award Acceptance Address” in the Journal of Research in Music Education (Vol. 58, No. 3 (October 2010)) pp. 208-218).

Beyond tackling the question of what makes research interesting in the first place, Dr. Duke gives advice to the young researcher. Here is what he advises…

  1. Read, read, read (surround yourself by quality).
  2. Write, write, write (creativity is a function of productivity).
  3. Don’t mistake form for substance.
  4. Talk to people all the time about your ideas and your work.
  5. Find one or more research buddies.
  6. Grow thicker skin.
  7. Hang out with KIND, SMART, INTERESTING, INTERESTED people
  8. Go to professional meetings where you are likely to learn something about what you are working on.
  9. Write research that will be read with interest outside of music education.

What strikes me, is that whether I plan to go into research or not, this advice is applicable. [Read more…]

The Work Behind the Print

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This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

At every step along the way in this class, I feel like I find out more about just how much I don’t know.

We’ve learned about complexities in the fields of writing, reading, publishing, and copywriting. This week we engaged with twelve different sources on the topic of printing works.

Perhaps because my mom’s family managed a printing press business in my home town, this subject is quite interesting to me. My mom and uncle would spend their time in the summers working in the shop (my uncle doing customer service in the front; my solving mechanical problems in the back). They would set and press the San Marcos daily record, other local publications, as well as private invitations and stationary.

I’ve grown up hearing words like ‘movable type” at “facsimile,” but I didn’t quite have a handle on the details until now.

Starting with the clear definitions presented in Grove Music Online helped me to get a footing. From their paragraph long definitions of publishing terms, I gleaned these concise descriptions…

– autograph: written by the hand of someone (even scribe/copysist)
– holograph: written in the hand of the author or composer (original work?)
– sources: the handwritten documents that lie behind the printed form in which the music circulates
– editions, historical: “historical edition” is music publication devoted to a past repertory (most useful for study of original versions of past music, i.e. scholarly or critical evaluation. These come from critical evaluation of primary sources which is different from ‘practical or performance edition’)
– urtext: the earliest version of the text of any composition
– facsimile: recreate appearance of an original handwritten manuscript or printed edition

Beyond the definitions, Grove also discussed historical influences, changes and practice, and warnings for modern researchers. One theme that I picked up on throughout, is that there really is no sense of certainty when it comes to music publishing. Whether reproducing a composers original work via picture, or looking at a collection of sources to determine the what the composer intended, the publisher is never able to know if what they are producing is what the composer intended. [Read more…]

How To Learn Names Quickly

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names

I was complemented often at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp for my perceived ability to learn names quickly. Indeed, learning the names of my campers, my students, and my peers is important to me.

I’ve talked before about the functional use of knowing names for teachers in group settings.

A teacher’s ability to give direct positive or negative feedback, as well as praise or redirect negative behavior is dependent on the knowledge of the name of people in their classroom.

Furthermore, in using someone’s name a teacher is acknowledging to a student that they are seen and heard. When someone is called by name, their individuality is affirmed.

Another observation is that when kids know each others’ names, they are far more likely to interact with each other. Just knowing the name of someone else can break down the awkwardness enough to then start sharing experiences together.

Names are powerful things.

So, of course, I worked hard at camp to learn the names of the campers in my cabin, in music history class, and in violin sectionals as quickly as possible. But I don’t think my success comes from an innate ability to remember more names, or pick up names more quickly than others. I just have a few tricks up my sleeve. [Read more…]

Deep Work, Fixed Productivity and a Workday Shutdown

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There are many self-perpetuated stereotypes of musicians, but two that frustrate me the most are that…

  1. All musicians are poor, and
  2. All musicians are busy

I don’t buy into either. The first I’ll address in future posts, but the latter I’ll handle today.

I know that throughout my undergraduate people would have lumped me in the “busy” category. I took more than 15 credit hours a semester, participated in ensembles and chamber groups, was a member of student organizations, moonlighted as the labor czar in my housing cooperative, played in a band, and maintained a violin studio. A few all-nighters were pulled. Some stress tears were shed.

There were moments that I thought I literally didn’t have enough time get it all done. I thought I was in way over my head. It was too much.

Ultimately, I am extremely proud of the work I did in my undergrad. I think the work I did has undoubtedly shaped me to be the person I am today. But moving into graduate school, I feel there is a more mature, healthy way to approach work. As the depth and substantiality of my work increases, so will my work efforts– they’ll have to.

The week before school started at Ithaca College I went back to one of my favorite books, Deep Work by Cal Newport. In it, Newport systematically argues that the skill of working deeply is being lost at exactly the same time it is valuable. I have totally bought into this notion, but I do struggle putting it into practice.

Luckily, Newport uses himself as a case study.

Newport went through graduate school, did post-doc work at MIT, was hired on as a professor at Georgetown, and received tenure by 33. All the while he was writing books and short blog posts on his own successful strategies. It is easy to see how his study of, and commitment to, a deep life directly correlates to his academic success.

In Deep Work, Newport suggests many ways to organize the work day to reach the same levels of depth as he does. I want to implement three particular approaches in graduate school. The first is a fixed productivity schedule, the second is scheduling my days, and the third is a workday shutdown routine.

FIXED PRODUCTIVITY SCHEDULE

In How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennet claims that, “More work, more genuine living, could be got out of six days than out of seven.” Though seemingly paradoxical, his idea is that by setting constraints on time one actually acts on the most important tasks and completes them faster. And, in constraining work time you are also allowing for rest time.

Newport sets up these constraints in his work days by only working until 5:30pm on weekdays, and doesn’t work at all on the weekends.

I want to set up a similar constraint. My plan is to work from 8-5:30pm, and not on weekends (the only exception being Mondays when I teach our studio scales class from 5:30-6:30 and violin practice on the weekends).

My daily work time will include my graduate teaching responsibilities (String Class, Scale Class), my academic classes (Suzuki Pedagogy I, Bibliography), rehearsals (Piano Instrument Duo, Chamber Music, Orchestra), practice, prep for classes, and admin tasks (attendance, email response, paperwork).

This will make it difficult for me to volunteer for gigs and playing opportunities since the rehearsals are often late at night and on weekends. I also won’t be staying up late working on homework or doing administrative, shallow work.

DAILY SCHEDULING

So on Sundays I already do a weekly review (David Allen style) in which I update all of my projects and tasks lists, clear out my inbox, and send an email to my grandmother with a description of the upcoming week. This helps me get my brain ready for the week ahead. My gears can start subconsciously turning and problem solving future assignments or projects.

This has been a very useful habit to develop, however if I’m going to stop working at 5:30 every day I need to make sure I’m being as productive as possible during the work day. I really shouldn’t be making decisions about what to do moment to moment during the day. My plan instead is to look over my hard commitments every Sunday like I have been, but also plan out the next day’s schedule the evening before.

Newport does this on a blank sheet in a notebook specifically set aside for this purpose. In the notebook he writes out the days schedule in half-hour increments. He starts of by blocking off his hard commitments (teaching, meetings), and then adds in deep work sessions and batched shallow work tasks.

If something comes up during the day, he rewrites his daily schedule.

I will use the same system. The goal here is not to stick religiously to a plan, but to be conscious and proactive about how I’m scheduling my days. In doing so I will better learn how long I take to do certain tasks and will become very aware of the opportunity cost for straying away from a plan I set up for the day.

WORKDAY SHUTDOWN ROUTINE

A final habit shift I would like to make as I enter graduate school is establishing a workday shutdown routine.

This is a strict ritual I will practice around 5:30 everyday, and it will be the last thing I do before I am free for the night.

This is my ritual

  • check email one last time, make sure there is nothing urgent
  • review task list, sort everything out of inbox
  • review projects, make sure everything is moving forward
  • plan next day
  • say out-loud “Shutdown complete”

After I do this shutdown I have released myself from commitments to tasks and my inboxes. I am liberated to do whatever evening activity I have decided on, whether it be volunteering at Green-star Food Co-op, meditating, attending a concert, writing a blog post, or watching Netflix!

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The three changes I’m making to my daily architecture are ambitious, but I think they will be well worth the effort. As I get closer and closer to a masterful, professional life I need to actively improve my routines and systems. I’ll be reporting my success back here, of course, but I hope that success comes in the form of better playing, quality teaching, focused research, and more “genuine living.”

Whose Ideas Are These?

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Photo from Grand Canyon, by Joshua Peacock

This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

Our readings this week all deal with the subject of plagiarism. If I had to summarize their main points, I would do so in the following sentences…

  • Give credit for the words and ideas of others
  • While what constitutes plagiarism can be confusing, especially for students, we need to pause and thoroughly question before we submit our work for review
  • When in doubt — cite!
  • The idea of being a contemporary writer is making your way through this morass of information

This is all common knowledge, right?

Well the trouble is that I’ve already plagiarized. I lifted those sentences word for word from the sources (and related sources) given to us to read this week. Had I published this blog post as a helpful list without citing sources, I would face legally jeopardy. [Read more…]

On Joyful Performances

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joyful performances

One of the highlights of my last semester at the University of Texas was performing the Scherzo from Dvorak’s Piano Quintet with some of my closest friends.  I’ve attached a video of the performance below, which I think captures the excitement we all felt to perform this incredible work together. I want to explore why this was such a positive performance experience, and consider the way I can encourage similar joyful performances with my studio.

Over the course of the semester, my chamber music ensemble worked on the first, second, and third movements of the quartet with Will Fedkenheuer, second violinist of the Miro quartet.  Though David, our pianist, was new to us this semester, the string quartet (Owen, Elizabeth, Yukai, and me) had  worked together for four consecutive semesters.  Having already worked together on matters of group sound, tuning, and style, we dove into the music with Will not from a technical angle, but from a relational one. Our ensemble used the need to work on the music as a way to practice working as a group. Unlike our time with any other coach, with Will we dedicated energy in our coachings (and then rehearsals) to understanding each other’s perspectives, feelings, and goals.

[Read more…]

What Does Predatory Publishing Mean for Young Researchers?

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predatory publishing

This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

This week we “read” six publications for this blog assignment in our Bibliography and Research class.

  • Wagstaff “Periodicals” (Oxford companion to music)
  • Weir “It’s Not Harry Potter”
  • Western Libraries “How to read a scholarly article”
  • Beall, “Predatory publishers are corrupting open access”
  • Kolata “Scientic articles accepted (personal checks, too)”
  • Beall, “What I learned from predatory publishers”

Some are published journal articles, but news articles, blog posts, web pages, a video were also included. They range in date of publication from 2011-2017, and range in attitude and advice as well. Their singular common link, however, is a focus on the subject of scholarly articles.

Wagstaff, Weir, and Western Libraries introduce readers to the culture around scholarly publishing, and how a reader can most effectively digest a scholarly article.

The video from Western Libraries encouraged readers to approach an article out of order. By closely reading the abstract, the conclusion, then introduction readers are able to make critical decisions about whether to continue reading a particular article. With a clear idea of the author’s intentions, the reader can evaluate in the body of the article how effective the writing is. I am convinced after seeing this strategy in several of our readings now, that reading out of order is critical to the research process. I plan to apply it to the way I read scholarly articles, as well as books and web pages.

Weir’s “It’s Not Harry Potter” was addressed to academic professors, but is an interesting read for the student. It speaks to the persistent struggle of the expert who, in teaching the novice, must start from the beginning (a stage they might not even remember) and resist passing on expectations of their own work onto their student. Weir, rather provocatively, encourages students to skim their reading and only retain what they need. This advice though, is given in the context of his class which teaches students how to read by helping them explore the purpose for reading. To entertain is not the same as to inform, and the writing of each of these purposes will differ dramatically. The clarification seems obvious, but was never explicitly discussed in any of my courses in my undergraduate education. Having the permission from Weir to approach a scholarly article differently than a novel will certainly speed up my research process and cut down on the guilt a feel when I pass over entire chapters of an author’s work.

The final three articles all use Jeffrey Beall’s specific experience to discuss the general problem of predatory publishing in an open-access environment. I did not know much about this issue before I read these articles, and feel both surprised and not surprised that predatory publishing is a threat to the community of academic scholars. [Read more…]

How Can I Improve Reading and Writing Skills?

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typewriter

This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

Reading Reflection

The four readings for our blog this week all have to do with personal relationships to reading and writing. And because they are grouped together for this assignment, I think our instructor is hinting at their relationship to each other.

Reading and writing is inextricably linked to each other, and inextricably liked to our lives. It is safe to say that no matter what field we journey into, reading and writing will be a part of it.

As someone who wants to teach, research, and perform I know that continual learning will be a big part of my process. I will need to stay up to date on matters of performance practice, music history, music theory, pedagogy, human learning, and business. I need to read those resources well to glean their meaning, evaluate their relevance, and to respond intelligently. Part of the continual learning process is also documenting what I do, critically reflect on my own actions, edit my work, and put a stake in the ground that indicates my understanding and insights via writing.

Much like I need to build skills in order to play my violin well in order to perform and teach, I need to build skills in reading and wiring in order to read and write well in order to perform, teach and do research. [Read more…]