"What the world does not need is another guitar player."

I am helping one of my guitar students prepare for her college auditions.
I was struck by the wording of two of the requirements,
“two pieces, one of which is technical and the other melodic.”

The meaning is not unclear; they require one piece that demonstrates
the performer’s technical proficiency and another piece that demonstrates
feeling and expressiveness.

But if one looks a little more closely at these requirements, the distinctions between technical and musical
are not as obvious as they first seem and even seem to promote, perhaps at a subliminal level, a duality in music that is most unmusical.

Technique is, or always should be, the servant of the music.
Technique is the wings that allow musical vision to soar into the angelic realms
of the miraculous.

Though he was not speaking directly about music, I think this statement by

Meher Baba hits the nail right on the head:

“Mind and heart must work together.
Mind without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Heart without mind is like a river without banks—the water having nowhere
to flow, becomes a swamp. Mind and heart working together is a beautifully flowing river,
lovely to behold.”

Paraphrased, the statement becomes:

Music without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Music without mind is like a river without banks—the music having nowhere to flow,
becomes like a swamp. Music that has heart and mind working together is a beautifully
flowing river, lovely to hear.

Andres Segovia once said, “There are no technical problems—only musical problems.”

What this means to me is that a musician can only teach her hands to do what her mind conceives of—no more, no less. This is not to say that different bodies don’t have different capacities, but whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the body, somehow a good musician finds a way. Take for example the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt who made incredible guitar music with only two functional fingers on his left hand, or George Allen whose fingers were so thick that he was unable to fret a string without holding down another.

In other words, if the mind accepts a buzz or a wrong note, the body will create wrong notes and buzzes and this will establish a technique predisposed to wrong notes and buzzes. On the other hand, if a musician does not accept wrong notes and buzzes, she will create a physical technique that tends to keep them from creeping into her playing. As my old teacher Jack Cecchini used to tell me, “A good musician gets it right, even if he needs to play it with his nose.”

So, what was my student or I to make of this requirement? Did a ‘technical’ piece mean that it needed to be fast, or complicated, or really stretchy? And did a melodic piece mean a piece with a tune-like melody—like a song? Really, I could name many pieces that are slow and do not sound ‘difficult’ yet demand great control—a balance of head and heart—like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Leo Brower’s Un Dia De Noviembre. And also, are there not many pieces that sound really ‘difficult’ that are in fact relatively easy to learn and to play?

In conclusion, I think that the requirements and pedagogy of many music schools and many teachers are promoting and sending the wrong message. With regard to the very wording of my student’s requirements they seem to be fostering a separation of the head and the heart rather than a harmonious union of the two. Again to quote Meher Baba, “There should be a balance between the head and the heart, but should one err, it should be on the side of the heart.”

Or finally, as Andres Segovia once said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player; what the world does need are musicians and artists who also play the guitar.”