The Means and End Problem and Pedagogical Clichés

Were it possible, would you hire Van Gogh to teach your children how to draw and paint? I doubt he would be a successful teacher unless he had cultivated an interest in and an ability to guide others. As English philosopher Michael Oakeshott has pointed out, “There is a difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and the learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”^[1]

If a university art school decided to hire a famous artist to teach classes because his or her work was considered “innovative” and the university wished their art students to learn these innovations, those responsible for hiring new faculty would still have to be certain that whomever they hired could teach their innovations. Consider this thought-experiment: If a school wanted to hire Picasso to teach its students about Cubism, the school would have to ensure that Picasso could develop a pedagogy of Cubism, which would require that Picasso could teach students about Cézanne’s use of geometric structure; El Greco’s approach to form and space; the influences of the post-impressionists; the influence of Georges Braque; and on it would go.

Although some artists can discuss their work with precision and can guide their students—the thrust of my Practicing Music by Design: Historic Virtuosi on Peak Performance is that the practice strategies described by many legendary virtuosi presaged scientific research about the development of peak performance—performance ability is no guarantee that one has developed expertise in teaching.^[2]

The Means and Ends Problem

The means and ends problem could be defined as using the language of the end not only to define the means but also to achieve the end. The comments I explore below are illustrative of the “curse of knowledge effect,” a term devised by psychologist Robert Bjork.^[3] Some high-level experts may be able to explain how they do something now, but that has little relationship to how they acquired their ability. Let’s examine a few remarks about technique made by several great pianists. These remarks may not have originally been intended as pedagogical advice for students, but that doesn’t mean these remarks haven’t been regarded or presented as pedagogical advice by others.

Pianist Ivo Pogorelich has stated that technique is “the art of knowing how to adjust your hand to a particular group of notes to produce a particular sound to fit the particular expectation of the ear.”^[4] Well, how does the ear come to have expectations? It seems the ears have to have had a lot of exposure, experience, and training to have meaningful artistic expectations. Even if the ear has some expectations, how has the hand acquired the ability to satisfy the demands of the ear? Pogorelich’s statement is meaningless as pedagogical advice to those who are starting to develop their technique, although it is understandable by those who are already well-trained, experienced artists.

One of Artur Schnabel’s students wrote that Schnabel believed that “if you knew exactly what you wanted, you would find—invent if necessary—the means to achieve it.”^[5] This is true once a refined artistic technique is second nature, but it is unhelpful to those who don’t know exactly what they want and need guidance, which is the case with most students. There is a chasm of uncertainty concealed by the conditional clause that begins with the word “if.”

Both Schnabel and Pogorelich assume that the end—“the expectation of the ear” or knowing “exactly what you wanted”—creates the means to fulfill the expectations of the ear and execute what one wants. The comment by Schnabel’s student could be reduced to, “If you knew the end, you would find the means.” Put this way, its flawed logic is revealed and easily seen.

It’s true that musical ideas drive technical development but not until one reaches a certain high level. To think otherwise is to have lost all memory of what it is like not to know or not to be able to do something, which is at the core of Bjork’s “curse of knowledge effect.” The big magic trick of outstanding teachers lies in their ability to bring their students to the point at which they can make creative interpretive decisions. Their ears will then have artistic expectations and if their hands are developed and sensitive enough, they will be able to realize their artistic expectations.

A different example of “The Means and End Problem” is the interpretive advice presented in some of the guitar master classes I’ve observed over the years: “Imitate Segovia’s recording of the piece. When you play it, it will come out as your own.” There are many problems with instructions like this, the most significant of which is that a teacher is asking a student to surrender his or her ability to make artistic decisions, or perhaps more accurately, to surrender one’s responsibility to learn how to make interpretive decisions. As I write in Practicing Music by Design:^[6]

Imitation needs no decision-making, and it may seem to be an easy way to approach a new piece, but decision-making itself requires practice. If one is only trying to solve a problem, then the results may be constrained by the definition of the problem. The interpreter, much like an artist facing a blank canvas, must create, articulate, or find the problem to solve. Artistic problems are more discovered than given.

Pianist Leon Fleisher said that, “It is your musical ideas that form or decide for you what kind of technique you are going to use. In other words, if you are trying to get a certain sound, you just experiment around to find the movement that will get this sound. That is technique.”^[7] But that’s not technique; it’s an explanation of how he uses technique and how he views the relationship between the technique and the music. It’s of no help to someone needing help to develop or change their technique, although it could be helpful to someone who needs permission to “experiment around.”

In an interview published in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1960, Vladimir Horowitz was unable to explain how he acquired his remarkable mastery, “as I can’t explain how I learned languages.” The article’s author added that while Horowitz studied with Blumenfeld, he “received no recipes for technique. The way to technical perfection is led, in a significant measure, through various purely musical approaches.”^[8] This is unhelpful to the student who has yet to form or develop a “purely musical approach,” which is really any student who is not yet an artist.

These statements by virtuoso pianists are only marginally better than the breezy advice of “do whatever works for you,” which allows those offering such advice to abrogate their responsibilities to those whom they teach.^[9]

All high-level musicians know that technique should be developed to be in service to the music; it’s a cliché to say so. These observations teach nothing to those who already know and offer little to those who don’t. It’s almost as though some musical artists are unwilling to discuss or learn about the use of the body, the way muscles work, the mind’s role in developing skill, or how certain positions can enhance or inhibit one’s playing lest they be mistaken for someone who is preoccupied with technique at the expense of interpretive ability.

I’m sure that the great pianists mentioned above would rail against a student performing a piece who used nothing but uncreative interpretive clichés, or as conductor George Szell described it, “the meretricious tricks and the thick encrustation of the interpretive nuances that had been piling up for decades.”^[10] But what the pianists mentioned above have each articulated about technique puts them firmly in the camp of teachers who resort to pedagogical clichés. It matters little if these artists never taught; their words are often passed on by others, buoyed by the formidable reputations of those who first said them.

The problem with clichés is that is that those who use them have capitulated to passing along only that which is “received knowledge”—although “knowledge” isn’t the word I’d use for this. In 1976, poet Robert Bly pointed out that when “language is all received knowledge that the psyche has not absorbed and inter-penetrated, then the language is dead.”^[11]

Dead language means dead pedagogy.