Here’s a contrast to consider: A professor in a modern-day classroom teaching early music on an ancient instrument by employing a university’s newly adopted, 前瞻性的方法.
For retiring 音乐学院 Professor of Harpsichord Robert Hill—who’s also the Eugene D. 伊顿,小., Chair in Baroque Music Performance—it all makes perfect sense. “如果你仔细想想,他说, “the academic community is like a formalized laboratory for thought—which it should be.”
Hill is stepping down this summer after a long career that found him in Europe studying and performing in the ’70s and ’80s with a parade of legendary figures in the early music revival, followed by an academic career at Harvard and Duke universities, and finally joining the 音乐学院 faculty in 2018 after a stint at the Freiburg University of Music in Germany.
His students have learned much more than how to play the harpsichord, he stresses. Speaking excitedly about the 音乐学院’s universal musician mission, which empowers students to widen their perspectives, Hill refers to musical life in the Baroque Era when versatility and the ability to improvise were requirements for success.
“Developing universal musicians reflects, 在某种程度上, the process of figuring out how to combine practicing musicianship and theoretical understanding of music,他解释道. “I emphasize that approach for the harpsichord.”
通过例子, Hill points to the 18th-century practice employing the figured bass, a shorthand sketching-out of notes and chords that would direct a musician to create a spontaneous accompaniment. “Keyboard players of that day would have been very well trained in music theory to be able to fulfill their roles as accompanists,他提醒博彩平台推荐. A crucial lesson for his students who study harmony and counterpoint, requiring repetitive exercises and classroom tests.
Hill admits he was pretty tough on his students, for good reason. “There’s so much pressure to fit in,他说. “So the way I treat the process is to encourage my students to question what they encounter in their worlds in the hope that that will lead to their own progression and empowerment—and an understanding of what they can do to make the world a better place.”
As Hill looks to retirement, including the continuation of recording all of Bach’s keyboard works—which thus far numbers 10 CDs—he remains hopeful that his students will hear his message, lean into the college’s mission and thrive as multiskilled, 多方面的音乐家.
“By advancing a career track where you train yourself—not just as a player, but also as a thinker about music—and combine that with a musicological training up to the point of actually getting a degree, you set yourself up to be attractive as a job candidate in a fairly broad range of situations,他补充道. “Equally important is finding your own voice as an artist. It takes a lot of work—it’s a life process.”
