Performers Continued:
"It can happen almost by accident that you discover an affinity for a particular instrument, and then you don't know what sort of trouble you are getting into. After playing the piano indifferently for ten years, then losing interest in it altogether, at seventeen I had a chance to learn classical guitar and found something in it that I wanted. My teacher at that time held to the philosophy that you could always learn something by doing things that were too difficult for you. This was very exciting, since it gave one the impression of an exceptionally rapid progress - how was I to know that it was progress into the abyss? At the same time, no foundations of technique were built, especially for the right hand. As long as some sound was coming out, nothing much was said about that. I grew to accept that what I played might have the same name as something I heard on a recording, but that they existed in different worlds of sonority - or the lack of it. The clarity of different voices and the power of the bass, which were so obvious in the great players that I heard on recordings, remained out of reach. The question of performance was never addressed. Perhaps the majority of music teachers, of whatever instrument, fail to address it, at least with the majority of their pupils? Once, I heard that teacher perform, and it was obvious even to me that there were serious problems. I simply concluded that performance must be terribly difficult - as indeed it is!
"After two years of this, the damage was done. A total of four years of playing, and four teachers later, none of whom was capable of undoing the direction in which things were going, I knew I was up against a brick wall. Nothing further was possible without going back to the beginning. I would have to start all over again, to build in the technique that had remained such a mystery because it had never been addressed in the first place. But that would have required long, isolating hours of practice, which at that time in my life I didn't feel like doing. There were too many other things to do, and people to meet; and so I quit. As painful a decision as this may have been, I told myself there was no hope for it. I was finished with the guitar, and it would no longer be a part of me. Once in a long while, I would dream that, carrying my guitar, I was setting out on my way to a lesson. It would be the first in a long, long while, and since I couldn't remember when I had last practiced, the sense of anticipation in the dream would be accompanied by a disturbing awareness that all might not go smoothly. However, as in most dreams that involve some attempt at a journey, there would be obstacles and digressions, and for some reason I would never arrive.
"It was a second lucky accident, completely unexpected, that brought me and a guitar together again. I have to thank my son Sam for this, because he asked to have guitar lessons. Following my own instincts rather than his (since, as I realized later, what he really dreamed of was playing electric guitar in a rock band), I called Robert Luse one day and found myself invited, or obliged, to share a lesson or two in the interests of parental involvement. A few months later Sam had discovered how much he hated practicing, and moved on to other things, while I had spent an undisclosed sum on a beautiful new guitar and had somehow been persuaded that it was possible to start again, even 25 years later. If it takes a degree of insanity to do this, well, as somebody said, we all need an obsession in order to enjoy life, and it is so much the better if it happens to be something constructive.
"If I take up space with this story, it is only because I believe it is quite a common one. There aren't enough good methods for the guitar, we don't start early enough, and there is a paucity of interesting easy and intermediate music available for us to build our skills with. In fact, none of those early teachers of mine used anything resembling a method at all. It was a novelty to find in the Luse Method everything carefully laid out in a progressive manner, and amazingly comforting to realize that this time I was being protected from doing things I was not yet ready for. Once I pointed out to Robert that after following his method for several years, I would still barely qualify to play the very first piece I had ever learned all those years ago. He laughed and replied: "Still! And for a long time to come!" But I know so many other things now that were simply never explained to me before, and I am very happy with that. Once you embark on the search for sonority, you know it will take years, but if you can find the patience to enjoy all that comes along the way, that is not going to be a problem. Obviously the enforcing of technical rigour by itself could be a deadly experience, if it were not matched with an approach to teaching that is also musically and expressively rich. There is far more in this method, it has to be said, than can possibly appear on paper, since from the start its teacher offers so much to learn about music at every level, from the most fundamental questions of technique to the finest points of interpretation. At first, it was terrifying, like leaping off a cliff, to find I could do nothing right. On the other hand, as all guitarists will agree, even a very simple thing can sound really beautiful on the guitar, IF you can figure out how to play it well enough. And that, to me, has become the crux of the matter. It is just so much better to play something simple well, than to play something difficult badly.
"To put it in the simplest possible terms, it comes down to the balance between the right hand and the left. It's the right hand that makes the music; I understand it now as being actually more important than the left. That, I feel, is what was most sadly missing in the way I was taught before. And that is what has been so carefully worked out and developed in the Luse Method, although I still doubt whether one can successfully learn it all just from a book, without someone to guide you with direct demonstration, and a lot of patient, repeated, correction. In recent years, I have been to Master Classes and seen people play things that require the most fantastic development of the left hand, while the right is simply not working. I wonder now how teachers could possibly allow this to happen, but they do.
"The other great new dimension that Robert Luse's teaching has opened up to me and to all his pupils is performance. None of my former teachers, whether of piano or guitar, had ever addressed this question. I suppose they assumed that, since most, if not all, of their pupils were never going to aim at being professionals, there was no point in addressing it. But this affected the whole approach to what we were doing. It didn't matter if we never learned anything perfectly, or even properly; and the psychological aspects of learning to share music effectively by playing for others - with all of the self-control that that must involve - were never discussed. It's hard to think of how much teachers must compromise their own standards in order to reconcile themselves to this state of affairs, and I can only imagine that it is painful to many of them. With Luse, everything is taught as if it really does matter - no compromise! A new respect for the music is born, and we discover that we have set ourselves higher goals, perhaps, than we thought we were capable of. At the same time, most of us have discovered so much pleasure and excitement in our efforts, however modest, to perform for each other and for strangers, that we look forward to each new occasion. It's a lot of work for the teacher to create these opportunities, so you can be sure we appreciate the dedication that it involves. But Robert has proved that all of us, from the youngest to the oldest, can achieve some measure of success and satisfaction here. The attention to performance influences everything we do. Practice acquires a new dignity. "Practise as if you were performing, and then, when you perform, it will be just as if you were practising." Since I am not someone who naturally loves technique for its own sake, I have to pay special attention to this injunction. You could say I am still learning to abide by it, since my immediate impulse is always to plunge in heedlessly. Mostly I am only able to love technique as a means to an end. In this context, perhaps I may cite a thought-provoking passage from the book, Free Play, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, a violinist, which for me has been a helpful reminder about what we are practising for. He writes:
Not only is practice necessary to art - it is art
When skill reaches a certain level, it hides itself. When skill hides in the unconscious, it reveals the unconscious. Technique is the vehicle for surfacing normally unconscious material from the dream world and the myth world to where they become visible, nameable, singable." "It has taken me a long time to understand this approach to playing more fully, but one day, Robert put it to me with an inescapable logic: playing to yourself is good therapy, but music is essentially meant to be shared, and it is this effort to communicate with others, to hold their attention and to move them, that is what music is really all about. Therefore, learning about performance really should be integral to the whole process, even for amateurs - which after all, means most of us. Unfortunately, this means aiming for perfection. Since that is almost impossible, who's to blame us if we often fall short? On the other hand, how do you know what you are capable of, unless you dare to attempt the impossible? For myself, since my job depends very heavily on linguistic communication, the chance to bypass words for a change and to communicate wordlessly is very refreshing. It is also endlessly mysterious. Thank goodness there's something that will forever elude analysis."
"I started playing the guitar when I was eleven years old. The church I was attending had an 'orchestra' comprising several pianists, clarinetists, trumpeter, lead an accompanying guitar players. I was one of the strummers providing accompaniment to the hymns and songs sung by the congregation.
"I remained a strummer for many years. In the beginning, I had a few lessons with a teacher who was playing in a band in one of the many night clubs in Singapore. With that base and over the years, I continued to build on my guitar knowledge, picking up instruction mainly from books, playing with other players and attending guitar concerts.
"Quite a few years later, I wanted to learn classical guitar to augment and increase my knowledge of acoustic guitar technique. I came across Mr Robert Luse and started lessons with him. It was my first and only exposure to the Luse Method of classical guitar playing.
"It has now been several years since I started formal lessons with Robert and I dontinue to benefit from the methodology in his approach to the learning of classical guitar. His method is well thought out, detailed, progressive and technically challenging. Naturally, at each stage of the methodoloy, the learner is learning the appropriate musical concepts and techniques and, depending on one's motivation, the process can be fast or slow. One good feature of the methodology is that it builds on the recently acquired knowledge and as a result, the learner's musical knowledge and technical skills can grow gradually and comprehensively over time.
"For a player like me who started with strumming, learning the classical guitar can be quite challenging. For one, the Luse Method has helped me to read music notes in good order and most importantly as intended in the score. Seemed so easy when you watch good music performers do it! The other interesting development for me is participation in the yearly student concert. On this occassion each student has to present an item or two generally taken from the pieces learnt in the past calendar quarter or recent time period. Even now for me, each time that concert comes around, I am challenged to show to the audience the knowledge and skills acquired since the last concert. In brief, I think Mr Luse tried to make concert artists out of all the students but in my view not all of us are cast in that mould yet. Perhaps with more time and effort, we will get there.
"Just now, I am at the intermediate stage of the method and making slow progress towards the desired end. Suffice to say the knowledge and skills gained in these years have allowed me to follow the Luse Method progressively. More important, it has also enabled me to play other music outside the books of the Method. I value this capability a lot as it enables me to broaden my guitar music knowledge and it shows that the knowledge and technical skills gained under the methodology can be transferred and used to appreciate other different music styles.
"Finally, I would recommend the Luse Method to anyone who is keen to acquire more knowledge on the playing of the classical guitar."
"Hi! My name is Wong Soo Wah. I'm Malaysian. Because my teacher saids: "Soo Wah, you've to write something to my website." So I did.
"But I'm happy that I can share my experience to everyone who needed. As I have been teaching for ten years, I realized that the guitar playing technique of students couldn't improved enough either one myself. So I told myself, "I can't go on like this, I've got to make some changes in myself."
"But at that moment I couldn't know what to do, until I went to a classical guitar camp in KL and heard about Robert Luse. I wonder what will happen if a person with poor English can study with an American. After under Robert Luse I started to understand the guitar playing technique. In fact I found that I've never known guitar technique before being under Robert Luse.
"Finally I've to said, "Thank you, Robert Luse."
Click here to see Soo Wah's contribution in Chinese.
Click here to see Miyako's contribution in Japanese.
"When I went to Robert Luse for lessons I was already a somewhat capable guitarist in the eyes of many people. I had in fact, come to him to make me a professional guitarist. And indeed, one of the first things Robert asked me in our first lesson was, "How far do you intend to go as a guitarist?" This was a crucial point in our relationship as teacher-student, because the answer to that question would define the objectives, pace and boundaries of the programme he would put me on.
"As it was, Robert started me on his guitar method right from the very basics. This was initially quite tough for me to take. I had already played guitar for several years and had many teacher before him, and not one of them thought I wasn't competent enough to play such unbelievably simple material. In fact, I had already won competitions playing very difficult pieces! Nevertheless, I stuck with it and as I progressed through the method, I began to understand why this was necessary. Only by going through the most basic of movements, slowly and repeatedly, would I be able to 'un-learn' all the bad habits I had developed over years of practising pieces that were too difficult!
"I have studied with Robert for five years now, and have progressed through almost the entire method. Although I am still far from realistically attempting the pieces I used to play before I met him, I know that I am a better guitarist and musician than I ever was then.
"Unlike the violin or the piano, guitar pedagogy is still an unsettled science. Even the very best guitarists seem unable to agree on technique, particularly when it involves the right hand position. In fact I have been told by a concert guitarist that there is no correct technique and that I should use whatever seems to work for me! In his method, Robert Luse takes a stand against this. Upon careful analysis and an understanding of the mechanics of the hands, the body and the learning process (which he explains with precision and clarity in his lessons), he bases an approach to playing the guitar. The Luse Method is wonderfully organized, and focuses on building a solid technique by progressive small steps.
"But where the Luse Method truly seperates itself from other methods is in the attention paid to expression. From very early on the student is taught and encouraged to play the guitar expressively. While other methods I've come across concentrate solely on how to play the instrument, the Luse Method also teaches how to play the music. The idea is that musical expression is something that can be learned, and should be learnt alongside technique and not after it. This approach inclulcates in the student very early on an expressive technique that will grow stronger as the student matures.
"Perhaps the best part about the Luse Method is the man himself. Robert is a prolific composer and his own works feature prominently at every level throughout his method. Studying with a composer has been a tremendous advantage and has helped me to understand the musical language better. In the belief that an artist should have as broad as possible an understanding of the world that surrounds him, Robert and I have had many enlightening conversations on topics that range from morality and religion, to technology and space travel. A true 'guru' in every sense of the word, Robert has had a great influence on me not just as a teacher, guitarist and composer, but also as a valued friend."
Roxana
"The most frustrating, agonizing part of creative work, and the one we grapple with every day in practice, is our encounter with the gap between what we feel and what we can express. It is in this gap, this zone of the unknown, where we feel most deeply - but are most inarticulate. Technique can bridge this gap.
Ronald
Soo Wah
Miyako (Photo by Mah Su Yin)
Chia Chu
