Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 14, 2003|Volume 32, Number 11

Pianist William Westney led music students through physical exercises before they performed for his "un-master" class.

'Un-master' class helps musicians
tune their inner instruments

Acclaimed pianist and music professor William Westney is not fomenting revolution among music students, but his "un-master classes," like the one he held at Yale, do fly in the face of certain staid traditions.

Westney presented the 90-minute group workshop to about 25 students from the School of Music on Nov. 7 in the Yale Opera Studio in Hendrie Hall.

A Yale graduate who earned master's and doctoral degrees here in 1971 and 1976 respectively, Westney has more than 35 years experience as a solo pianist. He has received many prestigious musical awards and has produced critically acclaimed recordings as well as, most recently, a book titled "The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self." He developed and teaches the 90-minute "Un-Master Class" around the globe.

Describing the workshop as a "complement" to the time-honored "master class," Westney enjoined the Yale participants to connect in a new way to themselves as performers and to their audiences.

Standing in front of the class, Westney began by asking the students to try to remember a particularly moving performance, their own or someone else's.

"How do you know it's special?" he asked. Students volunteered various physical responses -- such as tingling up the spine and a glowing feeling in the chest.

It is critical for performers to capture that "special" feeling and to incorporate it in their playing, asserted Westney. "If classical music is going to survive, it has to have 'vitality,'" he said. "It has to connect."

Westney noted that toddlers listening to music respond instinctively with their whole bodies. This "bodily intuition" is fundamental to the musical experience, Westney contended. With the human brain as their new frontier, scientists are particularly fascinated by musicians, he said, because "we use our body as an instrument of knowing."

Bringing his students to the front of the classroom and asking them to form a circle around him, Westney put them through a series of exercises designed to sharpen that intuitive instrument.

As a warm up, students were asked to loosen their knees by jiggling, then to shift their weight from side to side, then to shout out loud as they assumed various positions with their arms outstretched.

In one exercise, the young musicians passed around a ball in time to pre-recorded musical selections -- ranging from Tchaikovsky to Gregorian chants to unaccompanied drums -- while expressing their emotional response to what they were hearing in the way they handed over the ball.

In another exercise, Westney asked the students to describe in words the physical gestures they made in response to music, demonstrating, he said, that it was in fact impossible to verbalize that response.

After the physical exercises had, as Westney put it, "opened the class up in that two-year-old way," he declared that the students were ready for the performance phase of the workshop. He told the students that, unlike normal master classes, they could not critique their fellow performers for their technical skills -- they could only respond by saying, "here's what I got out of it."

Then Westney turned to the performers who were to play a wind quintet, and asked each of them to answer specifically, "What do I want to get out of this performance?"

In a later solo piano recital, Westney made the pianist who had just played a Chopin piece repeat the performance, this time looking into the eyes of another student standing in front of him every time he shifted his "thought" as he played.

"You have to love what you're doing," Westney advised the young musicians, adding, "Put the book away, and find out who you are."

-- By Dorie Baker

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