From the Ivory Keys to the Ivory Tower: A Lesson in Forgotten Beauty
At age five, my parents signed me up for piano lessons.
I was not particularly good at it.
After a few years or so of group lessons, my playing was so terrible that I was forced into an additional private ‘remedial’ lesson.
My teacher, Ms Huong, left our first lesson in tears. So poor was my ability.
Clearly something had to be done, so I was removed from group class and placed in private lessons with the one teacher willing to take me.
I remember the first time I played the ‘wrong’ note with the new teacher.
I was ready for the condemnation, the slap on the wrist, that I had come to expect. Surprisingly none came. At the end of my performance, he wasn’t upset at the mistake, but instead proceeded to offer me a list of alternate notes that could have been played. He offered no theoretical justification. To him, and later to me, the purpose of sitting at the instrument became producing good music. All the rest – the techniques, the theory, etc – was a means to that end, and could be discarded if it interfered in that goal.
My journey as a struggling young pianist taught me an unexpected lesson: technical mastery alone is insufficient without a connection to that intuitive sense of beauty that we all have, should we choose to pay attention.
This same principle lies at the heart of what ails modern academia and its technocratic elite. In prioritizing skill over soul, both musicians and scholars risk producing work that, while impressive, fails to resonate deeply with the human spirit.
The end result is a sort of academic emptiness.
In an Atlantic article published this week, How the Ivy League broke America, David Brooks says of the modern technocratic elite:
And yet it’s not obvious that we have produced either a better leadership class or a healthier relationship between our society and its elites
In the world of music, this is exemplified by the likes of Arnold Schoenberg who sought to break free of the supposed hegemony of Western music. He invented his own system of melody and harmony. This was quite a popular idea in the classical world around the time of Schoenberg, and the results speak for themselves. Despite several decades of orchestras and soloists performing his works and advocating for his ideas, many studies have found that Schoenberg is as disliked today as he was back then by the masses.
Contrast this to the development of early jazz 1. Jazz shares more similarities with classical than would seem to be the case. Classical composers like Chopin and Mozart often improvised, captivating audiences with their spontaneity. Classical music was not as ‘high-brow’ in its heyday as it seems today. Both traditions embrace the universal appeal of the V-I cadence (unlike Schoenberg). Sure, they emphasize slightly different (but mutually compatible) sets of harmonic rules, but this is hardly a complete break from the historic tradition.
But here’s the difference between jazz and Schoenberg’s serialism: jazz developed naturally, following the tastes of its listeners and its players. While there was some subversion of historical norms, these were not wholesale rejections.
This sense of ‘high-browedness’ – exemplified by Schoenberg – pervades almost all of academia today. There is a detachment that pervades every discipline. Whether in the form of esoteric critiques of sensory perception or jargon-heavy dissertations that alienate even their intended audiences, it is scant an academic dissertation today that does not focus on ‘tearing down power structures’ or ‘subverting’ natural human senses. Far from creating things of beauty, the new focus seems to be on destroying any sense of humanity.
Famously, between 2017 and 2018, three academics – James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian – submitted over twenty fake papers to academic journals. They ‘ticked all the boxes’ so to speak, but all the content was made up as a joke. Shockingly, several were published.
The problem with subversion is that you can’t fundamentally change what people like. That’s not to say that things cannot change. Like my music teacher noted – you can play many different pitches in any one spot. But those pitches need to be the result of a well tuned sense of goodness. It’s not enough to simply write music and play it well – Schoenberg did that; to sound good, the music must also please. This separates the technical from the brilliant.
Schoenberg’s music – popular in the academic circles of its day – is today relegated to the dustbins of history, while several ‘nobodies’ are household names.
My piano teacher’s lesson is one that applies far beyond struggling young musicians: creativity is not about breaking rules, nor is it about technical perfection. You have to find the right harmony between skill, intuition, and the timeless sense of beauty that links humans across time and space. Institutions that lose sight of this balance risk future irrelevance. If the academy wants to thrive, it must rediscover its role not as a subverter of tradition but rather a cultivator of the human spirit. Only by nurturing the sense of truth, goodness, and beauty can it find lasting inspiration.
As a side note, modern jazz is starting to suffer from the same issues that modern classical did. Not much is immune to the slow creep of the academic technocrat.↩︎