Music Video Lesson: What Makes a Great Teacher: Interview with William Fitzpatrick

ROBERT: Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. We've got a great guest for you today with a fascinating subject which is, what makes a great teacher? I've had the good fortune to study with so many great pianists from John Ogden, Ruth Slanchinska, Constance Kean, and I started my piano studies with my father Morten Estrin as my sister did as well, and we're both pianists and teachers, so there's a lot to unpack here. And I want to talk a little bit about our guest. William Fitzpatrick was the founder of the and first violinist of the New York String Quartet, and he's also kind of a dual career in France and the United States. As a matter of fact, he was the director of the chamber music at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, and long ago he graduated from Juilliard studying with the seminal teacher, Dorothy Delay. Most recently he was the esteemed Temianka professor at Chapman University Conservatory of Music, now living in France. I want to introduce to all of you someone who's very close to me and will get to our connection in a moment. You've got to hear about William Fitzpatrick. William, welcome here to LivingPianos.com. It's great to have you.

WILLIAM: It's great to be here, Robert. Thanks for inviting me.

ROBERT: So you have a tremendous background in teaching naturally, and the way we, our connection, we've been great friends for years, and I want people to understand our connection, which is my daughter, Jenny Estrin, when we moved to Orange County, it was trying to find another teacher because she had started violin at the great Indiana University Bloomington program, and strangely we figured in Southern California there's got to be good teachers, and we went through so many people until finally we found you, and you were life -changing for Jenny. From her playing and her whole persona, you know, your whole concept of teaching, I want you to talk a little bit about your feeling about teaching, and we'll get into where it came from, but I wanted you to tell people a little bit about your background and your idea about teaching, because I think it's unique the way you approach students, and I think people would really be fascinated to learn more about that.

WILLIAM: The way I approach students, well, how can I say this? It's sort of a reflection on how I was taught by Miss Delay. Miss Delay had a thing, I mean, if you talk, one of my friends said it very, very well. When you talk to a bunch of Delay students, it's like talking to blind people around an elephant, and they're all touching the elephant, and they're going, ah, that's an elephant, and somebody's touching the tusk and going, ah, that's an elephant. You know, everybody's got their take. Well, the reason for that is that she was different with everyone. She really tried to understand and zone in on the needs of that individual, what they needed, where they wanted to go, and for myself, I felt like that was just incredible, and it was real, obviously, well, I don't know, for me, it was really helpful, and I try very hard to reflect that in the way I look at the students who come to study with me. I don't have a cookie cutter kind of methodology about saying, okay, I'm going to do this, then this, then this, then this, and then they have to fall in line and say, yes, sir, we're going to do this, this, this, this. No, I try to figure out what's the best way to get the information, to get them to understand the information from their point of view, and I think that's what, to me at least, that's what one of the most important traits of a teacher is. You know, it's not about giving the information, it's about how you give that information so that someone understands and believes that it's them, in fact, that have come to those decisions, because that's the only way they're going to do it. I mean, you know, you tell somebody to do something, they would go, yes, sir, bonjour, thank you very much, and they go out the door, and they go, no, I'm not doing that. Anyway...

ROBERT: Well, you know, it's, watching you teach Jenny was really an enlightening experience, and sometimes you would say things that almost sounded like riddles, and getting her to think, you know, not feeding her the answers, but getting her to realize these things herself. And you know, it just occurs to me that it reminds you a little bit, I don't know if you've ever read any Carlos Castaneda, where he was the teacher, Don Juan, and it was always these obtuse, you know, riddles that, you know, wouldn't make sense, but then the discovery. And you know, I've often said that you don't just teach at a student, you teach with a student, finding where they're at, where their head is at. Interestingly, I come from a different background, my father was really not that type of teacher. And yet he was a great teacher. In fact, he taught me how to teach, which is another subject I want to talk about here a little bit. And his methodology of teaching, and I think it comes down to the fact that he didn't have his first good teacher until he just before his 18th birthday. So everything he really learned on the piano, he learned as an adult. As a result, every aspect of piano playing music theory, he figured out, you know, step by step in a very logical fashion. And that's the style of teaching that my father had. And I embrace that style of teaching as well. And I'm wondering, you know, so certainly with violin, there's a certain order of steps from how to hold the instrument, tone production, intonation. And so how do you reckon this duality of having the lessons, you know, a tailor to each person, how to reach that individual with having a regimen of steps involved in mastering the different facets of the instrument? How do you come to a balance between those two elements?

WILLIAM: Well, for me, I think it sort of plays, it goes back into when I started teaching in France. First off, my French was awful. But, you know, somehow or the other, you know, how we do it, I managed to get a job. And when I started, but I couldn't, it was difficult because I was in a language that I didn't know, that wasn't fluent in, not at the time. And certainly, attitudes towards music towards, towards this whole thing of playing the violin were very, very different. What happened though, and I didn't realize this until many years after, after this happened. What happened for me was that I in fact had to interrogate myself. How did I learn something? Because I couldn't translate it into French until I knew exactly what I did. And it turns out that I never had really done that. For, you know, I don't know, for me, a lot of what I did was very, very intuitive as a player. And so I didn't question, I just sort of did it. But to teach it, I had to know why and from why, how, how did I get to that point? And in doing that, it allowed me to then sort of really hone in and go, okay, I did this. And because I knew what I did, how should they do it? What do you think they should do? So...

ROBERT: You know, it reminds me of there are so many virtuoso pianists and violinists and other instruments as well, of people who just grew up as child prodigies, and with a great deal of natural abilities, of course, hard work. But you think of somebody who's playing on a concert level of performance as a young child, and as an adult, how can they possibly relate to the average student? And I wonder how people like that approach teaching. And that's why, like I said, my father, not having his first, you know, he learned how to play a major scale, you know, for the first time, just shy of his 18th birthday, put the metronome on and figure out how to, you know, approach the keyboard. So what about people, and you mentioned yourself, that things came very intuitively to you, and you have to break it down at some point. And I wonder how many teachers actually go through that process, particularly ones who were child prodigies.

WILLIAM: Well, for me, I sort of put myself as a teacher in a place where I wanted to prepare students to be able to deal with teachers like that, knowing that that teacher probably wasn't going to do the rudimentary work. You know, it was more about this feeling, this flow, this, this. But if you don't know what you're doing, it's very difficult to react, to respond, to be able to go and do what that person's saying. So my feeling was always, how do I get them to a point where they can actually deal with that?

ROBERT: You know, it's kind of like at the conservatory level, many of the teachers are really more coaches than teachers, as you described. And you need somebody in the trenches with you at some point in your development showing you step by step how to even practice, how to learn music, and how to assimilate things, how to produce tone, and all of that. And then you can be enriched with different flavors of interpretation, and sound production, and rhythmic feel, and all of that. But that fundamental, I was very fortunate to have a phenomenal French horn teacher, Hugh Cowden, and he had played in the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony. But this was a point later in his career when he was a freelance New York musician. And he would come to our house and spend all afternoon there. And he was a mentor to me. And it was an amazing experience making me do things that I was convinced I couldn't do. You know? And I think that's a sign of a great teacher, that somebody who enables you to do things that you didn't think you were capable of doing. So the question is, I mean, to some extent, teaching pedagogy, I've had a lot of teachers I work with even currently, and teaching how to teach. And my father certainly taught me how to teach. He taught my sister how to teach because we assisted him in his teaching when we were both in high school. But the thing you bring up of getting inside somebody's head and getting inside their emotions so that you can reach them where they are, where their head is, can that be taught? How much teaching can be taught is the real fundamental question.

WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah. How much of teaching can be taught? That's a really tough question. It's like, I guess it begs of someone to be willing to trust the journey, to have a journey, to make a decision about where they want to go and what they want to do, but not be so bound and myopic in that vision that they can't open themselves up to going to the left instead of the right. It's sort of, yeah, it's a, how do you do that? I don't know.

ROBERT: I think kind of like musical talent, there's a certain amount of natural ability people have, and yet there is one performer, and this could be kids who are on intermediate level and one or two of them will play perfectly fine. And then one of them, everyone in the audience gets this rush of emotions and you wonder, can that be taught? There's a certain amount of innate ability that people have in reaching people on an emotional level as a performer and as a teacher being inspiring. And I think to a great extent, it comes down to really caring about the student. And yet, some of my teachers, I won't mention any names, there was one who was not particularly emotionally supportive, but was a great teacher nevertheless, the nuts and the bolts. Now, if I had had that teacher for my formative years, maybe it wouldn't have been the best fit, but since I was already accomplished player, I took the criticism well, and it was a growing experience for me. So I think finding the right teacher at the level that you're at is really important, whether it's a teacher who's gonna show you the fundamentals and help you to grow into a accomplished musician, compared to somebody who's going to do the refining and the fine touches. And I think a lot of the university teachers and conservatory teachers are really of that latter style, that they really are not great teachers of the fundamentals, but they get to do that honing in and that polishing and that refinement. And then those are the ones who get noted for all the contest winners, because the people they get come to them already on a high level and they get to do that final polishing, which is an enviable position to be in.

WILLIAM: Well, something you said brought something into my mind, which is, I think in terms of looking at myself, it's important to understand that I really sucked as a violinist when I was a kid. I mean, that was really, really not good. When I was 16 years old, it was like a handle sonata was like a mountain for me. And for me, getting to the top of the mountain didn't mean it was good. It just meant I got to the top of the mountain. So I've always had this sort of an attitude about people that every child has talent. The deal is not to sort of placate them, put them into this one's got super talent, this one's got mediocre talent. The deal is to help them to find out how to channel the talent that they have.

ROBERT: That's exactly right. With piano playing, I'm sure violin playing has some of this component as well. There are so many different skill sets and nobody's got every single one at the top level. So you have to work with students developing their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses. And no two people have the same strengths and weaknesses. The other thing is being willing to let the student guide to a certain extent. I've had students time and time again, even right now I have a student and he was working on some literature that was pretty basic classical repertoire, not intermediate, but and then he wanted to do some Ravel. And I said, really? Well, you know, if you really want to do it and your heart's in it, let's, so I said, you know, let's see what happens. Wouldn't you know it? Next week he comes in. He's got more than half of some of the Ravel sonatine, one of the movements going just beautifully. And I've had students in the past who jumped from levels that they shouldn't be able to do. And sometimes if somebody's heart is really in it and they have embraced the methodology of how to learn music, which is what I teach, I teach how to practice, sometimes they can go from here to there. And so many teachers are so methodical in the repertoire, just like, you know, you've discussed, and I can't tell you how many times I get people who study with me and they are all, you know, about these different lists that, am I on grade four or five? You know, and you know, what grade am I on? 37? Is it 40? I don't even know. Everybody wanted to quantify where they are on some list and it just doesn't work that way. People could be out left field here and got a basic level here and way up here on something else. And I think going with the natural inclinations of the student to a great extent, as long as they're not off base, trying to play pieces that are, you know, just completely above them, which naturally is not in anybody's best interest.

WILLIAM: Well, you know, like I said, when I was 16, Handel was an issue. Well, I went into college when I was 17 and when I was 17, my big accomplishment was Beethoven's F Romance, which in fact, your daughter did. I was having, I had difficulty even playing that. Now, what's really fascinating to me is, okay, that's 17. When I was 19, I got into Aspen. What was I playing? I was playing Tchaik. Tchaikovsky concerto. And it's like, what happened? What happened? Well, I had the luckiest, luckiest thing to happen because my teacher, Stephen Klatt, was open to what I wanted to do. He knew what I needed to do, but he allowed me to get there. You know, he didn't try to harness, slip me into this thing. No, he just, he allowed me to, to roam and, and to, you know, I used to go into his studio. I remember once I went to his studio and I saw a Glamian's book on the principles of violin. And I started reading it and I saw this thing about bow grips. And he walked in and he goes, ah, Bill, William, you, you, you, you, you found this book. And I went, oh yes, Mr. Klatt. And you know what? I've decided that I want to hold my bow this way. I was mimicking what I was seeing in the book. And Stephen, and when I thought about this later, I was like, wow, this is, this is a teacher. Stephen didn't go, no, do it my way. No, Stephen said, but if you want to do it that way, you know, you have, he was not only encouraging me, but helping me to find out how to do what was in the book. Now later, when I thought about it, I thought, oh my God, he had spent a year trying to get me to hold the bow one way and here I'm doing it another way. And he's helping me to do it. To me, that's, that's, that's really somebody who really has the student at heart and will allow that student to go as far as they're going to go.

ROBERT: You know, there's a real balance that teachers have to have with guiding students, but not a pigeonholing them into one way of playing. For example, when I studied the Mozart -Tayyam in Salzburg, I had a French horn teacher there and he was an absolute virtuoso, magnificent player. But every one of his students, because we would have master classes, you could see his teaching for everybody, he would teach every single student how to play the Mozart horn concertos note for note, phrase by phrase, exactly the way he played it. And, you know, there are a lot of teachers who do that. Now, I will say that sometimes on the very elementary level, if a student has no clue how to craft a musical phrase, you know, spoon feeding them note by note so they understand the architecture, so at a certain point they'll go, oh, now I get it. But when you get to a conservatory level, you've got to let the student let their own inclinations come through, don't you think?

WILLIAM: Listen, I remember it brings up a story. A student, I assigned a student, a French student, I assigned the student a new piece of music at the end of a lesson, and the student looks at me and goes, they go, could you play it for me? And I went, I was really sort of surprised when I heard that. Oh, why? Because, oh, I want to know how it sounds, how it's going. Oh, okay. Well, listen, just go around the corner, you know, there's a music store, and you go in, and you can, you know, there are bunches of records you can buy a couple and see what goes on. I don't have enough money to do that. Oh, okay. Well, you know, if you go to Babur, there's a big library there, and you can go in there and you can just listen to everything. And the student finally looks at me and goes, oh, I see, I get it. I'm going to do everything and you're going to do nothing. It's for you.

ROBERT: They have to discover for themselves, don't they?

WILLIAM: Right. No, it's like, ultimately, at least for me, I don't think you can surpass what you hear. So you've really got to open up, you know, if I can do something as a teacher, just to open that aural horizon that they can hear what goes on. Another story comes to mind. I had another student who, not French, who came in and they held their bow in a funny kind of a way. But I knew that they had studied with someone who held their bow this way. And so I thought, oh, not a problem, you know, I'll get them to go back to what they did. But they didn't want to. They kept saying, but I like the way it sounds this way. And I was like, but, but, but, and we fought for like three years. You know, this is, it's like, in the end, no, they stuck up. And after it was over with, and I got over, I realized, oh my God, William, William. You know, you see, you let your ego get in the way because you wanted to have that student play this way. You didn't listen to what they wanted to do. In fact, if you really wanted them to change, if you wish, then what you needed to do wasn't to show them or try to get them to do this or that or that or that. It was to get them to change how they heard it. Get them to listen to things, you know, and in their effort to try to make that happen, they will, they would come to their own conclusions about what they need to do to make that happen.

ROBERT: Exactly. It's all about listening and that, that's the key, you know, and along those lines, you know, a lot of my students, I give them a piece of music and the first thing they do is they, they latch onto some performance on YouTube and listen to it incessantly. And, you know, whenever I learn a piece of music, I purposely don't listen to anyone until I have it on performance level. Then I go crazy and I listen to every performance and, and drive my wife, Florence crazy. You don't want to listen to the 10th performance tonight?

WILLIAM: My wife knows a lot about that. So yeah.

ROBERT: But, you know, and I would encourage my students and any of you out there, you know, if you're learning a piece of music, do yourself a favor and come up with your own convictions first, because otherwise it's really hard. Once you become highly influenced by hearing it from somebody else, coming up with your own impressions is, it's got to be really difficult to do. Don't you think?

WILLIAM: You know, for me, I remember I went through this period where I played a concert in, when I was in France, I played a concert at the American church in Paris with organ, when they just got this beautiful organ put in install and I played Vitaly Chacon, all the stuff that, you know, you spoke, you know, the bucket list stuff. And I listened, I was so happy and I listened to the recording the next day and I went, Oh, that really sucked. You know, you know, what you did here, that was, why'd you do that? Yeah. I had this long conversation with myself and the brunt of it is I decided I needed to change. So I, for a month I went and I would move this, I would do this. Finally, finally, I found a position that was helping me to do what I wanted to do. I listened then every day to Rabin playing Bruch Scottish fantasy and I tried to emulate it. And that's what I did for the next month. I mean, I didn't look at the music. I just, you know, from a year, I just tried to select, I wanted to sound like him. I remember about a month and a half later, I was doing a festival and I was sitting in the room practicing and I started playing with Scottish fantasy and I like what you did. That sounds like Rabin. And I remember sitting down and I went, cool, now you can sound like you. For me, it was like, understand, I needed to understand physically what was on. And then once I did that, I could go. My goal was not to be Rabin. My goal was to be me, but I wanted to understand how, you know, another perspective on how to do that.

ROBERT: Well, if you want to be able to produce a tone that you imagine in your head, I mean, to emulate somebody where you can quantify that you can do that process is a perfect study to be able to achieve.

WILLIAM: Right, but you don't want to be that person. You don't want to, you know, no, no, no, no, it's not about that. I mean, I've loved Perlman all my life. I thought, you know, it's an incredible player, you know, and he's been such a model for me, but I don't want to play like Perlman.

ROBERT: Right, you know, it's like, you know, I listened to Horowitz and, you know, and listened to the unbelievable performances, but nobody could play like Horowitz. I mean, it's futile to try, you know, you have to find your own voice, your own physiology, your own psyche. And that's really what it's about.

WILLIAM: And I think for a teacher, I'm sorry, for teachers, see, for me, for me, that's what a teacher can do. It can help the student to identify how to do those things, how they need to go around and do those things. And so for me...

ROBERT: That is a beautiful statement because that really, ultimately, is the ideal of teaching, helping each student find their own voice. And if you can do that, it's the most gratifying thing in the world.

WILLIAM: I could not agree more, could not agree more.

ROBERT: Before you go, I'm going to put links so that people can find, because you make videos. As a matter of fact, we are video partners on Virtual Sheet Music, where we dominate virtualsheetmusic.com with our content.

WILLIAM: You know, all of that happens because of you. You were the person who brought me into this mad world of video, you know.

ROBERT: That's right. It's my fault, isn't it?

WILLIAM: No, no, I'm very grateful. Thank you very, very much.

ROBERT: And so I'm going to have links because you have, you just sent a video to me today that I'd never seen with this animation that was unbelievably, and I'm going to later on communicate with you, how the heck you achieve that. I'll put a link to that video because it's so cool showing, you know, a tone production on the violin in such an entertaining and concise way. So we'll have that there. And I just want to thank you for making the time from your busy schedule to come join us here at livingpianos.com. And we will be in touch. And thanks again. And we'll be... we'll see you soon.

WILLIAM: All right. Bless you. Thank you very, very much for the possibility to be here. Thank you.

ROBERT: Thank you. And thanks, everybody, for joining us. We'll see you next time.

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Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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