When I was a fourth year violin performance student at the University of British Columbia preparing to apply for graduate school, the general advice I was met with was to select schools based upon the teacher you wanted to study with. This was fairly sound advice since the mentor-mentee relationship is a significant part of most music school experiences. But in selecting which schools to apply to I took the approach of identifying those institutions whose overall cultures I believed would best allow for my productive and fruitful learning. I was thrilled when I received my acceptance letter to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, a school in Glasgow which was inaugurated with an address by Charles Dickens in 1847, and is known for offering a wide-range of interdisciplinary educational opportunities. It is admittedly pretty cool to practice Bach in one room and hear a bagpiper blasting away down the hall.
When I moved to Glasgow my main contact at Conservatoire, as RCS is commonly known, was the Head of Strings, a conductor and cellist by the name of David Watkin who, in 2015 was presented with a Gramophone Award for his recording of JS Bach’s Six Cello Suites. I very quickly came to understand that he ran his department differently than most post-secondary string divisions. Music schools are funny things. On one hand, each musician brings something unique to the conversation yet on the other hand, that conversation is centuries old. Often-times, that tradition can morph into a burden rather than an inspiration to musical practitioners. It takes someone who respects, but is not afraid of the common law of music to make an impact on the lives of his students.
Late in my first term I had a fairly routine academic meeting with Watkin to discuss some quotidian aspects of programming in a couple of recitals I had lined up. Yet upon learning that I played tennis and was from British Columbia, the conversation quickly turned to Timothy Gallway’s The Inner Game of Tennis and what can be learned about Bach’s music from the storytelling practices of the Haida Nation; something which I, a kid from the Pacific Northwest transplanted into Scotland had no idea about. I realized that I had met a professor whose chief characteristic was his relentless curiosity, rather than a pigeon-holed musical identity.
Watkin approaches life with an almost Steve Jobsian sense of foolishness and hunger. Unlike Jobs, however, Watkins’ foolishness and hunger does not go hand-in-hand with a destructive ego. While the musical knowledge and wisdom that his title “Head of Strings” implies is unquestionably far greater than that of any of his students, he engages with each of them as though they possess the key to some priceless treasure.
This was evident after a particularly bad performance I had during what Conservatoire calls a “performance class” which is a less-than-pleasant affair in which a bunch of students pile into a room, perform for each other and then receive comments from the professor leading the class. Performing in these classes was a graduation requirement and I, quite dejected after my poor first attempt, went to Watkin seeking out a redo. He undoubtedly knew just how poorly my performance of Brahms’ FAE Scherzo was since he was in attendance, but, in an almost confused manner, Watkin looked at me and told me that the point of the performance was for me to learn. He suggested that if I thought, in good faith, that what I needed to further my education was to play the entire piece on a single string, that was good enough for him. For context, that is the stringed instrument equivalent of running a 5k using just one leg while wearing a dress shoe, it is absurd to do and weird to watch. Modern conservatory culture often treats music making as a competition, if not with others, then with one’s own self. It treats music as binary—are you good or are you bad? Yet here was a preeminent cellist who approached music with curiosity and humility, who encouraged experimentation rather than self-loathing from his students. Not only that, but he was invested in what we came up with!
For those of us beginning our legal careers, I think we sometimes view the law through a win-lose lens and of course, there is that aspect to the practice and enforcement of the law. Yet sometimes, and maybe this is a function of the way that popular media portrays the law, we lose sight of what the law is meant to do. Fundamentally, it binds us together—the law, at its best, strives to keep us all on the same ship, rowing in the same direction. How else can we do that if we aren’t constantly curious about our shipmates, how they view the world, and in what ways those views can contribute to our own?
I remember at my very first rehearsal of graduate school, where we were preparing a Bach orchestral suite and Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen,” Watkin stopped and, like an academically astute Ted Lasso, began to speak about the 18th century English painter, William Hogarth. The students who had been at Conservatoire for a while seemed to know what was coming, but we recently inaugurated expatriates had no idea what to expect. Being a newly-minted graduate student I thought I was pretty hot stuff, but Watkin quickly wrenched that egotistical notion from my grasp.
As a bit of background, classical music is formed upon two harmonic pillars: I (“one”) and V (“five”). I is home, relaxation, the Shire; V is a far-off land, tension, Mordor. Western music is rooted in this sense that tension, not unlike a rubber band, builds from a comfortable place, reaches a point just before breaking and then releases. It follows that the foundational structure found in most of the classical literature is I-V-I. You will find other interesting chords, developments, and modulations woven throughout this framework, but the pillars are clear.
Watkin explained that while many students took the return to I to be an emphatic arrival point, something demanding an exclamation mark, the baseline from which we should approach musical interpretation was much more elegant and graceful, but not wanting for power.
Enter Hogarth. In his book, The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth describes the “Line of Beauty.” This line curves and sweeps back and forth, is never still, yet is never jagged. Hogarth writes, “[T]he serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which, though but a single line, by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to enclose varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be expressed on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination, or the help of a figure.”
But while the curves of this line are exciting and pleasing, they are not random. Instead, in viewing them we are enveloped by sense of symmetry, a perception of balance. For musicians, we see tension and release; in other words, we see I-V-I.
Watkin then evoked the image of a dolphin jumping. It’s undoubtedly a powerful act, but one which essentially follows Hogarth’s Line of Beauty. Both power and grace are to be found by letting the music take its natural course, by not fighting against the path the phrase wishes to take.
It’s been nearly four years since that rehearsal, and I can’t say I fully understand how to implement it in my playing. It will take far more than four years to undo the bad habits I had formed over two decades. However, I’ve come to realize that these lessons about balance that Watkin taught me and my classmates are applicable to more than just music.
As you’ve no doubt realized by now, the headline to this article was at least two parts clickbait. I’m not sharing Watkin’s legal lessons, per se. But I think that these generalized life lessons may have more applicability for those studying and practicing law than for others. It’s important to remember that the law is not, in fact, life. Instead, it’s the mode by which our shared societal existence is facilitated.
There’s beauty to be found in balance, in living a life shaped like one of Hogarth’s serpentine lines. A life dedicated to just one thing, be it law or anything else, is, at best, a straight line which has nothing to balance itself against. It’s in the sweeping curves, the varied, but ordered existence of human experience that our lives “may be said to enclose varied contents.”