A Conversation with George Hadjinikos
Published: Author: Graham Wade
George Hadjinikos (b. 1923) is pianist, conductor and teacher, and has performed as a soloist and with orchestras in many countries. In his post at the Royal Northern College of Music from 1961 onwards, George Hadjinikos has helped many students, including guitarists such as Paul Galbraith, to develop their ideas about music and its relationships to life and society. He has created a special dialectic approach to music which he called ‘Logic and Foundations of Musical Interpretation’, but recently renamed ‘Essence and Origins of Musical Interpretations’.
The original recorded interview with George Hadjinikos in March 1991, at his home in Cheshire, was long enough to fill three ninety-minute tapes. The following is an edited version of the highlights of this interview. As both music educationalist and an outstanding pianist and conductor,George Hadjinikos is a remarkable personality with a coherent musical philosophy to offer of great relevance to all instrumentalists and teachers.
Graham Wade: You’ve taught quite a lot of guitarists; have you formed any opinions of their strengths and weaknesses as musicians?
George Hadjinikos: To start with I would like to make some observations about the guitar. At first I wondered about the guitar, that instrument which Segovia strove for so long to make popular against so many difficulties. The guitar was not taken seriously, even in Spain, and not considered an instrument for classical music. Then suddenly it became respectable and favoured, and was taught in conservatories for the first time. Now every academy is proud of its guitar teachers, and departments spring up like mushrooms.
What is this phenomenon? I think for everything there is a very deep need which cannot be invented. You can of course artificially create certain needs by commercial means such as today’s aggressive advertising. But the desire for the guitar is surely a deep natural need of our time. Stockhausen once told me that aural pollution is much worse than air pollution. Today we have noise all around us and in music they use loudspeakers and reinforced sound. But the silvery voice of the guitar has this fulfilling transparent sound and this is something therapeutic.
Of course, the guitar and related fretted instruments, such as the lute, have been popular not just for a few years but for centuries. In the nineteenth century apart from Sor and Giuliani, whom we now know all about, some leading composers played the guitar, including Schubert, Berlioz and Paganini. The dimensions of the guitar’s popularity have to be seen against this immense historical background.
One of the most deplorable characteristics of our musical education is the way the different instruments don’t learn to communicate with each other. Instruments are usually studied within their own sound world and individual technique, and so they are hindered from reaching the common origins of music’s conception and interpretation.
GW: Do you think the guitar is particularly alienated from other instruments?
GH: Yes, the guitar is very alienated. And of course this is not helped by the fact that the main pool of music literature of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century contains comparatively little guitar literature of substance. So, for almost one hundred and fifty years, the guitar repertoire was generally neglected. Now there are more and more composers for guitar because it’s so worthwhile.
GW: If the guitar is alienated, do you think guitarists are alienated?
GH: Yes, of course, unfortunately, they tend to be because usually they haven’t had the means to communicate with other instrumentalists. This, however, is not peculiar to the guitar. It’s still characteristic of most instruments, but particularly of the guitar and the piano which are self-contained instruments. Being so independent, the lack of communication is not so evident.
GW: One of the aims of EGTA is to promote the status of the guitar within the mainstream of music. Can this be achieved?
GH: Yes, definitely. Its status can and has to be substantially improved. One example, among others, of course, is Paul Galbraith. He has achieved something of this by successfully transcribing for guitar pieces such as Haydn Piano Sonatas, the Skalkottas solo Violin Sonata, Konstantinidis’s Greek Miniatures and other substantial pieces for piano. I feel this is a sort of an important opening. On the other hand, I have developed ways to help all kinds of instrumentalists and vocalists to reach the mainstream of music via an approach which I call ‘Essence and Origins of Musical Interpretation’.
GW: How would you define the central problem?
GH: Well, let us first of all clarify what is meant by ‘technique’. By this we mean the skill to transform accurately and precisely a musical text into sound, into aural reality. For this many methods have been developed which aim primarily for greater perfection and consider the slightest mistake unacceptable. The approach to ‘musical content’, whatever that means, is so often entrusted mainly to academically established musical grammar and stylistic ideas.
All this leads to an emphasis in musical education to the audio-visually tangible part of a musical piece. But we need to create an awareness of the mysterious area between the composer’s original idea and inspiration and its final visual definition on paper. There is often such a gulf between the natural roots of music, the purely technical articulation of the instrument, and the man-made rudiments of our musical education.
Compositional techniques develop continually. Instrumentalists improve their technical skills as well. The aim, however is not merely to demonstrate dexterity but to reach and convey the meaning of music. Hence, the point is not merely to play an instrument perfectly, but to reach through the instrument the roots of the music. This is something I felt more and more over the years. There were many other cases as well, but an important one occurred when I went back to Greece after long years of studying in Germany, and I realized that Greek national rhythms which any Greek peasant can perform with no difficulty presented problems to professional musicians, even to the Greek National Symphony Orchestra.
About the same time, a Russian Folklore ballet was performing in Greece. I went to see it and it was like a dream. The dancers were thick-limbed peasant girls. But on stage, all this disappeared and became ethereal. Such were their movements that you would think that fairytale princesses were dancing around. Some years later, having always remembered this experience, passing through Lausanne I saw the same ballet advertised. I went to see it – it was good dancing, but that was all it was. The special atmosphere had disappeared. I was very puzzled. So I went backstage and asked the manageress of the company whether this was the same ballet production that had been in Greece a few years ago.The manageress replied, ‘Oh yes, but we are now much better. We get grants from the State, and we have a big school, so we don’t get any more peasant girls. Those who come study music. We are therefore now much, much better.’ But this ‘much better’ had destroyed its uniqueness. Now that they had studied they did not produce this magic any more. They merely reflected good teaching instead of nature and soul.
Then I saw an Oscar Peterson interview on BBC television with Count Basie and an exponent of modern jazz, so aggressively energetic that when you heard him, you felt you had to protect yourself somehow and take cover. Then Count Basie was interviewed and he played. He just played a little thing and you felt your heart open. He created an atmosphere of a marvelous inner relaxation. They asked him about the new developments in jazz. And he said, ‘Oh, it’s most admirable. All these young musicians have degrees and they know all about counterpoint, twelve-tone, orchestration, and so on. But it’s not quite the same thing. With us, music was life; it started with getting up in the morning, going out, saying hello to one neighbour, having a conversation with another, and drinking a glass with another…’ So you see, once this element of life was alienated, it was not the same thing anymore.
GW: But how do we fit in with this if we are guitar teachers?
GH: This is not limited merely to guitar teachers. Unfortunately, it is common to instrumental teaching in general. I gradually came to see this. It could be said in endless words, but basically it is a very simple thing. The roots of music differ radically from the established rudiments of musical education. Instead of starting at the roots of music which come from human existence, we start with the rudiments of music education. The rudiments are abstract notions that were conceived in order to find a code of writing music, whilst the roots of music stem from our inner being and correspond accordingly to the laws of nature.
GW: How did you come to formulate those concepts of teaching music?
GH: It took me many years of teaching in a college, after having already an extended international career behing me. In order to clarify this, I taught piano, conducting, chamber music, history of music, interpretation of music, and I introduced active music making in UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). A particular point was reached when I was entrusted with poor second-study pianists who would have normally taken years to pass their exams. In order to attend to their special needs, I had to delve much deeper into the problems of music making, So they brilliantly passed their exams in one year, and I profited immensely from this experience.
As you know, I come from the country which produced Aesop. Aesop met a passerby on a countryside road who asked him, ‘How long will it take me to get to the next town?’ No reply. He asked repeatedly again and again, but got no reply. Desparately, he set out to walk. Then Aesop said, ‘Half an hour.’ The man asked him why he had not told him so before. Aesop replied, ‘How could I tell you beforel I have seen the pace at which you walk?’
The fault lies in taking an abstract line. Teaching is usually based on general principles. It is however best to analyse and penetrate every individual problem. You may then discover a problem which you had not realized before. By realizing and solving such problems, you keep discovering continually new aspects!
On the other hand, the whole education system pushes students to perfection. Thus, if there is a weakness they feel guilty and try to hide it. The important thing is not to hide faults but, on the contrary, to cultivate the courage of the fault. If there is a weakness, bring it out in the open, and expose it as much as possible in order to discover its nature. At that moment, you will know how to deal with it. But if you let it remain in the dark and push it down, it will come again and again, creating thus a constant hindrance.
GW: Were you impressed by guitarists when you started teaching them? Did you find they were musically aware?
GH: I think everybody can be musically aware. I came recently to reject even the notion of ‘musicianship’. Musicianship as a term serves usually to avoid problems difficult to deal with, by categorising people as either musical or unmusical. One should discover and cultivate naturalness. If you are natural, then you can be musical. One should not exploit talent and ‘musicianship’, but attempt to restore the student’s relationship to naturalness. One of the similes I use to illustrate this is that when somebody walks normally down the street, you don’t stop and say, ‘Goodness, how gifted!’ But if somebody has a slight difficulty in walking, then you assume that he is not normal. But in music, when somebody does something the natural way, you say, ‘How gifted.’ Because the ‘normal’ person is not supposed to be musically gifted. But musicianship consists in performing naturally. So the answer is that everyone has the basic essentials if his heart beats and he has his faculties. The aim should be to activate and cultivate constant communication with one’s own inner resources.
GW: So what attracts people to listen to music?
GH: The listener may be carried away by a superior technical quality in performance, but he is genuinely moved only by the performer’s devotion and humility because this allows him to become aware of the underlying inner meaning of the music. What matters in true performance is not merely the presentation of the prescribed sounds absolutely without faults, but the way these sounds are connected together in order to communicate the quality of emotions and feelings which gave birth to them.
GW: How then do we achieve all this in our teaching?
GH: What we need is a general reorientation in our approach to music altogether. Even at school the whole education consists of closed circuits. One learns individual subjects, such as physics, history, geography, and so on, as isolated subjects. Therefore later on one tends to forget them. In the same way we witness people who pass harmony, counterpoint, history, form – with distinction! – and yet they are unable to trace the meaning of a theme or a musical phrase. Therefore, they have nothing to communicate. Unless knowledge is cultivated like ‘intercommunicating vessels’, in which whatever you learn from one thing benefits the other, it becomes irrelevant. In order to trace our steps we will have to go back to the very beginning of our conceptions of musical activity, of music making, and see if and how this relates to our inner being and how this moulds technique. Overall, however, as Stravinsky said, instead of respecting music, to learn to love it!
Copright © 1991 by Graham Wade