i'll say it again at the risk of annoying some people: if you can play a Chopin Etude (one of the fast ones) with comfort and accuracy at full speed then you are 'there' technically, and you don't need a teacher. of course you still need to have musicianship to a profesisonal level, but if you care deeply about the music and you want it badly enough you will develop it. if you need help to get the musicianship side of things then you probably don't have the potential and the necessary self confidence in your own artisitic maturity.
If you think you don't need a teacher to improve your musicianship, then your "self confidence" will be a ground without a foundation; you will play "as you feel," but chances are great it will have nothing to do with the music you are playing.
This idea for me represents the
anti-intellectual view of music; that the subconscious feelings will somehow take charge, and magically explain everything that is logical or to be musically understood in any given piece, no matter how complex the logic, no matter how intricate the dynamic markings. In this view, nobody's musicianship can be "improved" by another because it doesn't relate to developing and sharpening your mind.
I put "improved" in quotes because the real consequence of this view is that potential positive influence is rejected. We see this time and time again in students: they come to play a passage a certain way, the way they "feel," not realizing that by bastardizing the passage, they remove all its meaning in context of the rest of the music. These students are so convinced of what they feel, that they reject the influence of a teacher more experienced and informed than they, and later probably will declare that no teacher can improve musicianship.
But this is not solid ground, as I said before. Watch for instance the Barenboim masterclass with the young pianist Kadouch. Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite blogs, describing this lesson:
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"One of the participants, the twenty-year-old Frenchman, David Kadouch, began playing a movement from one of the sonatas, and played forte a measure or two that apparently was marked piano in the score. Barenboim stopped him instantly. Why was he playing forte when the score called for piano, Barenboim asked. "Because," replied Kadouch, barely controlled defiance in his voice, "I like it that way."
For an instant, I misbelieved my ears. No participant in a master class in my time, not even the bravest or most gifted — or the most reckless — would have dared offer such a justification for disregarding so clear a notation in a Beethoven score. Not to a master of Barenboim's stature, at any rate.
In an interval of less than a split second, a dozen witheringly savage responses to that imbecile justification and Kadouch's unmitigated chutzpah flashed through my mind.
I held my breath.
Barenboim didn't miss a beat. "Not good enough," he shot back with equanimity, sounding more bemused than annoyed or angered. "Had you said because there's a diminished ninth that needs to be heard at that point, I would have thought you wrong and told you so, but at least your reason would have had some real thought behind it. Now, let's see what happens when you play it as Beethoven wrote it, and let's examine it from there.""
(
www.soundsandfury.com)
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Here we see the student who makes decisions not based on musical logic, of which Barenboim is a master, but on how he "feels." Now imagine having the opportunity to play for a Barenboim, or a Rubenstein, Schnabel, whomever, and insisting that the way you feel it is the way it should be (Godowsky promptly dismissed students who felt this way); you are the one losing out, if you think that no teacher can improve how you hear, feel, and understand music.
Walter Ramsey