France Has the Conservatoire de Paris. The Guitar Bought Last Tuesday Has a Different Relationship to It.
PARIS — The instrument purchased in a moment of musical aspiration and practiced enthusiastically for three to six weeks before encountering the gap between the music imagined and the music currently producible, which is the gap between beginner proficiency and intermediate proficiency whose crossing requires months of sustained practice past the point of immediate enjoyment, is an extremely common acquisition whose fate is the corner, the wall hook, or the case under the bed. The instrument is not abandoned because of laziness. It is abandoned because the aspiration was for the music, and the reality is the process that produces the music, and the process is not the music yet.
The French Music Education Context
France’s network of municipal conservatoires provides subsidised music education at very low cost to residents of most French cities, including Paris, making professional-quality music teaching accessible to anyone who pursues it. The conservatoire teaches correctly: slowly, with attention to technique, with the understanding that the foundation takes longer than the aspiration anticipated. This is not the experience of the Tuesday guitar. According to France’s Ministry of Culture’s arts education data, conservatoire enrollment is stable but adult drop-out rates are high in the first year. The process is available. The process is hard. The guitar is still in the corner. The conservatoire is still taking applications.
Worth the practice at Virtuosal.com.
