Screen villains, real villains

In the Dr. Seuss-authored The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), the evil piano teacher Dr Terwilliger (Hans Conried) abducts 500 boys to play his enormous two-tiered and fantastically curved piano at his "Happy Fingers Institute."  In last year's Whiplash, a high school jazz band teacher (J.K. Simmons) is so driven by his own notion of perfection that he becomes abusive, possibly even driving one of his students to suicide.   Yes, the mean music teacher is an authentic screen trope, one suspects with deep roots going back to myths of musicians with demonic gifts, for dramatists a useful villain.  And to be completely honest, both Conried and Simmons were compelling and memorable in their, respectively, comic-camp and dramatic performances.

However, both performances reflect a real presence in music training, the abuse of power and authority, often reaching the sadistic. This is totally unnecessary for achieving musical results, entirely outside the spirit of the musical and plain wrong, morally, ethically, and often legally. Although, with the advantages of being male, tall, and fairly self-assured, my own personal experience with cruelty in music education and practice were almost trivial — a band teacher who, in frustration at a bunch of 12-year olds with loud instruments, too often had no pedagogical tools left but screaming, yelling and throwing things at the ground, a college musicianship teacher from the Boulanger school (famous for endlessly proclaiming its "love of music") who would hit our wrists with a ruler if we played something wrong, or working with well-known composer who inevitably threw tantrums (yelling, flying drumsticks, slamming doors) before performances — there are far too many colleagues who have experienced far worse, in forms of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, and far too many of these are never able to recover.

Such abuse always begins with unequal balances of power and in this music teachers are no less prone than others in roles of authority: officials, bosses, religious leaders, athletic coaches, or teachers in general. We should expect that music teachers should be held to the same restraint in exercising that authority and power which we demand of all of these figure and abuse should cause appropriate action, from removal from teaching environments at a minimum to criminal prosecution when warranted.  But music teachers who use the virtues of their art form — that abstract "love of music" or that will to "perfection" — to excuse their human vices deserve, I think, additional rebuke: if they have to resort to violence or abuse to produce their music, then they have left the realm of the musical entirely.