Zigmunds Žukovskis and thinking in sounds

A music teacher is like a doctor — he has to make a diagnosis and prescribe the right pills

Zigmunds Žukovskis is a prominent bass guitarist («Eolika», «Zodiaks», «Raimonds Raubishko jazztet» and many different ensembles), session musician (albums of Artis Gāga, Maria Naumova, Jan Gunnar Hoff, and others), teacher (Riga Cathedral Choir School and others). Žukovskis is a Dr.Art. in music pedagogy, and he’s most interested in jazz theory, improvisation, ensemble leading, and guitar play. I’ve always wanted to talk to Zigmunds, but, just as it usually is, when we talk about people who have achieved so much in life, there are two usual questions that come to mind — «what do I have to do with this» and «where to even begin». This time I let the mood, improvisation, and dialogue flow and realized that it’s anyway impossible to discuss the whole life at one time, so I let the conversation go. And it led us indeed — to some very important things, and as a result, a portrait of the teacher is what we’ve got.

What was your last concert this summer?

The last one we played was some heavy metal with Johnny Salamander at Rūjiena’s city festival. So I get to play music of various genres.

Is any of these styles close to your own soul?

It’s hard to tell, really. There are no bad styles; there’s just… Sometimes music in terms of performance isn’t too good. For example, when a classical musician plays classical, and it seems that everything’s alright, but the music he plays isn’t always that honest. His fingers are running, while his soul and his artist’s goal aren’t there. There’s still an opinion out there that everything’s alright with a classical musician while jazz or rock isn’t that serious — and now these people have silenced a little bit, the ones who thought that jazz wasn’t suitable music to be seriously doing it. The most important is if the music is honest and if it has a soul.

For how many years are you a teacher?

Oh, plenty. I guess, thirty-five years now.

Are there many students whom you’ve advised to try themselves out in another genre or stop doing music at all?

Here’s this stepping stone — if we’re talking about the technical part of the music, you can teach it to non-musical people as well. But if there is no understanding of music, if a person doesn’t understand music as an art form, you cannot teach emotions. There either are or aren’t emotions; you can only create the circumstances for a student to feel this emotion. You know that method that a famous Russian theatre director Constantin Stanislavsky either believed or didn’t believe an actor. And here’s just the same — either we believe a musician, or we don’t. He’s got the book «My life in art» where he describes how he reached this method, and he reaches the conclusion that the main thing is for the actor to be sure of the role he plays. He has to live along it, and it’s just the same in music — in order for the music, to be honest, we have to live along that music. Europe, by the way, was the first one where classical musicians began studying jazz — the first jazz department in Hamburg, Germany, was opened in 1930. And then some people came and told you cannot teach jazz like this; jazz is a lifestyle.

But if you agree to this, you shouldn’t be teaching jazz in Latvia, too.

Of course, every nation has its own musical traditions, folklore traditions, its own approach, and slightly different interpretation. But you still cannot say what is or isn’t true jazz. You can teach jazz harmony or theory. This is a question that you won’t have a definite answer to.

Your «LinkedIn» profile states that the students have to learn thinking instead of technique first. How many people with musical thinking do you think there are in Latvia?

Such a question… Do we have time? [smiles]. See, when a person begins making music, the first thing he sees or the first reason why he begins his musical studies is that he sees a musician who plays really well; his fingers are moving fast forward. He sees his goal and thinks — okay, if my fingers are functioning really fast now, everything will be alright, and I’ll be as good a musician as him. So he keeps training, exercising from dusk till dawn, his fingers are moving fast, but there’s no fulfillment. So the next revelation is that he needs something else; he needs a good ear. He begins working on it, improves his hearing, and listens to the exercises and chord sequences — now his hearing gets better, but he also hears his mistakes. So the next step is that the important thing in music is the ability to forecast what we will be playing, so there’s that thinking. Now we are talking and putting our thoughts in a word form, exchanging them, and there’s the same thing in music — only we put our thoughts in sounds. So all the essence of a musician is thinking in sounds. Also, if you play classical, if you play a Nocturne by Chopin, you have to follow the sounds; you have to play just as a musician was feeling it.

What, in your opinion, is the most complicated thing in teaching?

Persuading young musicians that finger movements and technique aren’t the main things. Musicality, musical emotion, how do I say that… That ability to think and love along with the music. Very often, young musicians think that the technicality is the main thing, although they have to remember that the technique of the play isn’t the goal; it’s just the tool. If we want to write a good novel that would be interesting, we won’t train our calligraphy skills all day long — we would be thinking of a plot, of our language, of how to write that in a nicer, more expressive, easier way. And there’s the same in music. And it’s really difficult to teach it — people have a very strong stereotype about what the music lessons are. They think they have to put a metronome on and play exercises. And sometimes, when I’m telling them about thinking in sounds, they look at me as if I’m an alien. And playing exercises is just the same as if we were reading an alphabet out loud every single morning — would our language develop because of it? Would we be able to write a good novel or perform a nice speech? I doubt that.

But if you have to teach thinking in sounds — where’s in all that education a place for musical literature about history and theory?

Books like that aren’t a lot, really. I’m working on one right now. Seven years ago, I did a Ph.D. on this thinking in sounds, and we call it sonoric thinking — «sonoras» in Latin means listening. So I want to find an easily perceivable form to describe all of it because that’s a key to musicality. If we read about those old musicians and composers, starting with Bach, Chopin, and Schumann — they are thinking about this between the lines. I had that feeling long ago — something isn’t taught well enough in music; I was intuitively feeling something. There was such an example: three kids, each of them goes studying in his own school — one in the usual school, another enrolls in arts, the third one — into a music school. The first one learns to write, the second one — to paint, and the third one who went to a music school learns what a C is and then learns to make a sound out of it. And it has to be the other way: sound — note. Then he learns it, and he gets to play Mozart and Bach, and he plays the other people thinking all the time because he doesn’t get a chance to develop his own thinking. It took me quite a long time to reach that sonoric thinking idea — as a teacher, I wanted to find where that musicality root is.

The pedagogical tradition anticipated that up to the 19th century, a musician was a performer, composer, and improviser in one person — any musician thus was able to compose and improvise, and at that time, this happened within strict canons. This isn’t like it is nowadays — if I can compose three notes and put them together, I’m a composer instantly. At that time, there were strict rules on how it could be done; they were studying very thoroughly. And due to many reasons, this tradition now fades away.

So, can I conclude that jazz and improvisation seem closer to you than classical music?

I’ll put it like this — there are great technical performers, but not a lot of honest ones.

How often do you attend concerts yourself?

I’ll be honest — not a lot. This isn’t because I’m snobbish or arrogant. But what does good music mean? I don’t pretend I’m great myself either; one has to have a special talent and special state of soul, so I know how it should be, and I seldom attend such events. Some three years ago, I was at Julian Lage’s concert — he really plays what he hears in his head, a phenomenal concert. They play as a trio, he comes out with a guitar, and there’s a whole concert with one breath intake — you simply look and feel how a musician is born on stage.

This way, another addition to a musician’s portrait is also self-evaluation — at which point he dares to call himself a musician or a composer.

Well, yes, this is quite subjective. In order for the whole pedagogical process to be successful, you have to have self-criticism and self-evaluation, and these two things have to be in balance. If we teach a student higher self-assessment than self-criticism, the result won’t be too good. And if he has too high self-criticism, that means he will have plenty of complexes, so these two things have to be in balance.

Do you believe in talent?

There’s no certain answer possible. A talented genius is a rare thing — more often, we can see gifted people with special skills. But more often, these gifted people have some other interests, they choose other paths, sometimes too slippery, and some less gifted people can achieve way more than these so-called talented ones.

How much time do you dedicate to playing yourself?

At my age, I can allow myself to play for my own joy. And you get joy when you can put together the music you want.

What was the biggest challenge in your musician’s career?

Stage fright. And it isn’t anything nice. Because actually, great musicians don’t have such fright; they have it a different way — excitement, because they know it, they can do it, and they want to show it to the audience. And there are two options to fight this — either a musician going to the stage has to tell himself that he loves this audience and everyone is his friend, and now he’ll be playing music to his friends — or he has to go on stage saying he hates everyone and it doesn’t matter if they like it or not — he’ll just keep playing. You see, down there, a person always thinks about how others will perceive him, and this isn’t the best thing to be thinking about when you’re on stage. When you’re there, you have to make music and feel content about it, have to be pleased by what you’re doing, and then the honest music will be there. If we keep thinking if we’re playing loud enough or interesting enough — this isn’t good.

What, in your opinion, can be improved in the Latvian music education system?

We have to develop our intellectual skills judgmental skills. We have to improve them. Because you see, we teach people that 2 + 2 = 4, they know it and are educated, but if they have to sum up matches or sugar cubes, they won’t be able to make it. This is intellect — being able to put the information together. And this is really important in music. And nowadays, we, unfortunately, are moving in another direction. Of course, you shouldn’t be traumatizing a student, but if we aren’t telling him the truth, we’re harming him. We have to teach people to perceive criticism — this is normal; none of us is perfect. If a student doesn’t play well and I, as a teacher, tell him he plays amazingly well, he graduates with the same level, and if he gets to play with a jazz star (they happen to be harsh men, by the way), and if such a musician tells him he fails — he will get shocked. And as a result, I, as a teacher, won’t have saved him from it.

There’s also a harsher approach to education that is tempering students through necessary criticism.

This is another thing. I think educational processes have to be individual, depending on the person. There are people who have to be praised, and there are the ones who have to be scolded — a teacher has to see how exactly he should approach everyone. A teacher can be compared to a doctor — he has to make a diagnosis and prescribe the right medicine. And if he can’t…

Where’s a border beyond which you have to stop being a perfectionist?

Perfectionism creates stress, and you cannot allow yourself to stress out. Because I can tell from my experience — the less you think about perfectionism, the better musician you are. You have to make music, you have to feel joy from it, and then you can be honest, too.

How do you like it where Latvian jazz currently is?

Very well. The younger generation has good jazz musicians, and I’m happy to listen to them. This is also thanks to academic jazz education — young people can systematically educate and get experience, and this can be heard and felt. The young generation has to move forward and up. If we’re speaking globally, musical education is really necessary for everyone, but it should be done as follows: everyone should be taught musical basics so that everyone would feel the joy of making music. And when he does, he will begin studying music himself and, at some point, want to know how many compositions Mozart or Bach had.

So if someone brings you a kid who wants to be a musician and asks for advice, what would you say?

He has to begin with music. [laughs] He has to bring a kid to a piano and let him play. Whatever, anything — let him mimic a bird or an elephant; this is the first thing — letting a kid feel the taste of making music. And only then let him study theory. And the main taste of making music is the ability to put the music just the way we want it instead of the way we are able to. The music can be divided into two groups: the one we can expect and the one we can’t. And the people who can’t expect it are playing and listening. And the joy is being able to put the music together exactly the way we want to and the way we feel.