Embracing the Generation Gap

One of the challenges of coaching chamber music at Apple Hill is that, unlike most summer music programs, the campers we're working with, or "participants," in the local dialect, can range in age from 13 up to 95. There's no age limit on participating in a session here, and amateur adult musicians are allowed - no, encouraged - to keep coming back year after year. (Apple Hill is all about diversity in general - the camp t-shirts list dozens of countries from which participants have come over the years, and the racial and ethnic makeup is far more wide-ranging than any professional orchestra I've ever seen.) The adults aren't separated from the kids, either - it's perfectly normal to have a string quartet in which the membership features a 50-year age gap.

On the one hand, this is a wonderful idea. Adults playing music together for fun is an entertainment that seems to have nearly died out over the last century, with the rise of recorded music, and I'm all for including anyone as passionate as most of the adult participants here seem to be. Furthermore, having teenagers interacting with people two, three, even five times their age on a common level seems to do everyone a lot of good - the adults (particularly the oldest ones) seem positively rejuvenated by the experience, and the kids get a chance to see grown-ups at play, which makes adulthood seem a lot more interesting than it generally does when you're 16.

The flip side of the coin, however, is that coaching a chamber ensemble with both kids and adults in it is really, really difficult, for the simple reason that our brains are wired differently. Kids, of course, are continuously growing and developing the neural pathways in their brains that allow them to learn, which is why they pick up new skills so quickly. But the older we get, the more generally set our brains become, and the harder it is to form new pathways, and therefore, to learn new tricks. As adults, we compensate by using our lifetime of experience and sense of perspective to make up for our relative slowness in picking up new concepts and actions. It doesn't mean that kids are smarter than adults, of course - simply that we learn and respond to the world differently.

So, consider a string quartet in which two members are in their early teens, and two are north of 60. I've got one of those this week. I've also got one with three high school kids and one 30-something woman who teaches music at a high school. (I'm in awe of this teacher, by the way - imagine being someone who gives orders to kids for a living, and then volunteering to sit among them and take orders for a week!) And, just to round things out, I have a quintet made up entirely of young musicians under 25. (I call it my Control Group.)

The coaching experiences with these groups couldn't be more different, and even though it's occasionally frustrating trying to balance the needs of the two types of brain energy I'm working with, I feel like I learn a lot about human interaction just by trying. The main challenge is to remember that what works for one player won't necessarily work for another. Sure, the kids might end up bored for a few minutes as I slog through the seemingly endless repetitions needed to get a fresh fingering well and truly lodged in an adult's fingers, and the adults might sometimes marvel at a kid's conviction that he can get away with just showing up unprepared for a rehearsal and winging it. But for the most part, they all work remarkably well together, with a level of patience and good humor that I would never have expected.

I'm someone who has generally enjoyed being whatever age I am, and hasn't spent a lot of time mourning my lost youth or worrying about getting old. (College was fun, sure, but I don't really want to do it again, and as for aging, I just know too many elderly people who continue to be balls of energy to worry that there's a mandatory cutoff for enjoying life.) But I must admit that I spend nearly all of my free time hanging out with other people roughly my age, so it's great to get a chance to spend a length of time in close quarters with such a diverse group of musicians.

With very few exceptions, these people will never play music professionally, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of age, most of them aren't here to become the next Joshua Bell, or even the next Sam Bergman. They're here because they have an intellectual and musical curiosity about the world around them, and whether they're 16 or 60, they're here to have fun. I can get behind that.