Can genius be taught? Debates in Portuguese music education (1868–1930)

Introduction

Why do only some people learn music? Everybody has some relation to music, but only a few people formally learn Western music within a curriculum delivered in educational institutions. Vocational training is usually presented as a matter of choice and/or of talent. We make such considerations by wielding the term ‘genius’ in our everyday language and generally accepting its definition as someone who is chosen by destiny (or genetics) and who possesses great talent and other distinctive characteristics.

Modern schooling processes, speech and debate, including vocational music training, have presented the definition of genius as an outstanding human who is, at times, a hero, and at other times nearly a deity. In the past, a genius was the natural winner under any circumstances (e.g. Mozart or Beethoven) for no other reason than the nature of genius itself (Howe, 1999). This image of the genius as an absolute mystery was embodied in our everyday reasoning and rationality (Popkewitz, 2008).

As the music psychologist Michael Howe states about his own experience, the genius is part of the schooling imagery. It is in school that we first learn about genius and begin to understand that they ‘form a breed apart’ (Howe, 1999: vii). The fact that school attests for this division leads me to question how it can be maintained in the context of democratic politics and tentative equality measures which advocate ‘no child left behind’ education policies. Although scientists, especially after the 19th century, attempted a calibration of this concept, genius still became a consensual notion of common understanding. The development of this vocabulary is now left to everyday speech. Considering these peculiarities, for me genius is an abstract notion, undetermined in its contents, and used to describe the higher stage of musical attainment usually employed while describing a performance (i.e. referring to someone performing in a specific situation).

This paper aims to address the debate around the role of genius in Portuguese music education from 1868 to 1930 – a period of large expansion of music education which covered several political regimes (monarchy, republic and dictatorship). My initial hypothesis was that people who were enrolled in artistic practices had an internal concept of genius. This was the main responsible concept for the maintenance of rarefied practices (Fernandes et al., 2007; Martins, 2011; Ramos et al., 2013). However, over the course of this research I realised that genius could support the most varied goals, including the democratisation of learning. According to these findings, the idea of genius cannot be considered the sole justification for the rarefying practices in educational contexts and speeches; merely an important tool to support the arguments towards the implementation of different pedagogic aims and goals.

Genius: an endless topic

A review of the literature available on artistic genius shows that we are facing a surplus of definitions. However, despite the excess of literature on the topic, the term has not yet been fully explored.

The social and human sciences have sought to understand how the modern notion of genius was fabricated from the end of the 18th century onwards. It first appeared as a philosophical concept, then a scientific one, before becoming an everyday concept. Different disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches considered the history of genius as an idea which affected practice. Questioning the validity of ‘genius’ as a concept meant asking who the geniuses were at different points in time, what it meant to be a genius, who decided what merited the genius label, and under whose rules. As a result, we now have a vast repertoire of geniuses, of the description of the term, and several interpretations of the word which encompass the contingency and ambiguousness of the concept. But the effort put on the critique and deconstruction of the notion of genius, rather than being a destructive gesture, instead strengthens the concept. The more the idea of genius is analysed, the more it highlights the difficulty in defining genius: ‘speakers continue to use the word as if they can count on listeners to understand what they mean, and the attribution of genius is often used as a clincher in discussions as if to suggest that the word is entirely self-justifying’ (Jefferson, 2014: 1).

The power of genius as an assumption for all common speakers in modern everyday life was also the subject for many researchers, particularly in music sets (DeNora, 2000). In a classical perspective, musical genius was studied either using examples of single genius (Elias, 1993; DeNora, 1995) or existing in small groups (Kivy, 2001).

Large-scale studies on genius performing in different areas have a broader tradition, both in historical and in psychological approaches. Scholars involved in historical analyses sometimes go back as far as Ancient Greece to track the double genius etymology (Jefferson, 2014; Kivy, 2001). Others prefer to analyse it over short but decisive historical periods in a given community (Stadler, 2006). The overall tendency is to question the idea of genius by observing literary, artistic and scientific areas together in order to discuss the essence of this notion and its mutations over time. Bringing this discussion to the present has allowed academics to realise that more and more people in different areas (e.g. sports or fashion) are considered geniuses. The evolution of genius as a cultural concept developed into a new social function. Genius is no longer the exclusive domain of elite and distinctive practices. From 1945 onwards it has also adopted a role as a social equaliser and a double-edged sword of democratisation (McMahon, 2013).

The tradition in psychological studies on genius was founded with the emergence of medical and psychological studies. During the 19th century, the newly born sciences of the mind included genius in their research. The philosophical debate about the nature of genius was enriched by empirical studies on recognised geniuses, living or dead. The conceptualisation of genius was a leading point in the psycho-medical sciences, and studies were conducted to calibrate intelligence and vocational scales or to identify mental disorders (Martins, 2011; Murray, 1989). By the middle of the 20th century, psychological theories on intelligence and personality started to regard genius as an insolvable conceptual problem. Researchers were then encouraged to move on or to study other less ambiguous concepts, such as talent (Howe et al., 1998). Some psychologists tried to discuss the concept of genius by identifying and analysing consecrated geniuses (Howe, 1999). Scientific literature also started to reinvent genius as a synonym for a creative person, which led to more debate about the adequacy of this concept (Eysenk, 1995; Weisberg, 1986).

Recognising the paradigm of the genius today as a lonesome creative person, psychologists Montuori and Purser discussed the historical and conceptual victory of individualism as the basis for this unquestioned myth, bringing about the origin and nature of genius as an educational problem: can genius be taught? By posing this question, the authors follow the lead of historian G. Tonelli, for whom creativity as a ‘natural talent’ is an invention of the Renaissance (quoted by Montuori and Purser, 1995: 77). This was the period when ‘creativity’ first emerged, and when it was separated from genius, as the latter was considered an ‘innate capability, operating with spontaneous facility’, as opposed to talent, ‘which may be taught and learned by diligence’ (Montuori and Purser, 1995: 79).

At a certain point in these studies, whatever the theoretical and methodological framework may be, the tendency is to reignite the nature or nurture debate. This discussion usually involves the problematic of whether genius can be taught. In fact, one of the most prominent research trends aims to identify the different historical perspectives on this subject (McMahon, 2013; Murray, 1989). But the link between genius and schooling is expressed in a false relationship of confrontation, as genius seems to escape the formality of learning but does not exist as a phenomenon outside of school language. As Jimenéz Abadías (2010) argues, the concept of genius as a default within the school institution was embedded sometime in the late 18th century and spread from the German Romanticism as a pedagogical issue in itself.

Portugal and genius-building from a local perspective is an increasingly debated topic. The Portuguese word for genius preserves the complex genius Latin etymology: the dictionary definition of ‘génio’ includes references to a spirit, a person (an artist), a state of mind, a gift or ability. Its semantic richness has been used by education historians as a myth to be deconstructed and as an indicator of structural education problems. The myths outlining conservatory teaching methods and the difficulty in producing excellent artists are some of the issues studied (Gomes, 2002; Fernandes et al., 2007; Martins, 2011). They have shown that the genius concept was frequently intertwined with the idea of learning, without fully exploring this discursive ambiguousness. In fact, the expectation that a genius would have mysteriously learnt to play by his/her talent has been widely expressed throughout history. Nonetheless, at least from the 19th century onwards, genius was also the model for a long and arduous musical apprenticeship (Ramos et al., 2013).

Towards a history of genius in Portugal

The emergence of genius as a technology of speech responsible for the rarefying of school practices and the elitist split of the learning populations according to their social background was identified between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (Gomes, 2002; Ramos et al., 2013; Paz, 2014). Based on these earlier studies, my hypothesis was that adopting the idea of genius enabled distinctive sets of educational ideas which ultimately led to a clear division between the cultural elite and the rest of society.

To test this hypothesis, I tried to understand how social actors positioned themselves on the topic of genius and education. Using research trends in genealogy as guidelines, I undertook the study of educational musical debates as depicted in the Portuguese periodical press.

The first step was to identify the moment in time when such debates may have been held. I identified the period between 1868 and 1930 through a cross-analysis of legislation, statistics and expert literature on the subject. All of these sources pointed to this moment as a period of expansion of the music education system in Portugal. In fact, from 1868 the constitutional monarchy in place instituted legislation towards schooling the Portuguese at all levels and types of education, including music learning (firstly in conservatories and primary schools, later in secondary school). Until the 1920s there were more and more students enrolled in official music learning, until the new dictatorship government (1926) imposed a different scheme. The legislation forged in the 1930s openly stated that only a few people were to learn music professionally. The conservatories had strict numerus clausus; the rest of the student population would be enrolled in the official school music programmes. These policies prioritised choral singing as a way of learning the basics of music, but they also made it impossible for teachers to delve into further instrumental education. The musical press and expert literature also experienced an upsurge until the 1920s. Given this scenario, I imagine that educational ideas and the concept of genius must have been debated.

Secondly, I conducted a survey of the periodical press in order to ascertain what sort of journals and magazines published articles on music education, and I found more than 70 titles ¹ . I started with the educational press (15 titles) ² realising there was not much material, and then moved on to music journals (45) ³ where most of the data were found. Over the course of this research I ended up including literary and artistic magazines (11) ⁴ , as well as social life magazines (2), which paid a lot of attention to music issues and were the depository of precious iconographic sources ⁵ .

At first glance, these magazines and journals comprised about 900 articles related to musicians’ biographies (students, teachers or accomplished geniuses) and allowed me to organise the material into music education, news events (concerts in educational environments) and methods. But there were very few pedagogical debates per se.

I framed an original grid of analysis where I first tried to grasp the explicit and implicit processes which might enable the embodiment of genius in common music apprentices (Paz, 2014), while being aware that previous research had described genius within the context of an individual. This grid was used in a prospective moment and it serves as the basis for the present findings in this paper. It tries to study genius-building within a different perspective of social actors engaged in music education. It was initially thought out as a framework for content analysis, but quickly became the adjuvant of an historical analysis in more classical terms. These findings formed the basis for my doctorate thesis chapter on genius-building in the press, where I analyse in detail most of the topics outlined here.

I attempted to find studies on the various issues and problems in music education analysed in light of the genius issue, and found a restricted corpus of about 80 articles which directly discussed whether genius could be taught. According to the results of this prospective exercise, the main resources for genius-building in Portuguese music education environments are as follows (as we can see most of them depend on context and appropriation abilities): life (body/soul); time (past/future); curricula (mimesis, study methods); and simply being at the right place at the right time. These resources for genius-building focus on genius as a concept: a concept that could subsequently (and not previously) be attributed to a concrete person and/or situation, and that will have thus been built within a complex societal and environmental process.

Can genius be taught? Yes… and no

Firstly, I outline some general findings. At the outset, it must be stressed that Portugal had its own pedagogical debates (e.g. conservatoire organisation and numerus clausus), although the issues in discussion echoed the ones being considered in other European countries (France, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom) which held different methods and repertoires. Secondly, the national press published texts penned by renowned French, Belgian and German authors who identified themselves as music educators, but is scarce on local experts. Musical education in Portugal, as we shall see, was usually a subject for a music teacher or a musician. However, any liberal professional, from journalists to physicians, was considered eligible to opine. Despite the lack of specific experts, these multiple points of view amounted to a consensus that genius could and should be taught.

Genius was not just an innate attribute or an intangible ideal, it was grounded on several practices and routines, all of which were tailored either to a particular genius, or considered the apprentice in question. The following items assemble the most vivid resources for genius to thrive: the pupil’s soul and body; his/her relationship with time, space and social conveying; and specific models of studying and acquiring knowledge and technique. Sometimes the word genius was not there, but the character-building resources were present in unexpected familiar forms (e.g. descriptions of body parts that belonged to or were compared to those of geniuses). All of these practices and ideals rested on the concept of genius existing in regular pupils, which takes us to the core of an inner contradiction in the educational arena.

Mimesis

Music journals were the main source of information regarding Music History as a subject, even after it was introduced in Portuguese curriculum around 1901. The study of Music History meant recognising (and identifying) those who qualified as geniuses, building a genius gallery. Mimesis was probably the process used to hold ideal genius traits (e.g. like Beethoven’s) as terms of comparison with the pupils/teachers’ performance. Visual examples were efficient and commonly used, as we can see from this picture published in an article exalting the genius of Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), and which focusses on his hands (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The hands of a genius ⁷ .

Considering that piano teaching, at its highest level, was conducted on a one-to-one basis, and that the pupil generally met only a few colleagues, this was an effective way to demonstrate what his/her hands should look like and to encourage or deflate aspirations. As there was great diversity in the panoply of genius examples presented, the pupil could always find a model with who he/she could identify.

The future

Music curriculum usually mentions the best teachers and disciples. In fact, some teachers only become known because they once taught someone who later turned into a successful musician. The teacher is not necessarily more important than the student, especially in the final apprenticeship years. As an example, Figure 2 shows the pianist Timóteo da Silveira with some pupils who later surpassed him in reputation as pianists and composers. These include some of the male students, such as international piano concert performer Óscar da Silva (1870–1958), composer Luís de Freitas Branco (1890–1955) or Ivo Cruz (1901–1985), director of the Lisbon Conservatory (1938–1971) during the Estado Novo regime (1933–1974):

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Figure 2.

The impossibility of forecasting who will become a genius ⁸ .

This image made it clear to the student that no one could foretell who might become a reference musician. By eroding the distinction between teacher and pupil, or between promising and average students, this approach maximised the potential of promoting genius among pupils.

Concluding thoughts

The first conclusion is the void that existed between the discussion around genius and the education debate. Portuguese music professionals occupied many concurrent positions (e.g. musician, teacher and critic), which was the case in all musical fields in Western countries of this period, but in Portugal it was clear that music pedagogy expertise as a specific field of knowledge was not yet there. In this period of 1868–1930, Portuguese musical pedagogy was discussed under many knowledge fields, like History, Psychology and Medical Sciences by various opinion-makers (writers, and politicians) as well as music teachers.

Despite the absence of an expert role of a music educator, by the end of the 19th century the periodical press enabled forms of debate and consensus between several other sorts of experts who spoke about music and its learning. Their conclusions underline the power of genius as a dynamic concept, and its potential for educational purposes. Identifying the fact that geniuses had specific needs revealed, for example, that music students benefitted from having a gallery of recognised geniuses as role models. There was also a very close relationship and parallel drawn between the music pupil and master, and vice versa, which is distinct from the rest of the education landscape (e.g. the musical curriculum may recognise a teacher’s worth based on specific pupils they taught). Furthermore, the notion of genius is also drawn from social concerns about the proper institutional and pedagogical conditions in which learning should be based. Despite the common definition of genius as an unachievable level of musical excellence, in an educational context the idea of genius can be used as a goal towards which musical curriculum and educational projects should aim at.

These debates redefined the different emanations and forms of genius. The distinction between choral singing (assuming that everybody could sing), the music education delivered in primary and secondary school (implying the first music rudiments), and vocational music training (designed only for a few talented people) was increasingly clarified until the 1930s. The fact that we consider professional learning as a separate path echoes the style of reasoning and organic solutions that were embedded in the educational system forged around this time. Before that, when this delineation was still unclear, it was commonly believed that genius could and should be taught in a progressive way and according to personal aspirations. In fact, nature and nurture were considered convergent in the dynamics of genius. Pedagogical expertise tended to implement practical measures to teach everybody in each of these circumstances, dealing with the different levels of proficiency and with the final profession/activity of music learners.

This brief analysis of genius resources made me realise that speaking of genius in Portugal was not always a matter of putting it on an ideal and unattainable level, nor was it a means to support rarefied practices, as some Portuguese literature suggests. The opinions conveyed by the press, pedagogical debates and stories about geniuses, both living and dead, as much as practices of excellence and real students, gave music teachers and apprentices concrete data about the possibility of progression towards the genius. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that genius had a democratic potential: anybody was (in theory) a potential genius. The ambiguous and contradictory narratives fully supported this promise. This means that the genius as a democratising ideal was already being used before 1945 in countries such as Portugal. This finding anticipates and expands the idea of genius democratisation advocated by McMahon (2013). The republican plans to use choral singing as a means to demonstrate national genius (inspired by French models) are testament to this potential from as far back as the beginning of the 20th century. Also, the individual genius is presented as someone who performs at the highest possible level. He/she represents an ideal that is rhetorically, politically and wishfully required of more and more people. When transported to the educational context, a genius becomes someone whose path, methods, endurance – in a word, resources – should be copied and made available in music learning within a democratised society.

The idea that genius could and should be taught formed the basis for the emergence of a yet-to-be-established expertise in musical pedagogy. It is possible that the lack of internal debate is related to the absence of a reason to discuss it. Genius and music teaching processes were taken for granted a finding that converges with the findings of DeNora (1995, 2000) and Jefferson (2014). In order to prove this thesis, further research should analyse the notions and ways of regarding genius in other European countries, where the best musicians were trained and where, in theory, the concept of genius probably involves different concerns related to local needs. In the case of Portugal, there is room for subsequent comparative studies, as the rhetoric on the question of genius is partly due to the absence of straightforward policies on music education. And yet, one question remains: around this same period, how was the notion of genius regarded in countries with a strong tradition in musical education?