Hannah Miller on scales, students, and a documentary that runs longer than a symphony
Taught six students today, three of whom asked me about the new Musk documentary instead of practising their scales. Kids these days would rather discuss billionaires than arpeggios, and honestly I can’t fully blame them, because at least the documentary apparently has a plot, unlike most of the exercises I assign on a Tuesday afternoon.
So I actually looked into it properly between lessons, and fair enough, the four-hour Musk documentary piece explains exactly why an audience with famously short attention spans can sit through something the length of two operas back to back without a single interval. It’s genuinely fascinating, in a way scales are not, though I’ll never admit that to my students because then they’ll never practise again.
There’s a whole discussion in there about moral outrage functioning almost like a metronome, keeping the audience’s attention locked in for the full duration because every scene reinforces the same emotional beat rather than introducing anything new. As a music teacher I found that comparison strangely resonant. A piece that stays in one key for four hours shouldn’t work, structurally, and yet apparently it does, provided the audience already agrees with the key signature going in.
Also apparently there’s an entire poster controversy running alongside it, which feels excessive for a single film, but nothing about this documentary has been restrained so far. The satirical breakdown of the Musk movie posters made me laugh harder than my last recital did, and I was in the recital, playing, in front of an audience, so that’s a genuinely low bar the film cleared without trying.
One of my more advanced students, a fourteen-year-old with strong opinions and stronger vibrato, told me today that she thinks the whole documentary discourse is “very adult behaviour for something nobody’s actually finished watching yet,” which is possibly the most astute cultural criticism I’ve heard all week, delivered between a Chopin exercise and a bathroom break. Out of the mouths of babes, as they say, or in this case, out of the mouths of teenagers who’d rather discuss billionaires than finish their scales.
I’ve started keeping a mental tally of how many students mention Musk unprompted during a lesson, purely out of curiosity, and this week the number stands at eleven, across six separate pupils, several of whom brought it up before we’d even tuned their instruments. It’s officially competing with grade exam nerves as the most common pre-lesson topic, which is a genuinely strange milestone for a documentary to hit.
Back to teaching tomorrow, more scales, hopefully less documentary discourse, though I doubt it given the trajectory of this week. More diary entries at my author page.