LDV49.1
From 1972 to 2000 you were in charge of the organ class at the Conservatoire de Rouen. What does teaching mean to you? I’m very happy to have taught. I really enjoyed having people in front of me who were curious and eager to learn. Teaching enabled me to get to know very diverse students, with whom I’ve often kept in touch. Did I have a teaching method? I have the impression that there is not a method but a relationship to be established with someone. I’ve sometimes enjoyed great satisfaction with people who are said to be ‘not very gifted’, but whom I felt coming out of themselves, revealing themselves, taking pleasure in music, even though they didn’t work wonders. As a teacher, I never really asked myself whether the students I had in front of me were destined to be professionals or not; it didn’t matter to me. What teaching makes you realise above all is that no two people are alike. That’s obvious enough, but these days, when we tend to put people into categories, we don’t take sufficient account of it. That’s why one of the aspects of teaching that I hated was anything to do with ‘competitions’, ‘examinations’, in short, the ‘cult of success’. Teaching is a perpetual challenge. It seems essential to me to know how to accept differences, not to have too definitive an idea about interpretation, tempo and so on.
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