When I was growing up, there were one or two family friends we knew as ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’, even though they were in no way related. The phenomenon of respect and influence was therefore promulgated beyond the immediate circle of parents, their siblings, my grandparents and true cousins – and illustrated, early on, the interdependence of a ‘tribal’ community. Avuncular status was later extended to me when, in my teaching work, I was brought in as a supporting piano tutor and soon dubbed by the student’s mother as the ‘uncle’ helping him out at home.

We learn from our families in ways that help us survive and thrive as we grow up and go out into the world. In musical history, there are some famous examples of this: Bach studied with his much elder brother when his father died, and Mozart famously studied with his father, himself a significant violinist and composer. Bach went to live with his ‘uncle-brother’; Rachmaninoff, in not-unrelated circumstances, underwent the odd experience of living among a ‘family’ of students at the home of his teacher, the strict and eccentric Nikolai Zverev.

Such ‘unreal’ family connections – the Uncle John or Auntie Anne who are just family friends – are instances of ‘fictive kinship’, a term used in anthropology defining some elementary social structures in kinship systems. The ‘avunculate’, that influential role of uncles (mother’s brother in particular), is a characteristic trait of social systems and has been viewed as an ‘atom of kinship’ by anthropologists.

What are we brought up to learn? Behavioural qualities that allow the individual to function positively and proactively – a give-and-take that allows civilisation to sustain itself, develop, and maintain continuity. These qualities hopefully permit everyone to feel at home and free to respond and contribute to the world. Part of this lattice of activities is cultural work – practices that may seem to have little foreground meaning, but without which life seems simply survival. Think of the enacted dramas we all enjoy – live, recorded or broadcast – the creation of visual arts, books we read, dancing, poetry and indeed music: all these are part of chains of exchange between people, generation by generation. Summed up by the word ‘tradition’, not static and unchanging – subtly modified as each generation responds to what the previous generation presents to them, these conventions have come to them in comparable ways across time.

Music is one such tradition. In Classical music there is a whole raft of cultural practices – ways of performing, responding (think of the odd customs of silent audiences and clapping hands for appreciation), and putting it together – composer or performer. We learn these early, with a teacher from the wider ‘family’ of accepted social structures.

Student-teacher ‘genealogies’
The piano teacher who took me through to Grade 8, the highest grade in the UK’s general grounding in music set up in the 19th century by key music schools, had been taught at one of those academies. Brian Chapple, an energetic and acutely perceptive teacher, pianist and composer, told me brief anecdotes about his own teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, Harry Isaacs. In particular, the way Isaacs’ rolling thumb dominated his hand gestures when playing Brahms.

Harry Isaacs’ own teacher was author of a treatise, a ‘summation’ of 19th century piano playing called The Act of Touch. Its author, Tobias Matthay, shows how for recent history – not just industry, communications and trade – we are products of Victorian traditions. He also taught at the Royal Academy, from 1880, and his presence there reinforces the ‘family traditions’ inherent in learning how to perform music as society recognises and appreciates it. Much of what Matthay’s treatise articulates are things Brian taught, which I pass on when I teach; Matthay is therefore my musical ‘great-grandfather’, and an atom of the avunculate that anthropologists (and the cultures they seek to explain) show we can retain and which we find familiar.

But as with all traditions, things change and generations move on. Despite the establishment of the still-extant American Matthay Association, he was discredited and criticised for being ‘unscientific’. This is despite the methodical and conscientious approach his thinking has regarding physiology and technique. The American Matthay Association maintains an active remembrance of him, in some sense like a memorial to a revered ancestor. Matthay died in 1945, the year my teacher – his musical ‘grandson’ – Brian Chapple was born. There is a recording of old Tobias where you can hear, amid flowing arpeggios, a melody within them carried by the thumb: a family trait I’ve inherited via Harry and Brian.

Matthay himself had a fascinating ‘parentage’ at the Academy including William Sterndale Bennett and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Sterndale Bennett is maybe unfamiliar – but Sullivan, and his association with WS Gilbert, is famous. At this genealogical juncture, we move abroad – and Matthay is where the branches divide and move back in time and elsewhere to Germany – the heartland of important traditions in European music. Both Bennett and Sullivan had studied in Leipzig.

It is Sullivan’s connections on home ground that prove curious and quirkily historical. Sir Arthur was taught by Sir John Goss – another less familiar name, though he wrote some hymn tunes, among them ‘Praise my Soul the King of Heaven’, which some might call to mind. In the 1830s, Goss had produced – much in the way Matthay was later to do – a couple of instructive books on piano playing and music theory. Again setting in stone areas of the tradition he was also passing on personally to students, including Sullivan.

Goss was a student of the organist of St Paul’s Cathedral – one Thomas Attwood. And towards the end of the 18th century, Attwood had been a composition student of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna.

Degrees of the scale,
degrees of separation
I don’t think much has been passed down to me from Great Uncle Mozart. All of us in this belong to a wider tradition where behavioural traits are components of shared cultural practices, extending beyond blood-ties into the wider interdependent networks of society. Nonetheless, my student-teacher genealogy might look something like this:

There are eight ‘generations’ separating me from Mozart – the same small number as notes in an octave. It shows the closeness of cultural ties that unite one generation to the next, and which rely on ‘family’ friendships such as Uncle John or Auntie Anne.

William Sterndale Bennett, Matthay’s other teacher, was a concert pianist who at the age of 20 performed one of Mendelssohn’s piano concertos with the composer conducting. He had closer ties with the composer Robert Schumann; it is intriguing to be marginally associated with the lineage of learning that leads from Brian, through Matthay to Schumann and a teaching circle including Brahms, Schumann’s protégé. Brahms’s family secret was his life-long love for Clara – wife of Robert Schumann, virtuoso pianist, and composer of equal stature. I can readily give a ‘thumbs up’ to them (or perhaps a thumbs down, on the keys of a piano?).

Through Friedrich Wieck, Johann Adam Hiller and Gottfried Augustus Homilius, the line of musical training and tutelary avuncular connections leads back to the turn of the 19th century.

Hiller and Homilius were influential in teaching music. Like the composer Handel, Hiller had studied law, in Leipzig, but with music he secured a place in history. He later had associations with the Leipzig Gewandhaus – important to the work of Mendelssohn for example. The family ties are closely enmeshed even as far back as Hiller.

Homilius had been an organ student of Johann Sebastian Bach:

This chain of exchange in instruction passes from Leipzig to London – from the heartland of much in Western art music, to a cultural hub in 19th century music, and the place numerous students have come to learn – including those at the Royal Academy of Music. Myself too, in a small way – one of many with connections among a host of students.

Notes and nomads
Moving around doesn’t necessarily entail losing sense of self, nor sense of place. The traditions – music among them – that we pass down maintain continuity.

Among indigenous North Americans, the Apache have a history of a nomadic way of living. Yet the need for maintaining traditions has no doubt been as strong as in a more settled life, developing away from the ‘hunter-gatherer’ paradigm of earlier periods. In Apache culture, the avunculate proves important to teaching the next generation – and the responsibility of that component of social structures illustrates a wider instructive basis than direct lines of descent. The ‘fictive kinship’ of Uncle John or Auntie Anne proves remnant of this preservation of traditions, in context of more fragile lives in the landscape.

Learning what culture means and how to be involved is integral to the human ‘family’. Anthropologist Barry Hewlett says kinship is indeed “‘cultural’ in the sense that it is symbolic and transmitted non-genetically from generation to generation”. This does not mean kinship is purely cultural, he admits; such a view nevertheless enriches the fabric of genealogy research and wider study.

Ultimately, when we play Classical piano sonatas, or sing Baroque church chorales, we are connecting with our social inheritance in ways similar to Aboriginal songlines. We rely on listening to what Great Uncle Mozart taught us.

Further reading
Frederick Corder, A History of the Royal Academy of Music from 1822 to 1922 (London: Corder, 1922)
Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Perseus/Basic Books, 1963)
WHR Rivers, Kinship and Social Organisation (Oxford: Routledge, 2011)
Stephen Siek, England’s Piano Sage: the Life and Teachings of Tobias Matthay (Lanham, Md., USA: Scarecrow/Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); see also, pianosage.net
Linda Stone (ed.), New Directions in Anthropological Kinship (Lanham, Md., USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) – see Barry Hewlett’s chapter.