Education Quote by Luc Ferrari

The sting is in the casualness: Ferrari tosses off “dumb... and repressive” like a shrug, but it’s a manifesto in miniature. As a composer who helped push musique concrete and electroacoustic practice into more narrative, lived-in territory, he’s describing an early collision between institutional music education and the kind of listening he wanted to make central. Piano study isn’t just a biographical starting point here; it’s shorthand for a whole value system: virtuosity, obedience to the score, reverence for tradition, the teacher as gatekeeper.

Ferrari’s phrasing matters. “I thought” keeps the claim subjective, almost adolescent, yet he doesn’t soften the accusation. “Dumb” isn’t merely an insult; it signals anti-intellectualism of a different kind: teachers who enforce rules without curiosity, who confuse authority with insight. “Repressive” pulls it from petty frustration into politics. Postwar European conservatories could function like cultural refineries, processing young musicians into legible, employable professionals. Ferrari is naming that pipeline as a form of control.

The subtext is that dissatisfaction isn’t a phase to be corrected; it’s the engine of aesthetic breakaway. He implies that the problem wasn’t his lack of discipline, but the institution’s narrow definition of what discipline is for. In a field where “serious” music often policed its borders, Ferrari frames his departure from piano not as failure, but as refusal: a rejection of instruction that trains compliance instead of perception.