Tom Wolf Pushes Back on Jonathan Biss's Critique of Deified Music Teachers

Writing on his personal blog, flutist and author Tom Wolf responds to Jonathan Biss's New York Times essay "Push Your Musical Gods Off Their Pedestals" (August 23, 2026), which argued that students' tendency to worship music teachers breeds humiliation, abuse, and closed-minded imitation. Wolf counters with the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where oboist Marcel Tabuteau and harpist Carlos Salzedo were treated as gods yet produced students who filled prestigious positions; Tabuteau's pull was such that pianists attended his woodwind classes, and Salzedo's 1953 summer harp class met in Camden, Maine. Wolf's proposed remedy is redundancy: study with two contrasting masters. Flutists who trained under William Kincaid at Curtis later worked with Marcel Moyse, a Marlboro Music Festival founder; Wolf's brother Andrew Wolf studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczysław Horszowski. His uncle Boris Goldovsky wrote in My Road to Opera (Houghton Mifflin, 1979) that Artur Schnabel's influence "had robbed me of my artistic individuality" until Ernő Dohnányi offered a different path. Wolf also notes that Biss's mother, violinist Miriam Fried, and grandmother, cellist Raya Garbousova, belong to the same pedagogical lineage.