The Alchemy of Synergy, Part II

Part I talked about the fun and benefits of working together with another player, as coaches, mentors, and playing partners, especially in playing duets with the great benefits of sight-reading and transposition, among others.

There is another kind of duet and another kind of benefit to be had if you make up the duets yourselves. That is: improvising them.

Improvising means “thinking in music,” something that is nearly never done is traditional pedagogy of horn or any other instrument. More’s the pity. Now, why would you want to do something like that?

One great thing about improvisation of any kind is that brings together all elements of music: performance, theory, history, composition, ear training – you need it all to invent music on the spot.

What, me, improvise? [you say] I can’t do that! I can’t play 16th notes at MM=220!

Neither can I. But what I can do is revise my definition of what improvisation is so that I can do it.

First of all, improvisation does not have to be jazz. I’m not a jazz player. I’m a classical player. So I’ll play something that is like the stuff I play all the time. You don’t have to be able to play Donna Lee to make up your own music. A sarabande will do just fine. Start with some long tones. Start with one long tone. Listen to it. See where it wants to go next. As a duet, perhaps start with a common scale and listen to the interval between the two voices. Consonant or dissonant? If it’s dissonant, hold it a moment, then resolve it up or down. If it’s consonant, hold it until you take a breath. Then pick a new note and start again.

You very quickly find out two things when you do this: 1) It’s easy. 2) It’s fun.

And perhaps 3): why didn’t I do this years ago?

You discover that improvising duets is like having a conversation, except in music. You use what you know to discuss subjects that interest you in ways that are familiar and comfortable. Conversing doesn’t have anything particular to do with playing fast; if it did, auctioneers would be the most sought-after conversation partners. It just matters that it’s interesting and that it makes sense. If you recite something, you just need to know how to pronounce the words. If you converse about something, you also need to know what the words mean, both individually and in context, and you can use everything you know – vocabulary, grammar, history, jokes, expressive speaking ability, etc – to make your content and delivery more interesting. In a conversation you must also listen, and spontaneously react to and develop what your partner comes up with in the moment. It’s really fun, and improvising music is just like having a conversation except that at no time in our music training did anyone every give us training or encouragement to have a musical conversation.

But you don’t have to wait for someone to give you either permission or training.

Just do it. And get in on the fun and musical and technical benefits of making up your own stuff.

Making up your own duets is a perfect complement to a session of reading duets, both musically and technically. Here are a few more ideas to get you started:

•Player 1 (P1) plays some kind of I-V repeated bass (like an oom pah tuba) and P2 makes up a march. Here and forever more, always switch parts and do it again.

•P1 plays one low long tone – a drone. P2 experiments with making melodies using one scale above it. Start with the drone being the tonic, then see what’s like for the drone to be other scale degrees.

•Pulse the drone: give it a rhythm. Put some pep in your step!

•P1 plays a simple bass line, e.g. C-B-A-G, or in minor: C Bb Ab G. P2 solos over it.

•Players make up a piece based on the rhythm of their names.

•Players choose a familiar (and simple!) tune and figure out the melody via ear & error. After you can play it in C, play it in all other keys. Then repeat in minor. Then repeat, with P1 on the melody and P2 on 1) harmony 2) chord roots 3) countermelody.

•Just start playing: there are always rules, but here you have to figure out the rules as you go. Hint: arrive at a common pulse and key as quickly as possible. Hint #2: Recycle material. Find one simple, strong idea and develop it in all kinds of ways.

If you need more ideas, check out my book, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (GIA).

Have fun!

The Alchemy of Synergy, Part I

The title of this post is taken from a book by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson entitled: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. I’m about half way through and am enjoying his insights very much. I’m in Chapter Five, “Finding Your Tribe,” which is about finding the group of people to hang out with who are passionate about the same things you are, which will enable you to go much farther than if you were in isolation. This rang something of a bell with me since at a critical junction in college, I decided that I was really much more at home with musicians than chemists. Although I had and still have an interest in science (Discover magazine is usually my choice of airport magazines), at that time I choose to go after this music thing and see what might come of it. To cut to the chase, with a lot of work and even more luck, it all worked out.

But this post isn’t about seeking the tribe or the vocation. It’s about the idea of working with another like-minded person so that you each make each other better, challenge each other, mentor each other. As musicians we are accustomed to a lighthouse keeper style existence for much of the time working long and hard alone in a practice room. There is no way around a whole lot of that, but at the same time we should not overlook the great capacity for increasing both learning and fun when we work á deux.

First of all, it simply feels good to be with someone else who is as passionate about horn playing as you are. That Significant Other might be supportive and sympathetic, but unless they’re one too, it’s not the same. It helps your attitude to have someone else be there and understand your obsession. You can hang out with this person (or persons – it could be a Tribe, too), and have great conversations about all the details and minutiae of the domain (the Realm of Horn Playing) – players, equipment, history, recordings, literature, teaching, on and on. You can listen to recordings together and trade oohs and aahs over great solo playing and orchestral excerpts. You can play Trivial Horn Pursuit and see if you can stump each other.

A great help in achieving mastery is getting feedback. You get this from your teacher, but you only see your teacher an hour a week. Not much! Not enough! You can and should get your own feedback from recording practice and analyzing the results. But nothing is better than a live coach right there, who listens and suggests. So enlist your playing partner to do regular weekly sessions of coaching/mentoring. You will learn much more quickly than by yourself.

Another way for the two of you to enjoy the synergy of collaborative effort is duets. Make a point of buying duet books regularly, and have your playing partner buy them too; if possible, coordinate efforts so that they buy different duet books than you buy. You can both hone your sight-reading abilities playing duet after duet in many different styles. Transposition is a sine qua non for horn players, but – let’s face it – is not the most exciting thing to practice on your own. But with your playing partner it becomes fun. One afternoon of concentrated effort and you both will be among the 1% of hornist in the country who are comfortable sight-reading horn in B natural!

Two players working together can advance their knowledge and know-how much farther than either could alone. As Stephen Nachmanovitch in his landmark book on improvisation Free Play says:

One advantage of collaboration is that it’s much easier to learn from someone else than from yourself. And inertia, which is often a major block in solitary work, hardly exists at all here: you release each other’s energy. Learning becomes many-sided, a refreshing and vitalizing force.

There are a ton of duet books out there. To mention a few:

Bipperies (Shaw) – 2 Vol.

Odd Meter Duets (Gates)

Otto Nicolai duets

Barboteu “4 Duos”

Contemporary Rhythm & Meter Duets (Del Borgo)

12 Duets (Mozart)

20 Duets (Duvernoy)

30 Duets (Kling)

Five Canons (Bernard Heiden)

60 Selected Duets (L.A. Horn Club – publ. Southern)

Six Sonatas for 2 horns (Schenk – transcr. Reynolds)

Amsden’s Celebrated Practice Duets

Fiddle Tunes for 2 horns (arr. Agrell)

Selected Duets for French Horn Vol. 1 (Voxman)

Selected Duets for French Horn Vol. II (Voxman)

Six Canonic Sonatas – (Telemann, arr. Shaw)

Ten Pieces for Two Horns (Hill)

22 Duets (Wilder)

Don’t forget that although there are many collections of horn duets on the market, you can also profit by stealing duets from other instruments: give your bass clef a workout by getting books of duets for bassoons, trombones, tubas (old bass clef!). Or work on your high range with trumpet duets. Vocal duets can also be a great source of material. Get books of duets in many different styles.

You also don’t have to be limited to just horn/horn duets. There are fewer choices, but there are also books for horn plus one other instrument out there. Go for it!

In any case, find a playing partner and dive into the great enjoyment and deep pool of benefits from working regularly with another horn player (or other instrument).

Horn Fartlek

Sports training provides fertile ground for concepts that we can transfer to horn playing; an earlier Horn Call article of mine was entitled “Lessons from the Gym” that listed a number of such lessons. My wife (a musician, but not a horn player) has serious interests in sports training. She’s become an expert the past couple years in Cross Fit training and recently has done a number of “300″ training courses. 300 training comes from the intense training program that the actors in the movie “The 300″ had to endure to acquire the sensational bodies of Spartan warriors. Her class included a Big Ten football player, a bouncer, a policeman, and various athletes in their 20s. She’s in her mid-fifties. The trainers call her “mom.” This is the kind of training that gives Navy SEALS pause, complete with trainers who scream “more weight!” if they see actually able to lift what they give you. It’s an hour or so of very heavy training (often involving moving either yourself around quickly or very heavy objects not quite as quickly) 3 times a week. You get to run 3 miles on off days. I couldn’t do this kind of thing at gunpoint, but my wife found that she thrives on it. It takes some serious motivation to get through it; the class started with 20 and finished with 6. Wife not only completed it (they take a brutal test at the end for lagniappe), but signed up for it two more times. Recently they discontinued offering the 300 training, so wife has been looking to put together a new training program for herself that is suitably demanding.

She was musing about this, and I piped up, “Have you considered Fartlek?”

She gave me about the same look you’re giving me right now, but allowed me to continue and define my terms.

Fartlek is a Swedish word that refers to a type of conditioning training that alternates the intensity of exercise, e.g. alternating walking with sprinting. Its opposite is continuous training, such as jogging at a steady pace. Fartlek sessions can be custom-designed for both the athlete and the particular sport. According to Wikipedia, a typical session would include:

•5-10 min. warm-up (jogging)

•Steady, hard training (e.g. running for a mile or two)

•Recovery (walk for 5 min.)

•Alternate sprints (50-60 meters) with jogging; repeat until a little tired

•Easy running with 3 or 4 “quick steps” (sudden acceleration)

•Full speed uphill (200 m.)

•1 min. fast run

•Repeat whole routine until total prescribed time is achieved.

One big advantage of Fartlek training is that it can be adapted for each sport. “Athletes can make the most of the flexibility of fartlek training by mimicking the activities which would take place during the chosen sport.”  Most fartlek session are kept frequent and short. Longer training becomes interval training. The opposite of both of these is continuous training.

There is plenty of information on the internet for those interested. What interests me is brainstorming ways that fartlek training might be applied to horn playing. I invite readers to brainstorm along with me. Let’s see…

•Depending on what a player’s current goals and playing demands are, the player could select from the three types of training: fartlek, interval, and continuous.

•Fartlek is comprised of a mix of jogging, “cruising” (medium speed), and all-out sprints. What are the horn playing equivalents?

jogging: soft-medium dynamics, middle/low range

cruising: mf-f dynamics, range to top of the staff

sprint: ff dynamics, upper register

•Horn practice session corresponding to fartlek session might be something like:

-Warm-up 5-10 min. Easy on the embouchure – middle and low range, not too loud – overtone series. Intersperse rests.

-Technical review and development 20-30 min. Scales, arpeggios, patterns

-5 min. rest.

- Work on technical problems in etudes or solos; upper register work; intersperse short rests. Continue until a little tired.

-Alternate high/loud excerpt and solo problem solving with low range practice and/or rest.

-Speed drills with scales, arpeggios, or patterns; or: sight-reading

-Repeat

Just a start. Feel free to add your own thoughts on how we could apply the training benefits of fartlek to horn playing.

Tech Dreams

The University of Iowa School of Music is getting a new school – the flood last year put an end to the old one. We’re comfortably ensconced in excellent “temporary” facilities (better than the old school, I have to say) and await the building of a brand-new state-of-the-art school of music. It’s in the planning stages right now, and since I am 1) on the Technology Committee and 2) don’t know much about technology, I would like to ask readers of this blog to post 1) their technology hopes and dreams of what they would like to see in techn0logy in the ideal music school and 2) relay any hints they might have about what not to do or to avoid. I’ve had a few informative collections of suggestions (notably from UI alum Michael Ozment), but there’s always room for more. (forgive also the double posting of this notice on the Horn List as well).

What are your tech dreams? Let me know, and who knows, they just might show up in the newest school of music in the country…

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Sometimes as performers we forget that we are in the business of entertainment and illusion. Yes, yes, we’re artists, noble conduits of immortal masterpieces, etc etc., but this is about the receiving end of the music. What we do on the sending end may be a bit different from what the audience receives or perceives.

It doesn’t matter that David Copperfield doesn’t really go through the Great Wall of China, or make the Statue of Liberty or the Space Shuttle disappear. It only matters that it looks like that happens, which is where we derive our delight, wonder, and amazement. Mr. Copperfield, like all magicians, goes through a great deal of trouble and expense to make sure to preserve the illusion that impossible is happening (I saw him perform once and I still can’t even begin to explain some of the stuff that I saw – I can’t even come up with bad or preposterous explanations for some of the illusions).

How does magical illusion apply to us? There are a couple of useful answers to this. One is that we must remember that we are there to ‘give a show’, and the audience doesn’t care about our personal problems – that we’re nervous, or the part is difficult, or you had a bad day, and so on. We spend uncountable hours in the practice room to perfect ‘our show’, but we often forget that when we perform, there are other factors, i.e. how you look when you enter, perform, and even leave the stage. The audience begins its experience of the performance the instant you are in view on the stage. The stage is an alternate reality. It takes practice, craft, and art to appear ‘normal’ on stage – ask any actor. It has always puzzled me why we don’t have a course or two in Acting as musicians. The audience will have decided 50% of what it thinks about your performance before you play a note from how you entered, how you smiled, your posture, your movements. Did you look serene and confident? Fidgety and nervous? Distracted? Ill at ease? Calm and composed? Do your eyebrows editorialize during the performance? Have you ever seen yourself on stage before/during/after performing (i.e. video)? Or asked friends or a mentor to give you detailed feedback strictly on the impression you are conveying with your body language and stage presence?

There is no substitute for learning a piece really well before performing it, but with practice and feedback we can learn to act, to ensure that the audience’s perception of us is warm and positive. And it does take practice. Mr. Copperfield didn’t just think, “Hey, I’m going to make the Space Shuttle vanish” and do it without any effort.

The other aspect of illusion we need to take into account is doing whatever is necessary to deliver the goods. This might mean using tongued articulation that gives the impression of a difficult wide slur. Sometimes you have to help composers in all kinds of ways when they write stuff out of insufficient understanding of the instrument (e.g. stopped, echo, mute confusion, or that wind players actually have to breathe some time). Sometimes they write stuff that makes it clear that they had a bad childhood and are dumping their pain on you – in your part – in acts of insane polymorphous perversity. Your job is not to die trying to do impossible things. Your job is to give the impression that you are doing it. Some things are just gestures – nearly impossible to play note for note, but easy if you start and end correctly and do some artful wiggling in between. Sometimes you have to leave out a note or two to take a breath rather than try to play all the notes and then end up behind the beat because you took time for the breath. You are serving the music and the audience by coming up with a version that works. Tyros may shriek “Cheating!” but give me an excellent illusion than someone being “honest” going down in flaming wreckage every time. Is it ‘cheating’ to have an assistant to split the book so that you can have enough lip to get through those high, exposed parts?

Sometimes you might switch equipment to get the job done. Ever see a pro trumpet player who only owned one trumpet? A few years ago I had the good fortune to go to New York to play some gigs with some NY freelancers. I was very curious to see what they played. Here you have some of the best players anywhere, players who get to play the chart one time through if they’re lucky, and then have to be perfect when the red light went on. Did they play Kruspe wraps? Geyer wraps? Giant bell throats? Single Bbs? Descants? Triples? Something else? Answer: they played everything. Almost all of them had about six or eight horns of all different types. They had no particular allegiance to anything, but would switch to whatever they needed to get the job done, even from one movement to the next. Since much of their work was recorded or in the pit, etc. they didn’t have to worry much about people ‘listening with their eyes’. They used whatever they needed to do make sure the illusion was maintained.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, said the Wizard of Oz. The power and magic lay in the illusion perceived out front, not what it takes behind the scenes to deliver it.

What If….?

What if…. what if playing horn or music was like…. college football?

•We would have beautiful, spacious facilities. Trainers to keep us in shape. Masseurs/masseuses, physical therapists, Alexander techniquers to keep us fit and functioning.

•Horn teachers would be the highest paid state employees. They would have assistants – specialists – to coach and train high range, low range, transposition, wide slurs, scales, and so on. There would be special recruiting staff scouring the hinterlands for young talent.

•There would be a couple dozen full scholarships for the players.

•We would get new uniforms every year (tux, tails, et al.).

•70,000 people would watch each weekly concert in the …large… concert hall. Many thousands more would tune in on TV and radio.

•Announcers would deliver play-by-plays to home viewing/listening audiences (perhaps something on the order of what Peter Schickele did on one of the PDQ Bach records). There would be a “color” man to add colorful trivia and statistics to the commentary (“Well, Mel, he only got 99% of the notes last concert, and the coach may bench him if he doesn’t get his average up to about 99.95% soon. Remember what happened to Koczynski in ‘03!).

•Top college stars would be snapped up in the annual Spring Music Performer Draft

•Every bit of the latest technology, medical advances, etc. would be used to enhance performance.

•Amateurs would put together Fantasy Orchestra Leagues. Two types: 1) current players and 2) all-time greats

I’ll continue adding to this big of Fantasy Music-ball. Feel free to join the fun and add your speculations to this playful analogy.

Less is More, Or: It’s the Principle of the Thing

I’ve often marveled at method books that apparently consider horn players to be idiots. They demonstrate a useful pattern, and then proceed to waste forests of paper in writing out the same pattern or exercise in all keys. It’s not just horn books, of course. I once very hopefully bought a book of “jazz scales” that turned out to be nothing more than normal up and down octave scales written with a bit of syncopation – same rhythm in all keys, all written out, of course. Lots of paper. Filled the book. Good idea, but it could have been expressed very briefly, then left up to the player to extrapolate. Waste of time/money.

There are two reasons that I can think of for this practice: 1) it’s hard to sell a book whose entire content could be printed on less than a 3″X5″ card – i.e. if they didn’t write out the exercise in all keys and 2) we as horn players, or brass players, expect to be treated like idiots, because that’s all we’ve ever known. 3) Our classical training is entirely see-one-play-one. Our instruments are silent unless in the presence of music notation. We’re not used extrapolating from principle, or to thinking in scale degrees (1 2 3 4 5 etc.), which are the first step in going directly to the principle of the exercise or pattern and then learning without reference to musical notation. The first goal of learning should be to get the information into the player and not leave it on the page. We quicken this process by getting off the page as soon as possible (memorization) and understanding the principles behind the notation.

One example of this is a very good book that comes to mind is for cornetists/trumpeters: Herbert L. Clarke’s Technical Studies. He starts off with a useful chromatic exercise but doesn’t feel that the player has brains/skill/talent/mental capacity enough to extrapolate moving this exercise to begin on other notes, so he writes it out for the whole range of the instrument. The other exercises in the book are the same. Except for the etudes, this whole book could be compressed into one page easily.

Horn method books often write out overtone exercises in all keys (i.e. fingerings: 0, 2, 1, 12, 23, 13) as well, which retards learning. All you really need is one example and then the instructions: play through the fingering series.

Later editors of Kopprasch did give us a little credit by giving examples of articulation before some of the etudes as well as suggested transpostions. Bravo – that’s what I’m talking about.

Using metasymbols such as scale degrees and key cycles (all keys in various orders), I once put together on one page what is probably more technique than one person can work on in his whole life. For example, lists of diatonic patterns: 171, 13, 123, 1231, 1234, and so on. Do in all keys, many scale types, various articulation, various dynamics and tempos. Using this system I could put enough material on one note card to last an entire summer vacation and beyond.

Less is more in this case. You just have to use basic principles and then extrapolate and vary. Almost none of it has to be written down. This will get the knowledge in you, your chops, your fingers, much quicker than reading it off the page.

Then, when it’s time to read off the page and develop that skill, you will have already programmed chops and fingers to call up these basic technical moves very quickly.

Something Different II

Fall semester: school is underway once again, and I love every minute of it. There’s always too much too do, always more to learn, always the desire to hone the act both in playing and teaching. Teaching is like being a shark: you have to keep moving forward (i.e. learning more, expanding horizons) or you wither and “die”. I find learning intoxicating, especially when it comes from many and (wildly) unrelated sources. You never know when that bit you just read about deep space astronomy or tree frogs or interview psychology or football workouts or one-pot cooking recipes or the history of the Restoration is going to mix and match with something else you know and give you an amazing new insight into stuff you do every day. Such as playing, learning, and teaching the horn.

We are all beneficiaries of horn lore and tradition, but we would all benefit from some kind of shake-up of our routines, a good monkey wrench in the works (as John Lennon said, “A Spaniard in the Works” [play on 'a spanner in the works]) to make us wake up from the mental slumber of our routines. Routines are good – they get things done. Routines are dangerous: they distance you from sensitivity about what you really need in the moment and numb you to considering other and possibly more effective ways to get the (or a specific) job done.

It’s fall. Time to come up with a few monkey wrenches to start the year off with some attention. Allow me to brainstorm some musical monkey wrenches, in no particular order:

1. Daily Arkady. Arkady has always been one of the most astoundingly original and creative horn geniuses on the planet. I asked him once how he warms up and works out. He said, oh, some overtones, some long tones, and then I just play music.

You what?! You play music!? No one plays music to warm up! What does this mean? How is this possible!? Why, the very idea!

“Yes,” he smiles. “I just play music. A little rhythm, a bit of melody. I just listen and follow it where it goes.”

As he does so, he also pays attention not only to what the music needs, but also to what his chops and his technique need right now. When he encounters resistance, he stays there for a while, loops the difficulty, transforms it, plays with it, turns it this way and that, gets to know it intimately and at length. As my collaborator Evan Mazunik always says, invite your demons home for lunch. Get to know their favorite colors, their birthdays. Spend a lot of time with them, and they don’t seem so fearsome.

A Daily Arkady is infinitely flexible, but you have to pay attention and dare to try things. We’re not used to this. We get out our slick warm-up/technique routine – same one as ever – zip through it, pat ourselves on the back for being virtuosic and virtuous and move on.

All well and good, but, as you quickly find out when you do some D.A.’s: you miss a lot of stuff when you always just do that one routine.

2. Scale madness. Almost everyone does only octave scales, mostly major scales; the more dedicated may do octave minor scales as well. All well and good, etc etc. But for a fall monkey wrench or three, try some new approaches:

•Start the scales just before or after the beat.

•Play scales with a repeat rhythm. Start with Short Long Long, LSS, SLS.

•Play scales with a wide variety of note values. Kind of like…music. Why should scales be only one note value?

•Play scales with a mix of articulations. Ditto.

•Add accents. Duple (on the strong or weak beat). Triple. 2+3, 3+2, 2+2+3, 3+2+2, 3+3+2, etc.

•Play scales not just in octaves, but in all lengths. A good place to start is the Power Scale, scale degrees 1-5. Then start adding or subtracting notes from this length. Combine this with accent patters.

•Spend most of your scale time on unfamiliar scales like F#, Db, B, etc. Invite those demons home!

•Play scales as duets or even trios with other musicians (who do not have to be horn players).

•Combine scales and arpeggios, e.g. go up with the scale and descend with the arpeggio, and vice versa.

•Play a different scale when descending than ascending, e.g. C up, Db down, D up, Eb down.

•Practice scales in the context of music. Think of a title or some restriction and make a piece that uses that scale in all kinds of ways. Sample titles: A Red Bicycle. The Baboon Philosopher. Love Lost, 3 a.m. Ferris Wheel.

•Explore some less familiar types of scales: whole tone, blues, diminished, klezmer, pentatonic (major or minor).

3. Arpeggio Madness. Repeat the above with arpeggios.

4. Play with others. The most fun way to break up your routine and challenge yourself is to make up stuff with other musicians. Although my usual routine of teaching includes a lot of solos, etudes, and excerpts, my routine this fall is broken up by teaching my Improvisation for Classical Musicians class, which keeps me on my toes. I have a great class this fall and I’m looking forward to our (improvised) concerts. My playing this fall includes orchestral playing (Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, etc etc) and brass quintet (Iowa Brass Quintet), all of which I enjoy very much. But I also have had a delightful time with Cerberus, my improvising trio (horn, tuba, trumpet, and usually plus an extra player). We just did an out of town concert that was more fun than the proverbial barrel of monkeys. We invented the entire concert on the spot with the help of the audience, who provided information, inspiration, suggestions, and occasional help on stage conducting us and playing percussion (they even got up and danced on the last number). Cerberus is devoted to expanding the concert experience for both performer and audience in all kinds of ways, and thus far, both performer (us) and audiences have loved every minute of it. Our biggest problem is marketing – how do you describe something that hardly exists elsewhere? Cerberus will continue, but I am starting a new larger ensemble that will expand the concert experience even more. Can’t wait.

Shameless plug: If you’re interested in a multitudinous packed plethora of inimitable ideas for monkey wrenching your routine, you might have a look at my book, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians, GIA Publications. Watch out, though. You might find yourself having fun, and remember, music is serious, don’t let me catch you having any of this fun stuff.

Moving and Music Making

Lyle Sanford’s comment on the Imani Winds post has stirred enough thought that I will respond in a new post rather than in a comment to his comment.

On the group’s freedom of movement while music making as suggested by the photo: It’s possible that this is just a publicity photo and that they play some or most or all of their program with music stands – I don’t know, I haven’t seen them perform, but from listening to the audio clips there is no doubt of the freshness and vibrancy of their approach. Lyle, your last sentence is one that I may put in needlepoint. As classical musicians, we are trained to suppress physicality; sit there and play. Perfection is the prime virtue, small movements are tolerated (but not as far as tapping a toe). The prescribed appeal is Apollonian, not Dionysian. Humor or a light-hearted approach is suspect, and movement beyond the minimum is too close to dance and thus suspect and low status as well. Classical music for the past 150 years or so (we could all improvise before that) is based exclusively on literacy – instruments do not make sound when not in the presence of ink, and ink is all, no deviation from the printed page. English comes with a built-in confusion: we say “I have the music” when we mean “I have the printed notes”. German is better in this respect: they say die Noten for the sheet music and die Musik for the sounds we hear. Classical music has become largely a visual experience for the performer (our focus is on the printed page rather than on the aural component, which is a disadvantage especially in the process of learning a piece) and a nonvisual one for the audience (the performer/ensemble sit there, seemingly motionless, wearing uniforms without any color [black concert dress]). Of course, there are many who would say, I come to the concert to hear the music, not be distracted by color or movement. But that doesn’t seem to apply to any other kind of music where performers dress up and move around the stage and make use of lighting (the use of lighting in setting a mood is a hugely unused possibility in classical performances – imagine dance or theater without it). We’ve got our ways and we’re stickin’ to ‘em. (the current concept of classical concerts is, in fact, a relatively recent invention – programs and decorum used to be very different not so long ago – but that’s for another day, another post or twelve). I don’t think we’re going away from the page for big ensembles, but for chamber music, perhaps there are ways to find a new balance between Apollo and Dionysus (another post…).

But then everyone once in a while a group comes along who step gracefully outside the box and wow us with their new mix of moxie, imagination, gumption, grit, and gusto – and alleluia for that. The Imani Winds seem to be one of these. It takes a long line of such pioneers and a fair amount of time for the new concepts to trickle down and work their way into standard practices. In the meantime, we can enjoy the performance of this group and others like them and perhaps think in odd moments what we can learn from them and enrich our own musical lives with in the days to come.

Something Different I

If you’ve read any of my stuff over the years, you know that I’m a fan of ideas. If a path less taken presents itself, what the heck, let’s see what’s there. Part of that is no doubt due to certain indelible twists of my DNA, part of it is having done a whole lot of taking beaten paths for a long time and yearning for something different. Blogs are written by people who have their antennae out and are combing daily life (external, internal, electronic) for piquant bits of Different. I will visit and revisit this thread from time to time here (although at some point I want to make a whole new blog out of it, devoted to nothing but).

Next week an ensemble is coming to town (Iowa City) that is a group after my own heart: the Imani Winds have a unique and captivating vision of what a woodwind quintet can be and can do. It reminded me of when I was asked to join a woodwind quintet in the early 90’s with other members of the Lucerne Symphony. I said, sure, if we don’t do any standard repertoire. I had done plenty of that and wanted to do something different for a change. Thus, the Wildwind Quintet was born, and it was a great romp until I left the orchestra and the country. It also spurred me to do some WWQ compositions that have found favor with audiences: Circus Etudes and Carib Dance (soon to be published by Veritas Musica). The Imani Winds are terrific breath of fresh air, going by the audio clips of their performances and by the bios and statements about the group. Classical music has its treasures of the past, but for the future, it very much needs new ideas and visions from creative musicians like those of the Imani Winds.