Klarinet Archive - Posting 000849.txt from 2000/08

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Phrasing With the Harmony
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 16:17:52 -0400

On Sat, 26 Aug 2000 07:20:23 EDT, MVinquist@-----.com said:

> In my defense, it seems to me that phrasing in accordance with harmony
> has to come first and is 90% of the job. You can't phrase against the
> harmony unless you know what the harmony is in the first place. You
> can't be "free" in a vacuum, but have to be free *from* something you
> know, and as a considered, informed decision. I would insist that a
> student learn to hear and phrase with the harmony before going on to
> what are to me even more advanced ideas.
>
> It's the same principle as requiring a student to learn scales and be
> able to play a passage perfectly evenly, so that
>
> grow out of and part of the line - but have to separate
>
> Bernie
>
> will be in The C.

:-)

I always find this particular question an interesting one. Of course, I
know that harmony is an important structure, and I understand that
someone who is unaware of the harmony will be unable to achieve the sort
of balance necessary between metre, phrasing and harmony.

But I question whether that awareness needs to be as explicit as you
seem to imply.

I think it's instructive to look for a moment at the analogy that you
began making between the necessity to be able to phrase with the
harmony, and the necessity to be able to play perfectly evenly on the
instrument.

In fact, I don't require my students to be able to play scales perfectly
evenly any more. Instead, I encourage them to play scales -- if they
want or need to play scales, that is -- in various groupings; so that
different notes are important, and shown to be important, in different
versions of the scale. And it's not even that -- it's that the scales
are modulated in different groupings so that the shape of each
individual grouping is evident. That's more subtle than simply picking
out the beginning note of each group.

A simple version of that might be,(CDE)(DEF)(EFG)(FGA) etc, and then
(CDEF)(DEFG)(EFGA)(FGAB) etc, and so on.

I don't claim that this is original, or anything. It's just that
students are learning to play *unevenly*, but in clearly defined ways.

And further, rather than concentrating on scales mostly at all, I like
to have them pick out passages in pieces of music that they feel (or I
feel -- but better, that they feel) aren't working well, and then have
them create their own exercises based on that; exercises that go both
with and against the groupings that the music requires. There's an
example of such an exercise in my chapter in the Cambridge Companion to
the Clarinet.

OK, so what has that got to do with whether playing evenly is a musical
requirement, or with whether phrasing with the harmony is a necessary
ability?

The answer I think is that music is both simple and complex for humans,
just as speech is both simple and complex for humans. And when we learn
to speak, we learn what we have to do in its full simplicity/complexity.
We don't simplify the task by concentrating on the individual details of
speech, even if we do use simple sentences.

As adults, we don't ask children to master saying 'a' before they say
'e', and be able to perform both things in isolation before going on to
the more difficult task of combining them. We don't ask them to speak
in a monotone before going on to master dynamic or registral modulation.

What actually happens is that they learn to *imitate* what we do;
against a background, we now know, of an innate ability to do exactly
that sort of imitation.

So there's a lot to be said, in my view, for the very ancient trick of
having people play instruments the way they *sing* -- and singing
includes words, which have their own stress patterns that may or may not
coincide with the harmony. And by the way, I'm talking about *proper*
singing; that is, of songs, not operatic crap.

So I think that to begin with, we should *sing* to them, or have their
mothers or grandmothers sing to them; and then, we should encourage them
to play the way they sing, in its full complexity. The exercises I'm
talking about are designed to give them the ability to do that sort of
thing from the start, on the instrument.

Wojja think?

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... If this were an actual tagline, would it be funny?

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