Klarinet Archive - Posting 000103.txt from 2002/08

From: "Denise Wilson" <dew@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Are you a mover & a shaker?
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 17:10:23 -0400

Barb wrote:
> 1. Do you find it distracting when you are at a concert when musicians
sway
> w/ the music?
> 2. Do you emote with the music and move as you play?
> I am asking because I tend to move as I play and I'm wondering if I should
> stop....if it's a distraction

I'll start with the second question first.

I do move when I play on stage, although for a while I did not. When I
started playing the clarinet, I moved while playing without being very aware
of that, and my undergrad professor stopped me from doing that soon after I
began studying with him. The reason, he said, was that all the emotion
should come from playing the music, and not from moving. This was
instructive for me since I was losing some of my expression in the moving,
and found I could indeed *play* more expressively when I focused my
expression that way. This was not to say that moving while playing is bad,
just that I needed to *redirect* my energy into the music instead of into
moving.

A few years later, after a quintet concert, some audience members said the
concert would be *more interesting* if we would move around a little bit
while we played! I then asked several other chamber musicians over a few
years about their opinions on moving, and all agreed *a little is good* for
communicating with the audience, even if you can communicate with the other
players without as much movement.

(But a word of warning: When you are recording, if microphones are placed
directly in front of each individual musician, moving while playing should
be avoided. I did this once, and it did not take long to find out just how
much a little movement in front of a mic can mess up the balance.)

To answer your first question, I have only really *noticed* musicians moving
during a concert a few times, so I guess my perception of distracting
movement depends on how silly the person looks. One was a pianist who
stomped, with the foot literally coming all the way off the floor, both on
the beat and not on the beat ... Another of these was a clarinetist who
flapped her arms like wings the entire time she was playing...

Denise Wilson

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