Klarinet Archive - Posting 000217.txt from 2005/06

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Bounced babies
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 08:02:44 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:

> Judging by those I've talked to about it, absolutely it isn't. Indeed,
> one conductor I know maintains that without it, a player is useless,
> and that whilst he can help someone who has difficulty with complex
> rhythms, he can do nothing with someone who has a deficient sense of
> pulse.

This is true of dancers too. A friend in London is a composer who works
regularly with dance. One work of hers is an hour-long piece where the
music consists of very sparse bursts of samples (of a metronome, and a
white-noise sample). There are huge periods of silence, and stillness
on the part of the dancers. Nevertheless the dance and the music are
synchronized down to the second. :-)

> I did a bit more introspection:-) and came to the conclusion that
> there is an auditory component to my internal pulse, too. So, it's a
> mixture of kinaesthetic, visual and auditory components, and a mixture
> that seems to be spread out over a short time duration, with a sort of
> centre of gravity in the middle that determines a precise instant.
> Importantly, I feel, it isn't at all associated with any bodily movement.

But it can be *affected* by bodily movement, no? I mean, I'm willing to
bet that there are certain movements you don't make when you play
because they would disturb this sense. And in the case of difficulty
with complex rhythms it wouldn't surprise me if part of that difficulty
has something to do with the discrepancy between the physical movement
being required. For example, if you're doing seven crotchets in the
space of 4, in practise your fingers are going at one pulse while your
internal sense is going at another.

Then there are other things. We've all had the experience of trying to
play a passage up to tempo and finding our fingers haven't got the hang
of it yet (this happens often to people like me who combine technical
deficiency with a lot of impatience:-). The moment you hit the
difficult passage, often the sense of pulse goes out the window---the
speed at which your fingers are trying to move takes over your mind. Of
course, usually you *realize* you've lost the plot, but it's
nevertheless true that there are lots of stimuli which disturb the
internal pulse. I would imagine that a lot of the development of this
sense consists of being able to keep the pulse going *even in the
presence of these sorts of disturbance*.

So, maybe a good way to try developing the inner pulse would be along
the lines of the sort of thing they do in the BBC quiz show "I'm Sorry,
I Haven't Got a Clue", which consists of the contestant starting to sing
along with some music, then the music vanishes, and then it comes back
in later---and they get points if they are still in time. Imagine
setting up something like that with silences initially short, then
getting longer and longer, and maybe beginning to include long rests for
the player *during the period of silence*---you dig?

Then you might build in extra disturbances so as to try to train the
player to be able to filter out the kind of distractions that can occur
during performance....

-- Joe

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