 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Lala
Date: 2004-02-02 18:18
I've been working on the Brahms Sonata No 2 and am struggling with the phrasing/rubato. I have several recordings of the piece and have been listening to other Brahms pieces as well to see if I can get a more general sense of the style, but it's apparently, not sinking in. My teacher tells me that I have a beautiful, full sound and I sometimes wonder if because of my sound, he expects more of me than I'm actually capable of delivering.
To give you some sense of level; I was a strong player in HS and have returned to playing after a 20+ year layoff. I've been studying privately for 1 1/2, fairly intense years. During my lessons, my teacher often compares my issues to those he experienced during his undergrad days and believe he considers me to be an early advanced student. The last piece I played was Premiere Rhapsodie, which posed different challenges than the Brahms, but my teacher and I were ultimately pleased with how I handled it. The Brahms, is somehow more difficult, maybe because of it's simplicity.
Anyway, back to the original question - any thoughts on how to go about learning phrasing? My teacher thinks that I am beyond the point where he should be telling me "put a crescendo here" and such. He'll ask me to look at a phrase and analyze where it's going. Once I determine "where it's going" I still don't seem to be able to convey that feeling when I play the phrase. Could this piece just be beyond my ability at this point or am I just missing something basic here? Thanks for any thoughts on this.
Lala
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2004-02-02 20:00
Lala -
As you have found, you can't simply "do something" with a phrase. You have to have a reason -- usually because the harmony changes. You listen to the pianist, particularly the left hand, to hear how the harmony moves, and shape your phrases to match. The harmony is like your skeleton. The bones determine the shape of everything else.
One of the ways I work on understanding harmony and structure is to listen to a recording while reading what I don't play -- in this case, the piano part. In the Brahms Sonatas, the piano is as important as the clarinet, and you and the pianist are constantly repeating each other and tossing phrases (or parts of phrases) back and forth.
For this, and a lot of other things, see my posting on the solo in the Beethoven 8th, at http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Logs/2000/08/000671.txt , particularly the section called "Phrasing Is Based on Harmony."
You also have to think about tone color. It's no enough to have a good tone. You need many good tones. I posted a wonderful article about this by the great oboist Robert Bloom, called "Whip Up a Tone Palette" at http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=94788&t=94788 .
This gives you something to think about and work on, but once you learn to make many colors, you still have to decide which ones to use. Unfortunately, there's no guide (like the harmony) to doing this. You have to listen to the great players, with tone color in mind, to hear what they do.
Once you start thinking this way, listen to the great musicians to hear how they do it. A few of my favorites: John McCormack, Fritz Kreisler, Dinu Lipatti, Mabel Mercer, Louis Armstrong.
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-02-02 22:23
Listen closely to Frank Sinatra's singing of songs you're familiar with and notice how he phrases them. That will give you a clue, but in the end you have to "feel" the music.
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Author: Lala
Date: 2004-02-02 22:45
Ken,
That was a masterful summation of Beethoven 8; I wish I had the score!
Regarding the section on phrasing, I feel a little silly that I didn't make the harmony/phrasing connection on my own. My teacher keeps telling me how important the vi(? - don't have the music here at work) chord is in the first movement, but I just didn't know what to do with that information. Can't wait to get home and give this piece a listen with a new perspective. As for the tone palette discussion, I think my teacher may be telling me to do this as well, when he points out a change in "character". What a great article.
Even though I'm very focused on my weekly lessons, many times it feel like I'm learning to play "in a vacuum" - I'm not taking theory and music history like a typical student would be, in addition to lessons. Maybe I should be looking for a refresher theory class. Thanks very much for helping me to rethink how to approach this piece.
Lala
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2004-02-02 22:50
It's difficult to give you advice on this without actually hearing what you are doing. But here are a few thoughts...
Music is like speaking. IF-YOU-TALK-LIKE-THIS-NO-BO-DY-WILL-UN-DER-STAND! You have to put EMphasis on certain WORDS. You can also change the meaning, eg: you HAVE to put emphasis on CERTAIN words! Playing a musical phrase is exactly like this.
Music is like waves. Hardly anything in nature is a straight line. Every note should be coming or going somewhere, and you should hardly ever play a "square" note. There are various possibilties- you can make crescendos, diminuendos, swells, etc. Pay attention to how you start and end notes. Most often, in Brahms's music at least, you won't want to be starting or ending a note suddenly. Think about the way a string player would start a note when moving the bow across the string.
Phrasing can also be seen in different sizes. Lets call them mini-, medium-and maxi- phrases. Look at the first 8 bars of the sonata. You have 4 phrases: the first is two bars, followed by two one-bar phrases, and then a 4-bar phrase. 2-1-1-4 could be seen as the medium phrase concept. You could divide each of these phrases up even further. Take the first 2 bar phrase- if you put an accent on the first note of each bar (which is the most obvious, although not necessarily most interesting, way of playing it), you will have divided the first phrase into 2 mini-phrases. You could put words to it with the emphasis on these syllables- eg:
NOW I'm working on my PHRAS-ing!
You could divide it up even further, with more notes emphasised. But if you put too much emphasis on the high point of each mini-phrase, your phrasing becomes choppy. So pick one of the high points of the mini-phrases, and bring those out more than the other high points. This gives one or two high points for each medium phrase. Of course, it's up to you to decide upon these high points. One possibilty of this approach would be to place the main stresses on the the first notes of bars 2, 3, 4 and 5, and the middle of bar 8. This gives you 5 high points in the whole 8 bars. But then to make the whole 8 bar section a meaningful unit, you could grade each of these accents to give the 8 bars a shape- this would be maxi-phrasing. It's like you are creating one big wave, with a few smaller ripples within it. So you could put a medium emphasis on bar 2, a smaller one on bar 3, build up through a larger one on bar 4 and the climax of the whole 8 bars would be on bar 5. This coincides with the highest note of the section (B-flat). The last stress on the middle of the 8th bar rounds off the section nicely. But there are many other ways that you could play it that would also make sense. The main thing is to convey some sense of meaning and structure through your phrasing.
This sonata is really for 2 equal instruments, so follow Ken's suggestion and study the piano part too. Often the phrasing is dictated by the piano part, the harmony, and phrases are often swapped between the two instruments. For example- look at bar 11. There is a 4-note figure in the bass of the piano part. You also have a 4-note figure, the first of your 4 notes coinciding with the last of the piano figure. The combination of these two figures is actually the opening melody, just spilt between the two of you. So you and the pianist have to overlap these figures in order to create a meaningful phrase between the two parts.
There is no "right" or "wrong" phrasing. Experiment with as many phrasing possibilties as you can think of, and choose the ones that seem to work best for you. Have fun with it!
Post Edited (2004-02-02 22:55)
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2004-02-03 09:46
In his book on the clarinet, Jack Brymer discusses the first bars of the first Brahms sonata. Although Brymer's concern is as much with technique (which fingering is best for each note) as with phrasing, it's worth a read.
The other thing to say is not to over-analyse. You have to play the music, not the notes. If it sounds as if each note is being shaped individually, the effect will not be pleasant. To borrow Liquorice's analogy with speech, it will sound like someone declaiming a speech while hideously over-acting.
There's an interesting example of this problem, though on a larger scale, in the recording of Mahler 2 by the amateur conductor Gilbert Kaplan. The sleeve notes to the recording give a detailed section-by-section description of the music "now there's a loud bit with horns playing diminished sevenths" that sort of thing. The trouble is that the performance sounds as analysed as the sleeve notes. It sounds to me like each short section has been polished to be exactly as Kaplan likes it, but he has not thought about how the piece as a whole should hold together.
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-02-03 12:23
"Hardly anything in nature is a straight line." Maybe nothing.
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Author: elmo lewis
Date: 2004-02-03 20:39
Your teacher should be teaching you how to analyze a phrase, how to find the climax of the phrase, how to find the melodic line that leads to the climax, how and when to use rubato, etc. Why don't you ask him some direct questions on these topics. Of course he shouldn't be writing crescs.and decrescs. under every phrase-once you understand a little about phrase structure you'll be able to do it yourself.
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