Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-05-22 19:34
So, here's the 'best' bit:-)
Whatever level of support you're playing with, it's the relationship between the action of your diaphragm and the action of your abdominals that determines what the airstream does.
So, suppose you keep the action of your abdominals constant. (That's easy to do, because you can *feel* them.) Then, as you play, the action of your diaphragm determines what the airstream does.
But, of course, you can't *feel* your diaphragm. So what happens to the airstream, and hence to your sound, seems to happen without your doing ANYTHING.
Let's choose a rather simple example of that to begin with. I call this 'the magic diminuendo'.
If you play a loud note with medium support (your abdominals are significantly flexed); then you will find that you can, without altering the flexion of your abdominals, do a diminuendo *to nothing*.
It's as though nothing in your experience alters as you do the diminuendo (hence the 'magic' in the description). Of course, that's because what's 'doing' the diminuendo is your diaphragm, *which you can't feel*. It resists your abdominals progressively, until it matches their force, at which point you get silence.
I'll never forget discovering this for myself during a lesson I was giving. (Nobody had told me about it.) I'd used the technique before in my playing, but I'd never represented it to myself in this simple way.
It meant that I could throw away a lot of what I'd thought I had to do. Now, in order to do a diminuendo, I realised I had to do...nothing!! I continued to blow, and the diminuendo happened by itself.
But though this simple example is pretty convincing in itself, you'll very soon see that the general idea gives you much greater freedom and flexibility. Play, for example, the opening of Brahms's second sonata, using support, and without changing what your abdominals are doing.
The phrases seem to shape themselves without any action on your part.
It is as though to imagine the phrasing *is* to do it.
Later,
Tony
|
|
Keepers
