As I've mentioned before, I am working on a project to make a video every day (when possible) for the rest of April 2011. I'm having a great time with it, and heartily encourage others to give it a try. Here's a link to my Youtube playlist for this project. I invite you to subscribe to my channel!
Here is my process:
Choose a piece (or related pieces), preferably something relatively simple and unfamiliar to me. They will very in difficulty but will need to be short enough to not require page turning, and should not have more than a few technical difficulties.
Record myself sightreading it.
Analyze the result; make note of any difficulties, determine interpretation.
Isolate technical issues and practice
Refine interpretation
Record again and post!
The audio will be somewhat close-mic'd (2-3 feet away) and will remain unprocessed.
The end result probably won't be perfect, but one thing I have learned from performing is that at some point you just have to let the music out into the world. The sooner and more often, the better.
I've just started, but here are some random things I have learned or been reminded of so far:
Recording yourself is good, especially with video, but doing it frequently is even better. The feedback you get is incredibly helpful.
Give yourself a deadline every now and then to help you focus. A recital, open mic, video recording, etc.
I need to pay more attention to my right hand fingerings. I'm surprised by how much I repeat fingers, although left to its own devices, my hand will start alternating once it becomes necessary to achieve the necessary speed.
Left-hand positioning is really important. I don't think there's one universally "perfect" position, but if you're making a shift (for example) make sure you land in a position that's advantageous for what you're about to play.
You can learn a lot about your playing by watching your face while you play.
Take a piece like Villa Lobos's Prelude #3, and compare several recordings of it to the score if you have it. There is a sort of "traditional" interpretation of this piece, in which performances tend to follow a similar (to each other) contour of dynamics and rubato, to the point where the rhythms you will hear no longer really resemble what the composer notated.
There's a similar sort of tradition with Sor's famous B minor study, Opus 35 #22. My copy of "Complete Sor Studies" has the tempo marked Allegretto. Every 19th century copy I've seen of the piece says Allegretto... Yet there seems to be a contest amongst performers to be give the slowest performance of it.
That study clearly works well when played slowly. Sor could have written "Andante" and no one would have thought differently of it. But he didn't. So does everyone who plays it slowly do it because they spent time with the piece and decided slow was best? Or was it because that's what they were used to? Maybe Segovia's edition has a slower tempo marking.
Prelude #3 works just fine when played with that particular pattern of rubato. But I was actually surprised when I read through it the first time, that some of the written rhythms were so different from what I was used to hearing and I can't help but think that if HVL would have written them differently if that was what he really wanted. We should at least consider that. Somehow I doubt that everyone that plays it that way studied the score, and chose to play it exactly that way because of the contents of the score.
We can get so accustomed to hearing a certain type of interpretation of a piece that when played strictly as written it sounds amazingly wrong. Don't be afraid to play something differently from how it's written, if that's what moves you, but consider whether you're making your own artistic choices or letting someone else do it for you.
We need to develop technique so we can communicate with our listeners. We often get caught up in what is cool, or difficult, or whatever, but that's not really worth much if it doesn't help us communicate.
We can work endlessly on scales, arpeggios, slurs, tremolo, etc, but that's just where technique starts. Real technique is attention to the details that make the music come alive. Virtuosity is mastery of the details of those details.
Listen to some great flamenco guitarists, and notice when they buzz notes. It's not random and it's not merely because of the setup of their guitars. It's integral to the feel of the music. You learn that by listening.
Listen to when a singer or flute player breathes, and the sound of the breath. That's part of the music.
As a fan and player of irish music, I can't tell you how obvious it is when I hear someone who thinks that all there is to the music is playing the notes. I could learn flamenco falsetas from a book but to a real flamenco afficionado it's just going to sound like a classical guitarist reading the notes. It has to have the right feel, and you learn that by listening.
When people say "music is in the space between the notes," they don't just mean the rests. They mean that the notes are one of many aspects of music, and they all require our attention.
But actually, doing what other people expect you to is what’s overrated. The external rewards for pursuing a dream may or may not arrive, but regardless, you should feel proud of doing so. The first steps are more important than the later ones, because they’ll provide inspiration and security for everything that comes later. Just keep walking!
Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.
I recently commented on Chris Davis's post "The missing ingredient no one likes to talk about" that of all the musicians I've known, we classical guitarists seem like the least likely to get out and perform. We also complain about lack of public interest, diminishing ticket sales, etc. I bet these things are related.
If you love classical guitar and you play classical guitar, you should get out there and perform.
Don't feel like it's not worth it if you can't sell out an auditorium. Don't feel like nobody will want to see you if you don't have a degree or haven't won a competition. Don't worry about trying to impress people.
Just have fun and do your best. You don't have to blow everyone's mind, just make someone smile.
After giving a house concert in Seattle a few weeks ago (big thanks to Rich for hosting!), once of the audience members said to me, "that Bach suite must have taken forever to learn."
I've written about my experience learning this suite (BWV 1009) in the past and I'd sum it up by saying that I've tried every memory and visualization trick in the book on it and I've never had so much trouble with memorization with a piece. It didn't go badly in performance, but I needed the music in front of me to feel confident that I could stay on track.
So I responded, "I feel like I'll still be learning it when I'm an old man. If I could start over again with it and do one thing differently, I would study it a lot more before trying to play it."
Sometimes it's tempting to get into practice mode before music is properly studied and learned. In this case, the piece superficially appears 'easy'; it's mostly one note at a time, fairly easy to read, somewhat (deceptively) formulaic, and because of my listening history, it's very familiar.
But I was tricked by that sense of familiarity into believing I had studied it enough. I clearly skipped head, because as time went on, I kept finding areas where I wanted to change my fingerings to get things across better.
That's sort of where the problems started showing up. Better fingerings are, well, better, but what happens when you change fingerings? If you've been practicing the old way for a while, you've now practiced two ways of doing it. How do you make sure you're going to do it the right way when it comes time to perform?
Thorough study at the beginning of the learning process, finding the best solutions and committing to them early on, seems like the best way to head this problem off at the pass.
There will be cases where you need to change a fingering, but you need an effective brainwashing strategy (please share!) or it may be better to make note of your new way but then leave it alone until you've had a chance to put the piece down for a while and look at afresh.
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PS: Speaking of making changes, my wife Angeline and I are moving to Tulsa over the next month or so. She leaves in mid-April, after which my life will get quite boring. So I'm planning to make a series of videos between then and the end of April or so, in which I work on a short piece for a day and then film&post it. My main focus will be on musicality, but I have a few other goals:
1) Learn to pull together pieces and interpretations more quickly
2) Produce a demo CD to send to senior centers and other gig venues
3) Watch my movements, facial expressions, etc, and learn what I can from them
4) Get more comfortable with recording.
I've posted the first video already, mainly as a technology test. I hope to achieve better quality video in the future, but that may not happen until I can afford a real video camera. I'm pleased with the quality of the audio, though. The description on the youtube page describes my setup.
My hope is that I'll enjoy this project, learn a lot from it, and want to keep it up in the long run.
I've been sick with flu and now bronchitis for more than a week now, and although I started writing my post for this week, I don't have the energy to give it all the thought it deserves. So here are some photos my wife Angeline took at our recent recital in Bellingham.
I read "Casals and the Art of Interpretation by David Blum around the time I started this blog and have been meaning to write about it ever since. It's a treasure-trove of wisdom about music, and also paints a lively picture of Pablo Casals, sprinkled with quotes and anecdotes that bring to life the character from which the wisdom springs.
Although a lot of musicianship can be broken down into guidelines to follow, it's the individual that makes them into music.
It's worth noting that Casals' views represent a particular school of thought that I think is not considered universal today. A lot of his recommendations go against what's said Anthony Glise's "Classical Guitar Pedagogy" book, to give an example of a book guitarists will run into which deals with interpretation. I'm not saying either is "the right way" of doing things.
Phrasing
One thing that is highlighted in the book is the importance of the phrasing of musical lines. This comes more naturally to singers and people who play monophonic instruments, but most guitar music involves multiple simultaneous lines and we need to shape those independently.
The typical (and rightly so) advice is to consider these lines individually and sing them out loud. Casals suggests that within each line, the sound should get louder as the notes ascend, and quieter as they descend. This probably doesn't mean that phrases should usually have a wide range of dynamics, but that they sing out in a natural way.
The downside with guitar music as it is printed is that more often than not, we are not given phrasing slurs and in the clutter of fitting multiple voices on one staff, the phrasing can often appear ambiguous. I used to naively assume that they would follow the bar lines and consequently ended up with music that sounded very flat and dull. Then I learned that phrases often begin before the bar line, and are often longer than a bar.
The best ways to deal with this is to work on your music with an experienced teacher and to listen to a variety of high-level performers playing music and follow along in the score. It doesn't have to be (and shouldn't always be) guitar music. If you're interested in Casals, for example, you could listen to him on archive.org and you can probably find the scores on imslp.org.
