More thoughts on Effortless Mastery

Life has been busy recently, unfortunately full of real-world work, and not a whole lot of time for music. As I often do in these times, I'm still practicing guitar regularly but focusing on one just thing. This time, it is effortlessness.

It took me a really long time to figure out that the way to play effortlessly is not to struggle with material until it becomes easy and effortless. To date, that method has never worked for me.

The message of Kenny Werner's excellent "Effortless Mastery" book basically boils down to this:

• To play effortlessly, you have to play effortlessly now.
• You play effortlessly now by playing only what you can play effortlessly now.
• To play new things effortlessly, you have to work on them as slowly and/or gradually as necessary to keep the effortless feeling. Develop the comfort zone gradually. 
• Play the material fast sometimes, too, but keep the effortless feeling and completely ignore mistakes. You can work them out in the slow practice; the fast practice is to get used to the feeling of playing fast. 

So what is effortlessness? 

I used to think it was a physical feeling, but that's just part of it. Keeping a quiet mind is just as important. With the mind quiet and even detached from the physical side of playing, it becomes much easier to listen to what you're doing and develop a listening-based method of playing rather than a physical activity-based method of playing.

It's important to learn the feeling of effortlessness as early on as you can, whether you're working on difficult music, scales, basic finger mechanics, or even just sitting silently with the guitar.

A film about Leo Brouwer

Youtube user elduendecillo07 uploaded this fascinating documentary on Leo Brouwer. I've created a playlist that should play them all in order. There's a lot discussion of style and ideas, plus many clips of him playing his own music and others'. 


Not everyone loves Brouwer's music, but to me he is one of the greatest composers of our era for any instrument. I got hooked on classical guitar when I first heard a classmate play Brouwer's Etude #1. I come back to his Estudios Sencillos once or twice a year, always trying to play them better and discover more in them. 

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 4

The final performer at the William Kanengiser masterclass I've been writing about played the fourth movement of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Homage to Boccherini. Kanengiser offered some thoughts particular to Tedesco's writing. It's often said that the guitar should be treated like a miniature orchestra, because of the wealth of tone colors it offers us, and that idea is especially applicable to a composer like Tedesco who was very much an orchestral composer. He was also very particular about how he used dynamics and articulations.

The rest of the feedback given to this performer was of a technical nature, so I'm going to conclude this series of posts by gathering together all the technical and miscellaneous suggestions that were offered during the masterclass.

• Kanengiser reiterated throughout the class the importance of pulling the notes out of the guitar, moving the strings rather than hitting them. This is really the key to getting a good, consistent tone and needs to be at the core of our technique so that even in the fastest playing where you can't be thinking about control, you can rely on your fingers to activate the strings effectively. Move the strings in towards you before releasing them.
• The open high E string needs to always be played warmly and fully, to keep the tone balanced with the other strings. Do whatever you can to avoid harshness/excessive brightness.
• When performing vibrato, move from the shoulder and use the forearm as a pivot point. Don't just wiggle or shake the hand, but get the larger muscles involved.
• Practice maintaining the clarity and continuity of a single voice when changing strings. This is difficult on guitar, but really important to musical playing. 
• You can be flexible with the right and left hand positions in order to solve technical problems. The two examples I recall Kanengiser giving were related to damping. We often hear that the last phalanx of the left hand fingers should be positioned perpendicular to the plane of the fingerboard so as to only touch one string at a time, but when playing a descending scale in open position, dropping the hand a bit so the pads of the fingertips touch the adjacent string allows us to easily damp the open strings we've played so they don't keep ringing inappropriately. Likewise, we can roll the right hand thumb one way or another to damp a bass string while it is resting on an adjacent one in preparation.
• Sometimes it's necessary to simplify the music in order to discover its true shape. For example, when the melody is part of a series of arpeggios, leave out the arpeggios for a while and work on the melody on its own.
• When considering the shape of a line, figure out which notes are "juicy" and which are transitions. It's important for us to understand where the notes fit in the harmony and relation to the beat. Guitarists are infamous for arbitrary and inappropriate accents. 

This concludes my series of posts from that masterclass. Thanks for reading! If you've found this information to be helpful or you've otherwise enjoyed reading it, be sure to check out William Kanengiser's CDs, DVDs, and performances. 

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 3

Continuing on from my notes from a masterclass given by William Kanengiser in San Jose, back in 2007 or 2008.

The next student played the Prelude from Bach's Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro BWV 998. Some of Kanengiser's comments reiterate ones I have already mentioned, but I will include them again.

• Dynamics are important, but be careful how you use them. Think like a storyteller. When you want to change dynamics, you can't lose the thread of the story. 
• Bach's music is often ambiguous about whether it's one voice or multiple voices. The 998 prelude is a good example, as are the cello suites (as written for cello). You should get familiar with the implied lines as well as the literal ones, for cues to the overall shape of the piece.
• Take cues for dynamics from the harmony.
• The bass accents should follow the pulse of the rhythm. It's important to convey the rhythm in the bass as well as the upper voices. Don't be lazy about any voice. 
• The phrasing of pieces is influenced by harmonic modulations. This is especially true in Bach, as it modulates so much. Get to know the harmony!

The penultimate performer also played Bach, the Gavottes from Cello suite no. 5. Feedback focused on structure and phrasing:

• Ritards in music are like punctuation in writing. Phrases are like sentences. Pieces in a suite are like chapters in a book. Make it all fit together. 
• Breath - in suites, you need just the right amount of time to convey the separation but also the relations. The tempi need to feel related. 
• You need to feel sense of cut-time in gavottes.

My notes for the final performer are a little more lengthy so they will wait for now.

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 2

Continuing on from last week's post... Looking at the notes again, I was impressed by how much time William Kanengiser devoted to musical issues versus purely technical ones. I've decided to write this up in multiple parts, which will cover all the musical issues first and the final will cover technical and other miscellaneous ones.

The second performer played Guardame Las Vacas. Kanengiser mentioned that it was one of, if not the earliest written example of theme & variations. It's based on a popular theme of the time and I seem to remember him singing a bit of it, although that may be a confabulation on my part. You can hear a version by Alonso Mudarra for voice and (I think) baroque guitar played by Catherine King and Jacob Heringman here. It differs quite a bit from the familiar version by Narvaez, but I wanted to put in a plug for one of my favorite albums.

I have only two musical-issue related notes from this piece:

• The notes on top are supported by the rhythm underneath. Kanengiser has the student play it as alternating bars of 3+3 and 2+2+2 accents, found so frequently in spanish music. It helped the student give the piece a stronger sense of rhythmic structure and direction.
• Rhythmic energy is not necessarily the same thing as dynamic strength. I haven't recorded the context of this not but I assume the student at first put his previous suggestion into practice accenting the beats too forcefully but it is a great general observation. Often times a lighter beat can be more effective and appropriate as long as the beat is conveyed clearly.

The third student played Gavota-Choro by Heitor Villa-Lobos. IIRC, this student was a youngster, perhaps ten or eleven years old, who had broken his arm fairly recently and had just had the cast removed the day before. In spite of this, he only missed one day of practice. He was also playing a 3/4 size guitar and, frankly, had tone that most guitar students would be envious of. Needless to say, he was quite impressive, not to mention fearless. Of course, there was good feedback for him as well.

• Tone - volume is sometimes less important than richness. A full tone produced by playing somewhat over the soundhole and giving due attention to the quality of each of the voices in the music and the evenness/continuity of their dynamics will give a better overall impression of loudness and projection than attempting to play loudly but without the sense of evenness.
• Rallentando - Imagine the rhythm of the notes like a baseball card the spokes of a bicycle wheel as the wheel is slowing down gradually. 

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 1

I was looking through an old notebook this morning and found notes I took at a masterclass William Kanengiser gave in San Jose, CA two or three years ago as part of the Suzuki convention. My notes were hastily written and not terribly detailed, but I'll use them to jog my memory and fill in what I can regarding topics that are generally applicable. Apologies if I've misinterpreted my memory from that far back, but I'll do the best I can. :)

The first student played Sor's Rondeau, opus 48 number 6, and in response Kanengiser made several suggestions about phrasing:

• The shape of phrases follow the strength of the harmony. Harmonies are used for specific reasons, and especially so in classical period music like Sor's. There are some general rules, like when you have a dissonance resolving into a consonance, the (tense) dissonance should be louder than the consonance (release), but the deeper your understand of how this works, the easier it will be for you to give a mature interpretation of phrasing. This is all covered in depth on Chris Davis's website. 
• Tension, release, surprise - This is related to the above. Consonance moving to dissonance and back create tension and release it, but be on the look out for sudden and significant changes of harmony. Many pieces change keys to break up the tonality, and we might want to change our tone color or dynamics somewhat to reflect the change. Sometimes we are given an unexpected chord quite suddenly - this is meant to give a sense of surprise and we should play that up. 
• Crescendo - start soft enough to really get louder, to exaggerate the effect. Kanengiser suggested not just playing the section before the crescendo quieter, but dropping the volume at the beginning of a crescendo in order to give enough dynamic range to convey the effect and emphasize the new dynamic.
• When playing bass notes, think like a bass player. It's often said that we should work on the lines in the music we play individually to shape them the way we want. I think Kanengiser wants us to go a step farther. How would a bassist articulate the bassline? For that matter, if you consider the "guitar as miniature orchestra" idea and you have section of music that suggests a brass section, how would the brass section in an orchestra articulate that?
• After using rubato/decelerando, we need a strong sense of rhythm to pull us back into the pulse. 
• When making big leaps, think like a singer - it should have a sense of arrival, not a frantic grab for what we hope might be the right note. 

This is getting longer than I expected, so I will continue with it next week. 

Big thanks to the Longay school for sponsoring the masterclass, the participants, and of course Kanengiser himself, who is a thoroughly gracious and inspiring teacher. I had the opportunity to play in a masterclass for him a few years prior, but unfortunately for me I was very sick at the time and not able to focus very well nor remember much of the experience. 

Unforgiving

After doing some maintenance on my guitar this week, I put on a new set of strings, of a type I hadn't used before. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but they are much lower tension than I normally use on my guitar.

I strung it up, tuned to pitch, and played a few notes and was really blown away by how beautiful they sounded. All the warmth, fullness, and volume I've ever wanted in a string, yet so easy to play. 

Today has been kind of a crazy day for me, though, and after playing for a while I was really unhappy with my sound. At first I wanted to just swap them for something familiar, but I thought maybe I'd damaged my nails, so I redid them. As I tested them out, I could get that great tone again, but it went away when I started playing normally. Frustrating.

These strings are just totally unforgiving, and with any carelessness on my part the tone is unusably lousy. But with nails well-cared-for, solid contact with the string, and well-directed plucking motion, they reward me beautifully. That's how I want to sound all the time, and that's how I want to play all the time, regardless of the strings. 

I think it'll be worthwhile to leave them on for a while and focus on whatever I need to do to get that classic tone.