As time for the Colleague Exam slowly ticks away (5 months to go!), I've noticed one area that could use some work, personally.
Rhythm.
Oh, I know how rhythm works and I know how to count. I chastise the choir for singing quarter note triplets as a pair of dotted eighths followed by an eighth. I know how to judge rhythm just fine... unless it's me that is playing it.
When I was younger and strictly playing the piano as a casual hobby, I sight-read through all the books of music that I owned, and if the piece was too difficult to play all the notes correctly on the first try, then I would fake it as best as I could. I learned early that one shouldn't stop every time you make a mistake (Please don't take that as an endorsement; when you are practicing, YOU MUST STOP when you make a mistake so that you may correct it. If you make the same mistake twice then you've already built a habit, a habit as bad as parenthetical interruptions. It took me a long time to learn how to practice.) so I made sure to keep going no matter what happened. Despite my playing bearing only a superficial resemblance to what was on the page, in my mind it was much closer. It was always exciting to take this music that you had only heard and to actually produce it yourself. It's a kind of beautiful delusion.
As I've gotten older and take things a bit more seriously, I endeavor to make sure my mental conception of the music matches the actual realization of that impression. Since the organ I play on has a handy MIDI recording feature, I use it occasionally to listen to myself to help me with balancing my registrations since the console is in a terrible place for judging volume or balance.
So anyway, last week I recorded some of the hymns for the upcoming weekend celebration and was shocked to hear an apparent lack of a steady beat to my congregational playing. A steady beat is a fundamental requirement for all music, and I wasn't convinced that the organist I was listening to understood that. I was instantly embarrassed and so downloaded a couple of metronomes onto my phone and am incorporating metronome practice into my daily routine.
I think my beat has slipped lately indirectly because of my daily habit of reading open score C clef repertoire: Bach 4 part chorales, Frescobaldi's Fiori Musicali, and Bach's Art of Fugue. I'm treating them as exercises in sight-reading and am not carefully studying them as repertoire, so I end up playing through a set number of them everyday. I see in retrospect that I've not been maintaining a steady tempo the whole time, rather concerning myself instead with the task of reading the notes on the 4 different clefs and devising how they will lay under the fingers while I read. My tempo is affected by the independence and density of the scores. This lack of a steady rhythm has made its way into my other repertoire and I'm now using the metronome to correct this.
I've been often surprised as well at how a tempo that seems correct while I'm playing it sounds most often too fast when I listen to it on a recording. To help with this, before I play something, I try to hear it in my head at the proper listening tempo, then I tap that beat into the metronome (nice little feature), and then I follow the metronome through my practice of the piece. I'm often surprised at the disparity between my mentally conceived tempo and the physical sensation of playing it at that speed.
There are many mental illusions that can be swept out of the way by the use of the metronome, as long as you remember that the metronome is only a tool for achieving this basic beat and ensuring the proper proportions between all the different rhythms in the piece. As soon as this surety of rhythm has been achieved, the metronome should be discarded so that the piece can breathe. Now we can incorporate breathing room at the ends of phrases, expressive and logical tempo changes to reflect the flow of the music, and rubato when permissible.
As we work on more high level tasks, don't neglect the basics. Keep checking those fundamentals!
Posing an unsolved question as a title reflects negatively on a blog that should be devoted to answering questions, but as it leads directly to the subject of discussion we'll permit it this time...
What is the opposite of Analysis?
Maybe we can discover the opposite if we know what analysis is, first off:
Analysis - detailed examination of the elements or structure of something.
the process of separating something into its constituent elements.
Coming from old greek roots meaning loosening up, we take analysis to be the 'taking apart' of something so that we may examine how its constituent elements work, alone and together. This is what we do in school, working with our music theory and harmonic analyses. What we failed to do in school, however, was to rigorously do the opposite and put it back together into a cohesive whole. I hate to indulge in analogies (though I secretly love them), but we might be temped to think of musicians as medical students, learning about anatomy and physiology through dissection of other, until recently, living things.
The Fourth Species of Counterpoint concerns ligatures (suspensions). I'm not sure what species concerns gizzards...
The analogy breaks down, of course, because we as musicians don't just dissect, but create our own life in music. You will 'not learn little' from cutting into Frescobaldi's Bergamasca to see how it works, but you learn even more through copying it, and then imitating it: creating your own Bergamasca in his style.
This is how all great musicians get their start: analysis, copying, imitation, creation. And that is what I wanted to talk about today, the creative phase of work.
Creativity is a tricky subject, but there a few small things to be said about it. First, no creation comes from nothing. Your taste in music has evolved from a lifetime of experience, and that lifetime of experience shapes the music that you in turn create. Glenn Gould pondered this role of experience with a hypothetical scenario in which children are raised in an environment that has no tonal music whatsoever and is instead filled with only serialistic tone rows and atonal tunes (Hindemith says there's no such thing as 'atonal' music but we'll accept the term for tradition's sake). Here's some Schoenberg as an example:
Gould theorized that children raised in such an environment wouldn't have the instant distrust and confusion this music evokes among those uninitiated in its rules and structures, but would rather sing all their nursery rhymes in tone rows rather than diatonic scales. I personally believe that the story is a little more complicated but we can accept on a simplified view that Gould is correct; we like what we know, and we know what is around us everyday.
When we try to create something, we utilize the elements and techniques that surround us. This may be why we're seeing so many 3D street chalk tableaus and photorealistic paintings on the Facebook. These techniques may be 'jaw-dropping' and they may 'blow you away' the first time you see them, but being surrounded by them every day destroys their novelty and they become merely tools for artistic expression. This is as it should be. Novelty alone is not originality, or else the greatest composers and artists would be those who did the silliest things with their materials.
Who did what with the what, now? --Jackson Pollock
True, often art's value is influenced by its story; that's why a scribble by an elephant or a Chopin Etude played by a 6 year old garner attention, but let's not get sidetracked with caveats, exceptions, and redundancies. I have a book... which I can't find, that describes the differences between originality and invention much better than I can so I won't attempt to do so here. We can continue the conversation with the fact that creativity is not the true act of creation that intuition tells us it is; it is rather the synthesizing of what we already know into something new, or unique.
All of this preamble was meant to mention this point: the practical application of creativity. Say you want to create a piece of music. Since we're all organists, we have two ways to do it:
1. Compose a piece on paper, working at the desk.
2. Improvise a piece at the keyboard.
Each approach has its own virtues, but require a common approach to the work that is the opposite of analysis. Let's take a simple example:
You are given a chorale melody and you seek to harmonize it in four voices. The way we were taught to do it in our first Music Theory course was to:
Analyze each note in turn, writing down all of the possible chords that could harmonize that note.
Examine the what is likely 50 or so chords that you've written down and draw lines connecting from one chord to the next so that it forms a reasonable harmonic progression.
Using this progression, write in a complementary bass line that fits the chosen chords.
Now just fill in the inner voices making sure to avoid parallel or hidden octaves and fifths.
Voila! Hand it in to your professor.
This rigorous process assures you of success!
An academic success.
A success of limited value.
Ok, it's technically correct but will likely be lacking in the musicality department.
Which one of these expressions defines your success?
We could take a similar approach to harmonizing at the keyboard to ensure a probably technical success as well, by either writing in a similar analysis under the notes, or practicing each stage in turn if we have the time. Our results will be similarly successful and similarly lacking in living musicality.
Now, I'm not one who believes in a certain undefinable something, what the French call a certain I don't know what. Je ne sais pas exactly how all of the minutiae would appear in list form, but I do know that all these musical elements are real and can be accessed through the proper approach. The failing of the above approaches is that it treats the act of creation like it does analysis. Treat each element separately, in turn, moving from one note to the other, filling in blanks as we go. My experience at the keyboard and in reading tells me that this is the wrong approach. That's why I want to know what the perfect antonym of analysis is. Synthesis? Simultaneity? A bit of both?
In either case, the correct process is to, as much as possible, perform the many smaller tasks of creation simultaneously, rather than one at a time. If you are studying counterpoint, most books continually remind you to try to imagine the entirety of the counterpoint to be set against the cantus firmus before touching pen to paper. Never proceed one note or one voice at a time.
Contrapunctus V (excerpt) from Die Kunst der Fuge by J.S. Bach
Bach wrote many fugues over his lifetime, and when you study some of them, you come to realize that he couldn't have composed them one voice at a time. So great is their textural and structural unity, the multiple voices could only have come to exist simultaneously. This is one of the secrets to great music making:
Though we study music through taking it apart and examining each element and melody on its own merits, we cannot create good music through the separate creation of each element and melody on its own. They must be created, as much as possible, simultaneously.
Knowing this gives us further guidance in our studies. Practicing our harmonization skills, we know that there are several things that need to be done, such as creating a complementary bass line, choosing good harmonies to create a coherent and intelligible progression from the beginning of the phrase to the end, and perhaps using knowledge of ornamentation to add to the original melody. We can practice each of these on their own, but our training is incomplete unless we acquire the skill to do all of these simultaneously.
Marcel Dupre's first volume of his treatise on the Art of Improvisation provides practical exercises with harmonizing scales in various dispositions but I never really understood why they were there or exactly what we were practicing. I see now that the first exercise was to grow comfortable with the modest task of harmonizing a scale in the soprano voice with set harmonies. The question of the bass line was dispensed with at this stage to give the player a minimum of tasks to perform simultaneously. The next exercise uses inversions of the triad to allow the player to create a well-shaped bass line moving in contrary motion to the soprano scale. The next, harmonizing the scale in the pedals, the role of the soprano now is to act as a countermelody, moving in contrary motion to that of the bass; now the roles are flipped. The next exercise, harmonizing the scale in the tenor, adds another complication, like building a watch. In addition to fitting harmony to each note of the scale and creating a complementary bass line, we now consider the soprano as a sort of rudimentary countermelody to the tenor.
After these, we begin harmonizing short phrases, using our own discriminating taste to pick our harmonies and how to move from one to the other. Following this, we harmonize complete 'chorales' which involve some small modulations (or tonicizations, technically) and some differing cadences, giving us more problems to solve simultaneously with those we already know.
Gerre Hancock steers us in a similar direction in a larger scale in his method of studying musical forms, using written outlines. We start with a musical outline of the entire form writing in all the important moments and leaving most of it blank with some basic directions of which key we will proceed to and what techniques will be used. We practice first writing in the blank spots and performing our written work. Then we practice further by leaving the spots blank and practicing those spots at the keyboard, arriving at a satisfactory passage of music. Over time, we discard the musical outline in favor of an outline that has no musical notation, but rather just a verbal plan for the improvisation. Over time, even this outline is discarded as we grow accustomed to handling all of these details entirely mentally.
Over enough time, and careful study and practice, we can see the entire scope of a composition or improvisation at a glance of creativity. The only thing remaining then is to fill in the details, either on paper, or at the keyboard. What a wonderful tool to have, this spontaneous, simultaneous, synthesis.
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