Fundamentals Check: Time!

Time!

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!