On 19 Jul 2005 at 11:21, Chuck Israels wrote: > To carry this a little further, even visual cues can (not always, of > course - sometimes they are necessary) interfere with the deepest > levels of listening, partly because our eyes are our dominant sense > and can get in the way of our hearing. In my first rehearsal with > Bill Evans (October, 1961) I remember asking him to move his head for > a rubato ending. I had been used to that kind of thing from my > background playing cello in string quartets as a teenager. Bill > said, "Just listen, you'll hear it." He was right, and I don't think > there was a moment of uncoordinated rubato for the next six years. > He didn't move a muscle he didn't need for playing the piano (another > interesting idea), and I always understood where his tempo changes > were going. They were rational and incremental in ways that were > unmistakable to my ear, and I never felt the need to watch for > anything in the music, only to listen well.
Why is it that with certain people, I never have any doubts about what they want to do with phrasing and tempo, without even looking at them, while with others, I never have a clue? I think it's related to something I've learned over the last year or so doing lots of coaching of recitative with singers. Singers who don't know how to sing recitative fall into two camps: 1. those who religiously reproduce the exact notated rhythm (which is wrong), AND 2. those who rush through everything and have basically no rhythm at all. The ideal is something in between, where the rhythmic flow is controlled by the rhythm of the text, but teaching this is very hard. It seems that you should be able to have the singers speak the recit. and then they'd be able to sing it, but it never works out that way -- when singing they just don't do the proper preparations and emphases that they do naturally, without thinking, when speaking. It's the same with ornamentation. I'm in rehearsal with a group trying to build repertory for next year's concert season, and one of the singers is always unclear about where she's beginning her trills. Some of them *must* happen after the beat, and I can never hear where her beat falls. With gifted singers, this is never an issue -- they "sing" the beat even when it's just the end of a note sustained from the previous beat. The problem with somebody nodding their head to control ensemble is that they can't do what the conductor does, which is to *anticipate* what is coming up. If a conductor wants an accent on beat 3, the stick gives it on beat 2. By the time beat 3 comes around, it's too late, and that's why the head nodding never quite works in ensemble performance, unless the person doing it has conducting instincts. It's tempting to suggest that this is one of those things that distinguishes good musicians from bad, but I'm convinced it's something that can be learned, as I've seen plenty of musicians who are inexperienced with chamber music and *can't* do it eventually (sometimes very quickly) picking up the skills and becoming excellent ensemble players. Of course, it could be that they had the talent and had just never used it, so that it comes down to the same thing, but I hate to condemn certain musicians to the outer wastelands on the grounds that they will just never get it. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
