On 19 May 2011 14:03, Milton Kicklighter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Daniel, > > Well the best advice you have been given is to not worry about the > afterbeats. > I think you will find that when the melody is going, it will be much easier > to > make them fit, and as Hans said, if you leave out a few it won't matter. > > Precisely so. There is nothing at all wrong with a bit of honest cheating! I recall an incident from a few years ago, when the orchestra I was playing in was rehearsing the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony. There is a point at which everything stops except for the woodwind playing quavers on the first two quavers of each beat of a 6/8 bar. In rehearsal, they kept getting ahead, so that instead of playing on quavers 1 & 2, they ended up playing on 3 & 1. The flutes were clearly the worst offenders, so at the coffee break, I organised a quick impromptu sectional rehearsal just on that passage. First, I got them to play repeating the second quaver instead of having a quaver rest. Then when they got used to keeping time like that, I got them to replace the extra quaver with a loud and audible sniff, and only when they had that in time did I get them to play the part as written. By then, they had become sufficiently used to the speed and the relation of the first quaver to the beat that they stopped getting ahead. And there was still time for us to queue up for a coffee, which was by far the more important matter. In many amateur orchestras, rehearsals only exist to put something either side of a coffee break! :-) Regards Jonathan West _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
