Teaching Musicality?

[Wes Krygsman]

Hey everyone,

Just trying to gain some new perspectives on musicality and phrasing etc, for my students and I. Notes, rhythms, and the physiological can be easy to teach and figure out yourself, but this "something extra" is intangible and very individual/personal so it's much more difficult. How do you do it? How do you explain it to a student?

Thanks Tubenet!

[Kory101]

Have the student listen to great singers.

Listening to Thomas Quasthoff changed not only the way I phrase, but also my concept of sound.

[peter birch]

surely thats the life long learning element of music, that never ceases to grow and develop once you learned all the notes and the techniques you need to pass the exams.

[Rick Denney]

Hey everyone,

Just trying to gain some new perspectives on musicality and phrasing etc, for my students and I. Notes, rhythms, and the physiological can be easy to teach and figure out yourself, but this "something extra" is intangible and very individual/personal so it's much more difficult. How do you do it? How do you explain it to a student?

Thanks Tubenet!

I don't think you can explain it. Those who teach writing require their students to read great literature as part of their study, and then write about what they read to see if they can observe what makes it special. That's what I would do--assign listening, including comparisons between different interpretations, and have them explain to you what they heard.

If more listening results in more astute observations, then keep doing it, basically forever. If the person can't be motivated to listen, the music is probably not in them.

Rick "who teaches a lot by use of examples, as critiqued by students" Denney

[Donn]

That's what I would do--assign listening, including comparisons between different interpretations,

for sure ...

and have them explain to you what they heard.

Here it gets kind of sticky - explaining musicality? Not saying this component of the exercise isn't worth pursuing, but it isn't obvious how.

[Mark]

In My Favorite Year, a very funny movie, Peter O'Toole's character proclaims: "I am not an actor, I am a movie star". So, are your students musicians or are they tuba players?

Learning piano, voice and other instruments in addition to tuba will help to learn musicianship. Also, listening to great musicians, some of which are also tuba players.

[imperialbari]

30 or more years ago I read a report on how Pablo Casals read the text of Bach's cello suites to find the inherent playing instructions even if there were no indications of phrasing and dynamics.

I don't remember the source and I cannot remember quotes, only the big picture. Casals looked for dynamic lines through the music and for points of tension and of release. He looked for the rhythmic and harmonic structures, where they coincided and where they clashed. Suspensions and appoggiaturas never could be points of relief.

Quantz in his book on flute playing gives an advise, which in my ears is extremely important for tuba players playing any kind of tonal music, unless the composer has given clear indications of the opposite: Never break a tonal cadenza by breathing.

That takes the ability to see and hear ii-V-I or more extended structures. Also the relative cadenzas through modulations. And the reversed cadenzas used at highlights through a piece of music, the simplest form being I-V.

Not all musicians will interprete the given structures similarly, but then the important thing is that there is an interpretation. Playing deliberately against the ‘facts’ also is an interpretation, even if it may not win the player much acclaim. Used with discretion it still may be a great effect.

Klaus

[Jay Bertolet]

30 or more years ago I read a report on how Pablo Casals read the text of Bach's cello suites to find the inherent playing instructions even if there were no indications of phrasing and dynamics.

I don't remember the source and I cannot remember quotes, only the big picture. Casals looked for dynamic lines through the music and for points of tension and of release. He looked for the rhythmic and harmonic structures, where they coincided and where they clashed. Suspensions and appoggiaturas never could be points of relief.

Quantz in his book on flute playing gives an advise, which in my ears is extremely important for tuba players playing any kind of tonal music, unless the composer has given clear indications of the opposite: Never break a tonal cadenza by breathing.

This is exactly what I teach. There are two concepts that have served me well in my time as an instructor. Most of my instructors would frequently say that musicality could not be taught, that it had to come from within the student. I never bought into that and my years of teaching helped me to refine an effective method to teach musicality. My two main concepts are:

1) As Casals did, look at the music like there is more on the page than just the notes. This requires some understanding of music theory, voice leading, chord progressions, and Schenker analysis chief among them. Crafting your interpretation to take advantage of the musical phrasing tools that you are given to work with in the piece makes your interpretation sound organic and larger in scale, more architectural in nature rather than focusing on the smaller elements and having issues making the piece sound unified.

2) Much like learning to improvise, you learn fastest by doing! I use the Rochut trombone etudes for this aspect of my lessons and that book is a wealth of opportunities to study and learn how to interpret a phrase and, ultimately, an entire piece of music. It requires great concentration and attention to detail but all the clues are right there in the music. There's very little else required. That said, as you get more familiar and comfortable with the phrasing technique, you begin to experiment more with much less obvious elements and suddenly you're doing some remarkable things. This is where your imagination comes into play and I suppose that is the one thing I don't teach. I've never had an issue with this part of it though, all of my students have/had at least some imagination and that was all it took.

It's a great journey, one that every musician should take. The satisfaction in performances alone is worth the price of admission.

[ken k]

Marcel Tabuteau (the Philadelphia Orchestra's legendary principal oboist, who was the father of the American school of oboe playing) created a "mechanical" system to play musically. You might do some research into that.

' just a quick peek into some of what it is about...

http://harpmastery.com/how-to-phrase-by-the-numbers/

Arsis/Thesis, upbeats or weak beats need to lead to downbeats (gross simplification)

create tension then release, repeat...

[ken k]

I had a teacher who espoused "arching the phrase" generally as you play a phrase you increase the intensity to a peak in the middle of the phrase and then it tapers off to the end. Obviously not always what you want to do but more often than not it does help "shape" the phrase. You just need to figure out where the peak of the phrase should be.

also some other generally accepted ideas. when you have repeated notes, do not play them the same, either crescendo or dim. same with longer notes like whole notes.

Often times if a song begins with a pick up note, following phrases will also have similar rhythmic pick up notes. Don't breathe between the pick up note(s) and the downbeat, but rather before it (them). Take a song like America the Beautiful, for example. phrases start on beat 4 not 1, so breathe after beat 3. If you are playing a song or melody that has words to it, follow the phrasing of the text.

Think of phrasing in music like phrases and punctuation in grammar. There is usually a word in a sentence that you emphasize more than the others. Not all words in a sentence are said with the same inflection, otherwise you would sound like a robot or computer. Not all notes in a melody should be played with the same intensity either, again you can use the "arching the phrase" idea as a beginning point.

These are very very basic ideas but a good place to start with a student, and even a young student can understand the concept and apply them to simple songs and melodies.

http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/11/ ... e-meaning/" target="_blank" target="_blank" target="_blank

ken k

[ken k]

also practice breath control so the student can crescendo and diminuendo on long tones. have them play up the notes of a scale for 8 beats each. crescendo for 4 beats and diminuendo for 4 beats. then do it on 8 quarter notes (4 crescendo, 4 diminuendo). Again a very rudimentary exercise but it is the technique that needs to be mastered in order to shape a melody.

Also practice various articulations, slurring, staccato, legato tonguing, accents, etc.

These are the tools used in expression.

[hbcrandy]

I had the priviledge of privately studying theory, ear training and conducting with Dr. Asher Zlotnik. Dr. Zlotnik was Leonard Bernstein's conducting classmate at the Curtis Institue of Music in 1940. Dr. Zlotnik became an expert theortician instead of persuing a career in performance.

Dr. Zlotnik had a method to teach musicality by incorporating all of the aforementioned principals in this thread. I was given William Kincaid's notes on melodic line interpretation which alluded to Tabuteau's numbering system for both dynamic control and placing breaths so that the last beat of a measure leads ot the first beat of the next. Also, tension and tension release in the phrase was taught. This was expected to be oberved when singing from the Berkowitz, "Music for Sight Sining" book. Adressing Pablo Cassals, Dr. Zlotnik's doctoral dissertation was on the harmonic implications of the 6 Bach Cello Suites as they relate to melodic line interpretation. I use Dr. Zlotnik's methods on all of my students to build musicality into their concept of playing from the very start. Even students that are raw beginners. Warren Deck once told me that he believed almost anyone could be trained to play the right notes at the right time for the proper duration. That is half of playing. The other half is giving the piece of music that you are charged with performing a personaliy, bringing it to life, if you will, much as an actor brings a character to life for the audience.

For more information on the Marcel Tabuteau's number system, read David McGill's book, "Sound in Motion". Mr. McGill is the Principal Bassoonist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and former Curtis student that participated in John DeLancey's Woodwind Repertoire Class at Curtis and got Tabuteau's Principals from Mr. DeLancey, one of Tabuteau's students.

[MackBrass]

This is a great question that we as tuba players forget mainly due to the technical demands of the instrument we have chosen. A couple of years ago I put together a 5 part series on the art of playing musically. When I was in my mid 20's I wanted to come up with an actual method of teaching musicality so I put together several concepts where each concept builds upon the previous.

Concepts:

Dead spot theory
Single note theory
Ascending and descending line theory
Single phase theory
Micro phrases or phrase within a phrase

Here is a 5 part series I made a couple of years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34CB549E59486FEB" target="_blank

Although the above approaches what's on the page from a musical point of view I have found that its extremely technical and really helps with fixing technical issues in ones playing. Over the past 25 years this is all I have done with the occasional technical stuff.

[tubaplyer]

Jake said it was possible to teach musicality. I would look at some recordings of his and watch the videos on YouTube about him teaching some of his famous students like pat Sheridan et al. Reading song and wind wouldn't hurt. Also having students sing the passage first, sing like Pavarotti, makes a huge difference in connecting what's in the students head and what they do on the horn.

[Mitch]

"Musicality" can be, in some light, equated to Harold Hill's great line in The Music Man, at a crucial moment, "Think boys, think!"
The idea being that if you can think it enough, it will, somehow, magically come into being.

There's a great deal in music pedagogy that, unfortunately, follows this very same school of thought.

"Musicality," as most seem to intend it, is that indefinable quality of being expressive through music.

There's an inherent problem, though, that really just circles back to, "Think boys, think!" It's this idea that you have to feeeeel the music, that you have to be expreeeeeessivvvve. So...umm...define that. If you can't define it, you can't play it. Just because a performer "feels" something, an audience isn't going to get it automatically. I've been to plenty of recitals wherein the soloist did all kinds of moving around and elbow waving and brow wrinkling and...you name it..., but if you closed your eyes, you heard what it really was; non-dimensional and entirely boring. There are some "great" performers in the world of classical music for whom, if you close your eyes and remove the theatrics, there's really nothing great about them. Quite mediocre, very often. "Feeling the music" communicates nothing more to the audience than does a gallon of red paint thrown at a canvas communicate "Autumn, 1924, in Broken Bow, Nebraska, while children run through the corn, aware of the onslaught of tensions in Europe and the impending machination of war against hope, and the ensuing military-industrial complex that will turn America into a mechanized monster set on devouring the Earth."

Very often missing from pedagogy are the techniques that afford expression. Most often, it's reduced to adding some big stretch of the tempo at the intersection of phrases, like, "uh oh...here it comes...new phrase coming...wait for it...wait for it.......HERE it is." Frequently missing is the development of dynamics and phrasing as construct, not just having some conscious awareness of it from theory class, but knowing how to directly apply that in performance. I've been amazed over the years how some are just BLOWN away when a performer has a real grasp of their ability to manipulate dynamics, when, after all, shouldn't we all? But we don't. I've worked with/conducted organizations in the past with which I was flummoxed when confronted with the limit of their dynamic ability. Their "pp" was what I would call, being generous at that, mf. Heck. It was just loud. Waaay too loud. When I asked for less, I was looked at like I had tentacles coming out of my head. I even had a member of the group mumble, "It's not possible." To top that, someone, outside of rehearsal, called me the most arrogant conductor she'd ever met, based entirely on the fact that I "think [I'm] so much better because just want to harp on dynamics. Softer (in a taunting voice), softer, softer...what are you a one-trick pony?" No, I thought. I just thought "pp" ought to mean, um, "a little softer," perhaps. Mostly, I was just surprised that this seemed to be the first time anyone was saying to them, "That's too loud for a 'pp'."

I was fortunate to study with Marianne Ploger, and, to a certain extent, her husband, Keith Hill. They are, without a doubt, two of the most impressive musical thinkers on the planet. Marianne taught at the U. of Michigan when I studied with her, and is now at the Blair School at Vanderbilt (if you're in that area, you owe it to yourself to make contact and get some lessons). Keith builds what are considered some of the best harpsichords on the planet, and violins that world-class soloists have said play EXACTLY like 300-year-old instruments. One even said a particular instrument was identical in nearly every way, particularly the sound, of the Guarneri del Gesu ex-Paganini (Il Cannone).

It was under their tutelage that I learned a different approach, one that is seemingly more technically-based, but, in a way, not really. It's ultimately about serving the music and learning the techniques that make an audience hear your intention. If you're going to paint a tree, you have to know how to paint a leaf. If you want an audience to hear something you think/feel, you have to know the technique to create the sound and manipulations of the sound envelope that enable them to hear what you think.

One of the masters? Vladimir Horowitz. There are plenty of recordings available, but watching him can be a lesson in and of itself. He's considered one of the greatest, but doesn't employ any of what have become cliches of performance. And what does the audience do when he finishes? They go ape-sh*t. Absolutely freakin' nuts. Why? Because of his ability to audibly effect the sound, because of the tools he developed to do so. He misses plenty of notes. But they couldn't care less. Does he wave his elbows? No. Does he sway wildly back and forth? No. Does he have crazy hair? No. Does he dress in wild clothes? No. It's about his ability to create a performance they are still telling their grandchildren about. That's musicality. Listen, close your eyes. It only gets better.

[tubajoe]

"something extra" is intangible

It's not something extra, rather it's the only thing.

'Musical opinion" (or as Jacobs called it, "song")

Simply, don't even blow into the horn until there is at least some 'musical opinion'.
Even kids of a small age can form an idea about how they would like it to sound.
It's not a matter of what the opinion is, rather initially it's a matter of the opinion existing, and most importantly leading the quest.

TOO many teachers teach this way:
-practice your *** off on the mechanics
-then, add some "musicality"

It only get's you so far. (and creates boring, predictable music)


Rather...

-make a musical opinion first
-let the musical opinion be the guide for everything, technique notwithstanding. ...technique is only a single aspect, it's only a vehicle; a matter of how. Technique is not it's own musical element (except at brass conferences and guitar shredding competitions)

I believe that above all all, music (and art in general) is about engagement, not about replication.

Love this last line of this clip, sums up pretty much all art in general:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh79iPi-y-c" target="_blank

Don't ever let the music be boring. You can't inject interest after the fact. Musicality needs to be treated as the sole purpose for playing in the first place. Students of almost any age can understand this.

[BVD Press]

Using Casals above, grab a clean copy of of the Bach Cello Suites and have the student notate all of the nuances that are used in his interpretation. This is similar to "stealing" jazz solos and learning from the greats.

Next figure out why Casals actuated one note, slowed down or sped up, took slightly longer on one pitch, etc.

Explaining verbally or playing is fine, but some people need it on paper.

A while at a conference I was attending, back Phil Meyers did this with Schumann's "Adagio and Allegro". His markings essentially showed everything he was going to do and then he did it. He had arrows, accents, or whatever other marking he thought would describe what he was doing.

PS: Putting on paper what you are doing is not that easy.

[Rick F]

Pablo Casals name was mentioned several times in some of the posts above. One of my favorite quotes of his was: "Don't play the notes, play the meaning of the notes"

[imperialbari]

http://touch.baltimoresun.com/#section/ ... -81005979/

[David Zerkel]

"something extra" is intangible

It's not something extra, rather it's the only thing.

Amen. What he said.