Doing What Comes Naturally:
Natures Cues to Effective Interpretation
As Presented in the October 18, 2003
Marvin Blickenstaff Workshop at
Penn State's School of Music.
Point No. 1: All Music must Breathe!
Try to sing My Country 'Tis of Thee without taking a breath. You will discover that it is impossible. Singers and wind instrument performers know this because they are trained to take a breath at the end of an appropriate phrase. However, pianists often forget that the music must breathe.
What do you do at the end of a slur? You cannot treat the last note of the slur the same as the other notes in the slur. It is a composer's way of telling us to breathe.
Not all breaths are the same. There are catch breaths, and big breaths. If the composer puts in many small slurs, you should lift at the ends of them, but it is more of a catch breath. At the end of a section, you would feel the big breath.
Baroque composers typically used a small hand. They liked small, quiet gestures. In a Bach Prelude or Fugue, it is not an accident that a motif fits under the five fingers, allowing the hand to lift and move to the next five finger position to play the next motif. This allows the piece to breathe in the switching of positions.
And it is not only in Baroque music that breath articulations can be handled with fingering.
So, breathing is an important part of all music.
Point No. 2: Gravity
We know that in nature, gravity is acting all around us. If we were on a roller coaster, we would feel the pull of gravity as the car dragged itself up the hill, and we would also feel gravity pull us quickly down the other side.
We can feel this in music also. Imagine the great effort of moving up in a Chopin Nocturne, then cresting the top and flowing more quickly down the run afterward. It is not impossible to believe that Chopin thought this way if you look at his pieces.
Then we come to long notes that are arrival places where we feel a stop. These often lead us to another slow, upward climb.
So thinking about music as having a sense of gravity can help us develop a sensible rubato touch in the music. Making grand gestures of the hand to show the shape of the phrase can help us feel the pull of gravity in the music.
Point No. 3: Inertia
We define inertia as a body in motion. We know that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and that it takes great energy to move it. We also know that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and is easier to keep moving. It would be very difficult for a petite girl to move a nine-foot Steinway by herself. However, if several people pushed together and got it started, it would be easier for that girl to continue moving it.
Music has a sense of motion also. When music is at a stop, it is more difficult to get it going, so we think about pushing it off like a canoe that is pushed off shore. Imagine playing a trill by starting out slowly, then really getting it moving. This is one example of how inertia creates forward motion in music.
There is also the tendency of the object to lose inertia if it is not always being driven. Which kinds of notes tend to drive a piece? The shorter notes, packed tightly together, drive the music. But music doesn't stay in that fast driving pace. Longer values are written in, slowing the music down much like friction and gravity slow objects in nature.
Again we are driving toward our arrival place -- the note with the longest value. Once there, it is necessary to push off again until our inertia is built up again and the piece moves forward. We can see this dying of inertia in the B Minor Prelude by Chopin. At the end the chords become longer and quieter and we come to complete silence. It is a wonderful metaphor for death. The music literally dies away. The inertia has completely stopped, as it will, of course, for all of us. Then there are those lovely two chords at the end.
So think about pushing off in the music you or your students are working on so it will have a natural feeling of forward motion to it.
Point No. 4: Pulse
We are used to feeling things in regular cycles. Find your pulse. It is regular; at least we hope so. The seasons come in cycles, the day. Predictability is important to us. Things that are not predictable disturb the rhythm of the day. Sometimes we enjoy the disturbance when it is a surprise for us.
Music also has predictability. We cannot look at a base line that follows the same pattern over and over without realizing that the composer intended that to be predictable. Disturbing that pattern can ruin the intent of the composer, causing the piece to be jarring.
Point No. 5: Time vs. Distance
We pianists should always sing the music. We should listen to singers, because we would understand better how to make a leap in the music.
Play a trill with your second and third fingers on C and D beside each other. You can get it going pretty fast. Now play the same two fingers in a trill using C and D a second apart. Of course this would take far more time to do because of the distance. Yet, we try to make leaps of this kind with no preparation whatsoever. When you come to a leap, take a lead from a singer. Prepare for it.
Point No. 6:Tension vs. Relaxation
A great deal is written about tension and relaxation in the body. I make my students do tight shoulders/relaxed shoulders exercises and open hand/closed hand exercises so that they can feel the difference between tension and relaxation.
Music also has tension built into it. Dissonance is the tension in music. It relaxes into consonance. Think about the Tonic 6/4 chord. In classical music this is the most intense moment of the piece. The piece will tend to drive toward this tension and relax away from it. I had a grad student express this in theory class every day, and I have come to accept it as true.
We need to teach our students how to feel this tension and shape their cadences to reflect it.
Conclusion:
Nature gives us all kinds of ideas that we can apply to our music. We play more organically and expressively if we follow these ideas. Best of all we can accept these natural principals as norms that we can teach to our students. It is great for students to feel that there are models that they can follow to play music more expressively with better forward motion.
This summary was published with permission of Marvin Blickenstaff.
