I think the "don't mess around" thing may be personality dependent. One teacher has told me something to that effect -- he related a quote from Jack Nicklaus, who said that since he was about 15, he thought about every swing he made. In the backyard, he'd imagine a lie and play that lie. He said that I should think about every tune I play, every note in every tune.
I'm not like that. When I have limited time, I try to make that time count. But when I have an hour or two, I do mess around. It's kind of like science. When you come right down to it, science is really aboout creativity -- a new idea is NEW; it's not something you regurge out of a textbook. I think every person in my class in graduate school (every one who got a degree that is) was better academically than I was, but I've accomplished more in my career than most of them, and that's about creativity, not fundamentals. Music is also about creativity. So, yes, you do have to have all the fundamentals down, but if you want to be creative, you have to try new things, and that usually (for me) comes from fooling around.
Of course, one person's fooling around might be another's exercises or something.
Charlie Whorfin Woods
"Our work puts heavy metal where it belongs -- as a music genre and not a pollutant in drinking water." -- Prof Ali Miserez.
Chas has a good point. If you're playing ITM in particular, variations are important, and that means some inevitable playing around to find your own and practice to make them sink in. Most people can't pull variations spontaneously out of their hat without some habituated melodic runs to rely on.
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician
I was very fortunate to be a performing student at a master class put on by John DeLancie in the summer of 1997. The most important thing I have ever learned came from his opening lecture in that master class. Since I am not a skilled enough writer to put it succinctly, I will have to expound:
Music is structured like language, with its own grammar and syntax. Phrasing is "the art of defining while playing, the grammatical structure of music."
A musical phrase is a line with arcwise tension. The idea is to recognize the dramatic arc of each phrase, make your breath follow that arc, and then play the notes on top of the breath. Play through each line to its logical conclusion, and make sure that your breath puts a punctuation mark at the end of each phrase. Where you articulate is important, but not as important as how you articulate.
Intellectualizing this during practice and performance is important. After all, professional baseball players analyze every inch of their foot position hundreds of times. Missing a baseball by 1/16" is still missing.
fluti31415 wrote:Intellectualizing this during practice and performance is important.
You communicated your point very well, flutipi, but I don't know that I'd use the word intellectualizing. I think the best just feel it. I don't know that one can make good music (especially folk music) by consciously thinking about it. It may start that way (during the learning process), but I think (I don't know) that really good players feel the music and are able to instinctively communicate that feeling to their instruments.
And as you said, if I could only do it. . .
Charlie Whorfin Woods
"Our work puts heavy metal where it belongs -- as a music genre and not a pollutant in drinking water." -- Prof Ali Miserez.
What a good thread this is! The collective knowledge of this group is impressive. I know that I am learning a heck of a lot.
chas wrote:
fluti31415 wrote:Intellectualizing this during practice and performance is important.
You communicated your point very well, flutipi, but I don't know that I'd use the word intellectualizing.
Yeah, DeLancie does come from a much different background. Maybe what Lee Mathis said is a better way of expressing that -- listen to the music, and hear yourself. Constantly. Be completely objective. But do it with a goal. Know what you want to accomplish, and listen to see how closely you meet your ideal.
I think to try and keep it simple would be the best single piece of advice I've received so far. Not sure if I've managed to follow the advice, though...
But even if the style one is aiming for were a more complicated and variated one, I think the simplification would be of some use at some point especially when learning a tune. At least by stripping it down one would be able to learn where it is "appropriate" to play around and where improvising would only muddle the actual melody.
So yes, keep it simple is the best advice I've been given.
Tell us something.: To paraphrase Mark Twain, a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the spoons and doesn't. I'm doing my best to be a gentleman.
At a workshop, Chris Norman recommended (more elequently than I'm about to relate) that one should only lift one's flute to play when one already feels a pulse or rhythm. So, rather than lifting the flute, noodling about, and then finding a groove, one enters a pre-existing pulse. The idea is that every note played, be it a long-tone or a tune, is placed on/in the rhythm one feels before playing a note.
I know what you mean about kids, rama. They tend to seem "naturals" at many things (there's nothing like being beaten by an 8-year-old in the horse show ring or worse, by a three-year-old at bowling ).
I think .... we adults think too much.
(see?)
Seriously, my fella does a little Suzuki fiddle teaching on the side and says it's because, up to a certain age, kids are brilliant mimics. They see or hear something and they just pick it up right away, hardly any mental involvement at all. If you think about it, that's a good survival skill to have when you're small and rather defenseless ....
It's when you "grow up" that you start imagining too many possibilities....and limitations, alas!
Deja Fu: The sense that somewhere, somehow, you've been kicked in the head exactly like this before.
Kids don't stop to apologise when they hit a wrong note. I suppose it's because they don't feel shame when they are learning and make a mistake. Adults for some reason apologise when they don't 'get it' the first time.
).
