INTEGRATED PRACTICE: COORDINATION, RHYTHM & SOUND
INTEGRATED PRACTICE is a book about how to find the sources of good coordination in the rhythmic structure of the musical language itself. In other words, if you become truly fluent in the language of music you can use the energies inherent in the musical text to organize and harmonize your gestures, even to the point where you may prevent and heal injuries through your actual music-making. INTEGRATED PRACTICE will have a dedicated website, with 70 video clips and 25 audio clips illustrating the book’s principles and exercises. It’s scheduled for publication by the Oxford University Press in the winter of 2010/11.
INTEGRATED PRACTICE, together with my earlier book INDIRECT PROCEDURES: A MUSICIAN’S GUIDE TO THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE, will become the foundation of a new series called THE INTEGRATED MUSICIAN, of which I’m the editor as well as a contributing author. In the years to come the series will include volumes for string players, pianists, wind players, singers, and so on.
INTEGRATED PRACTICE
Annotated Table of Contents
Introduction
I tell the story of a young pianist whose parents are worried about his “posture,” when in fact his problems at the piano aren’t purely physical but come from his entire approach to making music. My main argument is that music is a language, and to become a good (and well-coordinated) player, singer, or conductor you need to connect all your gestures to the linguistic requirements of music.
Part I: Rhythm
1. Prosody, or the Secrets of Rhythm
This is a study of spoken, written, and poetic language, showing that the most important aspect of any language is its rhythmic construction. The study of linguistic rhythm in all its aspects is called prosody. This first chapter prepares the way for us to understand the basics of musical prosody.
2. Words, Sounds, Gestures
Rhythm is the most important component of any activity. This chapter illustrates the principle by describing rush hour at Times Square subway station, where we see rhythm embodied in locomotion, speech, song, dance, and even in the sounds made by trains over the tracks. The chapter lays out the technical vocabulary and fundamental concepts that will be covered throughout the book, and gives musicians many suggestions on how to start working on their rhythmic and linguistic capabilities.
3. The Grid: A Life Principle
The Grid is an organizational principle using lines and numbers, exemplified by the power grid that carries electricity from power plants to homes and factories, the street grid, the chessboard, or the numerical relationships that underline twelve-tone music. While the grid is relatively rigid and predictable, the forces that flow through it are fluid and unpredictable (for instance, the cars and pedestrians crisscrossing the street grid). The opposition between rigid, predictable structures and fluid, unpredictable energies is the very source of life. Grids abound in the musical cosmos. For instance, the circle of fifths is a grid that lays out chord relationships, consonance, dissonance, and the entire edifice of tonal music. Beethoven is different from Vivaldi because he opposes the grid of the circle of fifths differently from Vivaldi. You can learn how to use grids—and in particular the opposition of fluid forces against the grid—in order to improve your coordination and music-making.
4. The Metric Grid
Here we study one of the most important of all the grids in music: the grid underpinning the rhythmic organization of metric music. We look at the meaning of the bar line, the fundamentals of the beat and the measure, and the four types of energy that exist in the music of the common period (roughly from 1600 to 1900): metric, agogic, melodic, and dynamic. These energies are in permanent, dynamic opposition with one another, and if you know how to balance them out, you know how to coordinate yourself as a musician.
5. Coincidence: Intention and Gesture
Coincidence is a simple exercise to coordinate intention, gesture, speech, and rhythm.
6. Rhythmic Solfège
Rhythmic Solfège is a study of many-layered coordination. It involves learning basic conducting techniques as you say the rhythms of your pieces, thereby coordinating the body, the beat, the measure, and all other aspects of rhythm. The goal is for you to internalize these techniques and develop a strong sense of rhythm without misusing your body.
7. The Metronome and the Rubato
This chapter studies the opposition between metronomic precision (which has its own merits for all musicians) and rubato (which, for most serious musicians, is one of the most prized musical skills).
8. Superbar Structures
The superbar structure is how bars coalesce into phrases and sections. Four bars of 4/4, for instance, can become a superbar of 16/4, where each downbeat from each 4/4 bar becomes a new beat in a larger structure that appears to move more slowly than its component parts. Learning superbar structures helps you in two ways: It gives your performance large-scale structural arcs, and it allows you to husband your energies in performance. A 700-bar movement in a sonata may have several thousand notes, but in fact it only contains a few dozen superbar phrases. Sensing these phrases helps you feel that you only need to make a relatively small number of technical and musical decisions in order to organize a large piece of music, thereby saving a lot of energy and effort.
9. Opposing The Grid
Most good compositions create an opposition between order and disorder, predictability and unpredictability, tension and relaxation. If you thoroughly understand the opposition between the orderly compositional grid and the apparently disorderly energies that flows through it, you can use your understanding of this opposition to coordinate yourself better. In a nutshell, it’s the music that carries the tension, not the musician’s body! In this chapter we study the principle of “opposing the grid” with the help of several short piano pieces by Johannes Brahms.
10. Patterning and Sequencing
Most compositions are built on patterns (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and so on). It’s useful for you to learn how to discern patterns, how to master each pattern in turn, and how to put them together in performance, using both the patterning and the sequencing as sources of good coordination. We use a movement from J. S. Bach’s Sonata for Solo Violin in g minor to illustrate the principle.
Part II: Coordination
11. Connection & Flow: First Principles
This chapter introduces basic principles of coordination, using the Alexander Technique as a starting point. The chapter focuses on the concept of connection. Connection means a lot of different things, all of them interrelated: Connection between body parts (finger to hand, hand to arm, arm to shoulder to back to legs…); connection between what you think and what you do, between intention and gesture, between body and mind; connection between gestures, so that any gesture flows naturally from the preceding one and prepares the one that follow it; connection from note to note as you sing or play; connection between you and the physical world, including a connection between you and your instrument or voice; connection with the pieces you play and with your audience.
The next four chapters introduce many exercises for musicians to learn how to coordinate and connect themselves thanks to a deeper understanding of the rhythmic structure of musical language. For the sake of narrative, I’ve chosen to group these exercises as a cello lesson, an oboe lesson, a voice lesson, and a piano lesson, although the exercises are useful for all musicians.
12. The Juggler: A Cello Lesson
Making music is similar to juggling several objects at the same time: you need to take care of your whole body, your contact with your instrument, left and right hand techniques, sound, rhythm, intonation, phrasing, and many other things still. This chapter explains how you can organize all aspects of your playing in an orderly fashion, much like a juggler learns to handle one, then two, three, four, and more objects in turn. The exercises in this chapter include how to become comfortable in the sitting position, thanks to latent resistance and latent mobility; how to create connections between gestures; how to create a connection between physical gestures and linguistic intentions; and how to coordinate the left and right hands. The chapter also includes seven simple practice routines to work on coordination, rhythm, and sound.
13. Object Wisdom: An Oboe Lesson
This chapter includes exercises for standing; connecting the back, shoulders, and arms; using objects of all sorts (such as a broom or a basketball) to improve coordination; and learning how to let music carry tension instead of carrying it in your body.
14. Body, Breath, Vibration, Text: A Voice Lesson
This chapter includes an exercise for the whole body and its connection to the breath and the voice; an introduction to the vocal registers (the “falsetto” and the “chest voice”) and how to strengthen them and put them at the service of your coordination; a way of using all texts (spoken or musical) as maps to good coordination; an exercise to discover how sound contains tangible vibrations that you can feel in your hands and your body; and a way to tap into instinctive and intuitive animal-like energies and shape them into healthy, powerful sounds (vocal or otherwise).
15. The Quadrupedal Prosodist: A Piano Lesson
This chapter includes a discussion of bilateral transfer (the dialogue between the left and right sides of the body) and quadrilateral transfer (the dialogue between all four limbs); an exercise to create a circuit of connections between the two arms and hands; an exercise to establish connections between the four limbs and use these connections to communicate with an audience; and a study of rhythmic aspects of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” variations, with exercises for the coordination between the left and right hands.
Part III: Sound
16. The Harmonic Series
The harmonic series is the acoustical phenomenon that explains the nature of sound. Most sounds we produce are complex combinations of many vibrations, each note having a fundamental pitch and a series of higher pitches called overtones or partials, which together comprise the harmonic series. The harmonic series underpins the working of most instruments. A trombone, for instance, can only sound seven fundamentals; trombonists produce the entire pitch range by manipulating the harmonic series of each fundamental with the embouchure. Sensing the harmonic series will improve your understanding of resonance, consonance and dissonance, intonation, and sound production, helping you make full, rich sounds without muscular effort. This chapter describes the phenomenon and includes exercises to increase your aural awareness of it, as well as suggested practical applications.
17. The Harmonic Series and the Voice
Overtones—some faint, others prominent—give each voice its individual timbre. The healthiest voice is the one with the richest harmonics. This chapter contains vocal exercises that allow all musicians (and not just singers) to use the harmonic series to work on their voice, their coordination, and their overall health.
18. The Messa di Voce: Virtuosity of Contact
When opera was being developed in the 1600s, the messa di voce was a prized vocal ornament consisting of a crescendo and a diminuendo on a long note. More broadly, the messa di voce is the manipulation of dynamics in sound, which is inseparable from the manipulation of tension and relaxation. For this reason, mastery of the messa di voce can become mastery of coordination. This chapter studies the history and practice of the messa di voce and explains why it’s the most important exercise for all musicians.
19. Practicing the Messa di Voce
This chapter contains practical exercises for the messa di voce, including a description of the three roles we all play in everything we do: as actors (actively deciding to do or not to do something), receptors (sensing and collecting information of all sorts), and witnesses (observing, analyzing, and synthesizing all events into meaningful experiences).
20. Improvisation: A Lifestyle
This chapter introduces improvisation as a sort of lifestyle and state of mind: You can learn how to use improvisation to solve many, if not all, musical and technical problems, and you can also learn how to use improvisation to learn how to perform actual compositions as if you were their author, improvising them on the spot.
Conclusion
Here I ask a question—What does it mean to be an integrated musician?—and I try to answer it with an overview of the book’s basic principles. Then I state that the integrated musician is connected with the Logos, the metaphysical concept that we might define as “the inward intention underlying the speech act.” To be an integrated musician is to have something meaningful to say, and the means of saying it.