| I’ll try to explain, but it gets a little sticky, so please bear with me.
A true story: I once had a real lip-reading bona-fide deaf student – hearing aids & all, who I taught in German, and it worked pretty well, except for the release of notes. Once the sound level dropped below 80db, she couldn’t hear anymore, and the end of each note would simply fall off. We worked on the idea of holding the note until after it “ended,” and the result was longer notes, which got a little quieter at the end, and then fell off. We simply can’t play what we don’t hear.
The problem for this Vulgano Brother is that I can’t always play the things I “hear.” The trumpet has an infinite number of weirdly mutated demon-possessed notes built in, and I’ve played most of them, trying to take the trumpet to a level of expression its never been before . (I am sometimes guilty of trying to swallow things bigger than my own head, and it somehow doesn’t work.)
My point about “planting” and “sticking” the notes has some other names – Bruno Walter spoke of the “impulse of will” as a conductor, but I mean it mainly as an antidote to the concept of “not missing notes.” Too many audiences can’t comprehend the level of music coming out the bell, but they can sure count wrong notes. The “English” and “German” styles seem to be predicated on the virtue of not missing notes, and as a consequence music sometimes suffers.
Playing mistake free is much too often given more worth than musical communication, and I find that sad.
So, the Vulgano Brother approach is to:
1. Scale down my grandiose fantasies into something at least idiomatic.
2. Play in such a way as to “nail” each note within the musical context.
Scaled down further:
Be moderate without being mediocre.
__________________ "A tool good enough to be so used and not too good" C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength www.letsbuildhope.org |