What performance tools do we consciously employ to be musically expressive when revealing these hidden opportunities?
Many young brass students are told to “sing” with their instrument or to “bring out the music.” These are good objectives. Unfortunately, I have witnessed a disturbing number of brass players offer realizations of the music that are shallow and suffer from a lack of imagination. This is often due to their lack of diversity when it comes to phrasing. Subsequently, brass music and brass performances are seldom associated with elegance and refinement. “Bringing out the music” is often translated in a young brass player’s mind as, “Play with more vibrato and/or louder.” Overuse of one or two performance devices can be crippling to the artistic growth of a player.
Assuming a basic level of instrumental proficiency, we have at our disposal volume, articulation, rhythm, pitch and sound color, yet how many of us seek to use these tools in a balance and conscientious way?
Volume
This is the pipe wrench of performance
tools. All players can wield it to a certain extent and all listeners can hear
it being use. Brass players are particularly apt to overuse and abuse this
rather blunt tool—periodically emerging from a block of rests to bludgeon
woodwinds, strings and audiences about the ears with it. Even as soloists, when
brass students are instructed to “sing” with their instrument or to play more
musically they will pullout this tool without considering any other. They
believe that bringing out the tension in the music simply means to play louder
and when the music is less tense play softer. It is this narrow minded approach
to phrasing that often makes brass performances sound one dimensional and
unsuitable for baroque and classical period music. Although it may be possible
with enough ingenuity and time to built a fine China cabinet using only a pipe
wrench, a much better product will surely result from a more imaginative and
balanced use of performance tools. Because changes in volume are relatively
easy for the average listener to hear, if overused, they can quickly become the
least interesting of performance techniques.
Articulation
Following the notated accents in a
piece is being responsible, not necessarily imaginative or musical. Utilizing
“ta” exclusively through a rhythmic piece or “da” exclusively through a lyrical
one can become very mechanical sounding. String players use a myriad of bow
strokes that are not marked by the composer to create an affect and, if we are
attempting to sing through our instruments, we should not forget that vocalists
spend years developing their diction and using the distinction between consonant
and vowel sounds in a given text to further articulate expressive points in the
music. In fact, composers are very aware of how the beginning of a word relates
to the affect of the music. A brass soloist should not try to articulate every
note differently but should certainly avoid articulating all notes the same,
especially while playing a vocal transcription—a piece whose affect is, in part,
dependent on such variety. Bringing attention to a special note or series of
notes in a phrase by slightly changing its/their articulation shows an added
flexibility to your phrasing and alleviates the necessity to crescendo into all
of your “special” moments.
Rhythm
Without changing the tempo of a passage, a
performer can draw attention to important moments in the music through minute
shifts of its rhythms against its pulse. This can serve to draw a listener’s
attention to a change in the momentum of the music (e.g., playing one or several
notes on “the front side”or “the back side” of the beat), a change in its
timbre (e.g., slightly shortening notes in brighter textures) or even its
harmonic tension (e.g., holding a exceptionally dissonant note a few
milliseconds longer before resolving it). Whether one is making dramatic rubato
in romantic music or acute momentary manipulations in less elastic music, rhythm
is a difficult tool to use. Its use requires a strong sense of tempo. However,
when administered with subtle precision, it more clearly endows a performer’s
phrasing with character than any other performance tool. Great performers from
Glenn Gould to Wynton Marsalis have all mastered the discreet manipulation of
this tool to reveal special moments within phrases. The use of this device
should be conscientiously considered and applied when developing one’s
interpretation of a musical line.
Pitch
The technique of inflecting the pitch of a
note higher or lower to magnify a change in musical tension or character should
be transparent and used sparing. It is important to do this within the
boundaries of “in tune”. It is quite common, for example, for a cellist
playing, say, a slow movement of a Bach cello suite to slightly bend a
dissonant pitch towards its resolution at a cadence (e.g., leading to tonic).
This increases the inherent harmonic tension of the moment giving the line more
direction. In jazz music, pitch inflections are used even more freely and
apparent than in classical. The key is to hear and understand when “just”
intonation verse “tempered” intonation is being violated so that our playing
never breaks the “in tune” boundary. If your just and tempered intonation is
good, it is simply a matter of learning how far away from those tunings you can
inflect a note before good tension turns bad for any given register and tempo.
Once this is understood, actually doing it on the instrument is not difficult
yet shows a mature diversity in your phrasing.
Sound Color
Whether you call it “timbre”, “color” or “sound quality”, it’s, arguably, the
most important component of your expressive voice. Unfortunately, brass players
tend to base decisions on what timbre to use on only two criteria—who the
composer is and whether the music is lyrical or not. Using vibrato is certainly
a means of enlivening one’s sound. Unfortunately, many performers are under the
misguided belief that vibrato alone will actually change the color of
one’s. Many brass players will perform an entire phrase or movement (or even an
entire piece!) using only one sound color, content with simply letting the
manifestation of the written pitches generate any and all coloristic changes in
the music. Identifying places within a phrase where a subtle change to a
complimentary sound color can highlight and supplement similar changes in the
notation is the sign of a mature artist. It could be one note or a series of
notes and can be done at any tempo. A rudimentary application of this type of
manipulation can be heard when a jazz player uses a halve valve on a
particularly “blue” note or when a performer changes his or her vibrato
intensity. Conversely, when a performer is responsive to the many shades of
color in any given progression of harmony or melody, true artistry is reached
(listen to any recording of classical guitarist Sharon Isbin). It is not a difficult task to make
slight changes to one’s sound color on a brass instrument. However, it does
take a high level of sensitivity to the often-subtle changes hidden within a
composer’s notation to recognize where these changes could and should happen.
Take a look at the following examples of how these ideas could be applied.
| Diversity in Phrasing page 1 | 2 |
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