Learn and practice the basic principles of running an effective music ensemble rehearsal. Techniques and strategies are applicable to a variety of ensembles, including bands, orchestras, choirs, and chamber groups.
A Choral and Orchestral Perspective: Score Study
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Fundamentals of Rehearsing Music Ensembles
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Articulation, Balance, and Tone
Module 4 begins with perhaps the most crucial task a conductor undertakes: score study. Score study is the umbrella term for the process of thoroughly learning a score-- not just knowing how to sing the melody or memorizing phrases and meters--but learning every aspect of the music that may come to bear on our ability to interpret, conduct, rehearse, and perform it. Unlike many grammatical aspects of conducting, score study is a time-consuming, immersive activity for which it is normal to develop one’s own process, assuming the end result is a deep understanding of the work.
After score study, Module 4 moves back to the grammar of conducting, particularly technique for conducting articulations. Please note that this week also contains a very brief introduction to the three types of fermatas. In Module 5 we’ll cover them in detail. These are topics for which regular practice and self-evaluation will be necessary to develop gestures that are clear to the ensemble and second-nature to the conductor.
Finally, we will return to “The Rehearsal Toolkit” and explore strategies for rehearsing articulation, balance, and tone. This final topic includes a video on using the piano to demonstrate harmonies and other musical features to the ensemble. Particularly in educational settings, it is important for the conductor to do more than treat the ensemble as his personal musical instrument. Instead, find opportunities to lead ensembles to an understanding of the music it is performing, a goal that only score study makes possible.
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Dr. Evan FeldmanAssociate Professor & Wind Ensemble Conductor
Music
[MUSIC]
Let's go back to our interviews with Tonu Kalam and Daniel Huff.
For an orchestral and choral perspective, this time on the topic of score study.
So we've talked about picking literature, we've talked about being in the rehearsal.
Of course, there's a big important step that comes
in between those two, which is learning the music.
Learning the score, or score-study.
Tell us a little bit about your approach to that.
>> Well, everybody has their own approach to score study and
I would say there is no right approach, there's no wrong approach.
There's just a personal approach that works for you.
And mine has changed over the years and how
I mark scores has changed over the years also.
I find that of course the more you've studied,
the easier it is to study the next piece.
If you've already done five Haydn symphonies
it's easier to learn a sixth one.
You know the style.
You know the composer's quirks of notation and, and texture and balance and that go,
holds true for almost any composer once you've gotten familiar with their output.
I like to start, again we're talking about pyramids
here, I'm starting with the big picture and working downwards.
I like to get an overall view of the piece.
I like to think about it a little bit in context historically.
When was it written?
What was the occasion?
How does it fit into the composer's other output?
What period did it appear in the composer's life?
Is it representative of other stylistic things
in that composer's output at that time?
I'm very fond of telling my students that it's
really important to know a large spectrum of music.
That if you're going to be a successful and confident
interpreter of, let's say, a Beethoven symphony, you need to
be familiar with 32 Beethoven channel sonatas, 16 string quartets,
ten violin sonatas, five cello sonatas, the opera, Fidelio, whatever.
The more Beethoven you know, the more you're
going to understand him, and the easier and quicker
it will be for you to study a piece of his that you're actually going to perform.
And this will hold true of, any composer.
My teacher Max Rudolf used to say that you cannot
perform any Mozart symphony with any sense of authority or confidence
if you aren't intimately familiar with the four big opera's: Marriage
of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Le Don Giovanni, and Magic Flute.
Because Mozart was essentially a man of the theater.
Everything he wrote was theatrical in motivation and inspiration.
You can almost hear in the symphonies' characters on stage, answering each
other with a profusion of melodic ideas that Mozart brings into play.
So the broad picture of knowing composers, and the context is,
of course, a first step at a long term process decades.
Once you have that knowledge though, it becomes easier and easier
to buckle down and learn a new piece by that composer.
I start with the overall form.
I like to see where's the piece going, is it
sonata form, is it variations, is it rondo, is it ABA?
If sonata, where is the exposition end?
What keys does he go through in the development section?
Big picture tonal areas.
I don't put Roman numerals under chords, but I just look and
say, okay, here's a section in D, and now we've got a section
in A, and then he starts to wander every few bars, and
now we're anchored on the, dominant before the recap, whatever it may be.
The big picture is what interests me, I don't care if it's a five, two or
whatever, and I know some conductors will put
Roman numerals under almost every measure of their score.
To me, that's not important in my process of learning.
Obviously I'm interested in looking at the textures.
The orchestration, how are the instruments used, how do
they fit in to the progression of the piece?
One of the things that I find extremely valuable is if you do have a Sonata form
movement, compare the exposition with the recap and
see where are the differences, where are the similarities.
You'll say, oh, the first eight bars are identical and then, oh,
but here he's added a few instruments and he's changed the instrumentation.
And here all of a sudden are four
bars that are missing that were in the exposition.
And you go through that and you see what interesting things
have happened structurally in the analogous
box architecturally, and then you go
in and see if the coda has things that are not
present elsewhere, or the development section has something that's in the coda.
You look at still the big picture relationships.
Architecture, of course, is for me, a prime motivator in, in score study.
I, if we think about music in a very abstract way.
Music is one of the few art forms that only exists in time.
Music exists only as it is experienced over
a period of seconds and minutes and hours.
When we hold a score in our hand, that's not music.
That's a set of instructions.
That's a graph for creating the music.
We can look at a painting on the wall, and we
can look at it for 30 seconds or for ten minutes.
It's always there.
>> And we see it all once.
>> We see it all at once, and we can do it as long as you like.
The music, it's gone after we've heard it.
Unless of course, you have a pause button, and all
kind of modern technology, if you're sitting in a concert though.
So, you have an experience over a span of time as a listener.
The performer's responsibility is to make that span of time
intelligible and logical and obvious, so that the listener sits
there and thinks, oh yeah there was a beginning, a
middle, a big high point a return and an end.
Made sense, felt good.
And I've been to performances where I think,
I don't know where I am in this piece.
And it's a piece I knew, I say, I'm lost.
[LAUGH] Because the performance is gibberish.
So, how do we organize point A, to B, to C?
As a very important part of my, interpretation and study of a
score, I like to think of the conductor as a tour guide.
We are leading our listener on a journey through the music.
From A to B to C to D, et cetera, and
we’ve come from the beginning to the end of the trail.
And, of course, first we have to lead our
players through that journey, who then lead the audience.
But if we don’t know where we’re going, how can we be a tour guide?
So we have to know the progression of what's happening in
time from point to point, whether it be harmonic, melodic, instrumental.
How do we get there?
Where is the important stuff?
Where can we take liberties?
Where do we allow phrases to breathe as we get
down to the more detailed parts of the pyramid, so
that when we get to the end our listeners have
been satisfied and felt yes, this makes sense to me.
And this holds true for new music of course, especially so
as for older maiden music that people may already be familiar with.
I think you know, Sherm Berg had that famous quote
that, my music isn't difficult, it's just been badly played.
And I think a lot of living composers have had that frustration over the centuries.
That they didn't feel that the
performances did justice to what there was.
And I've heard pieces that I've not been excited by.
And then later I'll hear another performance by a completely
different person and say wow, this is really a cool piece.
I just didn't hear it done right.
So that's our responsibility and that's what the goal of this score study is.
Understanding that architecture in time and making sense
of it, and then of course all the details.
Where are the sforzandi, and where are the decresendi?
If we're speaking about dynamics, for example, Beethoven is a great example.
Sometimes he'll have a crescendo that lasts 16 bars.
Sometimes he'll have a crescendo that lasts two bars.
How do you bring those to life?
>> Mm.
>> How do you make the players aware of pacing them?
I say, guys, you've got 16 measures to get
from piano to forte, you're way too loud too soon.
>> Mm.
>> We have to be going like this, not like this.
And all of that is part of, again, your study.
But making your players aware of these things that
you have gained through your study at the same time.
>> It's a, it's a, it's a long process, isn't it?
>> It's a very long process.
>> It doesn't take place over night?
>> No, it doesn't.
And you have so many parameters to deal with.
You have to deal with melody, and harmony, and rhythm.
And, and structure and modulations instrumentation and balances and textures.
And then where do you need to make things?
And then you start to look at one
final step might be to anticipate problems spots.
And you look at the score and you think,
this sections' going to need a little bit more rehearsal and
when you plan out your rehearsal time you think yeah,
sometimes you're surprised and what looks difficult on paper isn't.
And other times you think what looks like a piece of
cake you get stuck and even after having conducted for many years.
I'm still sometimes surprised by a piece I've never done
before where I think is going to be tough, and it isn't.
But, one thing also that I, I like to talk
about is using, how, how one uses recordings in score study.
How one uses or doesn't use.
What are the benefits?
What are the disadvantages?
We are surrounded by a profusion of performances now, which
are readily available at the click of a mouse or whatever.
For us to hear of historical performances,
modern performances, especially when we're talking about classical
period repertoire, we have period instruments groups that
are now playing Beethoven's symphonies and even beyond.
And I find it can be helpful sometimes with a new work to maybe listen to a
recording once or twice just to see the
big picture, how it goes, then put it away.
Then study the score and see what you come up with and then maybe listen to it again
later and see, wow, that doesn't sound like what
I thought it should be doing with it or whatever.
With older music that's standard rep and we know
a lot the danger, especially for students is, they get
stuck with one recording that they absolutely adore, and
they think, oh, this is the way the piece goes.
>> And maybe the first recording they ever heard of.
>> Maybe the first ever, exactly.
And then I think you know, there's a lot more out there.
So, don't listen to just one recording.
Go out and listen to ten performances of the same piece.
See what the variety is out there.
The differences of tempo, articulation, character, balance, whatever.
And I say, remember that any given recording is only one
person's opinion of that how, how that piece might be performed.
It's not how the piece goes.
It's not the piece.
It's one opinion.
And if you'll think about that carefully and then start to
look at other opinions, some opinions being better than others in terms
of artistic accuracy and knowledge of style and understanding,
then you can develop a perspective out there that can help you as an interpreter.
But to just latch on to one recording that you
love and then try to imitate it, it's never going to happen.
You have to find your own interpretation through the score, through the composers
notation and understanding each composer's idiosyncrasies.
What did Elgar mean by a dash over a note, a penuto word line?
[UNKNOWN] meant the same way.
Other composers use dashes in different ways.
It's tricky sometimes to figure those things out.
Brahms is the only composer I know of that uses a dynamic PF.
People think it's opposite of FP, forte piano, it isn't.
It's his abbreviation for poco forte, which is halfway between mezzo forte and
forte for Brahms, and we had this one, we did Brahms recently here.
There were a couple people said, said how do you play piano forte?
I said no, that's poco forte.
It's Brahms' abbreviation and he's the only one that uses it.
But if you don't know that and that's part
of your score study too, you're in, you're in trouble.
So it is a huge process, absolutely.
>> And it's a process that we do ourselves, we share with the ensemble.
>> Yeah.
>> And eventually we share with the audience.
>> Exactly and the audience has no idea how much time
we put into creating that process and what it's taken us.
And by the time we stand on the podium, we have to know the
score well enough that we can answer any question that comes up from our players.
because if a player says should this be a G or a G-sharp, you
can't be going well, let me see, I'm not, yeah, I guess a G.
You know, there goes your authority and your confidence on the podium.
You have to be ready for anything, because if you
don't know your score that well, then you're not prepared.
>> That's a great overview of score study.
Thank you.
>> Thanks.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
I think in order to put all of these techniques that you
were talking about in to play, first we have to know the score.
>> Mm-hm.
>> We have to know kind of what we want to put into play.
>> Mm-hm.
>> How do you break down a score?
How do you learn it before the first rehearsal?
>> Well, I'm kind of a, I guess I'm old school in a lot of ways.
So, I try, first of all, before I even pick a piece,
I try and figure out what the variables might, might have been historically.
In other words, since I do some early music, one of
the things I do is, I try and authenticate the notation.
So, I begin to look first of all for, places where, for instance,
ficta had been written into a score, and become part of that score
in perpetuity, when in reality, they were intent to there was intended to
be a certain dimension of interpretive freedom
implied on the part of the performer.
And so you didn't necessarily have to use
a particular note, a particular pitch, change the pitch.
secondly, I look for
things that are implicit in the style itself.
In other words, even if I'm doing something completely modern then
I try to hear who's done that and who's done it when.
I want to see what it seems like in
totality, I want to get the overall sense of it.
That's easier in some cases to do than in other cases because you can always find
a recording of something that was written, you
know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
You can't always find recordings of things that were written 400 years ago.
And, and, then even if you do, what
you're hearing is somebody else's set of educating guesses.
So, there's nothing necessarily religious about the according.
But I try and get the overall sense of it first.
And then the second thing I try, and do is I
try, and imagine it in terms of the people that I'm doing.
And then I try and work through
the problems that I think they're going to encounter.
Either in terms of vocal problems or, rhythmic problems or textural problems
or textual problems, I try and I put those in my own body.
I try and sing those parts, not necessarily every part,
but I try and sing the parts that I'm going to have
to do in some octave, so I get a sense of
how it's going to feel for the people that I have to.
That I'm going to ask to learn it.
And then the third thing I do is begin
to actually, bare down on the finer points of it.
And, I, I played piano.
I, I sit, I de-rhythmic it.
I make it, I just take the rhythmic out and I just play the sounds.
Clunk, and, clunk, and, clunk, and, clunk.
And I begin to figure out the form and the shape.
And how the parts relate to each other.
And I look for a translation of the text, and I try and figure out how
it is that the composer is saying, what
it is they're saying and maybe why that's true.
There-.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Why are they saying it in that way?
And then finally the last thing that I do, I think is
begin committing some of those decisions to temporary working hypothesis.
Not knowing for instance, how it's going to work out.
I, I like to, if it's polyphonic, I like
to I use colored markers, and I put colored highlighters
and I put, I show the thematic relationships and where
they start because those are going to be my conducting points.
Those are going to be my queuing points.
>> So the main theme might all be green as it weaves it's way through [CROSSTALK].
>> Yeah, well one of the characteristics of renaissance
music is when you change text you change thematic material.
So, every, every set of, every bit of a text
will wind its way up and wind it back down and
then out of that will come a new section of text,
and I'll change colors where the new section of text begins.
So that I begin to see the form as
well as the texture relation or the, the compositional relationships.
>> Just be clear as a technique, you're not highlighting an entire,
are you highlighting an entire line or just the beginning of it?
>> No just, yeah just the, yeah well,
typically contrapuntal part the imitation will break down
because it's not precise complete, not like high
counterpoint like it would be in the Baroque period.
In the Baroque period you can become more and more complex at this,
but what I'm looking for is the places I'm going to have to conduct.
Who's important and why?
That's what I'm really looking for.
>> And that's the part you'll highlight.
>> And that's the that I highlight.
>> It could be just the, the head of the motive.
>> Yeah, it could be the head of the motive.
It could go in a major an a half, and then, since a
lot of it is chant related, I sometimes write the chant, you know,
where the change came from so I see what the person is quoting,
where the person is quoting the chant and all that sort of thing.
In more traditional homophonic music, I go through and, and try and figure
out what they indicate or what they mean when they indicated the, the dynamics.
And again, partly, that's a vocal thing.
So I may try and sing it the way I see
it imitated, and, and articulate it the way I see it articulated.
Then, if I need to, I go back and reauthenticate
that, because a lot of times, people over edit things that
are, that fall in the midway gap, from say 1800
to 1850, a lot of things will still get over edited.
They weren't necessarily committed to firm print by the composer to begin with.
And the playing of the piano business, that's just simply
so that I can hear the complexity of the harmonic motion
in slow motion, so that I can, I can see
how things are working together simultaneously at a lot of levels.
And then finally, the last thing I do
is well I, I should have said this differently.
The first thing I do is I take a clean copy of the
score, because I'm likely to ruin the score with my first set of marks.
>> Hm.
>> That was a standard joke when I first began teaching.
I just went out with the kids, kids folders and I took out
their copy that they never marked in and I put in the one that
I'd already ruined and for about a month thereafter, the kids would raise
their hands in different places and say, Mr.Hoft, somebody wrote all over my music.
What's wrong with my music?
And I'd say, people who are writing all over the, it
took them a while to figure out it was me all along.
[LAUGH] But basically, I, I now anticipate making mistakes, so I
take a clean copy of the score before I ever do
it and I work off the copy as much as possible
and retain my score until I actually have the decisions made.
>> It's almost like in math, showing your work, you do
your work on one thing and then show your answer on another.
>> Yes.
That's exactly, that's a good way of putting it.
Until I actually hear them attempt to sing it I
don't know what I've missed, and I always miss something.
I've grown to expect the, actually I sort of look forward to the missing.
I think it would be boring if you were
dead accurate every time and sometimes they surprise me in
terms of what they can do and I let that
let that dictate where I can try and take them.
Some years ago we did a Richard Strauss piece that just had
an impossible phrase at the, at the tempo that was marked A.
It was ridiculously high.
The, it was dynamically extreme from both ends.
So it was ridiculously big to ridiculously small and controlled.
And, and the phrase was a page and a half long.
It was insane.
It's not physically possible.
So I had marked in all sorts of provisional breaths.
And even though that interrupted the flow of the text and
how he was trying to express what he was attempting to express.
The, the text loosely speaking talked about an unending search
for peace, and it, he used funny modulations and funny
resolutions to reflect the idea that mankind is permanently looking
for a peace that's elusive and difficult to find and,.
>> He wrote it?
>> He wrote it, yeah.
And he wrote right into it.
And so I put it in all these little provisional breaths, and then when we
first started doing it, I told my guys, take the breaths here, here and here.
And when we got there they said, that feels really weird.
And I said, well that's because there's not supposed to be a breath there.
And they said, well, why did you tell us to breath?
And I said because I didn't think you could do it.
And they said, well, don't you think you should have let us try?
[LAUGH].
>> I did!
And we ended up stagger breathing our way through
page after page after page of that silly thing.
And we still ran into problems because there were times depending on
how many of them had to breathe in order to carry the.
It got so totally individual that the certain voices had to breathe
at certain points in order to be available to sing certain notes
in certain places because they were the only ones who could manage
or control that kind of thing and it was a really interesting experience.
But I've grown to almost accept that as part of
the fascination, the creative process of the recreative process, you know?
I don't know for certain what they're going to bring to the equation.
And my preparation is essentially a framework.
I want to get it in my hand and get it in my voice, and get it
in my ear, and get it in my psyche, my mind and then see what happens.
And then we get right down to brass tacks.
>> Yeah, there's a great dichotomy between the process that you outline, in terms
of figuring out the context of the piece and how the piece is broken down.
And then forms how you work your score in terms of perhaps
highlighting and that informs how you
conduct because it's all connected and then
balancing that with this kind of living, breathing organism that it might
all change, or at least be adjusted as we get into our rehearsal.
>> Mm-hm.
Well, tempo is a critical thing, even in Renaissance music
where the top piece is more or less in a frame.
A piece becomes intensely dramatic if you slow
it down, depending on the nature of the text.
And, you know, it's traditional to
use cruchifixive, cruchixive statements, you know?
You slow things down, or, team more themes or, you know, monitor Thursday material.
You slow them way down, they become intensely
dramatic, but the practical problems go up exponentially.
And I never know that until I actually hear the choir.
And often times that emerges when we tour with
the program because they finally have it so well.
They have, they have their head around it and they have their voice around it.
And then collectively we can become creative
then we can experiment with how we're
going to speak as a single voice even though we're 34 people there or whatever.
>> Yeah.
A lot of great ideas.
Thank you.
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