Sometimes let's say there's a C, F, G.
Okay, so is the C, F, G, is the F just a true dissonance in there or is it a suss.
Is it a sustained F a suspended F, that's
going to resolve eventually back down to the E.
Depends how you hear it.
You have to just go to the piano, or go to
your head, or go to your instrument, and figure it out.
So I'm constantly making decisions like this, and this will help us sell
it to the group, so we know hey, here's how this thing is constructed.
This thing is C over here, and that voice is dissonant, and you need to know
that's dissonant, and make you listen to who
you're consonant against, and who you're resolving against.
These are important decisions.
It also, helps us in rehearsal, quickly diagnose and fix problems.
So, if we are conducting through and we hear
something is not matching what we're expecting, we can
quickly go to the score and say oh, we know it's supposed to be an E major triad.
Something is not creating an E major triad.
And that's one of the reasons why this jazz notation can be useful.
Because if it just says, let's say four, Roman numeral IV, then we have
to do this calculation of, well okay, what, what key are we in, and
what's the four quarter in there, and that's not very efficient, so, by just
putting the letter and perhaps a supplement
of the Roman numeral analysis, that helps.
Of course it's not about harmony there's melody we got, if
we have to know kind of what the what the main melodies,
we need to know rhythms, and these are all things that
we're going to break down at the micro-level and just work through.
And as we're doing that, we're going to be
consciously and subconsciously creating connections between everything that we're
seeing, and this is one of the other reasons
why this is not going to happen in one sitting.
because at first the piece is not, may not make sense to you, and
you may not realize, hey, the melody that I see and hear in measure six,
is the same melody, but twice as fast as the one that I see
on measure 28, I didn't realize that until the fifth day of working through this.
Or, the harmony I see here, is the same harmony
here, except, except it's been altered in a certain way.
Or, man I didn't realize that this accompanimental figure, is really just
the melody, broken up into little pieces, and repeated as an ostinato.
Lots of different connections we're going to find gradually.
And again, that's going to shape our interpretation of the piece, and
going to shape how we rehearse it, and how we ultimately perform.
So, as we go through it, we're going to be making these connections,
notating them when appropriate, and then, piecing
together what this, what this sounds like.
Jump-started perhaps by our recording, but eventually, we are
going to be creating the sound world, in our head.
After we go through this process, is when we
begin to start zooming out, back to the macro level.
Now all through this, we could be working through some conducting issues.
Except I would encourage you not to score study
like this, where you're just watching the score, and
it all becomes about just, lemme conduct my way
through it, because then we're not connecting to the music.
We're just worried about what we're doing
physically, and we're doing it in reverse order.
because really, we want to get the music
in our head, and then start constructing this.
However, it can be useful to say, okay, that's a tricky rhythm.
How, that's one [UNKNOWN] and work through with our conducting,
or if there's a transition, take a step back and
say I wonder how I would conduct that, I would
that's okay to, to start introducing it as we go.
But you're going to be doing more of that as we start zooming
out of the macro, the micro, and back in to the macro.
So as we do the and, and we're entering the macro, now is
when we start figuring out, okay, what is our interpretation of this piece?
And I mean that in terms of, as we've discussed in other videos, how
do I want every single note, every
single harmony, and every single measure to sound?
Not, not only terms of the micro level, like in that
specific staccato, but what is the view of the entire piece?
Is it going from here to here?
Or is it going from here to here, and then to recede, and then go back over here,
and to, eventually there is a valley here, until
we really go to the, the [INAUDIBLE] of the piece.
How do we form our interpretation?
And there is more than one answer.
And that's again why we don't want to listen to
too many recordings early on, because if we do
listen to too many recordings, then when we get
to this stage, we're just mimicking what we heard earlier.
But we want this stage to be a function of what we did in the micro stage.
That we know, okay, well, I'm going to bring out this figure
here, because I know it's important, because I just realized that it's
the same melody that we heard opening, it's the, in the
opening, it's the main melody, so I'm going to bring it out here!
And I'm doing it not because that recording told me to
make that loud, I'm doing it because my score study has
created a connection between these two lines, and thus I've made
a decision that, that's important, and thus it's in for my interpretation.
So we're just going to work our through, construct
our idealized version of the piece, and then
as we do it, at this point, can
we start looking at some of our conducting gestures.
Because now we know what the piece should sound like to us, based on what the
composer wants, and now we can say, why, what gesture, do we need to create that.
And that's important, not to say early on yeah, that's what this downbeat's
going to sound like, before we've decided that, what that note should sound like.
First, what does the note sound like?
Then, what gesture can I create, that evokes that sound?
I mentioned just a couple of sentences ago,
the idea of what the composer wants, and there's
another video on being a compose, the composer's advocate,
but make sure that's always in the back of
your head as you're creating this idealized recording,
that not only does it fit your interpretation of
the piece, but does it also do service to
what the composer, what we think the composer intends?
And, that's something we have to do through our research.
But we want to make sure that the
composer, in some ways, is on our shoulder,
at least to a degree, looking down on
our work saying, yeah, yeah, that's, that's reasonable.
Even if they say I don't know, that's
not, I never thought about that, but, that'll work.
We don't want the composer ima, our imaginary composer up there to be
saying, no, no, that's completely opposite what I wanted, please do not do that.
There needs to be a balance between what we want, and what their intent was.
All right, so, we've worked on our interpretation of the piece.
We've created the idealized recording.
We've developed some of these gestures that are going to evoke the sound.
Now what do we do?
Well, now we want to internalize the piece as much, much as we can.
In some ways this means memorizing it, but, for the re, the reality for
most of this us is that we don't have time to memorize every single piece.
But somehow we want to get it internalized as much as we can.
I often call this the interpretive dance phase.
This is when you're essentially going to go around your house, or your apartment,
or wherever you study, and try to just physically dance to the piece.
Not while listening to a recording, but while listening it, listening to
it in your head, and perhaps using the score as a reference.
So it might be, your might have a music stand
there, and you know what it should sound like, you know
what the sound world of the piece is, and you're
just going to kind of bounce around and just dance to the piece.
I'm not going to do it now for you, because,
although I won't hear you laughing, you will be laughing.
because this is a private sort of thing,
that you just try to, be the piece physically.
And, of course, that's not only practice and in terms of internalizing it and
trying to get it inside our core, so it's, we're not up here reading it
this way the whole time, but it'll also generate some conducting gestures, that we
might be able to extract from our dance and turn into, an actual physical gesture.
At this point, is where it would,
might be useful to intro, reintroduce the recordings.
And because we've already created our interpretation, pretty firmly in our head.
And now, we just want to get other ideas.
We want to say, okay, what does this great conductor do?
What did that ensemble do?
In this case, I would recommend getting as many recordings as you possibly can.
In the age of YouTube, this is easier than it used to be, in iTunes.
So, download, find rec buy as many recordings as you can.
So you can get as many different perspectives.
And, you're going to learn something from it.
You might learn, you know what, that part I was studying at the piano, sounds very
different in reality, than I have it in my head, or as I pounded out the piano.
That's good to know.
I'm, you're checking your work, essentially.
You might also find huh, I never thought
about taking a ritardando in that measure, that's interesting.
Or, interesting how they bring that voice out, or
this connection is not what I thought it was.
And you might either say, I'm going to steal that, or, I reject that.
But at least you're going to get some good ideas
hopefully, and you're going to get a wide variety of them.
So, we're not imprinting just one of them.
Score study is not easy, I found early on, it took me
much longer than I really wanted to get through a piece, and the
more I did it, the more i came up with my own
tactics shortcuts in a good way, and became more efficient at doing this.
so, practice your score study, but know that the more you score study, and
the more you know the piece, the more effective your rehearsals are going to be.
And the less we're going to just be reacting, and creating sound in rehearsal.