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.
Score Study
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En provenance du cours de The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fundamentals of Rehearsing Music Ensembles
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À partir de la leçon
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]
Up until now, we've been talking about reversal strategies and conducting
technique, but there's really something much bigger that we haven't discussed yet.
Although it was good that we had an introduction to those techniques.
What I'm talking about is the idea of score study, knowing the score.
And there's two ways that we need to know the score.
The first way is, knowing what the note should sound like, the rhythm should sound
like, the basic building blocks of what is this piece supposed to sound like at all.
The second part is, of score study is
having interpretive decisions made about every single note.
So not just know that, that's supposed to be
a B-flat, on beat three, but what kind of B-flat?
What's the style, the balance, the articulation, and those sorts of things?
These are two separate skills.
Admittedly, so, we can go into rehearsal and, for lack of a better
word, just wing it and go in and just react to what we hear.
Oh, that doesn't sound good, there must be a
wrong note there, and fix it and look at the
page while we're conducting and say oh, there's a crescendo
there and we need to do more for a crescendo.
And sometimes we have to do this purely reactive sort of conducting.
But if we truly want to be efficient, we need to study the score in advance.
And I know from myself, that my
most effective, efficient rehearsals, are the ones where
I've done my score study, and I've used that score study to plan the rehearsal.
If I just wing it, I usually find that the rehearsal is
not as good, and often I know, that if I come out of
rehearsal and think, boy that was not a very good rehearsal, it's
often my fault, because I didn't study well enough or plan well enough.
You probably can guess by now, that the best way
to score study, is the old mantra of macro, micro, macro.
So a three part setup to this.
The initial macro, when we first discover a piece,
we’re opening the score for the first time, and
we're looking at it, is just to get a,
a basic road map how the piece is constructed.
And so, we would start with, okay, what's the title of the piece, of course.
Why is it called that?
Why was written?
Who commissioned it?
Who's the composer?
What sorts of things as he or she composed before?
When was this written?
Is this a style, it's new to the composer?
All these basic background information is the first thing we need to know.
If there are notes in the score we should read them right off the bat.
So we understand the background, and that background
prepare us for what we are about to see.
Then we want to take a walk through of the score.
Just flipping through, looking how it's constructed, okay it starts
at this tempo, then there's a transition to a second part.
We can hum and tap, hum some melodies.
Sing some accompanimental rhythms.
Start looking for basic connections like oh, there's a melody there oh,
I see the melody appears again in the bass voices later on.
Look at tempo relationships transitions, fermatas movements titles
of movements, a basic overview of the piece.
The question becomes what many people ask
at this point is, should we use recordings?
And there's multiple ways of looking at this.
What we can probably all agree on, is that you should not
use recordings as your primary way of score studying, in terms of
just, all right, I open the piece stick on the recording and
just keep listening to the recording, until I think I know the piece.
That's not a good approach.
Some people will say, never use recordings,
just do it completely in your head construct
the sound of the piece in your
head, and then construct your interpretation from there.
And that's a great goal, but there are, there
is a way of using recordings efficiently without, kind of
imprinting someone else's interpretation of the piece on us, and
that's one of the main criticisms of user cordings, of
using recordings, that if we listen to some other
recording, then we're just going to say, well that's our
interpretation, and then we relinquish our own interpretive rights to
the piece it also, using recordings can hide inner voices.
So, if we're using it to really know what the piece sounds like, well, maybe the
recording, doesn't play that third clarinet part strong
enough so you can hear what's going on there.
Maybe there's something that's hidden in the
recording, and only by us really digging in,
which we'll see in a second, can we find out what the piece sounds like.
However, if we're going to use a recording, at this
stage, it could be useful to just listen to it
once, maybe twice and if twice, preferably two different recordings
to prevent that imprint of a, of a specific interpretation.
Early on, after our initial walk through, just to jumpstart our study of the piece.
To create the overall sound world that we're about to inhabit.
And just put us on the right track.
All right, so we've started that first macro process.
The essential vital information about the piece.
We've done a walk through of the piece and gotten the sense.
We've hummed, sung a couple melodies perhaps just
work through a couple of interesting tricky rhythms.
Now we're ready to go into the micro phase.
In the micro phase is where we, as you'd
expect, we zoom in on the specifics of the piece.
This is really the most painstaking work that we're
going to do in score study, and it does take time.
It's not something that you're going to do in one
sitting, depending on the piece, it might take you weeks.
Of do, of doing hours and hours of this sort of study.
And everyone has their own personal way of
doing this, so I'm going to give you one road
map or one way of doing it, but
you're eventually going to find your own your own way.
And our eventual goal is to just be able to open the score
and hear in our head, but that's a process we have to work towards.
So, what I like to do is, you have to make
sure that you can, you know what every single voice sounds like.
If there are twelves lines on the score,
you want to know what every single person is playing.
Not just what the homogenized or combined version of it is that we are recording.
We want to hear what does the second violin part sound like?
Because that helps us fit that second violin part,
into the cello part, and that'll help us know, okay,
not only do they have different melodies, but there
is a dissonance that's created by their two voices, and
we can only hear that dissonance, if we know
their parts individually, and are able to combine them, and
then add other parts to the whole, until we
eventually combine the piece into what it really sounds like.
So it's important to sing or play, perhaps the piano, through every single part.
It doesn't have to be fancy.
It doesn't have to be the most beautiful singing or playing.
It doesn't even have to be at tempo.
I'll often get to the piano and I'm not
primarily a pianist, and I'll just hack through a part
or a harmony, and just see what it sounds
like, out of context, and then I play another part.
I'll play just the melody.
What's the main melody?
I'll play the bass line.
I'll eventually start combining the melody and the bass line, so
I'm creating what I will call the lead sheet version of the
piece, kind of the jazz lead sheet where you have a
bunch of chords and you have the melody, and that's the piece.
The stuff in between is the interesting filler, and things like that.
But eventually essentially we have to know what the
melody and is and what the harmony is like.
So I'll start playing through that, then I'll start building harmonies.
So, okay, not only is C is in the bass line, but it's part of a C major triad.
And so then I'm able to play.
I may not have the right voicing.
I may not play exactly how it's scored.
But I can play the melody, and the C major chord, in
a big clunky version, and get a sense of what it sounds like.
And then that goes to, all right, D minor in first inversion.
Okay, so I know, not only is it a D minor
chord, but I know that there is an F in the bass.
And that's crucial to know that.
So I'll play, it might be clunky, a D, a D minor
triad with an F in the bass, or first inversion, and the melody.
So eventually I'm, I'm slowly constructing what this
piece sounds like, and I'm creating a version of
it, that I can play at the piano, and
sing in my head effectively, to slowly construct it.
This seems like it's a lot of work for
just something that the recording can give you, but
there's something really important and powerful, about being able
to have a kinesthetic connection to what you're doing,
to not only see that it's C major, and
hear that it's C major, but to physically create
C major, either using your voice, or your piano
skills, or even playing it on your primary instrument.
So, as I'm doing this of course, I'm making
notations in the score, so I know later what's there.
Some people like to use a separate version of the score, meaning a, a copy of it.
So they'll take the main score, they'll make a copy, and that'll be their
study version, so they can just mark it up as much as they want.
And they might transfer some of that information back to their
main score for rehearsal and conducting purposes, or they might not.
Sometimes they just do, I'll use the regular score.
I mean I'll just, this main score that I'm studying off of, I'll
make notations in it, and that's what I can what I conduct in.
And so I'm making notations on the harmony underneath.
I might circle a note in the second trumpet part.
Because it's a dissonant note, or it's an important note.
I might make notations in the margins about, which voices have the same parts,
so I'll say okay, flute one, violin two, and trombone, all share the melody.
So I can see that very, very quickly.
And in terms of the harmony that I'm
writing, I don't necessarily use Roman numeral analyses.
If you've take a music theory class, you know Roman numeral one is
the, is the tonic chord, if we're in D major, one means D major.
I don't use that, because I really want to know that it's D major, so I'll write D.
Now, for me, I'll write D plus, that's my code for
D major, although many people know the plus to mean augmented.
But it just, whatever works for you.
I don't like D M, because it's just too many letters.
But find some version some code, that can allow
you to very efficiently notate what the harmony is.
So, for me D, Roman capital D or D+ is D major.
A l lower case d, or d with a, a minus is d minor.
For me augmented happens to be D Aug, because you don't see them very often.
And so, it's, it's a lot of letters but I don't use it very often.
diminished, I would use the little circle superscript circle.
For half-diminished, I'll use the circle with a slash through it.
It's whatever works for you.
It's kind of my version of a jazz harmony notation.
So I can quickly see, that it goes from C to G.
Now, if if I want to point
out the functional relationships, and that's important.
I will also supplement it with the Roman numeral analysis below.
So if, if I go C to G, and I know C is the tonic, and G is the dominant, in terms
of the, the, the key, I will write a small one
to five, or at a, perhaps at a cadence I'll say 5-1.
So I know yeah, the relationship that's
been created here, is a dominant, tectonic relationship.
And that's very useful to know.
In terms of dissonances.
Well, there's lots of ways to do it.
I like to sometimes, as I mentioned before, circle certain notes in the score.
And I'll also write them in sometimes in
parenthesis, next to my quasi-jazz notation in the margin.
And when I say margin, I'm talking about the bottom of the score.
Some people like to do it at the top, I
like to do it bel at the white space below.
The top I reserve for measure numbers, and phrase markings, and phrase notations.
Below is where I put harmonic information and things like that.
Whatever works for you is what you should do.
So, let's say I have a D at the bottom to tell me that it's
D major, and I know though in that chord that there's an E in there.
That it's not part of the chord, it's a
non-harmonic tone I will sometimes circle the E in the
score, in the voices that have it, as a
reminder to myself, and I'll also put it in parenthesis.
Next to the D, so D parenthesis E, which tells me in very
efficient terms, that's a D major triad, and there's an E in there.
Remember when we're doing this kind of study,
some of this is up to our interpretation.
If you've taken theory, you know, there's, there's
more than one way to spell a chord.
For example, if I have let's say the notes C, E, G, B, D, C, E, G, B, D.
Well, there's more than one way to interpret that.
I can interpret that as a C ninth chord, C, E, G, then the
B is the seventh and then the D is the ninth, so, it's one triad.
Or, I can interpret it as two triads, juxtaposed, C, E, G and then G, B, D.
That G serves as both the fifth of the C chord, and the root of the G chord.
The answer is, it depends what it sounds like.
There's no one answer to it, which is one of the reasons it's so important
to get to the piano, or get to some, into your head, or to your instrument.
And play the stuff, so you can determine, well what does it sound like to me?
because that's really what matters.
If you played at the piano and in context of the harmony, it
sounds like a C ninth chord, well then it's a C ninth chord.
If to you it sounds like, no, no it really
sounds like two triads juxtaposed, well then, it's two triads juxtaposed.
If your theory teacher says, it's two triads juxtaposed, and that's the answer.
It doesn't really matter, it matter what it sounds like to
us, and how we're going to interpret it, and thus, rehearse it.
And, that's ultimately what the goal of this course study is.
It informs our interpretation, which will inform how we rehearse it,
which will inform and create how the ultimate performance will be.
So, you make some decisions like this.
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.
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