Scott Price is Assistant Professor of Piano, Piano Pedagogy, and Coordinator of Group Piano and Piano Accompanying at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Bowling Green State University, he has studied with Jane Magrath, Thomas Hecht and Virginia Marks. He has performed at the national conventions of the Music Teachers National Conference, Music Teachers National Association, the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, and has given performances and seminars at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas TX, the University of Oklahoma Seminar for Piano Teachers, the North Dakota State Music Teachers Convention, the South Carolina State Music Teachers Convention, and the Bowling Green State University Summer Music Institute. He has served as repetiteur with Lyric Opera Cleveland, and as music director for Lyric Opera Cleveland's Educational Outreach program. He has been a faculty member of the Cleveland Music School Settlement and the Bowling Green State University Creative Arts program. Dr. Price is creator and co-editor of the on-line piano pedagogy journal "Piano Pedagogy Forum," and publishes educational piano compositions with the FJH Music Company.
Scott Price
School of Music
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
803.777.1870
sprice@mozart.sc.edu
As an undergraduate and graduate student, I traversed the usual round of accompanying classes, coachings, studio accompanying assignments and served as recital accompanist. I was also lucky enough to work for a small opera company as coach and rehearsal pianist. In all of these venues, I was fortunate to have some fine teachers and colleagues who worked with me on noticing and refining the details of collaborative piano artistry.
Details in rehearsal and performance are certainly important if one wants to send a stylistically correct and communicative performance past the footlights and into the audience. However, many students can become mired down in the endless pursuit of details. The concept of the unfolding communicative musical process becomes subordinate to the attempt to get that one detail that was discussed in class. I was one of those students who suffered from this syndrome and probably caused my coaches and teachers much frustration. As I became more frustrated in my collaborative studies, both with myself and my coaches, my more stubborn self kept hinting that there had to be a better solution to most of the problems than all of the endless note-by-note detail work.
Now that I am on the other side of the student/coach equation, I have tried to study the problem from the other angle. I think the answer to ensemble problems between young pianists and their partners is in the fact that most young collaborative pianists are instructed to work incessantly on details without a proper grounding in a few simple principles. If these basic principles are understood, then the details are more easily noticed and more quickly managed by the student. The most important thing I have learned is to allow the students to teach me what they need through their performance rather than jumping in and nagging them with my supposedly infinite wisdom.
One of the most important basic principles is that of being able to keep the ensemble together at all times. Beginning and advanced collaborative pianists know that this problem is most often at the center of every rehearsal session. Although the problems of ensemble facilitation are more varied and complex with higher levels of artistry, understanding the basic problem of how to enter, traverse, and exit a musical gesture together serves a student throughout his musical career.
As I listen to my accompanying students and their partners, I find that most of our time is spent working on late entrances, cadences, and other rhythmic gestures. If these basic problems are solved, many of the details often take care of themselves. By dealing with this basic skill, we may teach our students not only how to rehearse, but how to conceive and practice their music so that problems are solved before they occur.
Students these days are frightfully smart and even the most sleepy student mind understands that the pianist and partner must begin together, remain together as they traverse musical gestures, and properly set up major cadence points and endings. This is an admittedly nebulous subject and constant work on details results in mere blind target practice. A few moments spent on the perception and recognition of a basic principle can save precious hours of repetition. So, why don't our students always have success in these areas?
The first and most important instinct of the student who desires to fix ensemble problems is to count - and count furiously. What most students don't realize is that if they are able to actually count the next beat, they are late. The brain processes the beat and the hands come down on the keyboard a fraction of a second late. This "galloping horses" effect can become a lifelong habit preventing true unity between performers. If a student can learn how to avoid this problem, then detail work can become a joy as partners work through and execute details in a mutually gratifying and consistent act of music performance.
How do students get over this problem? One of the cardinal rules of collaborative pianists is "Know your ensemble partner's part as well as you know your own part." In a perfect world, both parties would adhere to this rule. If both partners are aware that the two parts create a unified musical representation, then the stage is set for exact cuing of the rhythmic gestures leading to a unified ensemble presentation.
In the facilitation of this process, one of the first things I have my students do is to put down their instruments and take their parts to an area where they have to rely on the visual score and aural visualization of the musical sound. They are forced to read the score and and know what sounds they desire before they touch their instruments. I often require that my students and their partners use nonsense syllables to vocalize their way through the rhythmic gestures of a section or the whole piece. By speaking the rhythm to each other, they are actively communicating the natural rhythm of the piece in a manner that is most natural to themselves. We all struggle from early childhood to make ourselves understood and I find that this process of requiring the students to speak the rhythm to each other deepens their understanding of the composer's intent and their understanding of each other's musical desires. As they begin to agree on the rhythmic language of the piece, I have them begin to inflect contours of the phrases so that their understanding and agreement is unified. Because they are not faced with the problems of physically executing technically challenging passages on their instruments, the understanding and communication of the idea is more pure and easily focused within each student's mind. This process facilitates comprehension of the microbeat gestures within the composition.
The students gain a sense of agreement and unity of idea through vocalized rehearsal of the musical gestures. Once this is achieved, they can begin the true process of ensemble collaboration by recognizing the macrobeat structure of the composition. Students who have achieved understanding of the rhythmic structure of their music can move forward in the comprehension and actualization of the larger metric structure. They can sense the relationship of anacrusis to downbeat not only between individual beats, but also between measures, groups of measures, and within larger phrases and sections of the musical form. When the students have become comfortable with speaking and inflecting the phrases and rhythmic gestures of a piece, we then move on to feeling the relationship of the anacrusis to the downbeat. I often have them walk around the room while they are speaking the rhythm having them swing arms, sway, or hop to feel the beat relationships. If a particular school has a Eurhythmics program, much of this conceptual work is done for the students through the Eurhythmics class sequence. As the students begin to feel the lager metric structure, they can make decisions about how they are going to set up individual beginnings, rhythmic gestures, cadence and ending gestures together in a procedure that will be consistently accurate as opposed to the hit-and-miss target practice that occurs in most rehearsal and performance situations. They begin to think and plan ahead in a manner that facilitates the aural visualization process and creates a sense of community understanding between partners.
No one wants, or intends, to create a rigid metronomic performance presentation through this process. I realize that every student has an individual personality and musical identity and that inspiration is an integral part of a truly moving and communicative performance. If each member of the ensemble recognizes and agrees on these basic principles and has established a basic understanding and agreement of what they wish to present musically, then they have forged a truly unified partnership that can sustain a high level of performance over any mishaps that may occur. They are able to set up anacrusis structures that allow them to feel, hear and begin pieces and phrases together. They are able to feel, hear and rhythmically inflect the internal phrases of the work. They are also able to feel, hear, and set up larger metric structures that create unified cadence patterns and endings that happen together between partners. Most important, they gain skills they can practice on their own without the need of a teacher. They gain basic skills and principles of absolute conviction that also allow for maximum flexibility in the expressive performance setting.
Not every student is willing to go through this process at the outset. However, with a little humor, coaxing, and perhaps some heavy-fisted commands from the coach and teacher, they ultimately will try the experience. I have found that the students are convinced by the results and, most importantly, are able to take those results and become more self-sufficient pianists and collaborative artists.
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