The Hourglass Method for Learning Music: Part 2 - Big Picture
This is the second article in a series examining the Hourglass Method, click here for Part I: Outline.
Here’s a reminder of the outline of the Musical Hourglass.
In this post I’ll go a bit deeper in examining the first step in the Hourglass - the Big Picture. This is perhaps the most important step to the actual performance of a piece, but one that I often neglected (to my detriment!) as a younger player.
Just as when I'm actually performing, when I'm starting a new piece, my goal is to get a feel for the music AS A WHOLE.
In this phase I’ll do things like:
Listen to multiple recordings
Research the composer and what was happening during their life while they were writing it. If I’m unfamiliar with the composer, I’ll also make sure to listen to some of their other works, so that I can get a sense of their personal voice and style.
Study the score - look at the structure, harmony, phrasing. Understand how my part fits with the piano and/or other parts if it's a chamber work. Write in cues for other parts!
Play through the work many times
Questions I’ll ask myself during this Big Picture phase include:
What do I think this music is about? What story, mood or emotion do I hear (or see!)?
Where are the musical high and low points?
What sort of musical tools does the composer use to create contrast?
Music tends to fall roughly into 3 categories: song, dance or speech (rhetoric). What category or categories does this music fall into?
Where are the places that needn’t worry about (what Nathan Cole calls "islands")? Mark them!
Where are the places that consistently cause problems? Mark those too!
I don't need firm answers to all these questions when I start a piece, but I want to make sure that I'm ASKING them - thinking about them from the outset and throughout the process. If I start asking these questions at this phase in the preparation, then there is time for me to ruminate on the answers.
If I do this work and ask these questions, then what's really going on in the first Big Picture phase is I'm beginning to develop an INTERPRETATION of the piece. If I skip this step and just launch into fixing every shift and intonation error, then I've trapped myself into the goal of "correct" or "note-perfect" playing. This "note-perfect" playing is not only an unattainable goal, but it's also not a particularly desirable one.
When a beginning reader reads aloud, it's common to hear them read words, but without an understanding of the thread of the sentence. Their brains are working so hard to decipher the letters into sounds and sounds into words that there is no brain power left for them to also understand the story. To me, the approach of "note-perfect" playing is is like “reading the words” in a book versus “reading the story.” And this can happen at any level of playing! If a piece is so technically challenging that I’m spending all my energy "deciphering the words" then it can be easy to lose sight of the story behind it.
Unfortunately though, for many different reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, this philosophy of "learn the notes" THEN "learn the music" is all too prevalent in music education, and it's a trap I’ve often fallen into as well.
From experience, I know that if I go down the “note-perfect” path, I will listen to myself later, hear musically stale playing, and then find myself trying to then "inject" musicality into the playing. Since musicality (timing, phrasing, sound color, articulation etc.) effects my coordination, intonation and rhythm, that essentially means I now have to start over from square one!
I have, in short, started the piece aimlessly, WITHOUT A CLEAR INTENTION of how I want to play it, or what I'm trying to communicate. I have started without an opinion.
A better goal than note-perfect playing, that was beautifully articulated by Daniel Matsukawa in this Bulletproof Musician podcast, is to make your audience FEEL something. This is the goal of an artist, to make your audience FEEL something. This is such a basic idea, but one that easily gets lost when we are stuck on HOW we are playing the instrument.
WHAT we are trying to communicate dictates HOW we are going to play it! If we don't have something to communicate, something to say, then it doesn't really matter HOW we do it!
If I want to make a convincing musical argument, and put my own musical stamp on a performance, then I need space and time to take in a work and formulate my own ideas about it. IT TAKES TIME FOR THESE IDEAS TO MARINATE! And that’s why it’s so important to ask these big picture questions at the outset of learning a piece.
Now, depending on the timing of a performance, marinating may have to be compressed! With the timeline of the Violympics program, for example, we were given just 7 days to learn a piece. With that timeline, I had to trust my initial musical instincts and just go for them with conviction, there was no time to consider lots of alternatives! But I'll confess that as a serial procrastinator, I found that deadline helpful!
Playing Through Pieces
Someone once asked Itzhak Perlman how he practiced and he said something to the effect of, "I play through a piece, and then I play through it again and if I have time, I play through it some more." Playing through a whole piece, or "rehearsing while performing," is a GREAT way to approach a work in the beginning stages. Not only can I get an overall sense of the piece, but sight-reading it many times will often allow me to solve many of the problems that happened in the initial read through!
Now, if the work is really challenging, I may only be able to play through things slowly, or I may have to skip sections, and that's ok! It's important at this stage to "find my islands" as NC would say, but also to start noticing technical hangups - these hangups could be general technical challenges like a certain bow stroke or left-hand technique, or specific measures that are just HARD.
Noticing patterns of errors at this stage is more important to me than noting specific errors. For example, if I notice that I'm having trouble with a shift in a passage, and also a string crossing and "oops, just played that note out of tune!" that's less interesting to me at this stage than noticing "oh, this section has a lot of spiccato and mine could use some work."
Patterns of errors become the meat of my scale practice. I was first introduced to this strategy in 2017 by an interview with John Stulz, violist of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in the American Viola Society journal. In the interview he showed how he had broken down the technical challenges in a complex viola work by Zimmerman into 32 different technical problems.
Stulz cataloged each of those problems on a piece of graph paper. Tackling a few of those challenges each became his daily scale routine. In this way, he was about to make each technique an effortless part of his musical vocabulary - in performance he wouldn't trip or fumble over any of these "words" in the music.
I LOVED this idea and have used it ever since. Here's an example of patterns that were challenging to me in the Debussy "Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp."
Keeping good records of these challenging pattern also serves as fantastic archive for working with students on the same piece! While I initially did this work on paper, I now do it on the Goodnotes app on my Ipad and catalog it in Evernote along with the observations I have about the piece during practice so that everything is easily searchable.
Most importantly, by identifying these patterns early in the process of learning a piece, I have time for them to become a fluent and unconscious part of my technique. My mind is then more free to focus on the more important goal of communicating to music to the audience!
That's all for now! In my next article I'll examine the next step in the process, Section Work.
What strategies or tactics do you have for approaching a new piece for the first time? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.