Getting Bach in Shape: Kashkashian Kontinued
In case you missed my last post, let me quickly get you up to speed – last month I was fortunate to participate in a masterclass with the amazing violist and teacher Kim Kashkashian. In Part One I went into detail on some of the many ideas she shared while working with other class participants. In this post I’ll share the feedback she had for me, as well as a few other ideas she shared that were too good to skip over.
In my time with her, we worked only on the first eight measures of the Sarabande from Bach’s D minor/G minor Partita, which I’ve pasted below for reference. This was in part because I derailed the discussion when I asked about re-pull. More on that later!
From Nathan Cole’s Urtext Edition of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas
Fantasia on a Sarabande
This Sarabande begins in a fashion typical for the form, with metrical stress on beat 2 (as opposed to beat 1, which would be expected in 3/4 time). Kashkashian noted that the Sarabande quickly departs from this pattern and morphs into something with a more improvisatory quality, like one might feel in a Fantasia.
To capture that feeling, she encouraged me to play with more rhythmic freedom (or rubato), following the natural ebb and flow of the musical line. In the end of measure 4, for example, to feel the leading quality of the 32nds into the downbeat of measure 5, or how in measure 5 the 16th notes have forward momentum into the downbeat of measure 6, which then gradually releases that momentum over the course of the beat.
Riding these rhythmic waves, which gather momentum as they crest, then release energy as they fall, felt natural and easy. Kashkashian stipulated that while exploring this freer sense of time that I must maintain the pulse of the measure as a whole, as if there was a metronome going slow enough to click on the downbeats of each bar (at my tempo it would have to click at 15 bpm!).
A theme in the class was the importance of spontaneity and a sense of improvisation in performance, and how that can be accomplished in music that is notated and not improvised. In my practice after the class, I found that coupling rubato with the ideas discussed in Part 1 of “Transitions & the Evolving Sound” and “Tension & Release” opened up many more musical options in my playing. It felt, as my teacher Donald McInnes might say, that I was playing the Sarabande for the first time: there was a spontaneity to the playing as if I was composing the music on the spot, rather than executing some sort of complex pre-planned choreography. That felt good!
Baroque Grammar: Sculpting, Tiefpunkt & Phrasal Geometry
Kashkashian worked with me and another student on several ideas to dial in the particular style, or what she called “the grammar,” of Baroque playing. While she felt I was shaping or “painting” the line well, to capture the sound that a Baroque bow would have, Kashkashian encouraged me to think of longer notes as having a “deep center,” playing with a more focussed sound into the middle of longer notes.
I appreciated how she framed this idea, as I had been thinking more about releasing notes at their ends, or as she later described it “having air on either side of the note.” By drawing my attention to the middle of the notes, I was soon able to do what she described as “sculpt” them – sinking into and out of the string as if a single note had multiple layers. With some practice, I started feeling how this “sculpting” of the notes gave them a three-dimensional nature that couldn't be captured by “painting” alone.
Kashkashian also discussed the role of the Tiefpunkt (Google translates this to “rock bottom,” though I’m curious how my German readers would interpret this word!) in slurs – that the middle of a slur should have the deepest sound. This was something I had observed in Baroque playing but never heard someone “articulate” (Get it? No? Try again! :-). As I applied this to other Baroque pieces, I was astonished at the elegance and varied texture that this nuance brought to the music.
The final point in the discussion of Baroque grammar was understanding what Kashkashian called “phrasal geometry.” As I understood it, “phrasal geometry” is an awareness of how rhythmic impulses are grouped within a bar AND an understanding of the groupings of measures or gestures within a phrase. It’s discerning how a phrase is constructed at both the micro and macro levels.
The grouping of rhythmic impulses is related closely, but not always directly, to the meter of the piece. Another student in the class, who played the Andante from the Bach A minor Solo Sonata, was striving for a feeling of calm in her playing, which she sought to achieve by keeping the underlying 8th note pulse even.
Bach Sonata for Solo Violin in A minor - Andante
Kashkashian demonstrated how if the LARGER sense of meter, a feeling of rather ONE-two-Three, was regular across the bars, that the sense of calm remained but that a sense of forward direction AND musical contrast was also created. Simply by zooming out to the sense of pulse at the bar level, rather than the 8th note or sub-pulse level, the student could accomplish her goal in a more musically satisfying fashion.
But Kashkashian also pointed out that Bach is too creative to simply give us a regular ONE-two-Three all the time! The rhythmic impulses are not always so regular! Extracting the bass line from this phrase, we can see the delicate interplay between the harmonic rhythm, or how fast the harmony is changing, and the meter.
Andante Bass Line
There’s a faster harmonic motion in bars 3, 6 and 7. And in bars 4 and 5 we have a slower harmonic rhythm, like in bars 1 and 2, but they’re offset by a beat, changing on beat 2 rather than beat 1, and creating some luscious dissonances against the melody along the way.
Awareness of this delicate geometry of the phrase helps us understand how to shape it! It allows us to understand both where the musical punctuation should be (where the commas and conjunctions lie), as well as how to pace it – where it ebbs and flows.
The Neutral Paw
While discussing the center of notes, I asked Kashkashian if the “deep center” to the notes had anything to do with the idea of re-pull.
Re-pull is a component of Karen Tuttle’s larger concept of the physical and musical approach to playing called “Coordination,” and understanding of this particular concept had always eluded me. It’s beyond the scope of this post to discuss Coordination, but suffice it to say that while explaining the mechanics of re-pull, Kashkashian encouraged me to think more about balancing my bow hold towards the back of my hand (pinky side), rather than pronating so much onto my first finger (I believe the quote was “Honey! You’re so first finger dominant!” 😂).
This approach to the bow hold, which she calls the “neutral paw” seems like it shouldn’t work, but it does!
In my attempts to get a more neutral bow hold and rebalance my bow hold during the re-pull, the base knuckles of my right hand kept collapsing down towards the bow stick. To avoid that problem, she had me imagine I had a golf ball inside my hand that supported the knuckles as I rebalanced. As I sit here typing, I can’t help but notice that the shape of my hand is similar to the shape she was encouraging me to have while holding my bow!
When I started to get the golf ball concept working in my own practice, I noticed a massive side benefit of this bow hold – I was playing with more bow hair on the string! I’ve had teachers tell me to “play with flat hair,” meaning more of the bow hair is on the string, since I was a teenager. The reasoning given is always that more hair leads to more clarity on the viola, which is generally slower to speak than our string cousins. Flat hair was important enough that I remember Michael Tree, the inimitable violist of the Guarneri String Quartet, repeating this advice over and over in the coachings I had with him at New York String Seminar.
This idea is a trope that comes back every year or two in my playing, coming back most recently when I played for Robert DeMaine. Problem was, no one ever really explained HOW I was supposed to play with flat hair (or perhaps someone did and I wasn’t listening!), and I never figured out a way on my own to do it comfortably.
Every time I would go down the road of obsessing about playing with more hair, it would interfere with the rest of my bow technique and leave the rest of my playing a mess! Defeated, I would abandon my pursuit of the ever elusive “Flat Hair Grail” and return to my default of playing more on the side of the hair, and thus the cycle began anew.
So, though Kashkashian didn’t say a thing about how much bow hair to use, the “the neutral paw” NATURALLY led to me using more of the bow hair, which resulted in more effortless sound production AND felt good!
Perfecting the “Plop”
While she didn’t discuss it directly with me, the student that played before me asked for help with keeping his left hand relaxed, and the ideas Kashkashian shared with him were too good not to pass along.
Kashkashian introduced her ideas about the movement of the left hand by having the student open and close his left hand quickly, as if making fists. She pointed out that the thumb can stay loose during this motion, and the fingers are able to effortlessly spring up and down from the base knuckles in the palm.
To carry that same springy action over to the instrument, she had him imagine making fists with the left hand that were interrupted by the fingerboard. This captured not only the physical feeling of the left hand action, but also kept the fingers VERY close to the string, and the closer the fingers are to the strings, the shorter the distance they have to travel, making the execution of fast notes instantly easier.
She then had him try an exercise in which he put his finger down, then immediately released it to harmonic pressure. This exercise, which I’ve heard others refer to as “Bounce Fingers,” encourages the springy downward action of the finger, combined with an immediate release of any tension in the hand, all while keeping the finger as close to the string as possible. She had him try this also playing notes normally, releasing the finger after dropping it but keeping enough finger pressure to still get the note to sound.
Finally, to get the student to feel the subtle shift in balance from one finger to another, she encouraged him to think about walking, and how we shift our weight from one leg to another as we move. In the same way, the fingers “walk” up the fingerboard – fingers release as soon as they aren’t being used, staying close to the string while simultaneously rebalancing the hand over the playing finger.
With just a few brief instructions, Kashkashian had led the student to what Karen Tuttle might call the perfect “plop” of the finger on the string!
This “plop” serves at once as efficient finger action, a continual release of tension AND it cultivates a sense of the hand subtly rebalancing from finger to finger. When desired, the springy action of the plop can be released through the fingertip as vibrato — a plop and sizzle, as it were, or what I call a “plopsizzle.”
Having worked with several Tuttle students, and even Tuttle herself for a few weeks at The Banff Institute, many of these ideas about the plop were familiar. But the “fist” concept was new to me, and was especially direct in making my own plop even ploppier. Working with my own students, I found it to be an incredibly useful image to quickly capture the feeling of the hand springing from the base knuckles.
In my own playing, approaching the finger action as a fist opening and closing also changed the shape of my hand: my thumb moved slightly higher on the neck and I found myself playing even more on the pads of my fingers than I had before. Somehow (and yes I know this is weird!) it even made my fingerboard and neck feel wider — in a good way! I immediately noticed a much softer left hand, and my vibrato, especially on my first finger, acquired an effortless speed and richness that I hadn’t felt before.
Coda
It’s hard to believe that all of these ideas, and more, were covered in just one two-hour masterclass! I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Kashkashian, and to see her work with the other students. This was not just a great masterclass, but in the scope of my own development as a musician and violist, it also happened to be exquisitely timed: it was the precise information I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed to hear it, and I know I’ll be working on these ideas for a long time to come!
I hope these posts have provided food for thought in your own practice, and please let me know in the comments which ideas hit home for you!
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