Getting Bach in Shape: Kim Kashkashian Edition
N.B. While I’m sure every violist on the planet knows who Kim Kashkashian is, through my social media posts I discovered that her name is close enough to another celebrity that some confusion can arise amongst non-violists. So let me get this out of the way -- I DID NOT have a masterclass with Kim Kardashian! Sorry to disappoint you Kim K. fans!
Postus Interruptus
This post was set to be a continuation of my previous one, Getting Bach in Shape: Left Hand Part 1, but in the midst of writing that post, I got an opportunity to work with Kim Kashkashian in a masterclass. There were so many transformative ideas presented in that class that I decided to hold off on my planned post and write about a few of the MANY things I learned from her class.
While I have listened to and admired her recordings, read her work in the fantastic Karen Tuttle Legacy book, and seen her teach online at the Karen Tuttle Coordination workshop, this was my first time working with Kashkashian one-on-one. Admittedly, I was a bit anxious about playing for such a big figure in the viola world, but seeing her work with the three participants before me, it was clear that she was all about the music and how to help students achieve greater expression through the instrument while being physically comfortable. By the time it was my turn to go my head was already full of ideas, and I was excited to see what kind of feedback I would get.
The Life of a Sound
One of my high school chamber music coaches advised my quartet that every sound has a beginning, middle and end. When Kashkashian demonstrated, every note seemed to have more than just a beginning, middle and end, it seemed to have its own life! There was care, attention and intention to each and every part of every note. Throughout the class, she challenged all of us to think more about how to craft the insides of notes, how one sound LEADS to another, and how silences function.
Just as a singer would never hold out a note with an even or flat sound, Kashkashian encouraged all of us to think more about how we shape the insides and ends of notes. To that end, she encouraged another student to think “and” while playing the middle of a note. This had a fascinating effect, as it at once encouraged a sense of forward motion in the playing, but also instantly drew awareness to the inside of the note that the student was playing, making her consider how it was helping her (or not) to move to the next note.
In The Karen Tuttle Legacy there’s discussion about how in dotted rhythms the dotted part of the note should have the most musical energy. I never really understood how that worked, but saying “and” internally while playing dotted rhythms helped clarify that idea for me. Mental and musical dots connected!
“Silences are part of the story”
Kashkashian encouraged us to come up with a text for the music we play, and as part of that process to remember that “silences are part of the story.” In addition to transitions from one note to another, she made us think more critically about silences, and to ask ourselves how they function in a phrase. If silences as like different types of punctuation in our musical grammar, was the silence indicative of a comma, a question mark, a period, an exclamation point? Did it suggest a conjunction, like “and?” or “but!”?
With a clear idea of how the silence functions, we then had a clear idea of how to “pronounce” or end the note before the silence. While she explained that there were an infinite number of ways to end a note, Kashkashian gave us three basic categories of releases to work on.
Here are the three types of releases she described:
The “and” or “question mark” : the bow tip moves vertically as it leaves the string (arcs upward). The forearm feels as if it’s turning a doorknob clockwise.
“Carry through” or “neutral release” : the frog and tip make “two smiles” as the bow leaves the string. An alternative way of getting this release is that the bow continues moving in the same direction at the same speed as it leaves the string. This was the most familiar release to me, reminding me of the circles in Paul Rolland’s “The Teaching of Action in String Playing” films. By increasing the bow speed at the end of the note, she also showed how this release becomes an exclamation point!
End of a paragraph: bow tip goes down as it leaves the string, it also seemed like the bow speed slowed slightly. This had the effect of a “hard stop” on the sound.
Bowing on the Ocean
An image that came up a few times in the class, and that had the most direct effect on my own bowing and tone production, was the idea of the bow as a boat on the ocean. As she explained it, the string is constantly “rotating” or “spinning” underneath the bow. And just as a boat has to follow waves on the ocean, the bow has to follow the vibrations of the rotating string. A boat can’t insist to the ocean, “Hey, move this way!” it has to ride the waves that present themselves at any moment. In the same way, we can’t insist with our bow that the string behave in a certain way, we are its servant, and must follow its lead to spin the sound.
This image reminded me of advice I read from William Pleeth, Jacqueline du Pre’s teacher, that your sensitivity to the friction between the bow hair and the string should be like the sensation of walking on the beach barefoot, feeling every grain of sand underfoot. (Great bowing metaphors appear to be inspired by the ocean, clearly I need to spend more time there!)
I connected immediately with this image of the boat on the ocean, and it radically changed my relationship to the string. Instead of trying to force my will on the instrument, I let the string lead and followed its vibrational whims with the bow. As if by magic, a whole new palette of colors became available on my instrument. The darker and warmer cello-like colors that I had been missing in my sound, and thought just weren’t in my particular instrument, revealed themselves. Apparently they’d been there all along, I just had been trying to force them out! By working WITH the instrument and letting things happen, the instrument was ready to speak with its true voice.
Tension and Release
When she demonstrated, I was constantly surprised by Kashkashian’s choices of contact point, bow speed and weight. It wasn’t that the sounds weren’t beautiful (they always were!), it was that she was often getting those sounds in a way that I didn’t expect to work — many of her choices seemed counterintuitive to me!
In replaying the recording of the class, I noticed that her bow was constantly moving to and from the bridge, and that the bow speed was constantly changing, all in an organic way. But in watching her, I had trouble understanding HOW she was making those choices. I couldn’t understand what principles were guiding those decisions. That bothered me!
In further replays of the video, what I started to gather was a sense of breathing to the playing. Just as breath has a regular gathering of tension on the inhale, and releasing of tension on the exhale, her playing had an organic sense of tension and release. But of course these musical breaths with the bow aren’t regular, they have to follow the phrase! And the waves of tension and release in a phrase aren’t totally uniform, just as the waves in the ocean are constantly changing height and length.
Since I felt I had a relatively clear idea of where musical tension was gathered and released in the Sarabande I was working on, after the class I set about thinking how to achieve that sense of gathering and releasing in the sound. Pressing on the string with your finger, you can feel that the tension on the string is highest near the bridge, and decreases gradually as you move away from the bridge. By extension, the intense sounds can be found nearer the bridge, and the less intense ones further from it. I did some simple experiments where I simply came nearer to the bridge as the phrase increased in intensity, and further away as it decreased, using my mental map of tension and release to guide my coming into and away from the bridge. If I followed the lead of the vibrating string as I did that it resulted in beautiful and effortless sounds!
Transitions and the Evolving Sound
In addition to discussion about the insides of notes, much care was given to thinking about how to move from one note to another, the transitions or connective tissue between notes.
While I was an undergrad, a common piece of feedback in studio class from our teacher was to shape lyrical phrases “more organically.” Again, a phrase I heard many times, but never really understood! Reflecting on Kashkashian’s words and her playing, I realized that a clearer way for me to understand this idea is that the sound always has to EVOLVE in a way that seems natural and inevitable.
A cloud is constantly changing shape, but so slowly and smoothly that we only notice the change if we pay close attention. Similarly, our sound has to evolve over the course of a note, and BETWEEN notes, in a way that feels inevitable to the listener. This can only occur if our attention is fully consumed by every detail of the changing nature of our sound! If we aren’t paying close attention to the smooth evolution of the sound, it can be like a video of a cloud that’s missing frames — we can see that it has changed from one shape to another, but it appears to do so jerkily. Likewise, unnatural transitions in our sound from one note to another appear as “bumps” to our listener.
Kashkashian worked on this awareness with a classmate playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Towards the end of his time with her, he exclaimed “I’m exhausted!” Indeed! This moment-by-moment hyper attention to the sound requires so much mental energy! I drew a connection between my classmate’s observation and LA Phil cellist Robert DeMaine’s image of himself as a fighter pilot monitoring fifty dials and instruments while performing. As DeMaine observed, this level of attention is tiring, but it is also so all-consuming that there’s simply no mental space leftover for nerves!
My own experiments with this idea after the class were somewhat mind-blowing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, simply by paying closer attention to the parts of the sound I had been neglecting, a hundred little things in my playing improved. This was a powerful reminder of the idea that where and how we point our attention can have transformative effects!
In the Hot Seat
All of the ideas discussed so far are just a taste of what Kashkashian worked on with the other students in the class. In my next post I’ll share the specific feedback I received from her, and how I’ve been able to apply it so far.
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