Heresy, or am I making sense?

It’s one of those things I’ve always wondered about, and having both performed and workshopped Capricho Arabe last week seems to have brought it more to the front-center of my ever-fiddling mind than usual. So I must share, regardless of the disagreement, ridicule, or spewed coffee this might cause. Then again, maybe it’ll get you thinking about this, or some other pieces, in a way that could further make it/them your own. Either way, here’s the thing:

So you know the chromatic scale you get to halfway through the middle section? This one, I mean:

Now why is it that this must be a) a crescendo, and b) accelerated? Musically speaking, it follows a dramatic cascade and glissando, and the most delicate part of the piece comes after this. Personally, I find the crescendo a bit forced, in that it seems to me a bit like a staircase to nowhere, as the following passage seems to respond better to a soft touch than to grandiose treatment. When I play the scale, I try to carry some of the tumult from the previous figure into it. I start explosively and close to the bridge (which is where I was at the end of the last figure), and decelerate as I go up, creeping up past the sound hole with my right to mellow out as I go. That seems to me the more graceful or ‘flirtatious’ treatment – and isn’t that what this piece is all about, anyway?

On swimming with whales

Blessed am I, to have been in Calcutta last week! The festival was such a hit, and I got to encounter enough guitar and guitarists in those four days to make up for the past several months of the classical music wasteland that I have alluded to in previous posts. A ton of good musicians came out of the woodwork to participate, many Indian, some not – if any of them ever read this: it was both an honor and a hoot to meet you! And then there were the artistes. Ah, such class, and a much-needed reminder of what I’m aiming for. Learning little things from the best in the world was perhaps the greatest part of it, part wonderful, part overwhelming. And though I got my derriere handed to me in the competition, this was done by guitarists who performed so well that I do say it was a bit of an honor to have been schooled.

Takeaways, then – this festival has made a number of things clearer to me. I’ve had some sense of all of these things all along, but perhaps not so consciously as now. In no particular order:

1. I need to study more. As in, conservatory. There’s only so much I can learn by knowing the general direction in which I need to grow. It’s time to get a teacher who can help me transition from gliders to jets. Now to start looking.

2. Being a successful performer is as much about exploring, marketing, and selling, as it is about ‘delivering’. It does help if you can play, but you can’t play unless you know people who know people who can gather a crowd for you to play for. So talk to people – especially people who are a lot better established than yourself. They tend to have all the contacts, especially if they’re on the far side of 50. Classical guitarists are inherently technically-conscious people, and often prone to self-deprecation. Counter this when you’re networking by straying just over the line that separates marketing your art and over-promising. You are a jedi ninja gunslinger who deals in seduction. Act accordingly.

3. In competition, in performance, or really ever: never lose concentration when you’re playing on stage. If you’re nailing a passage, don’t start enjoying yourself to the point that you look up and give your listeners a big smile. Unless that too is something you’ve practiced, the piece you’re playing, be it ever so familiar to you, will land you on your arse like a willful horse that you forgot to feed yesterday. I did that with the last bit of Capricho Arabe during the competition, and that friend of mine for over 10 years let me have it between the eyes.

4. Have a plan every time you touch the guitar – don’t doodle on it. And when you do play, play the hell out of it. Be calm and sure with your left, and dig deep and follow through with your right. If there was one thing that differentiated pro tone from amateur tone at a range of 3 feet, it was how powerfully they played, even on comparably responsive instruments.

5. When you practice, practice expressions, not just notes. It’s easy enough to fall into the trap of running through pieces perfunctorily. Don’t. If you don’t think about a piece enough to figure out how you feel about it, and don’t invariably practice rubato, legato, and con espressione, it’s not always going to come to you when you need it.

6. Festivals rock, with more opportunities to do more wonderful things for your life in music than you could ever imagine while sitting in your practice room. This festival does, for sure, and I’m definitely not just saying that because I’m going back next year. 2014’s edition will start two weeks into December, and wherever in the world I am at that time, I’ll be going there for it. You should come.

Exhortations

Yesterday I went over to my old teacher’s place in New Delhi – my first ever teacher, that is, about whom there is much I could say that is laudatory – and met a couple of his (other) proteges. These guys aren’t just students, really, in that they are fluent guitarists in their own right, teachers, and have on their own plate the rather consequential gaggle of pieces that will make up their LTCL programs sometime next year. It was great to meet other guitarists – in a western classical landscape that is as sparse as the hinterlands of India in which I’ve been wandering, one often slips in to a feeling that is part loneliness, part lethargy. Meeting other guys and talking music provided a welcome reminder of and refocusing on the point of it all. There were a couple of things we talked about that got me thinking about la vie musicale, which I thought I’ share here as well.

Be a musician, as well as a particular instrumentalist. I, of course, approach this as a guitarist, so that’s the context in which I’ll write – but this applies to any musician, really. Especially outside the European and American context, but all over the world latterly, the pedagogy available to music students is closer to instrumental and technical training than to an education in music. In an art/discipline/profession/industry/trade (all of the above!) that trades in expression and whose currency is emotional response, it is important for the producers to understand what they’re making, and why. It will help them market and sell, but since production in this context is dependent on the modulation of skill, it will also help them produce. The cultural context of a piece, the oeuvre from which it hails, or even its genre of music are important informants of how it is played, what it means etc. For example, and I realize this may invite musicological brick-bats: does anybody else out there find that Bach has written a few ‘wrong’ notes into his works, which when presented prominently, contribute to the reasons why his compositions are considered a cut above their contemporaries? The man had humor, and even in his work, he enjoyed co-opting his colleagues to lead an audience up the garden path (that would be you, performing Bach – yes, you are his partner in this production). Your possible contentions on my example aside, my request is this – get in to the music you play! A piece is not just a piece, just as a flower in your hair isn’t just a bit of chopped veggie that got stuck up there.

Purpose is important. IMHO, it is important to always be working (musically speaking) towards something. A performance. A new program (for later performance). A new piece (for cocktail evenings, or other places you’d show your friends). A competition. A recording project. An exam. Guiding your students further down the road to proficiency, whatever their objectives. It’s also important to line up a bunch of them in series. Even when one is occasionally stirred to action, it’s easy enough to crest one objective, and then fall in to indolence. I think of this as unfortunate, because a) it’s a shame to sound wonderful and do nothing with it, and b) if you’re worried about not sounding good enough, there is nothing like a setting a bar to help you soar past it. There are, of course, also meditative, introspective, deeply personal practitioners of music, who play much like yogis stand on their heads or float up in thin air when nobody’s looking – if you fall into that category, I don’t mean you. I hope the balance of your personal economics allows you the luxury of music for your own purposes; if it does, I congratulate you. If it doesn’t, but you find yourself irresistibly drawn to its making, I suggest you explore ways to locate the targets you set yourself outside your own mind. It will likely help with the economic situation, and you might just make other people happy en route.

Don’t over-think it. This is especially true for people aiming for virtuosity. I myself am only just a striving upstart, so I’ll own that I don’t speak from experience – but I do say this on the strength of long observation, and extensive experience on the other end of things, that is, as a deeply-engaged listener. When one is trying to get that tremolo to move faster, passage to sound even sweeter, louder, better etc, it’s important to remember that music is a picture you paint on silence. Usually when you play (particularly as a classical soloist), there is no sound but that which you make. Assuming you know your notes and are not deficient in your technical ability – don’t sweat it so much. Relax. Slow down. Get softer. Listen to yourself – if what you’re saying/playing is important, surely it bears your hearing it too. See what effect the passage or piece has on you, as much as the effect you have on it. Make peace with it being what it is, no more, and no less. Be conscious of what you’re saying, and get behind it. Then fill your silence with it. Say it.

Recent developments

I recently decided to attend the Calcutta International Classical Guitar Festival (whoa, bigger mouthful than a rasgulla, that!) and to compete in the competition as well. Whoop dee do, one might well say, and so I did – here’s purpose and direction. The competition will be judged by pros, and it will be both a joy and an honor to play for them. Also, the hall in which this is going down is reputed to have phenomenal acoustics – and you know what a sucker I am for that sort of thing! Being the diligent young muppet that I am, I immediately got down to preparing the pieces I’m going to compete with, pulling them from my existing program (as you might well expect). I went back to the drawing board, and pulled out the stopwatch, and turned off the podcasts, and slowed down my slow practice, and banished all but a smidgen of rubato from my playing, and did everything over and over and over and over…and over. Hours fell like leaves for the last couple of weeks, and more than once my calluses were too creased by the end of the day to be of much use for my last after-dinner practice session. But as always happens, even with pieces you’ve lived with most of your life, going back to basics was very worth it. And now I’m ready, more or less. For the last week of prep, I’m letting the nostalgia back into Traumerei, the stumble back into the Saudade, and a little flirtation back in to my Capricho. It’s nice to have my license to express myself back, and to be able to practice with it towards a proximate end.

It’s also nice to have time of day to work on the rest of my program and practice routine, though – I have the exceeding good fortune of a concert lined up for almost immediately after the festival to keep me from getting overly bogged down by the 6 pieces I’m playing in Calcutta.

My cup runneth over – December is being a busy month!