Sonatina beginning
Assignment 4 Using Fig 82, p 146:
1. Analyze form in the piece. 2. Sing the melody in the piece:
Tune in to the piece’s emotional image and a part of the composition scheme; imagine the first sounds only in texture with movement. Gather weight and sing the melody with musical speech filling each interval with an imaginative-dramaturgic meaning.
3. Separately play the melody and accompaniment in the piece:
Tune in to the piece’s emotional image and a part of the composition scheme; imagine the first sounds only in texture with movement. Gather weight and play the piece while thinking about phrasing (sentences, phrases and motifs) and feeling how you express emotional image and form through musical speech.
4. Play the piece by both hands:
Tune in to the piece’s emotional image and a part of the composition scheme; imagine the first sounds only in texture with movement. Gather weight and play the piece while thinking about phrasing (sentences, phrases and motifs) and feeling how you express emotional image and form through musical speech.
5. Play the piece by both hands:
Tune in to the piece’s emotional image and a part of the composition scheme; imagine the first sounds in texture, harmony, dynamics and balance with movement. Gather weight and play the piece while thinking about phrasing (sentences, phrases and motifs) and feeling how you express emotional image and form through musical speech.
Lesson 44
Artistry
Artistry is a MEM that is related to performing a piece on stage.
There’s a difference between playing music while practicing at home and playing music in front of an audience:
1. While practicing at home, you create a beautiful world — your own space full of harmony, beauty, order and love. Any stranger will destroy this order and create chaos and uncertainty. And you’ll no longer get any satisfaction from playing.
2. While playing in front of an audience, you experience feelings that are impossible to produce while playing to yourself. Performance is a type of communication, energy exchange between people by the means of sounds without words. Therefore, this communication is finer and deeper — you feel the energy of your listener and he feels yours. And this communication becomes harmonious only if you, as a story teller, begin to “lead” your listener. Performing before an audience is the only opportunity to feel your audience’s admiration for your playing, experience a divine feeling when your audience listens to you with all their hearts, when they breathe with you, when they totally agree with you, when their hearts are open. And it inspires you even more, it nourishes you and gives you energy to create such a piece on stage that no one ever felt or performed like you before!
So, if you’ve decided to risk and experience new feelings while playing before an audience, then you’ll need artistry so that this communication would give pleasure and satisfaction to you and your audience. Artistry is an ability to fully express on stage all MEMs and feelings that you’ve learned before at home. Artistry is a feeling of self-control, as well as control of your instrument and audience.
When you played something to other people, you probably remember that you usually get shy, don’t play as confidently as you could while playing to yourself and even begin losing yourself. This is a very unpleasant feeling and it’s caused by worry. Worry is a natural feeling that is caused by uncertainty about those important things that you do for the first time or haven’t done in a while. It’s a natural, normal feeling and you shouldn’t fight it. But worry can grow into two feelings:
1. A feeling of fear and panic before the unknown; a feeling of losing yourself while playing; a feeling that you lose everything you’ve learned when a feeling of failure and dissatisfaction remains after a performance.
2. A feeling of anticipated bright joy and confidence about your performance on stage when you control your playing, when you lead your
audience and together create such a piece that couldn’t be created in solitude. You need artistry to make your worry grow into the second feeling, and so that a feeling of satisfaction, amazing time and a desire to repeat it again would remain with you after your performance.
It will be a surprise for you, but your audience isn’t initially 100% ready to listen to you. Their thoughts are someplace else, even if just a little bit, yet enough not to be totally with you at your performance.
There’re two exercises which will help you to transform the invisible dialogue during your performance into a confident and imperious monologue. By saying “the invisible dialogue”, I mean, in a negative sense, all distracting thoughts of other people that interfere with your monologue and create haziness in your head. This haziness is an obstacle for your clear expression on stage. You try to move through it with your eyes closed in fear of losing yourself. At such moments you feel yourself like a frightened “victim”: your voice (your sound) becomes quiet, your pronunciation (articulation) becomes weak, your thoughts freeze in fear — this affects your intonation, which becomes listless and inexpressive. Your playing is a materialization of things that happen on the energy-mental level. Those things that no one seemingly sees, but everyone perfectly hears and unconsciously feels.