Mae Mai » pedagogy

Mahler Project

Jon Silpayamanant — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 13:31:08 +0000

I was tempted to call this the “Mahler Symphony No. 1 in D Major Project” but thought that might incline me to have an end point for the project.

As it stands, what I’ve decided to do (since I’ve decided I should go ahead and do this performance of Mahler 1 with the IU Southeast Orchestra) is start a blog detailing some of my thoughts, trials and tribulations regarding the process of learn, learning about and ultimately performing the work (the concert date, if I’m not mistaken, is 2011 April 17 – so mark your calendars!).

What often happens when I learn a new piece is that I’ll at least learn something about the work. Whether I’m just coaching a group of youths for a performance, or as in this case, learning a work for one of my own performances I will invariable want to find out something about the music and composer (if the latter is possible).

In this case, what I’ve learned so far is fascinating. The many revisions; the excised second “Blumine” movement; the recycling of musical materials from the Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen; the context surrounding the practice of “Bruder Martin” (otherwise known more familiarly as Frère Jacques); and Mahler’s Jewish background all contribute to an intriguing and compelling story.

Not that there isn’t an intriguing and compelling story to pretty much any piece of music, but it’s not one that I’d bothered to explore when I’ve performed this work in the past.

What I’d like to do is share some of this story as well as document the process of learning the cello part to the work as well as give some analysis of the actual composition (and possibly some comparative analyses with other versions of work and the aforementioned song cycle, Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen).

While the work itself doesn’t have as many difficult licks for the cello as, say, works by one of Mahler’s contemporaries Richard Strauss – especially if we’re just looking at the shear proportion of licks to composition length – I think, for some of my students at least, having a description of the learning process (and with luck some audio samples if I can manage it) could be of great pedagogical interest.

The analyses might be of more general interest to the readers of my blog as well, though I suspect it might be a bit tedious for a non-musical audience. It has been some time since I’ve had the opportunity to analyze a symphonic work but I would like to toy around with some analytical techniques I haven’t had a chane to play with for some time like Schenkerian or Musical Set Theory analyses (I might even throw in some snippets of Generative Music Analysis ala Lerdahl and Jackendoff) in addition to the standard Roman numeral analysis developed by Rameau that so permeates orthodox Western Art Music education.

If that doesn’t sound appetizing, well, there will be some historical and biographical posts that may be of more interest to a lay audience.

The big issue was deciding where to blog about this. I don’t want to clutter up my blog with this, and wanted to make the Mahler Project more of a stand alone work [in progress] so I’ve decided to start (yet) another blog for the purposes of collecting my writings about this subject.

As I’m in the process of overhauling the website as a whole anyway, and trying to figure out how to integrate all of my various blogs into one (while having the ability to keep them separate) I thought “why not add one more project to that stew” – it’s not as if I’m a busy person or something, right?

Anyway, I will post a link to the Mahler Project blog once I get that set up and running and by the beginning of the new year I hope to have it going full steam!

hearing the spaces around sounds…

Jon Silpayamanant — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:22:33 +0000

While reading some research about rhythm cognition I came across a link to a chapter (“How Music Organizes Time”) of Robert Garfias’ book.

This is quote is pretty self-explanatory!

In teaching us to see more accurately in order to draw realistically, Betty Edwards in her book, Drawing on the
Right Side of the Brain, advises us that we must first overcome the natural interference created by the preconceptions that the “logical” and “thinking” functions of our brains have been trained to tell us about objects we see. We need to see things as our eyes see them, not as our “intellectualizing” brain tells us it knows it really is. She suggests that we may learn to achieve this by attempting to look not only at the object but also around it at the abstract pattern of shapes created by the spaces around the object.

By thus concentrating on these abstract patterns of space for which we have no logical or verbal preconceptions the actual form of the object we are attempting to depict will appear in more accurate proportions. In music we are accustomed to thinking of sounds, but these sounds would not lend themselves to organization into meaningful patterns without the spaces which set them off.

While in many cultures music is thought of as a pattern of sounds, in fact, the durations, pauses, rests, or empty spaces which surround the sound are also a vital element in delineating patterns in our perception. In our culture we sometimes speak of a person as having a bad sense of rhythm. This usually means that this person is not careful or skillful in preserving the spaces around the sounds, although the sounds themselves might be correct.

to create or to copy

Jon Silpayamanant — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:10:32 +0000

I was reminded of a quote I’ve often posted in various online forum debates about originality in music. Here’s the blurb from an old issue of the Theatre Symposium journal–the special issue titled “Crosscurrents in Drama: East and West” (Volume 6, 1998). It’s from “Part II: The Symposium, A Panel Discussion on Crosscurrents in the Drama” which is a condensed transcription of the panel discussion. Samuel Leiter says this in his discussion about Asian theatrical performance:

[This] reminds me of interviews I had with the chief puppeteer in the major bunraku troupe, the chief chanter, and the chief shamisen player. I asked them how they trained, how they learned as children. As we all know, the standard system in Japan is to copy your master. [But] those artists said, “We do not copy our masters. Of course we watch our master and we learn. But no two human beings are alike, so it is impossible for me to copy my master. I have to internalize my art, make it my own. Then I can become a great artist.” This is a wonderful illustration of the solution to what might seem to be impossibly opposite goals: to “replicate” and to “create” anew.

I think it can be too easy to be so concerned about originality at the expense of the realization that we’re always borrowing from someone before us. It may make good talk for artists to talk about lack of creativity, but more often than not I find those kinds of arguments disingenuous at best, and just downright wrong at worst.

At the same time, the slavish devotion to copying, mimicking or imitating someone else can be just as impossible a feat to accomplish (as the Japanese artists above intimate) but it’s so easy to accuse someone of doing just those things when we can’t recognize the actual individuality and idiosyncrasies of someone’s “representation” of a work.

In the end, the greatest artists are those that can make ANY work, whether their own or someone else’s, speak powerfully. On the flipside the weakest artists have to hide behind the rubric and hubris of citing originality and creativity, or, dedication to the re-creation of a previous work to hide the fact that he or she has nothing really to say.

Alternative Careers as a String Player

Jon Silpayamanant — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:33:31 +0000

Earlier today I had the pleasure of giving a talk to young string players (grades 7-12) about, as the title of my post says, “Alternative Careers as a String Player” during the IUS String Clinic 2010.

The idea was to emphasize the kinds of careers a number of string players currently (or in the recent past) have pursued as well as talk about some of the string playing traditions that exist worldwide and emphasize that the training they are getting as young classical musicians is perfectly suited for a lateral shift in musical direction if that is what they wish or if that is where playing music takes them.

I didn’t say much about the idea that classical music in the US is declining a bit as I didn’t want to focus on some of the negative aspects of a shrinking musical market with a surplus of specially trained musicians for that market (though I did speak to a couple of the older kids afterwards about this). At the same time I almost feel that by not doing so I do a disservice to the kids. it’s really the main issue I have with teaching and what almost kept me from returning to this line of work.

What is nice is that I can tell people that if they want to go into music, then they have many alternatives rather than the three limited choices–the trivium as it were– of full-time ensemble performance, teaching (at either the private level or University level), or freelancing.

Granted, many of the things I did talk about piggy back on the freelance world–at least until you can create your own ensemble(s) as well as the need for it.

And not that it’s any easier to do that–starting practically from scratch (this is an overstatement) can be a daunting task so I needed to demonstrate that there is precedent for some of the string playing careers about which I was talking. And to go back to my interview with Colin Ramsey about creating a contemporary cello career that is far easier to do in this day and age than it would have been in the past due to technology and the ease with which information can be seen and consumed by musicians.

At some point I should probably formalize some of these issues and work on having a much more prepared presentation that I can offer to whatever institutions that would be interested as I believe thinking about career choices in these ways is far more fruitful than stating something to the effect of:

“Well, you’re going to need to work really, really, REALLY HARD and there’s still no guarantee that you’ll get that orchestral position/university position/string quartet position. Sure, you can probably go into an arts related job with your idiosyncratic knowledge–maybe a job on the staff at a concert hall or with a Symphonic organization, but your love of playing music is not going to guarantee you get to do so at any more than a part time hobby.”

Which can be the default answer whether or not the performing positions are available. I just happen to think they are available–just not necessarily here (in the US) or here (in traditional and orthodox performing organizations). That there seems to be a growing classical music scene outside the US and Europe hasn’t been emphasized enough and neither has the fact that Western instruments (especially strings) have been part of any number of Art music traditions in various countries outside of the Western world for up to a couple hundred years in some cases.

The fact that with this surplus of Classically trained musicians in the US has shifted what kinds of instruments/instrumentalists you’ll find in a “band” setting or non-Western Art music setting is just another sign of how musicians who love the instrument that they have trained with for what usually amounts to decades will find a way to perform on that instrument even if the Classical Music market can’t fit them in it.

Which just shows us that for some folks, if there’s a will to play, then there’s going to be some “unorthodox” way to play if the normal channels don’t pan out.

Ottoman Cello Suites

Jon Silpayamanant — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:39:34 +0000

This is a project I’d been thinking about for some months now but just haven’t had the time to get around to for various reasons. With the recent publication of Eric Siblin’s The Cello Suites as well as the general lacunae in conservatory Music History education regarding the music in portions of Europe during the Arabic, Byzantine, and especially the Ottoman Empire, I thought the new year might as well be the time to start.

It’s been nearly a year since I starting seriously considering doing solo recitals again. One of the ideas I had back then was to do a program of just Ottoman compositions. Over the past few months of reading and research I’m finding good structural parallels between the Bach cello suites and what are ostensibly called “suites” in Ottoman music (fasıl) and I thought that it might be an interesting experiment to take an Ottoman fasıl and give a solo cello performance of it. There are any number of Ottoman pieces that I just absolutely adore, but working from an outsider’s perspective [of Ottoman music] makes it difficult to decide how to negotiate a number of the issues that come from such a project.

I don’t have the time to sort through (or even list) some of these issues in this post, but I think I will be using my blog as a sounding board for them as well as just a place to document some of my solutions as good or as bad as they may be.

facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/notes/jon-silpayamanant/ottoman-cello-suites/234695927090

Précis on the role of a performer (part 1)

Jon Silpayamanant — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:02:04 +0000

I believe it was Gunther Schuller that said something to the effect of “play exactly what I had written and nothing else” (if I am completely making this up, PLEASE let me know).

But basically I agree to a large extent with what Schuller was saying with respects to the role of a performer. This was one of the points I had made in my undergraduate thesis (titled “The Ethics of Performance Practice”) and this is pretty much how I try to approach composed works. Yes, ultimately the performance of a piece of music is a collaboration between composer and performer, but the roles are relatively clearly defined. The composer writes the notes, the articulation, and the phrasing; and the performer plays the notes, the articulation, and the phrasing.

Sometimes a performer will let his or her lack of technical proficiency dictate how a passage in a piece should be played. Other times, as in the case of e.g. Fitzenhagen, the abundance of technical proficiency will dictate how a perfomer “adds” to a piece (cf. Paganini & “Harold In Italy”). Obviously, the former parallels what happens when a performer lacks the technical proficiency to play outside of one, or a few genres of music; or the technical proficiency to play more than one, or a narrow range of instruments; or even read one, or a narrow range of musical notations. What exactly does it mean when, e.g., someone who can play tin pan alley songs only on the piano and can only learn the music by ear. In other words, what exactly does it mean to call this person a musician. This was a question I asked when I was finishing my Music degree in cello performance–what exactly does that qualification mean anyway? It confers a kind of legitimization, but by the time I finished my undergraduate work I hardly felt as if I knew that much about music. In fact, I still often feel that way–especially as I recently discovered the Turkish Yayli Tambur (see video below).

Ultimately, what’s at issue here is how much of the idiosyncrasies of the performer should dictate what a particular piece sounds like. In other words, how much of the idiosyncrasies of a performer’s ability to play should mold the shape of the piece outside of the composer’s written notation.

How much the composer’s intention is followed, and what role the performer has were central to my arguments in my thesis. Obviously, the interesting issue is how to re-produce (cf. Jacques Attali’s Representation) [sic] that intention. Or, to frame it in a more practical historical context, how a performance tradition teaches a performer how to re-produce a composer’s intention.

Putting aside all the issues of Authorial intentionality–which has always been more of a Eurocentric (and by “Eurocentric” I do include North American) Literary Critical viewpoint (see Patrick Hogan’s Ethnocentrism and the very Idea of Literary Theory)–we can easily imagine and even empirically test (more regarding that in a future post) what amounts to a form of cultural transmission through populations of performers.

For a majority of non-notated music (e.g. traditional folk tunes; improvised genres) the performing culture itself serves as the “composer” of the tunes. And this is where performing roles get interesting, I think. I reminded of a lesson I had with Hussam Al-Aydi on Arabic Taqasim some time ago. I had asked Hussam if there were particular patterns of pitches that get played often (I think I also asked him about modulation from maqam to maqam). He responded simply that I “have to feel it” which brings to mind a sentiment given by Justice Potter Stewart. This wasn’t particularly helpful to me at the time, though in retrospect I realize what a ridiculous question that was to ask him. It would have been comparable to me asking one of my cello professors if there are any particular arrangement of pitches in the cello concerto repertoire that I could practice to help me learn how to play concerti.

Maybe this is not quite the same thing as one (Arabic Taqasim) is an improvised genre while the other is a composed one (Western Classical Concerti) but I think the issue is that there’s really no way to completely say in words what can be said in music. There’s no unambiguous translation algorithm between languages much less between one form of expression (language) and another (music). We often have to resort to metaphors and metonyms to give some sense of the shape of our thoughts about music and what it is supposed to convey and how we’re supposed to convey it. This isn’t to say that anything we state about music will be ambiguous and absolutely vague anymore than, going back to Authorial intentionality, can we translate the meaning of any particular statement into anything we want to at a whim–there’s a core meaning or set of meanings there that are entirely determined by the text and, by extension, the author.

Microtones

Jon Silpayamanant — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:10:15 +0000

Calling a music microtonal is really such an unfortunate and misleading thing and belies alot of the assumptions that we make (in the world of Western Music) about how another culture’s music is organized.

Basically we take as a standard Western diatonicism and when discussing other culture’s scale systems (the idea of a “scale” is also problematic for similar reasons) we reference some normative idea of what an interval between two tones or notes means. So if we have a normative tonal system, with half steps being the smallest distance between two tones, then technically, if we have a scale system with intervals smaller than a half step that would be “microtonal” scale system (and vice versa for a “macrotonal” scale system).

This works fine for scale systems by a number of avant garde composers in the Western Art Music tradition (e.g. Harry Partch, Lejaren Hiller, Glenn Branca) who have worked out scales with intervals that are smaller than a half step. But this really makes no sense when applied to, say, Arabic Music.

Sure, in the history of Arabic Music we have theorists that have attempted to reconstruct a theory of scales using a 24-note per octave quarter tone scale as the basis for Arabic Music (and Persian, Turkish, Azeri Musics) but there are technically no scales that use a quarter tone in between two intervals. There are any number of tones that fall in between the notes of a Western Scale (often called “neutral tones” to contrast with “sharp tones,” “flat tones,” and “natural tones”) but the stepwise motion to those neutral tones and from those neutral tones usually consist of an interval that falls somewhere in between a half step and a whole step.

So with no intervals smaller than the smallest interval in a Western scale, what exactly do we mean by Arabic Music being “microtonal” anyway?

I’m sure I’ll have more to post about this later, but felt the need to ponder this as I’m learning a number of new Arabic tunes for an upcoming performance–and realizing that the Western tuning of Cellos isn’t really optimal for playing and I might have to adopt an Arabic or Middle Eastern tuning or settle with using fingerings that are terribly unidiomatic for cello playing (which won’t be the first time for me).

Practice [B]log

Jon Silpayamanant — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:22:53 +0000

In the interest of charting my new found obsession with practicing, I’ve decided to start a “Practice [B]log.” Basically after each practice session I will take notes on repertoire or techniques worked on as well as my thoughts about the practicing process or the music itself.

I haven’t decided whether I want it public or not–not that I care so much who sees how much I practice–but I’m not sure I’ll even have coherent sentences (or even phrases, for that matter) about my thoughts. I have so many idiomatic ways about talking about music in my head that I’m not sure much of what I post would make any sense to anyone other than me.

For now, I’ll keep it private though maybe in the future it will go public. I don’t think I’ve quite come across anything like this (as far as the full content of blogs go; individual blog posts, maybe) so I might look around to see what might be out there just to see how other people are presenting things.

It’d kinda weird getting a little upset if it’s been more than a few hours since I’ve last touched the cello and I really don’t know exactly what the motivation is so maybe some thoughts about that will go in the Practice [B]log, or maybe even in this one.

On being an active educator again…

Jon Silpayamanant — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:19:55 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure of coaching the cello section of the Floyd Central High School Orchestra (I’ve been coaching the cellos of the Floyd County Youth Symphony, and a music instructor for toddlers and pre-schoolers at Gymboree Play and Music since the fall of ’07) and being back in a high school setting brought back some fond (and not so fond) memories.

More importantly, helping budding young musicians in their craft is becoming a very rewarding experience for me. The most interesting thing about the experience is that the students are teaching me as much as I am teaching them.

Let me explain (and I’m sure many teachers and educators have this experience): having to actively show anyone how to do what you already know how to do is simply the penultimate indication of what you actually know about what you’re doing. In other words, the way I look at teaching is if I really know what I’m doing on the cello, then I should have no problem translating that knowledge into a workable skill for a student.

Obviously this doesn’t always work. Sometimes it just seems like you don’t have the right words, or can’t fully demonstrate exactly what you mean. But for me that implies that I am not exactly sure what I mean–which further implies that I’ve so long ago internalized how to do something like play the cello that I think very little of how I actually do it.

So this is where the kids teach me: if they don’t understand what I’ve showed them, or if my demonstration or pacing is too fast or imprecise for them to understand, then that means I better find another way to show or demonstrate to them.

Sure, I understand that there may very well be some lazy students; or students that just don’t give a darn; or perhaps a student that is being difficult just for the sake of being difficult; but until I know them better I can only give them the benefit of the doubt and assume I need to work on my skills as a coach. Certainly though, other learning opportunities from a pedagogical standpoint are available for the problematic students mentioned above.

My props, kudos, and respect go out to all the educators that do this on a regular basis–and get results–and all that (plus many “Thank You’s!!”) to all my former teachers, music instructors, coaches, orchestral directors since where else could I have learned what few skills I do have now for teaching music, eh?