The art of "practising" extended techniques

So this post is to address a question I have had asked to me several times in the past weeks in regards to working on extended technique. I thought this would be a useful post to write since for me, it is not cut and dry. I think there is this idea out there that people who are involved in new music spend all our time in our dark dusty corners, surrounded by electronics, and bizarre contraptions always in search of new ways to make sounds. Obviously I can only answer for myself, but this is pretty far from the truth. What I have found with those who perform lots of new music, and myself would be included in this group, is that there tends to be a great deal of time spent on the fundamentals of sound production, articulation, flexibility... you know the meat an potatoes of playing. The more time I have spent with new music the more focused my basic work becomes.

Why?

I think that this is a necessary reality when we are dealing with lots of extended technique, we need to invest a great deal of time and energy to our simplest aspects of playing, since there is a good chance you may not make a conventional sound, in a conventional way in your two hours of rehearsal today. As well, having wicked technique and flexibility is a must for new music, or at least it is the pipe dream.

But all those sounds... how?

There it is, the elephant in the room, and that is we need to be able to meet the demands of the music when it comes to extended technique. There are two groups I lump things into.

1. "Normal" extended technique.

2. Unorthodox technique.

In group 1, this is where I put things like, flutter tongue, growling, multiphonics, stopped and echo horn, microtones, etc. Things you encounter all the time and are drawn on constantly. Some people may not include stopped horn in here, but one thing I have learned is that you need a killer right hand for new music, fast, nimble, and accurate.

So with all of the things listed in group 1, the only thing I routinely do in my practising is flutter tongue and stopped horn work. These are worked on for other reasons, flutter scales for air, stopped horn for.. well... being able to do it well.

Group 2 has techniques like, slap tonguing, hammer tonguing, different air sounds, multiphonics in contrary motion (this is, for me at least, an INSANELY hard thing to do, kind of works against how my brain works), combining flutter and growl together, and the list goes on. These are things that you encounter less often, or are unique to a singular work.

If you are still here we have arrived to the part about working on these techniques... so set phasers to fun! So the two groups we are important to this next part. When something falls into group 1, our "normal" group, these are things that are a byproduct of good base technique and mechanics. So if your nuts and bolts are in the right place they tend to just happen. For microtones, if you understand how they work, can hear them, and have a fingering for them they pop out since that is the harmonic series at play. Flutter tongue of course some of us have to learn to do it, I was one of those individuals that can't, and still can not, roll my R's. Had to learn to flutter, but now it works. So again group 1 is all about just being able to play horn in general.

Group 2, now here is the trickier part. There is always a trade off when learning these things, some people are unwilling to, complain it's "not idiomatic" and write it off. Others sit down and figure it out. That is what I'm going to talk about, my process of figuring it out. The best thing you can do is shop-talk with someone who knows the drill, assuming you don't have this luxury here is what I would do, even if you do have someone to shop-talk with, you still need to do the work... sorry?

First: Make a decision about what the technique is, what sound EXACTLY are you going to make. With no decision, you cant conceptualize how to make it work.

Second: Experiment, this is the big steps, start trying things, it could be vowel shapes for air sound, tongue positioning, anything. Leave no stone un-turned.

Third: Deconstruct it to it's elements and master them individually, then put them back together.

Fourth: Implement it back into the piece. Though, do so with no tempo, rhythm, dynamics, etc... The gaol is to place it around the other sounds and start to make sense of it sonically, and structurally. The same way we workout tricky licks in any kind of music, we are building relationships now.

Fifth: Add either the rhythm, or the dynamics, not both. I do this because I am trying to not overload the system. We are close to getting what we want, not just "something".

Sixth - infinity: Add the remaining elements one at a time. So depending on what we are dealing with it could be range, tempo, dynamics, etc. Keep this slow approach going, again we want to get what we conceptualized.

So the above method is slow... and can be tedious depending on who you are, and how you like to get your work done, but, it works. Remember we are not faking it. We need to figure these things out or what is the point. The take away here is that one needs to be really focused on their basic elements of playing to make things work, The more unorthodox a technique is, the more focused time we need to put into it to make it work, since in the end we don't want to get in the way of what we do naturally. I'm not a supporter of sitting down and working on my microscales daily, or anything like that, BUT when these techniques are called on I work them out AWAY from my "morning routine". Good habits, and a strong base will get anything to work.

Be sure to check out the download section for ideas and exercises

"Faking" it

So the title of this post is misleading, sorry, but that is just what it is. This post will be back about my learning process and Nebadon, and what I am doing with this work. Though it is worth noting that this is one of my big concept things I feel strongly about, especially towards new music. For now, let's jump back on starship Stockhausen and depart for Nebadon (nerd alert).

One thing I truly respect about Stockhausen's music is by and large it is rather quite playable, that is not saying it is easy, it is actually rather difficult. It is full of little things that at first look simple but turn out to be either complex or downright ludicrous, be it in it's coordination, execution, or simply playing it with a beautiful sound. I will put two examples of this on here.

So above are those two examples. There is nothing really complicated about the patterns, they present some challenges, but again, nothing to lose that much sleep over. (Ignore my markings since that is some analysis and such that I have talked in brief about before). So back to the challenges that exist in these examples. With the first example, the challenge is can you make a nice clean shift between open and stopped, maintain pitch, while entering delicately on a higher pitch. BUT, the priority here should be can you do it with the singing sound that you would use in Brahms, or Schubert.

Example number two, the challenge is facility in the low range, clarity, a good trill, and a resonant sound. This is good enough for a sub par version of this lick (which appears in various permutations throughout the entire work (over 20 minutes!!) It is a tricky little lick, but executing it has to be a guarantee, not a good enough.), what I am truly striving for is can I make a "majestic" or "interesting" musical line out of the material, in such a way that nobody notices this slightly unidiomatic horn lick.

Since Stockhausen writes music that is very playable I am going to pull an example from another work I am preparing that is more towards the... "are you kidding me? I'm not a bass clarinet" kind of lick." Which will help me make my bigger picture point.

As you can see, this is a little further away idiomatically from something horn players are used to seeing. (The work is full of this, and it grows in complexity, and each permutation you get LESS variance in what pitches you need to draw attention towards.) So this is the kind of lick my title was referring to, Faking it. Anyone who knows me knows that when I hear someone say "I can just fake that" is akin to nails on a chalkboard. So I think I will take  moment to explain that, and as well relate it back to Stockhausen, and Sirus (dork) in general. 

If you have ever been to a new music concert, you have heard (and probably in great supply) faking. Otherwise known as, kind of making the gesture. Now, some of you have probably made it to see a concert of new music that seemed to be so insanely good there must have been some witchcraft going on. Well, there was no witchcraft, you probably heard someone(s) who had spent countless hours getting it AS CLOSE to the ink as possible (while keeping a wonderful, intune, captivating sound, that is full of musical gesture). If you imagine playing Beethoven and the player beside you is "faking" it, you would know they were not up to par, and that person would most likely not be in that chair next concert. Could you imagine a concert of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra with a string section full of faking it (you probably can...). When you compare those to performances where they "nailed it" why would you ever buy the other product.

As a performer I feel obligated to make sure I can play the music as well as I can. If that means I have to woodshed a lick up until the day of the concert that is what I will do, I can't personally accept "faking" it as an answer for any kind of music. So back to Nebadon, I am focusing on always having this wonderful sound that is full of colour and intrigue. My sound model is the same that I would use playing Cello Suites (in C) on horn. If someone froze time on a single note, I wouldn't want them to think that I was playing some strange modern music (or isn't good...). I would want them to be able to say what a great resonate note, he must be playing some Schubert. (Then when time resumes they would be in for a treat)

 This isn't a problem unique to new music but it seems to be a slightly more accepted practice for one reason or another.

Getting it right the first time, and every time

Over the past year one thing I have been working on in all aspects of my horn playing is getting it right the first time, and every subsequent time. It is something then when I write it out it seems like common sense, but more often than not it seems that the process of “learning” invites in the possibility to make lazy mistakes. Expanding on what I wrote about last week in regards to interpreting the music into digestible and accessible fragments, this week when I took what I had learned and placed it back into the context of Nebadon I had to be very active in making sure I only allowed good habits and thoughtful actions into my playing.

What I mean by the above statement is that when I have a piece of music under control I will shift my focus to be more on musical elements, allowing the technical things to be driven more by the work that has been done to establish them. As I am still early on in the process of learning this work I have to be mindful to make sure that though I am pursuing musical things I cannot let mistakes happen, I have to remain in control and in anticipation of what could go wrong.

This is a concept I have worked on a great deal in my etude work this year that is having a great carry over to repertoire. To repeat, it is the process of being aware of my playing in a way that allows me to anticipate something coming up so I can act before the mistake happens. An example of this could be as such: My mid-low register is not responding as quickly as usual, so in my approach I need to take this into account so I can adjust the equation of air/attack/volume/etc. to make sure that the notes come out.

There could be an argument made (as I have heard it made in the past) that we should always be striving for musicality. I agree with this 100% but, that can’t be an excuse to allow mistakes to happen, if you have a great phrase and you chip a couple notes and are out of tune I do not believe that your musical line will come across. All things in balance.

Reaching into the bag of tricks.

So this week brought forward some interesting challenges while practicing. One that I focused on and feel that I personally learned from is with being flexible and creative in how I practice material. I have never fallen into a routine of how I practice music, I try to approach things from many angels to find solutions and to make sure I learn and understand the music on a deeper level. In Stockhausen, this has been more of an issue than in other works. The challenge is in regards to how the music exists on a “musical” level and the interaction that is has with the electronics, this poses a few challenges the most notable being:

     How to learn the music so I can accurately start to put it together in small pieces with the tape.

The challenge here is that there are tremendous technical requirements that have to nailed down. Most of these fall into sections that have no tempo markings, are highly rubato or make use of other devices (irregular tremolos, irregular and regular grace notes etc...), and have a very intense inner musical line. This was a situation where I had to reach deep into my bag of tricks.

One success I had was writing my own etudes, the short etudes were mainly based on technical demands. I did try to find and create musical elements that were different from those of Stockhausen’s since I feel that this approach really lets me understand the interaction of all those little black notes. As well, I would isolate cells of notes and place them into an unrelated or changing time signature so I would get different emphases.

Example: 4 notes from a 9 note cell (original order is how they appear in the first measure. Note: these four notes come from the middle of the 9 note cell).

This was a useful tactic this week, one I have underutilized in the past, but it will definitely be more present with this work due to the nature of the music.