Exercise

If you take a look at the top of the page you will see two new link, a project tab, and a downloads tab. I have put an exercise I like to do in there.

The idea behind it is practicing the division of a beat into rhythms we tend to not be as good at. Mainly, five, seven, and nine. I had a conductor once ask how often we all worked on those subdivisions... needless to say not a lot of people did, or do. The end result of that is we are great at dividing a beat into 2, 3, and 4 but our ability to play even 5/7/9/11/13 etc... is poor in comparison. So, just some food for thought. Use a metronome, take time to make sure you are accurate in  your subdivisions and not guessing. It is my opinion that this kind of work will make you a better musician, and when you encounter polyrhythms they become "not a big deal" which frees you up to be more expressive.

Exercise link

Some cool stuff in the pipeline so stay tuned. Leave a comment, hit the +1 button, you know the drill.

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.