How to hit the right notes.
Part Two.
The first question to ask yourself whether you're hitting the right notes is, how do you know? There is more than one skill required and we all exercise them to one degree or another. Which also means we ignore them to one degree or another.
Memorizing is a key skill but it has to cooperate with other skills to be effective. Often, especially in contemporary music, it is easy to memorize wrong notes just by playing a passage wrong only once. Other mistakes can creep in and become permanent by virtue of repetition. Knowing the geography of the keyboard by visual means alone will not necessarily subject that knowledge to the score. The brain also has to have cognitive understanding of the composition for the geography to make sense. What if the composition has little discernible construction? That's common enough depending on whether we have accrued a substantial vocabulary. Most importantly, if our ears are not attuned to the score, they make no judgments about what is right or wrong. I know a few players who pride themselves on their reading ability who are blithely unaware of how many notes they are missing.
We often choose the path of least resistance, particularly when there is a limited amount of time to learn a piece. For me, the skill that seems to be the most innate is pitch memory. I began playing by ear at an early age, but I also remember the many times that has failed me. First of all, I have the concentration span of a gnat. When I'm playing with an ensemble, pitch memory doesn't tell me how many measures of rest I have between passages, it doesn't tell me what the next lick is, it doesn't remind me of the correct rhythm, and unless I see the notes on the page, my ears are simply listening to somewhat unrelated material while I wait for my entrance. And pitch memory doesn't help me at all with rhythm. Every one of my students who has played in marching band or drum corps can memorize rhythm better than I can. It wasn't until I began making connections between the score and how it would sound that I could trust my ears. So the question is, what is your best skill, and how can you use it to develop the others?
I start almost every practice session with an exercise I've been warming up with for ever. I usually start with #6 on page 2 in my book Mallet Keyboard Exercises. It gets my muscles moving, my ears listening, and gives me something to concentrate on that is familiar enough to play in my sleep. I can spend as much time repeating the first measure as is necessary to get all systems engaged. While looking at the keyboard, I make sure I'm hitting the bars exactly where I aim. There isn't much else to give my eyes to do here, so I concentrate on just exactly how my hands and arms feel.
If I vary anything else at this point it is where I am standing. I'll stand farther to the left or right than I need to, and continue experiencing the difference in the way that it feels to my hands and arms. I can also vary the stick height and the rhythm because they create different physical sensations. Then I look at the page: it's amazing how easy it is to read music when you only have two quarter-note dyads to play over and over again. (More on that later). Then I look at something other than the music: the wall, the ceiling, the view out the window, the mirror, or another part of the keyboard. By now my ears can tell me if I'm hitting the right notes and my eyes don't care. So I might as well play with my eyes closed. How about with the lights off? Now I have to have the picture of what I'm doing in my mind's eye. On to the second measure... Actually, I usually have gone on to the rest of the exercise a while ago, but if I want to isolate each of the skills, (cognitive, visual, kinesthetic, and aural) repetition is necessary. The main thing in this exercise is that there is a finite, predictable, and executable number of notes. For each skill you are concentrating on, you are hitting the right notes.
When I need to practice my reading ability, I often choose familiar things to play. I've already analyzed the score. My hands already have an idea where to go and what sticking to use. My ears are already expecting to hear the right notes. If you need to work on reading and accuracy, keep the obstacles to a minimum. The exercise outlined above works just as well with scales and arpeggios. It works with music you already have memorized and helps to find things your memory has learned in error or has forgotten. It forces your kinesthetic sense to reside in your mind's eye. And it gets your ears involved in the process. They're the only ones paying attention to whether you've hit the right notes.
I am fortunate that somewhere along the line I developed the ability to translate what I see on the page into the way it will sound. It is hearing by sight. But it is far from perfect. Atonal music that goes by too fast for me to digest comes more slowly which is partially the reason I have difficulty memorizing snare drum music. I regularly transpose the exercises in my book for technical reasons but also because it strengthens my ability to hear if I'm playing the right notes. I have to correctly identify the intervals of the exercise and know what they sound like. If I look at something other than the keyboard it helps me to trust my kinesthetic ability. Part of my practice regimen is reading hymns. They are so simple for me to hear by sight that they are relatively easy to play in all twelve keys. The reason I do this is because I want my ears to tell my hands where to go. The combination of visual and aural skills are my best allies. Being able to recognize a scale or a pattern by sight helps to tell my ears what to expect. If it is something I've played many times in other applications, my hands already have an idea what to do. However, kinesthetic memory is one of my weaker skills. It might be your strongest skill. So capitalize on it. Learn to sing the notes as you play. Sing without playing. None of these skills are sufficient by themselves to play what's on the page and they are all subject to a gaps in concentration.
The first premise is that the score has all the right notes. The point is that you have to practice all the skills necessary to know if you have the right notes.
If what you were expecting to read here was something about how to practice, that is another subject altogether. "So where is Part One," you ask? Oh yeah, play slowly enough so you can get all these other skills in line with your hand-to-eye coordination.
Copyright © 2003 Tyler-Rounds Productions