Posted by Rick Denney on July 10, 2003 at 11:47:43:
In Reply to: Re: Keeping a good beat posted by Why bother playing? on July 10, 2003 at 09:35:10:
Well, that all sounds good, I admit. But I just don't think it works that way in practice.
The ability to keep time has not much to do with the difficulty of the music. Sure, highly technical music may drag just because the musicians don't have the technique, but really that is a different problem.
I think what the pro musicians are describing is an underlying sense of tempo that all musicians in the ensemble will subconsciously understand and agree to. This underlying tempo is suggested by the movements of the conductor, but not by the points of his beat pattern--else orchestras with conductors who don't do much beat direction would be bereft. A quality of being a pro musician is that this internal metronome is an innate part of performance, not something that has to be considered objectively at the time. Thus, they can talk (as Mary Ann does) of purposely coming in a little late with a confusing conductor, while the rest of us wouldn't know where the beat was in order to decide to be behind it.
It seems to me this internal shared metronome requires years of extensive practice in ensembles, being sensitive to and anticipating the pulse of the music (which isn't the same thing as hearing the pules and responding to it). It is a predictive skill rather than a responsive skill.
And on the general subject of "playing music that everyone can play well", I have to say that I completely disagree with this objective. Many community bands outnumber their audiences except for outdoor July 4-type performances. Thus, the music has to challenge the musicians in a way that makes the experience personally satisfying even without an audience of people not related to the band's members. Pros have to please the audience (i.e., the client) first and themselves as a result of that, but amateurs have to please themselves first and as a result are more likely to please audiences, if not by their flawless technique at least by their positive energy. Because community groups have a wide range of skill levels, meeting this objective requires programming music that is well beyond the skills of the worst players, and challenging enough to retain the interest and potential for satisfaction of the best players.
I would rather hear an amateur group reaching for a difficult work and not quite getting there than programming boring and easy works and still not quite getting there. This brings me to my next point.
Bands of all abilities have a quality set point, it seems to me. The Marine Band might be a 99.5%, and our community band might be a 70%. This quality level is only partly controlled by the skill of the group. It seems to me that it is mostly controlled by the commitment and interest of the musicians in the group. I have repeatedly participated in bands that have played both easy and difficult pieces on the same program, only to have the more difficult piece turn out better. Why is that? The more challenging piece encourages amateur musicians to woodshed the parts and really work on the music, while the easy stuff lulls them into a false sense of security, or frankly bores them too much to spend time practicing it. So, whether our band plays Silverado or Symphony of Sit-Coms, we will hit our 70% mark, and the Marine Band, whether playing the Giannini Variations and Fuque or Semper Fidelis will hit their 99.5%.
Speaking of the Giannini, I played in the Austin Symphonic Band many years ago, and we programmed the Giannini. This work as well beyond the skill of the group, but so intrigued were we by the sound of it and so encouraged by the challenge of it that we worked our tails off to make it happen. In the performance, we barely kept it together by any technical measure. But the energy of the group was so high that the audience stayed with us. I don't remember what else we played on that concert, but performing that work (badly by professional standards) is still a highlight in my community-band experience.
Rick "who thinks music is much more than skilled execution" Denney