Picking a piece to play can be a prickly proposition. I like alliteration. It has a sing-song quality that makes it easy to read and speak. When my kids were small, I used to read poetry or sing nursery rhymes to them. As they got older, I continued to read aloud but many of the authors did not intend for the stories to be read aloud. Though they were written for an age when children are not quite able to read by themselves, their lack of the sing-song flow made them impossible to speak. I tried, but often spent more time stumbling over the words with a twisted tongue and the flow of the story would get lost. Oddly, some of the rhymes I would tell them included older tongue twisters that maintained the quality of a poem that should be spoken and thus were easier to say aloud.
Music often has the same issues as prose. There are some songs that are meant to be played and listened to, and they flow. Other music is a challenge to listen to, it can be difficult to play and takes a long time to learn. I like to listen to the songs that flow. I like the sensation of hearing in my head the flowing notes written on a page or how the notes align under my fingers when I play. Don’t be confused though with the idea that a flowing song is an easy song or not a challenge to play. They often have a complex structure. The nursery rhymes often told complex stories that many have forgotten but they are there just below the surface. The sing-song quality, the allure of alliteration, the attention to intention to speak aloud the musical notes, determines my interests in a piece. Fortunately, many of the pieces we play in our band contain at least parts that bring with it a flow. My individual part may not speak to me but usually when we play as a group, I can hear the song patterns. There are a few that tie my tongue and I think that of others, and often, maybe not surprisingly, those are the ones that the group rejects. It is interesting how my favorite songs, my favorite books and poetry all sing. They are all just notes or words on a page, but they have in them a quality that speaks.
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I’ve heard it several times before. After we perform a concert and then suggest to the audience that anyone can join our group, that you don’t have to be seasoned musician to play in the New Horizons Band, the comment that seems to keep coming back is “I’m not good enough to play in your band”.
I don’t want to sound too negative about my own group but if you heard us in rehearsals, you might understand why we all laugh at comments like that. It is not that we are bad in rehearsal but you will see that we are not professional musicians. You will see that we are all learning as we go. As we learn we get better and finally by the time we do a concert, we have been practicing for several week, and we do sound pretty good. The music is fun to play but it is music that has been written so that musicians with a wide range of skills might all be able to participate. If you are an absolute beginner, it may take a little time to be able to play an entire piece, but that is where the New Horizons group and philosophy has the advantage. If you only play one note, you are contributing to the group sound. One thing we do practice more than anything else, is the beginnings and ends of songs. So if you are new, concentrate on how a song ends. How the song ends will determine the impression the audience leaves with after your performance. If we end well, most people will not even remember if we missed notes in the middle somewhere. And that is probably what happened for you if you have heard us before and felt that we were too good for you to be able to join. So if you have ever dreamed of playing in a band or orchestra, visit us at a rehearsal and see how bad, or good we can be. |
AuthorDaniel Zarka Archives
March 2019
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