Outreach performances, where we get to play for the community, is one way that I as a member of a New Horizons band can give back, but it is more than that. Really, I should say that it is more selfish than that. While I truly hope that the people listening to us playing are enjoying the music, the excitement of the performance is mine. The fulfillment, the accomplishments are mine. I am a very selfish person. But I also enjoy the feeling of helping others to find those same feelings. It is often a complicated duel between the dual feelings of outreach and selfishness that sometimes makes me sit back and question my motives. Am I here for others' enjoyment or am I here to help myself? My daughter recently asked me what I did when I had my mid-life crisis, that time in your life when you assess your accomplishments and regrets and do something wild and out of character. I told her "I joined the band!" She laughed. It made me think though, about why I joined the band. Am I here to perform for others or am I here to help myself? Well heck, you only get one chance at this life, as far as I know, so I'm doing it for myself. I will continue to play in a band because it is something that I have wanted to do since I was a kid. I will encourage others to join the band and orchestra so that I will have a place to play and so I can feel the contentment from their experiences of excitement. I will continue to be selfish and play those outreach concerts so that I can get the gratification from watching an audience enjoy our music. And I hope others do enjoy our music and that it makes them feel good or remember good experiences in their own lives.
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One of the nice things about playing in an ensemble is the blended sound from a group playing multiple parts. While it is nice to sometimes have a lead part with the melody, if everyone played that, it would be boring to play and to listen to. I was thinking of this the other day when I heard a beginning student band play a piece and every part was the same. It makes it easier to learn to play when everyone plays the same thing because you can often match the sound of your neighbors. But unless it is my child playing in the band, I don’t want to listen to a whole concert of unison playing. So how do you decide who gets the first part and who plays the second (or third). In some bands, the best players play the first part, and the second or third part go to the lower ranking members. But what if your band doesn’t have a chair ranking. If it is a good band, you get to share the lead parts. But some people really like to play second or third part. They want to be part of the ensemble sound but don’t want to take the lead. Or maybe they like the challenge of not playing a melody part. Some people really like the lead part. I find that the lead part is often a little easier to play, especially if I am familiar with a song. If I know the song but I am playing the second part, it can be challenging because while I can read the notes, it doesn’t always sound the way I think it should in my head because my head is thinking melody. It also forces me to listen more to the sound of the ensemble. I listen for other instruments playing similar parts so that I can play with them. But an ensemble is a living organism that relies upon all the parts to do their particular job for the whole to function properly. Most of the time, the parts are divided among members for each song so that everyone gets a chance at playing the different parts. And that is fine because we are not competing for first chair. We are playing because we want to learn, challenge our brains and we like to play the music - we like the sound of an ensemble. I was listening to someone play an instrument the other day and it had an interesting sound. At first, I was intrigued and thought that was a unique sound that you could do a lot with. After a short while though, the sound started to annoy me and I thought how someone could pick an instrument like that to play, it would drive me crazy. But obviously that sound spoke to the person that was playing it and they played it well, but it didn’t speak to me. We all have instruments that speak to us. I play saxophone in band because it spoke to me. Way back when I was in junior high school, I heard someone playing the saxophone and I just loved the sound. Before that I had never really listened to music that featured the sax like that. The person was playing a piece on the sax and it had a range of sounds and styles that appealed to me. It could be soft and soothing or loud and raucous. I started listening more and more to different players on the radio. Finally, when I graduated from High School, I decided to buy my first sax and took lessons. Unfortunately, after a couple of years life got in the way of my playing and I put it away for several decades. But finally, I’ve found a group that lets me play again. And I still like the sound of the saxophone, even when I am playing it. Now I’m sure there are some that say, “how can you love the sound of such a hideously sounding instrument?” I guess to each his own, that is the point, and that is how you pick your instrument. I’m an adult. I play music because I want to play, not because it is a career or required for anything. So do I really have to practice? I do. Even though it is often difficult to find the time, I practice so that I can get better. Otherwise, what is the point. I have been working in my professional career, not as a musician, for over 30 years and I still try to learn new things that will improve my understanding of how things work. In music, it is the same. I want to understand some of what real musicians know. Not because I want to become a professional but because I’m curious. Because I want to try new things. Of course there has to be an interest in music.
Some people like to do woodworking. Some like to bake. Some like to play video games. In all things we have to practice to get better. But is it the same to say I am practicing to make a better chocolate chip cookie. Of course it is. Bakers, are always practicing with new variations of recipes. I wouldn’t call myself a baker but when I do bake, I often have to practice my skills at adapting a recipe because we always seem to be out of one of the ingredients. In music, I practice the pieces that we play in the band but I also practice scales and etudes because I enjoy the thrill of challenging myself and the feeling of accomplishment when I finally make it through a piece or even just a difficult passage, or am able to sight read a piece that last year seemed impossible. So I’m going to go get my instrument to practice. I recently completed my 100 day challenge and have extended it...I’ll see how far I can go. Can a piece be too easy to play. Sometimes music can appear very simple on the page but have a very harmonious sound. Harmonious is the key term. I’ve been listening to a musical group lately called “First Aid Kit”. At first I couldn’t quite place the type of music that they played. I had just stumbled upon them watch an ad for something completely different on TV but it had two lead singers that sang harmonies together which I liked but I don’t hear very often in most modern popular songs. My daughter suggested maybe indie folk. I thought some of the songs also had a country sound to them and when I figured out who they were they were described as modern folk.
When we warm up in the band, we often play “boring” scales or chords, but sometimes we stop and one of the directors will have us just hold onto a chord. They then often comment on how nice that chord sounds. How nice a single chord sounds? Actually yes. We don’t have to play super fast complicated melodies to enjoy the sound of music. Sometimes a single note can leave an impression or bring back a memory. That is what is fun about playing music. Taste, smell or sound can all bring back the sensation of a “comfort food” and sometimes the simple songs resonate the most. As much fun as rehearsals are, the goal is to get out and perform. And while it may appear that the main purpose of this goal to perform is to entertain others, in my mind the real accomplishment demonstrated by a performance is the knowledge that I have learned to play several new pieces of music. That I have, maybe, learned a new technique. That I am growing as a musician and that we as a group are able to listen to each other, follow our director and play a piece of music that hopefully can satisfy the other goal of entertaining an audience. Once I recognize the first goal then I pay attention to that second goal of entertaining.
Each semester we play one concert that combines bands at the Community Music School. This year the concert is December 9th at 3 pm in the CMS performance hall. The audience is often family and friends, although anyone is welcome to attend. The CMS concert is what I think of as our formal performance where we can demonstrate to ourselves the accomplishment of the first goals we have set for ourselves. We also often have one or two concerts that we call outreach and we perform for the community. While one might assume the outreach performances would be the more formal concert because the audience is made up of the general public, I think the band gets more excited to play these and thinks of them as the fun performances. I would compare the difference between the two types of concert like when you were in school and had to do the mandatory end of semester concert for a grade and your parents were in the audience. Your parents may have enjoyed the concert but they are family and they would applaud even if it was a horrible show. The other concert is like when you got to go on an overnight school trip and did a performance at the location. People in the public are not required to stop and listen to you play but they do and when they applaud, you feel like you really did entertain them. This fall, the New Horizons Band Too had the opportunity to do an outreach concert and play with the East Lansing High School Band for one of their fall concerts. That was a thrill to play with them in a large hall on a raised performance stage. We were able to share the fun of playing with a larger audience and also share the stage with a group of very accomplished musicians. I think we accomplished our goals for that night. NHB has two more outreach concerts this fall at local senior centers. Are we performance ready? I think so because we sound pretty good in rehearsals and as always, we are having fun, which is really the overarching goal. 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. 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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