Still, the guitar department was afflicted with a severe inferiority complex in relation to the other, more famous concert instruments like piano, violin, etc. The head of the department, who is, honestly, a pretty cheesy player, was obsessed with the idea that the guitarists studying in the department didn't have the same basic skills as, say, a beginner pianist.
Now, this was probably true to a certain extent. Piano and violin, for example, are extremely competitive instruments and the students who studied in the music department were clearly motivated, well-trained players. There was only one other undergraduate in the program with me (the rest were graduate students) and she was a little lacking in basic skills.
Unfortunately, the curriculum was so focused on developing rest stroke scales, free stroke scales, arpeggios, tremolo work, rasgueado, and anything else under the sun, that I felt like I spent most of my time cranking through exercises and not playing pieces. I am not going to suggest that it didn't help develop some skills, but, as I later found out, it exacted a toll on my playing.
I eventually reconnected with Yasha a few years back and he was distressed to hear my playing. It sounded mechanical, tense and overpowered with a harsh tone. For the last few years, we have worked to retain the technique, but get rid of those less appealing qualities.
And what is so strange about that journey is that I play less and less guitar each week, but I seem to make more and more progress creating a beautiful tone, creating phrasing for the pieces and adding a pulse to keep the playing alive. I often play very little in our lessons. Sometimes I just listen to Yasha play. Sometimes we just talk.
One thing that Yasha said early on has stuck with me. To play the pieces beautifully, we must become the kind of guitarist who plays the piece beautifully. This is not achieved through hours of practice and technical exercise. This is achieved by allowing yourself to fall in love with the piece. To sing it, sometimes literally. But, most importantly, it is achieved by changing who you are inside.
And that is something they can't teach you in college.
5 comments:
In my experience, and you are one of the few exceptions, 'trained' players rarley have the expressive qualities that are neccessary to move an audience.
That's often true in the rock world, but in the classical world there is no such thing as an untrained player, at least not a professional one. Just to play the pieces at all requires a certain level of training and skill.
In the end, it's the difference between playing music as a quasi-athletic activity and playing music as a creative endeavor. It is always amazing to me that the hardest passages become the easiest when I think less about the technical challenge and more about speaking each note as if it were a word in a sentence. Once you do that (as long as you have done the basic work), the technical part seems to take care of itself.
How many times have I heard about highly trained musicians for whom the playing is nothing more than a quasi-athletic activity...
I think it takes a very special player (or mindset) to get into the narrow space between athleticism and creativity and make a home there. I also think that the fact that most classical players do not grow up on a steady diet of hearing themselves - in other words, they tend not to be the kids who get 4 tracks and record their music or their "band" - makes it easy for them to think that they've got feel when they've really just got technique. For punk rockers in front of a crowd, it's much easier to get that sense of the moment working and get lost in the pure emotion. For the audience, there's also a much more accessible set of benchmarks or contexts for something like rock or punk or hip hop. By definition, modern audiences are spacially and temporaly removed from classical, and there's little incentive for a player to make that connection that seems so obvious to us...
Speaking from the other side of the divide, I obviously favor more training over less. The challenge is that training gives you a lot of easy answers. Because of how I learned, I see the fret board a lot more clearly than most rock players. (Actually, there was a funny example of this at VS rehearsal - George kept telling me that I was playing a different "inversion" of his chord, but I wasn't; it was the exact same notes played in a different place on the fretboard).
So, it is limiting, in a sense, but so is the time wasted by a kid who has to figure out the basics on his own.
In the end, I don't think it turns on training. It turns on deciding if that what you are trying to do is reach people.
Yeah, I agree. With a limited amount of time it's certainly possible to encourage technique over communication, or visa versa, and I don't know that musicians are always even aware of where they stand.
I wish I could see the fretboard in a more coherent way...
Post a Comment