On 17 Mar 2010 at 13:52, Darcy James Argue wrote: > Fascinating -- I know nothing about the "notes inegal" problem but > your description of it makes it sound very familiar.
I hear the same "familiarity" whenever I hear y'all despairing over swing. > What's most frustrating about the swing problem, though, is that sure, > it's an oral tradition, but it's an aural tradition that is *very well > documented on recordings.* This is one case where there's a lot less excuse for those who can't swing as opposed to those who can't play notes inegal -- we really don't know exactly what it sound like because all we have are written- down descriptions of how it was to be done (and many of those are contradictory). > And yet people persist in putting that > horrifying "Swing (two eighths = triplet quarter, triplet eighth)" > indication on charts -- or worse, actually playing it that way. I grew up playing in high school band (percussion) and stage band (piano) thinking that's the way it worked, and it wasn't until I was an adult and had taken up a stringed instrument that I developed the perception necessary to hear the variety of emphasis and duration in swing. Over my musical lifetime, I've had various levels of "aha!" moments where I developed perceptions that were earlier lacking, and that then enabled me to appreciate things I'd previously been unable to hear. My best example of this is one of my earliest (but I've had waves of them since): Back in high school I recall thinking that I was playing Chopin almost as well as Artur Rubinstein. This was, of course, completely ludicrous. I wasn't even close. But in terms of what *I* heard in Rubinstein's playing, I was doing all of it and more! The number of things I wasn't hearing was huge. Only later on did I develop the awareness of all the nuances that allowed me to hear what Rubinstein was doing that was well beyond anything I was capable of (then or now). You can't play what you don't hear. And I think that's the issue with a lot of the players who can't swing, whether that be in jazz or French baroque. > Again, one listen to any pre-1941 Lester Young solo (many of which are > collected and transcribed here, with commentary from the great Lee > Konitz: > http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/1-18-with-lee-k.html) > ought to be all it takes for anyone to realize (A) that the purported > 2:1 swing ratio is complete BS, and (B) there is a huge difference in > rhythmic placement between playing *anticipations* and playing *lines* > -- there is no one-size-fits all solution. But it's hard enough > getting student jazz musicians to wrap their heads around this > distinction -- and if they can't do it, how are you going to get > classical musicians to do it? In playing a stringed instrument, the most important thing of all is bow control (at least, so it seems to me). But most of the teaching (arguably) is about the left hand (pitch) and bow direction (up or down bow), with, I think, insufficient emphasis on bow speed and bow division (the amount of bow used for each note -- for instance, in a quarter / two eighths passage, theoretically, the quarter note would use twice as much bow as each of the 8ths, though it actually is more logarithmic, and the quarter uses roughly 4 times the bow (or more) as the 8ths). My viol teacher often gets undergrad students taking up the viol after studying cello or violin for years, but they've never heard a thing from any of their teachers about bow division! And they end up giving up the viol quickly, since it turns out to be much, much harder than they thought (they often imagine they can just pick it up and play at a high level because it's just another stringed instrument). And that's even before they get to the issues of playing musical styles they don't know (their heads explode when they have to play in a viol consort, reading polyphonic music in 4/2 -- they can't count and they keep getting thrown off by the rhythmic independence of the individual lines; and don't get me started on Baroque ornamentation, another topic that floors them). In jazz, I suspect there's a similar issue with tonguing, phrasing and breath -- not that these things are not taught, but that they are *hard* to execute sensitively, and that those who can't play with this level of nuance often lack it because they don't perceive it in the models they are listening to. Exactly *how* you teach their ears to hear what they don't already perceive is a conundrum -- having them listen to good models is not going to accomplish much if they can't perceive the desired result in the models (or if they their ears shoehorn all swing into the 2:1 ratio because that's the only model they have in their heads, even when there's a huge amount of subtlety and nuance in what they are listening to). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
