I can't believe it's been a week since my last post - where has the time gone? Well, actually, I can see from my calendar exactly where the time has gone..... I teach at two local colleges and both of them started on the same week, and while scheduling and teaching in two studios isn't all that daunting, the first-week-of-classes email deluge is really something to behold. Add to that, that I'm trying to squeeze in as much summer with my daughter before she starts pre-school next week, and well... here we are.
So one thing I've been thinking about lately is hearing. I mean, we all hear things the same way, right? I guess not, or I wouldn't have to point out pitch issues when I'm teaching. One thing that has taken me a long time to learn is how to listen and place pitch both vertically and horizontally. (relax, I'll explain as best I can, and it's actually not rocket science) I ask my students to listen to their intervals, and many of them are working on scales in thirds at the moment, as a way to deeply learn the fingerboard and become more confident as they shift up the A and D strings. It bothers me that so much pedagogy allows students to take the G string as the way of ascending without asking them to really learn the higher positions on ALL their strings. We have a wealth of beautiful tone colors to choose from on our other strings.
Ok, but I was talking about pitch, or hearing pitch, or really hearing ahead of time how you want to place your pitch in context. So here's my example today: as you play a scale up and down, probably you are thinking horizontally, that is from note to note, how far to space your half and whole steps. So it probably sounds fine. But if you place a drone note below your scale (if you're in C major, let's say, you might work with a C or a G below your scale as a reference point) - you'll find that you need to adjust your pitch in slight ways to make the notes consonant with the drone note. That's a vertical pitch placement.
Why does it matter? Well, if you play with a piano, a fixed pitch instrument, you'll need to think about placing the pitch against that kind of drone. If you're playing with other string players, you'll all bend the pitch around to each other and the key you're playing in rather naturally. Also, in the case of yesterday's lesson, I had a student working on solo Bach and playing heaps of double stops. If he played the melody line alone for me, his placement of the notes was fine. But once we added in the double stops, he had to adjust his melody notes (especially when they were above an open string or harmonic, basically a fixed pitch) to correct the intervals.
Ideally, I'm working on pitch in both ways, just not both at the same time! It's important to think about how your melody is written and whether you are going to color a note, accentuating a leading tone for instance, by pushing it a bit closer to the tonic note. If you are the accompanying voice and your pianist has the melody, really find the piano and be centered on that pitch to match the piano's temperament.
Maybe this seems a bit head in the clouds, but I've seen great results in students who practiced their scales against drone pitches every day. It gives them a real sense of grounding the pitch and regulating it, so that when they do decide to use color, it is a musical decision and not just a whim.
Happy practicing!
Gaelen
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