Learn and practice the basic principles of running an effective music ensemble rehearsal. Techniques and strategies are applicable to a variety of ensembles, including bands, orchestras, choirs, and chamber groups.
A Choral and Orchestral Perspective: Dynamics
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来自 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 的课程
音乐合奏排练基础
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从本节课中
Phrasing
Module 5 begins with a discussion about score marking, a topic that is controversial by some ways of thinking. One school of thought suggests that scores should never be marked with cues and other information, since doing so reflects a deficit in score study on the piece. Another school believes that judicious marking enhances our efficiency in rehearsal and allows for better connection with the ensemble. This module also includes detailed explanations of the three types of fermatas that were introduced in Module 4: caesura, release-in-tempo, and continuation. It is worth spending extra time on these techniques, as the skills involved in preparing, sustaining, and releasing each one apply to a variety of conducting situations, including cues, rubato, and accompanimental conducting. For rehearsal strategies and the rehearsal toolkit our topics are phrasing and dynamics. As with many other topics in this class we can only touch the surface in terms of depth, but I hope there will be a few ideas to begin filling your rehearsal toolkit.
与讲师见面
Dr. Evan FeldmanAssociate Professor & Wind Ensemble Conductor
Music
[MUSIC]
>> Dynamics.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Talk to me.
>> Well, dynamics, I think, are another subset of tone.
It's interesting that our conception of dynamics
is based on our understanding of amplified sound.
So we tend to think of dynamics as decibels.
More of them and less of them.
The great American way.
If a little is good then a lot has to be better.
And in the initial sense of the term, the word forte
was strong, our word fort comes from the same general sense.
And it wasn't loud in the sense that we
hear loud, like, just here-splitting sound, it was strong.
And strong doesn't necessarily mean.
Well, it could mean anything, it could mean, single F, it could
mean two Fs, it could mean three Fs, but the concept of gradation
>> More, it's more, it's almost a style and a feeling rather than
>> Yes, yes.
>> A number.
>> Than a raw quantity.
The way this, the way this is interesting in the terms of the voice is how
the voice creates loudness is by systematically tuning
the overtone structure of a well formed vowel.
So once you get your vowel well shaped and well placed then you're
aspiring for what, what's referred to as the singer's formant, which is a standing
wave that you generate as it's it's a super wave.
it, without going into all the physics of it, the difference that you hear between
a resonated, or what would, what a lot of people would call a trained voice.
A resonated voice is really a better way to describe it.
Is that it's massive, it's loud, and that's
what enables people to sing over an orchestra,
or to sing by themselves without a microphone
and be heard, you know, a block away.
I mean, those things, that's, that's the holy grail.
But it's individual.
In a choir, if you had two or three or four
of those people, they would profoundly impact a choir of 20.
If you had 20 of them, they would just be a gigantic cat fight.
You couldn't, it'd be, they would actually begin
fighting each other because the higher up the wave
goes, the the, the more it's influenced by
the fundament wave, the onset wave, the beginning wave.
So, the theory is that loud, when you create loud, what
we call dynamics in the ordinary, ordinarily perceived sense of the term.
You're doing that at the same time you're vocalizing.
So you're teaching your choir how to, produce
a tone that's simultaneously resonated as a collective.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And under control at the same time.
And again, most people, because of the more-is-better.
Feel like they should just simply push more air or
push something or squeeze harder or look more muscular or whatever.
None of those are going to have any appreciable
impact on their capacity to resonate the tone.
As a matter of fact, that'll probably get in the way.
I mentioned earlier that people jut their chin.
That's one of the prime ways of singing high.
They think if they sing high they need to tilt their
chin towards the pitch, and in the process they destroy it.
One of the ways that people think they need to sing loud is to use more.
The question is more of what and where?
And well-trained singers, the loudest tones that they
have are the most effortless tones that they have.
They're not, electually or cognitively, frugal.
They're extravagantly active cognitively, they have to think like crazy.
But it isn't blunt force trauma either.
>> Well you get the tension, and it >> Yes, and it, control, it wrecks it all.
So what you're actually trying to do.
One, among the many things that you're trying to do when you
vocalize is to train them how to give you gradations of relative sound.
If this is the biggest we can be.
If this is the strongest we can be on a vowel, and control it.
Then how we go here?
And how do we go here?
And how do we go here?
In other words, loud dynamics is truly a sense of context more than anything else.
And one other point that I'll make is that in, in notating dynamics, the
cultural practice, the composer's practice has varied dramatically over the years.
So in modern music, it's fairly common for the,
for the nature of the phrase to be explicitly indicated.
So things like, crescendo and decrescendo and, sostenuto and, you
know, different forms, leggero, and all those articulatory marks imply dynamics.
I mean, it's really hard to sing.
Fortissimo leggero.
You know, you just can't do that.
And, so modern composers are fairly explicit about what they want
you to do expressively and dynamics are a function of expressivity.
So one of the things that happens when you
train vowel and you train consonants to work in
conjunction with vowels is, you train people how to
think, on a line as a fluid living thing.
Which is going to start at one dynamic level, go to
a different dynamic level, and come back to another dynamic level.
And I'm not so certain that explicit gradation is the key point.
It's more a frame of reference.
So one way to look at classical dynamics, for instance,
which we used to, we were all taught they were terrorist.
One is that a composer would simply want this part of
the music to be more or less in this context overall.
But not specifically loud here versus specifically soft there.
You know, it's common to look at a lot of classical music and
wonder why it is we have a forte in the middle of nowhere.
That's one that would explain that problem.
You know what I mean?
I don't think composers everywhere just got loud for no purpose.
>> They might be connected with something.
>> They are.
>> Or there's subtle gradations in between.
>> Yes, yes.
That means dynamics as their commonly understood as a raw
expression of quantity doesn't translate very well to the singing aspect.
And the singing act is far more fluid.
And I think if you want kids to be
loud, just unrequited loud, then you should mike them.
The interesting thing is that, what a, what
an amplification system does is it provides the decibels
absent the tone, absent the, the personal acoustic tuning
that occurs when you're highly trained as a singer.
Mm-hm.
>> And under no circumstances does a kid need
to bellow into a microphone to get a loud sound.
So they don't have to put the primary, they
don't have to make the primary onset wave over, over-energized.
They can control the onset wave and be healthy
and still be perceived as louder than everybody else.
I mean, it just makes sense to me.
If loud is what you want you don't do it by attempting the acoustic
sense of the term, but if you do they'll never learn how to do that.
>> Yeah.
It's I think there's similarities with instrumental ensembles also,
where it's easy to get groups to over play.
To kind of play beyond what they're able to do physically.
In, in so doing we might get more decibels,
but we lose all sense of tone quality, musicality.
So it's kind of understanding the limits of the ensemble.
>> Mm hm.
Mm hm.
>> And separating decibels from fullness and strength.
>> Exactly.
>> As you mentioned before.
>> Exactly.
That's well, that's well put.
Let's jump right into dynamics.
How do you get effective, distinguished,
not overplayed or underplayed and musical dynamics?
>> Well I think the most important thing is context.
How does each individual player section fit in, and this
goes of course with balance and texture as well, and how
do you interpret the dynamic markings on the page given to
you by the composer which vary greatly from period to period.
We see of course in the baroque period you're lucky if you get
a forte and then a piano 40 bars later and that's about it.
Mozart you get a little more.
Beethoven you get more.
By the time you get to Tchaikovsky you look at the sixth symphony of Tchaikovsky
and the dynamic range goes from six p's up to five f's in the same piece.
Well what's the difference between four forte and five forte marking?
Conceptually what it indicates, of course, is the five is
the biggest, the peak, the climax, the point you're heading for.
The lowest end, the six 's, has obviously got to be the softest
dynamic in the whole piece, so you at least work proportionally from there.
Verity was also very wide ranging in his notation of dynamics.
Beethoven started to use triple forte.
Probably the first composer that, that did, and he has it in very few works.
Only towards the end of his career.
It's always a matter of context.
Understanding what each composer.
Meant.
And then making those distinctions that are very subtle sometimes.
I find what's very difficult is for people to make
the difference between a single f and a double f.
Especially when they're coming down from double to single.
They've been playing fortissimo, and they see forte, and they keep sawing away.
And I say guys, forte is less loud than double forte.
You need to drop here.
Oh, oh yeah.
Okay.
Then, they realize it.
So making them aware of what's on the page already,
and making aware is their dynamic marking, an accompanimental dynamic?
Or is it a solo dynamic for a wind player,
let's say a clarinet has a solo somewhere marked piano.
If they play what they think is piano in
their living room, it's not going to carry over in orchestra.
They have to play out.
It's their moment in the sun.
And everyone marked piano at the same time needs to play pianissimo.
Because they're aware of the context and
they're accompanying somebody who has the main line.
By the time you get to [UNKNOWN] all those dynamics are built into the orchestration.
He'll write forte for the harp and [UNKNOWN] for
another instrument and they'll sound perfectly balanced because he
knew the harp forte is not going to obscure
anything but it's going to produce a nice sound.
But until that time, when players started
writing, composers started writing layered dynamics, with
the texture and, based on their experience
and practical application, we have to make changes.
Beethoven writes fortissimo down the page.
Now if you've got two trumpets in unison playing fortissimo C's and
G's all the time, it's going to obliterate a lot of the material.
So you have to adjust.
You have to ask them to mark things down, maybe mezzo
forte or you may have to ask them to play forte piano.
Attack the note, get out of the way, so we can hear what's going on.
You use a lot of personal judgment on the podium.
You use your own ears as your guide to make
sure that you're always hearing the main thread of the music.
Music wherever it may be, asking some people to play more, some less.
The first step of course is asking people to just play what's on the printed page.
I remember a rehearsal video of the great Romanian Conductor
And it's very funny.
He's got a professional orchestra and, and,
they're sawing away and he stops and says,
in German but he says, you know, well do you have piano printed in your parts?
They said, oh, yes.
Well then why are you playing forte?
Very simple after that.
Of course.
Just play what's written.
So we start from that but we have to adjust, we have to adapt.
We also have to think that some people have great difficulty playing softly.
It's much harder to play softly than
loudly, because it requires control, requires technique.
And we have to always, I find we have to
more expand our range of dynamics downward rather than upward.
As I am fond of saying in our rehearsal, any fool
can play the forte, but who can play piano with beauty
and warmth of sound let alone a pianissimo that just sustains
the interest and has direction and shape and all of that.
Acoustics are a large part of the thing, too.
Some auditoriums.
Very difficult to play softly in.
Others, great dynamic range you can do whatever you want.
And some auditoriums are so loud and harsh, you have to
tone everything down, so you have to adjust to that as well.
It's a constant.
Work in progress of adjustment, rehearsal to
rehearsal, sometimes rehearsal space to performance space
and balancing out your players' abilities and
understanding of their role in the texture.
>> And you mentioned how some composers, moving up to, say, Mahler,
were essentially just, well everyone's piano and you have to sort out.
Of the specifics.
>> Yeah.
>> And then some composers are, have layered it
to adjust for balance, and acoustics, and things like that.
>> Yeah.
>> And today we're kind of postmodern wild, wild, west.
Where some composers do one.
>> Right.
>> And some composers do the other.
And we have to figure out, well which approach did they take?
>> Yeah.
>> Or which approach makes more sense?
>> Yeah.
>> I often had players.
Who in terms of taking things relatively who will say ask for a dynamic but I have
mezzo forte written so okay it's relative to what other folks around you are doing.
It's not a specific decibel level that they have to achieve.
You mentioned in terms of earlier on how in baroque, perhaps sparser dynamics.
Denser dynamics.
Would you agree that even when there are sparser dynamics, there are some dynamic
margins that are applied within there, that we might even add to the parts.
>> I, I, absolutely.
>> For performance.
>> Absolutely, performance practice.
I think it would be ridiculous to say that Bach intended
this whole 20 bars to be played at an uninflected forte.
No.
Or piano.
Whatever the case may be.
We have to use our musical judgment and taste to make the pieces come alive.
Shaping the lines, and this means a lot of extra work on the part of the conductor.
We have to almost create an interpretation.
We have to edit, and we put things in the parts.
We'll actually write dynamics in and say I want piano here.
I want a crescendo leading back to this forte.
We study performance practice of the period.
And of course, there's been a lot of research
on that in the last 50 years or so.
Lot of period instrument groups out there, that we
can listen to on recordings and see what they do.
And there's some incredibly inventive performances out there of
music by Vivaldi and Corelli and Bach and Handle and.
But for a modern group to do that stuff and to do it convincingly, you
have to do a lot of research, a lot of work, and a lot of editing.
Not only on dynamics, but on articulation, also.
And, what's going to be shorter.
What's going to be longer.
Should we really slur these or not.
So, it's, it's a bigger challenge.
There's more work to be done on that
earlier music because less is given on the page.
>> Yeah, it's not that the music
is less expressive, the notation is less expressive.
>> Exactly, yeah.
