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.
Basic Patterns
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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
An Introduction to Rehearsing
This week, Module 1, we’ll discuss basic philosophical issues such as: What we do in rehearsals, what skills are needed, and the idea of the conductor as “the composer’s advocate.” I will also introduce the concept of Macro-Micro-Macro, which serves as the overarching principle of rehearsals. Then we will move on to basic conducting technique.
与讲师见面
Dr. Evan FeldmanAssociate Professor & Wind Ensemble Conductor
Music
[MUSIC].
Let's cycle through the essential conducting patterns, so we'll start with a
four, four pattern and I'm going to use a baton for these demonstrations.
So our four, four pattern.
Looks like this.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
It's down, to the left, to the right, and up.
Down, to the left, to the right, and up.
Notice how I'm placing each beat in a different spot.
One goes over here.
Two is over here three is over there and four comes back almost to where one is.
One, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four.
The idea of putting each ictus, each.
Beat, in a discreet
part of our conducting plane, is one way of approaching this.
What it allows us to do is first create a larger expressive box.
One, two, three, four.
Then if we place them all in the center.
And it's not quite as big.
Another thing it allows us to do is be very clear about where every beat is.
You can't confuse beat one with beat two because
they are placed in different spots of our conducting plane.
And then three is clearly over here and
then four is distinguished partly by the way.
We're getting to it from the previous beat.
If we put everything in the same place which is a perfectly valid
way of doing it and is it's quite common, it looks like this.
One, two, three four, one, two, three.
Four.
It's very focused because everything is right here
and that's one of the real advantages to it.
The box is a little bit more compact and that
we don't have to woo, where's the, everything is right there.
One of the disadvantages is that we, or
some of the disadvantages we don't have this
larger box or we have to conduct a
larger to get this box, and even more importantly.
Sometimes it can be a little hard to tell what beat we're
on because everything seems to be coming down into this area here.
One way we create distinction in that is by the rebound from one beat to the next.
And rebound and how we treat them is important in both styles.
This focal point conducting where everything.
Is in the same spot, and this discreet ictus conducting,
where everybody, every place has a discreet part of our plane.
Rebounds are important here.
The common rule about rebounds is that we rebound in the
opposite direction of where we're going to next, in the pattern.
Or nearly the opposite direction of where we're going to next.
So, if we break down that four-four pattern.
And we come down from one, we know beat two
is over here, so we're going to rebound, typically, this way.
It's not literally opposite way, but it's certainly not that way.
So we one, two.
We might rebound straight up, one, two.
At least that is a different direction, than where we're going to next.
Well, that's a different direction.
Both of those are perfectly, perfectly valid.
So we rebound, and then we go over to our next beat.
So now we're on beat two, and we know
the next place we're going is beat three over there.
Well, if we're going that way, we want to rebound that way.
We're going to rebound the opposite direction of where
we're going to next, or the near opposite.
So one.
Two.
We rebound that way and then we switch directions and go towards three.
So now we're on three over here.
We know our next beat is four, which is
more towards the center, or some people put it up.
Let's say we're going to do it towards the center on the same plane as beat one.
Well, from three we're going to go.
That way.
So we go three, four, three, four.
So it hops it, rebound from three.
Come back into four.
And then once we're on beat four, we know beat one is going to come this way.
So we rebound up to set to go down back to beat one.
So four, one and then we start it over.
Or one.
So that whole pattern with special attention to those rebounds.
One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
Here's one with a little bit up in to the right.
Two perhaps not as common but still viable.
So up, to the left, to the right and up that way.
Couple of caveats.
First, at least for now, conduct with your palm down through the entire pattern.
So one, I state it's always down parallel to the ground as I go.
It's very common to switch specially as we come across to B3.
You want to avoid that.
It's not that it's bad in and of itself.
It's the fact that it's an expressive gesture.
When we do this, we're doing something
expressive and it's quite a nice expressive gesture.
But, if we do it every single time.
It's no longer expressive, it just becomes wide noise.
So if we can get a good baseline that's
just solid and fluid, then we can express from there.
It is valid and not unusual to conduct with
the thumb up, the palm facing to your left.
If you do that.
And this is probably better for lighter kinds of
passages, but some people do it all the time.
If you're going to do that, make sure that it stays to the left the whole time.
You don't want to be moving it through the pattern
if you're not completely aware that you're doing it.
For an expressive reason.
Another thing to be aware of as of the pattern, is
pay special attention to what happens from beat three to beat four.
This is the part of the pattern that we're most likely going to
have a hitch or a glitch of some sort that we don't want.
What often happens two, three.
Four, one, two three, four.
Or something odd on the way back from the rebound of three, back to four.
Think about that travel path, travel path, being the exact
same path on the way out, and the way in.
So if we have one, two, we go out this way, and we come back to same way, three.
Four is a little bit of a U, kind
of a little pendulum, which just goes back and forth.
I might move a little bit, but if you can concentrate on making
that path the same, then you avoid any hitch or glitch in there.
It's not that you never want any sort of
hitch or glitch, there might be a part, two, three.
Four, one where I completely came over the top
there, but I did it for an expressive purpose.
If I do it all the time, it doesn't mean anything anymore
just looks like a weird little habit that I have in there.
So, we can talk about style and size and articulation in other
videos, but let's at least get the, the basic shape of it.
To see it from a reverse angle it would look like this.
Sometimes it's hard to mirror when
someone's doing the, facing towards you, but,
or to say imitate, but this way you can do it right with me.
And the same down to the left, to the right, and up, and I'm making this perhaps
a little bit larger than normal for a baseline pattern, so we can see it.
Hm, one straight down.
Sometimes we go a little bit more to the right for beat one.
One, two, three, four.
And that allows us to have a spot for our left hand.
If we put one over here, we sometimes get in the way of our left hand.
If we put it over here.
We're in our basic setup.
So that's fairly common.
The other reason we might put it over here is to
give us more travel space from beat one to beat two.
So one, two, we've got room to go.
As opposed to one, two, it's a little more constricted.
So that gives us a nice expressive space, and we know we
have lots of expressive space going across our body from two to three.
Whenever we move across our body this way and often an
opportunity for an expressive gesture, so we know we have that.
And then, four gives us not only coming back into the center but also up.
It gives us a lot of expressive space that way also.
Alright, let's move on to a three pattern.
A three pattern can be thought of as a triangle, and in it's most basic form.
One, two, three.
We go straight down two, three.
If I add some rebound in it, we'll get this from the reverse angle.
Go straight down and I come up this way.
Now one of the issues,
with this is that we're not using this side of our body at all.
It's all this artificial line and we're only using this side of the body.
Well, we can fix that a little bit by where we put our, our beat one.
So instead of it necessarily coming down straight down the
center, we might place it a little bit to the left.
One two three, one two three, that allows us to have that across
the body gesture that we got from beat two to beat three in our four pattern.
Now we have it from two to from one to two in our three pattern.
One, two, as opposed to one, two.
Another way to achieve that is to rebound, instead
of up, is to rebound up and to the left.
One two, so we come straight down, but then we rebound.
Almost literally the opposite direction of where we're going
to next and we have that expressive ability there.
Same issues at the end of the pattern coming
from two to three be aware of that path that
we take from two back to three and strive for
it to be the same pattern for our base line.
Three pattern.
We can experiment with focal point conducting, one, two,
three, one, where every beat is the same place.
Or one, two, three, where every beat has a discrete, part in our conducting plane.
So one question might be, well, when I do use this kind when I come straight down.
And when do I use the, the style where I place the pattern over here on the left.
A little bit left of center.
Well, the advantage of this, is the expressive capability.
It gives us from one.
All the way to two.
The disadvantage is that sometimes people can say, can get
confused and say, well, I don't understand where beat one is.
I see you goin' to here, but that looks like beat two.
Of a four pattern.
Two.
So where is beat one?
Generally speaking, all things being equal.
We use this kind of style when we're playing
something expressive, that does not have rhythmic complications in it.
We would use this style, where we come straight down.
And just make that very clean triangle when we're worried about rhythmic issues.
When we want to
clearly show one,two,three, one,two,three, one,two,three.
There's no question.
There's one and it frees us up to do other things without inadvertently confusing.
Musicians about where one is.
Alright, let's move on to the two pattern.
The best way of looking at the two pattern, well it's often described
as a reverse J or at least from our own perspective a reverse J.
And notice.
We can either kind of put one over there and two back to the center, or we can go
more focal point style, where one and two have the same.
Place where they click, where the ictus is or this way.
There are a lot of variation on the two pattern and some
of them are because, it's even more restrictive than the three pattern.
It's just these two gesture and we're losing all
of this space, that we have saying the four pattern.
Well, one way to solve that is to, here's our pattern, to tilt it on it's axis.
So instead of this, the J becomes more left to right than up
down which then gives us this horizontal space, one, two.
And you can see there's lot of variations
on that, depending how vertical we make it.
Here's a very vertical version of it, and here's a very horizontal version of it.
Again if it's something very rhythmic, we're probably going to be more
vertical, so people can clearly see one and two, but something expressive.
The idea of showing them exactly where one, is not as important although we are
still showing them one, it just happens to be that way, instead of that way.
But now we have expressive space to work on phrase and style.
We can go the total opposite approach and instead of going to
the right and up, we can go just down up, down up.
Down up, you can think of it as a march.
Ding, dong, dong, dong, dong, ding, dong, dong, dong.
Just one, two one two.
Notice how there's no rebound, or very small, very rebound on the bottom here,
it's almost just stop, go, stop go or stop go stop [LAUGH].
We just simply get in to each spot, and then just move to the next one.
We can edge that towards the other pattern with, this.
So it's very vertical, but there's a little bit of bounce, on beat one.
And of course two has the rebound back to prep one.
We can use just our wrist.
In the J version, in an up-down version, or
I might make a hybrid between this, and this.
In more of, of a V or a very tight U and do something like this.
There's lots of variations on this depending on the style of the music.
One patterns.
In some ways one patterns are the most difficult
pattern of all to conduct because there's no shape whatsoever.
Any shape that is created we have to add ourself.
The basic one pattern is just up and down and this.
Is the kind of pattern where we want to emphasize the effect of a bouncing ball.
If you have a super ball or any very bouncy ball on a hard surface, bounce it,
and watch it's path, trajectory, and speed, and no, notice how.
It hits the ground, explodes up, because all the energy
is there and then gravity gradually takes over and then pulls
it back down to earth and it accelerates as it goes
towards the ground and then bounces up again and then slowly.
Gets to a stop, and then, for a split, imperceptible
second, [LAUGH] pauses and then heads back down and accelerates.
If we can imitate that path of a bouncing ball, we create the most.
Easy to follow and predictable pattern.
The problem if we don't do that, if we just have a consistent speed or
even an inconsistent speed, that just changes but doesn't follow gravity.
It's hard to follow, because you can't predict when you're going to get down.
To that down beat.
But with the ball, we know we can time it perfectly.
I would even suggest taking that ball and just following it.
Just bounce it, and conduct along with the ball.
Eventually, it's going to get [NOISE] and get faster.
But that's okay.
Then we just.
Practicing our accelerando as we go but it can
be a really good exercise to get that ingrained in us.
So we really want that to be in some degree in
all of our patterns but it's particularly important in that one pattern.
And the one pattern doesn't necessarily have to be
literally in one in terms of just up and down.
We can add shapes in a couple of ways.
First we can add a circle and what usually works is from the conductor's perspective.
A counterclockwise circle.
Almost like we're moving sound along or time along and
whipping it around and that's often what this is good
for is to say no faster or energy but sometimes
it just allows us to have a little more expressive space.
We can go the other way.
Clockwise from the conductors perspective.
For me, it never feels quite as natural, but it's perfectly valid,
and if looks expressive, and gets the desired effect, then absolutely do it.
We can have, we can change where we're placing each beat, a little bit.
I would avoid doing this style where we're almost haphazardly just bouncing around.
Because it's not predictable.
There's no real shape to it.
But if we are going to place it at different
spots, do it in a way that reflects something musically.
Now what we would often, we'd often call
this using, conducting in the macro-meter or the hyper-meter.
So even though a piece might look like it's in one.
And we might conduct it this way.
Doesn't mean that it really is conceived in one.
The notation may betray the composers intent.
A great example of this would be the Strauss Blue Danube waltz.
That even note.
Dum, dum.
We can conduct it in one, and we might do that, but if you think about it and sing
it to yourself, it's really in four with the first
da, da, dum is beat four of a one pattern.
Da, four, da, da, one, da, two, da, three, da, four and
da, dum, da, two, da, three, da, four and a one.
And we might want to conduct it that way, in kind of a four pattern.
Dah dah dah one, dah two, dah three.
I'm still in one but I'm showing the macro
meter, the underlying phrase that's hidden with those bar lines.
The way it's, currently notated.
And we don't have to exaggerate it this way and show a huge one.
We might just make it very subtle, four, dum dum dum dum dum.
Which gives us some expressive space, which allows us to show how the phrase
works da da da, one, da, two, da, three, da four and a one.
So those macro ones feel like they are
rival spots and we can show phrase through there.
And it also helps us memorize and organize the phrase,
so it's not just memorizing a lot of different ones.
It's a chunk.
One, two, three, four.
That's four ones put together into a macro pattern.
And we can more easily ingest and memorize large scale phrasing, if
we can chunk it together, in these sorts of macro and hyper meters.
Well, okay that's the basic introduction to patterns.
There's a lot more to talk about and obviously a
lot more subtlety and detail that we need to add.
But practice these best you can.
Practice them in front of a mirror.
Practice them in front of other musician friends.
Practice them by recording yourself, and watching and critiquing yourself.
It's the type of thing that eventually we want to have, on complete muscle memory.
With as little of our brain thinking about it at one time as possible.
So when we're in rehearsal, we're not worrying about what our pattern is doing,
we're putting all of our energy on listening to what the ensemble is doing.
