Bach's Violin Music: A Better Understanding
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- Опубліковано 5 січ 2023
- Short excerpt no.3 from my course on tonebase:
"18 Experiments for the Practice Room"
...inspiration and experimentation have been essential to my improvement. As musicians, we have constant opportunities to learn from the players around us and the recordings we have access to. By translating that energy into concrete technical and musical ideas in the practice room, we can better diagnose and solve lingering problems and discover new possibilities from our musical expression. These 18 experiments are starting points - make experimentation a lifelong habit!
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I enjoyed hearing your question on Darkhorse. Couldn’t make sense of what came next in relation to the question, but it was nice to see that you follow them. I’m an orchestral violinist and I really enjoy your playing and content.
I liked Bret's idea of a sort of "reboot state". I guess it doesn't completely map onto the art space, as I am not sure artistic movements are based on "what works", (sometime it's explicitly ideation of what DOESN'T work) although maybe I'm wrong. Thanks for your comment!
I just listed watch the full video on tonebase, and I love what you said about listening to someone play, humming the tune and playing the violin should all feel the same - that we can aim to play with that same freedom. I often find myself humming out singing pieces that I'm working on (I'm focusing on variations 5 and 7 of Sevcik Op following on from your masterclass), and taking away the fussiness and perfectionism of the instrument - or rather my relationship with it - allows me to find things in the music that I probably wouldn't otherwise see.
💯 - we must always connect back to the human vouce, how it moves between notes and navigates (more) gracefully between phrases. Our voice understands the cadence of speech; the arc of stories.
Indeed! Lovely! So exciting!
That's all I can think to say, but I'm fairly sure I get your point, and I like it!
I think of the first two measures of Preludio as the pickup and the piece actually starts on the third measure.
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I disagree. The rhythmic theme in that E prelude works the entire time to make you feel that pickup. Aren’t these all originally for a specific dance too? If you dont feel the pickup I think there are other issues.
The violin piece doesn’t feature much of what you’ll hear in the cantata, naturally. The brass fanfare isn’t there to accentuate the descending line, the celli aren’t there to mark 8th-notes (typically violinists would be scolded for making their playing of running 16th so symmetrically ’beaty’) the different organ stops aren’t there to create the thinner and thicker colors for the bariolage - there are many other places where you either have to have a great imagination (and it seems like you do, which is fantastic!) or study the other settings of this tune. Many of the violinists we (rightfully) admire don’t really play the beginning as a pickup, for example. In fact they might argue that it must be played out because you are alone, it’s not an ensemble, the circumstance is different. I think that’s a totally valid approach in theory, and if one possesses such virtuosity, it can be quite convincing. For the rest of us, an alternate approach that I suggested could be engaging and colorful. This music isn’t based on any dance to my knowledge, but certainly it has a dance-y and joyful quality. This is another thing that comes through far more in the cantata than the violin setting. In fact it would sound ridiculous to try to implement all of the dance-y qualities we hear in the cantata into the solo violin. There are no rules in the end. What you do is captivating or it’s not.