Daydreaming in the Rests; Breathing and Blowing

A bit of free association.

During rehearsals of Verdi’s Rigoletto this past weekend, I had a stream of free-associative thought during a long period of rest. It was a bit like the popular trivia game, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Our guest conductor is fairly meticulous about giving clear cut-offs for note releases. Many conductors that I work with take this for granted. While I would like to say that the Arizona Opera Orchestra is on par with the Met and can consistently release unison chords together, we are not.

Sometimes we need a little extra help from the podium and with this guest conductor, his clear cut-offs are helping us to play a bit cleaner than usual. This detail – releases – is one of the basic elements that distinguishes the great from the good.

Along this line of thought, my mind wandered to lessons with Milan Yancich at Eastman. He always insisted on calling the end and the beginning of a note as a “release.” He had strong reservations about the term “attack,” insisting that it encouraged students to overuse the tongue for note production.

Triggering the imagination

“Imagine a bathtub full of water,” he would say, “with a rubber stopper in the drain. You reach in with your finger and pull out the stopper, and the water rushes out.” I like this metaphor for tonguing for several reasons – it gets the imagination going and it gets one thinking more about air flow and less about the tongue.

I recall an old Canadian Brass video where a similar water metaphor is illustrated. One of the musicians turned on a water facet and to demonstrate tonguing, took a table knife and made slicing motions through the stream of water. The water still flows at a constant rate, the video explained, and is only temporarily interrupted by the motion of the knife.

“It’s not an attack – it’s a release,” Yancich would exclaim when I would hammer out overly-aggressive articulations. When he sang along in lessons, he accentuated the beginnings of notes with a “pull-back” gesture, rather than the typical stabbing gesture. It was like he was pulling a trigger or yanking a rip-cord on a cannon.

Mind over matter

I find that a little dash of technical information accompanied by stories and metaphors can help students much more than a boat load of technical details.

Sam Pilafian remarked once in a warm-up class that we needed to “breath through our knees.” What fantastic imagery to get us thinking about proper breathing technique without getting into the specific mechanics of breathing!

In the hands of a wordsmith, metaphors, imagery and wordplay can help produce the correct technique and inspire the right state of mind – all at once.

…oh…uh…back to the Rigoletto rehearsal … “psst … hey,” I whisper to a colleague…

Where are we?