Quartet Vibrato

Reading "The Art of Quartet Playing, the Guarneri Quartet" has given me some really powerful insights including how to think about vibrato in our quartet. Vibrato can easily fall victim to becoming a "routine" component to making music rather than a fundamental nuance, artistically integrated into the overall performance of the tune. Routine vibrato is the kind of vibrato that is always the same, same speed, same degree - all the time, no matter the musical style, ensemble mixture, dynamics, or..... Approaching vibrato as a fundamental nuance to performance immediately challanges us as a quartet to thoughtfully integrate vibrato into the score.

So the challenge is laid out - Integrate Vibrato, be Thoughtful about Vibrato, Have a Plan (and justification) for Vibrato Use, Ensure Group Involvement in Applying Vibrato. Sounds easy right?

I've taken the material from the book and developed the following list for consideration.

• Ensure all members of the group have a fundamental understanding of vibrato production.
• Ensure members feel confident in their own production of vibrato -- ie -- all have applied the fundamentals of vibrato to create variations in vibrato, including speed and degree and application at various dynamics.
• Recognize that vibrato is not standard. The amount and degree of vibrato WILL vary for the group and for individuals.
• Recognize that vibrato is not ALWAYS ON. A non-vibrato passage can be very powerful.
• Recognize that mixing non-vibrato layers with vibrato layers can help bring out musical priorities.
  
• Recognize that vibrato can bring emphasis to a lesser important musical line (this is a negative thing :-)
  
• Recognize that vibrato should be discussed, decisions made and marked into scores and parts.

This seems like a lot to think about... and it is. In the book, this topic takes several pages with examples, and additional converations. I've just brushed the surface. Our art and our desire to better our performance requires indepth study of the elements. Vibrato is one of the elements worth dissecting and understanding.

Thinking "Quartet"

The first 30 pages of a book recommended to me by James Berrera are history. The book, The Art of Quartet Playing: The Guarneri Quartet. Readers should note this book highlights the wisdom and musical genius of the Guarneri STRING Quartet. What we as Sax Quartets can learn from this book is that instruments aside, great ensembles are first and foremost great MUSICAL ensembles. So a book such as this can be an amazingly powerful tool, much like best selling books on Leadership can help Leaders from a variety of organizations. As a side note, the quartet after 45 years will be retiring. Check out this link to learn more.

It may have been the environment when I was reading the book (I was listening to the WSO Symphony rehearsal in preparation to play the American in Paris), but the first 30 pages spoke to many of the questions I have had regarding how our quartet can establish great rehearsal habits. So, over the next few posts, I will be highlighting the thinking, tips, hints, methods and practices outlined in the book. I should first say nothing replaces reading the book. The book is jammed full of advice. In fact, the conversation around the first 30 pages easily filled the 45 minute ride home for my wife and I after the Symphony rehearsal. So, the posts will be high level take aways that may entice you to read the book for yourself.

A key takeaway from the first 30 was a great conversation regarding quartet leadership. The quartet believes in a shared leadership model, ie - not uber leader. Leadership is defined as the ability to inspire others to join in on a mission, to inspire others to WANT to follow, support and push towards a common, attainable goal. Notice that leadership does not have as part of the definition a statement such as "following 1", or "Obeying the commands of an individual." Leaders are among us each day, we all can and should be leaders. But leaders come in levels. My role in our quartet for example is to do what I am doing here. I hope my words inspire our own group to think hard about how we work together and how we can better ourselves. So, for this effort, I do consider myself a leader. But as we start to rehearse, new leaders will and should take on their roles. As the book states, a group with a single leader will musically take on the desires of that one individual and only that one. In this case, the group will become followers and not participants. I think we would all agree, this is not the intent of any great musical ensemble.

The approach of "Leaders in All" can be a very personal issue for groups. I know in talking about this with my wife, the philosophy is not one that traditional musicians grow up with. Many of us come from backgrounds where the "Director' or "Conductor" model is applied to all we do musically. I would go so far as to say we are ingrained by the Authoritarian model of musical leadership to expect 1 person to surface and lead us to greatness. The advice from the book clearly points the advantages of thinking past those constraints and building group leadership in each performer.

One idea mentioned in the group to build a groups application of "Leaders in All" is to have each member take a tune or movement of a tune and work to build their own leadership skills. Through this effort, the members will start to experiment with what they can empower the group to perform -- ie -- how can they express, both verbally and non-verbally what they feel the group should do?

I feel like I could write forever on this topic in order to really flesh out the details. But, this is a blog and blogs are meant for idea sharing and conversation. The main point I will leave is for groups to be great -- they must build "Leaders in All" for themselves.

This is post one from what I am sure will be a great book. It will take me time to read this book as my life is pretty full of research, business, and teaching right now. So, stay tuned. Or, grab a copy yourself and join in.

Rehearsal Thoughts

One topic I wrestle with is how to run great rehearsals. This is a really personal topic for me. Why? I have been "out of" the music instruction scene for the past 9 years. So, I feel a bit affected by the "use it or loose it" concept. To harness the positive, I feel this gives me a great opportunity to capitalize on what I can learn from making a come back from my hiatus. Added to that, I do think running great rehearsals also involved group dynamics and personal relationships among the members. For a quartet this is especially critical.

So, combining a personal mission to make our rehearsal value as high as possible with acknowledgment that our group dynamic and individual personalities add greatly to our success, I've started to put some thoughts into how we work so well, what we are trying to accomplish and how and where we go from here. Since no group exists for, or on, the desire of just one member, I know my fellow members will have something to add.

First, some group history. If you don't know, Judy and I are married. Her twin sister, Janet is our Bari player. BJ, well, he is not related in a familial sense. However, BJ and Judy have played together for a few years before BJ filled Judy's teaching position after her retirement. So he for sure is a member of our family. (We charge him very little for continued "membership"). With our family tree now firmly in mind, I think the path is clear to jump right in.

In my quest to find information about group rehearsal techniques, I have found little. I would have expected to find tons of how to's or "here is what we do" messages. But, I have not. I think it must be a secret or something. Or is running a great rehearsal just supposed to be an assumed skill for all groups? I tend to think neither is the case. I just think we have not had the ability to share thoughts on this subject easily. Today - no excuses. Blogging is a great way to get thoughts on 'paper' and out to others.

So, here are my thoughts on holding and benefiting from really great rehearsal techniques. KSQ is getting better every day. Being the goal setting type, I know some of the items on my list are skills our group has in plenty. Others, are stretch goals for us - ones we will certainly work hard to improve. As we do, I will keep this post topic updated.

1.) Communicate -- all kinds works best. Talk about the upcoming rehearsal, what you want to accomplish, where it will be held, what pieces you will cover, what pieces you will not work on, tempo updates, recordings to listen to prior, clothes to wear (oh -- that is just for Judy and Janet), plan meals -- our rehearsals are often long and span 1 meal or more. We have found that the things that make great rehearsals is making them memorable and fun. While we all remember the days of scheduled rehearsals just barely fitting into our day, we consider our group our opportunity to be in total control of how much we enjoy rehearsals. We talk them up, make events out of them to whatever degree makes sense, not going overboard, and enjoying the prep and planning as part of the lead in to the actual event.

2.) Generating Urgency -- ok, this is straight out of a Leadership workshop I am building, but it fits. KSQ has gotten better because we have created URGENCY in our group. How have we done that? We didn't wait for performances to come to us. We went out and told others we were performing. We have not been turned down. And, thus, these 'urgencies' have led to a NEED to rehearse. I think we are very good at knowing what we are rehearsing for. We always have an event that we are prepping for. We make that a driver for our rehearsals. I don't think this is an obvious approach. In my early years, prepping for a concert band concert that was months away never seemed to be the priority. I am not a fan of rehearsing for rehearsal sake. Call it old age or impatiences or over exuberant goal setting. Now-a-days, I need a sense of URGENCY, and I think our group has really benefited from that approach.

3.) Coaching -- this topic served as a really great thought partnering activity between Judy and I the other night. I asked a simple question - "Who leads our group?" For about an hour we shared past experiences with other groups, how they worked together, what the outcome of their work was (ie -- how good were these groups), and discussions on group dynamics, not the musical dynamics but the interrelationships in the group. I have been thinking that our group could use a coach to help us get to the next level. I had in my mind that the group could only get to the next level if we had someone telling us what to do and how to do it. Considering the picture I painted above of my past group rehearsal experiences - ie -- they were schedule, repetitive, not so fun, my coaching idea created a real double talk situation for myself. What was I saying? Did I really think a coaching environment fit into the culture of our group? After consideration, I've realized that what we have been doing is starting to develop our own internal coaching skills as a group. We haven't reach or even defined our own model yet, but we are opening up. We all have a ton of respect for each other. We all hear things in our own way, beneficial ways to helping the group move forward musically. The more we play together, the more we are discovering what bugs each of us more. Interestingly, we have started to "predict" what will be caught by someone else. I know if I miss an accidental more than once, Judy will politely hand me a pencil and say "MARK IT!". Since BJ and I play the Bb Instruments, we are more so now than in the early days listening to our "D's" and "Eb's" knowing that our instruments handle each differently, and thus cause intonation issues. These are small coaching efforts that we do for each other, sometimes non-verbally, sometimes verbally. While we have not actually spoken about this in our group (at least not up until now), I do think our next step is the development of internal musical coaching beyond what we are doing for each other now. Discussing the topic is the first step, one that I am glad to create here and for expansion on when we rehearse for our own betterment.

If you were expecting a "do this", "don't do this" checklist, sorry. My mind doesn't work like that. But, I am a single voice in our quartet. I know my fellow members will contribute their thoughts in time. For now, my advice to all is to Communicate, Create your own Urgency, and Coach each other to better success. Give these simple challenges a try!

Mark