Once again, I’m digging deeply, not just to a piece with which I had no previous strong familiarity, but to one I had not heard of before I started listening to the recordings from the 2013 Boston Symphony Orchestra Tanglewood season. I’ve been considering visiting this piece for a few months now, but have been dissuaded by the duration. At only six minutes, I have felt like I should channel my energies to a longer piece. However, last week’s Debussy outing was coupled with the opening of the school year, and I did not get to listen as much as I’d have preferred, so this week a six minute piece is perfect for me.
Initial Impressions
A few weeks back, I didn’t have the opportunity to listen immediately to a recording with my score, so I dusted off my solfège skills and learned the themes of the piece without hearing a note of it. Interestingly, since that week in July, I have recognized those themes whenever I hear them, and can recall them on my own as well. Clearly that is a process which works well for retention, and of course it improves overall musicianship to sight-sing.
This past week, I performed a similar experiment with my church choir. I had a brand-new anthem for them, and planned in advance that I would not introduce the accompaniment, or assist with plunking notes until we no longer needed them as a crutch or teaching tool. I led them in an initial singing of the opening themes, and proceeded to walk them through locations to get entrance notes from previous passages, and pointed out difficult sections to be aware of interesting rhythms or interval leaps. The results were incredible; we could have performed the piece that evening. And now, I believe, we will come back to it this week, with stronger recollection because their brains used a different area to learn the piece, and didn’t rely on what they were hearing as they went. We’ll see if this hypothesis holds true.
And so, last evening, I looked through the Pavane, finding which instruments seemed to have the lead role in each section, figuring out the transpositions for the necessary instruments, and began to read the score as best I could. This would be a completely different project, with different methodology were the entire score in the concert pitch, as a choral score, for instance. But, when transposing instruments are employed it becomes more difficult. I looked over the opening horn phrase, for instance, and had to determine what its tonal center was, and do the same for the C-instruments. Once I had established do for each part it wasn’t too difficult to jump between parts. After a few pages, I allowed myself to listen, and was pretty pleased with what I had learned on my own. The melodies were intact. The ethereal harmonies could not make it to my internal ear though. I’ve always admired people who can hear different lines at one time, especially when they’re only reading the score. At some point, perhaps, I’ll get to that point, but for this week, I’ll consider it an advancement that I was able to transpose a G-horn line in my head and read through it correctly.