From watching the Glen Gould doco I found something interesting whilst playing this evening.
If you play through music sometimes there can seem to be a slight disconnect. It's as though the music is written and there is a process between reading it and performing it that seems to be held back some how.... << bad explanation of a very subtle idea.
Perhaps this is a better approach. I've always been jealous of people that can perform by memory. When I do play from memory the music seem to be generated like a song in which I actually follow the rise and fall of the melody etc. Sometimes whilst reading sheet music that gets lost and it end up being 'one note after another'.
Today I tried something different.
Sing a section and comprehend it. Then play it. I found that it felt like I was playing it by memory. It's as though singing activates that part of the brain that takes ownership of the melody. When I played the music back after singing it (whilst reading the music) it felt like I was playing it by memory. It felt as though I was trying to play the music I was singing / reading.
It felt great
- much more musical.
- faster and easier.
- better comprehension.
- clearer perspective of what the purpose of a given set of notes was in the context of the phrase.
- magic magic magic.
I sing like Glenn Gould does... Horrible mumbles.
It was magical to hear how much better my violin playing is that my singing or anything else.
It was nice to hear how different my vocal sounds is to my violin sound.
It was nice to hear the different sounds and explore the 'idea' of the music without having to worry about actually playing the violin.
It was nice to read the music and use my brain without having to worry about the technically of holding and playing the violin.
There is no such thing as technical difficult. Just a lack of musical comprehension.
"We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind." (Glenn Gould)
After singing and comprehending the music the technique become a non issue!? My brain new what was expected and so my body was prepared for those longer shifts / accidents etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould#Eccentricities
Gould is widely known for his unusual habits. He usually hummed while he played the piano, and his recording engineers had mixed results in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was subconscious and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize the music as he intended. It is likely that this habit originated in Gould's having been taught by his mother to "sing everything that he played", as Kevin Bazzana puts it. This became "an unbreakable (and notorious) habit".[51] Some of Gould's recordings were severely criticised because of the background "vocalise". For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg Variations opined that many listeners would "find the groans and croons intolerable".[52]
