Posted by Rick Denney on January 28, 2003 at 23:25:20:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: High Range: Drawing lips toward teeth? posted by Mary Ann on January 28, 2003 at 11:52:49:
As an engineer who is completely committed to analysis, I have to agree with everything you have said.
I think many are missing what Jacobs actually said. He said that mechanical problems should be worked on as mechanical problems, outside the context of music. Then, once the correct physical movements are incorporated into habitual responses, they can be brought back to the music. His fear was that we would get in the habit of thinking about mechanical processes instead of making music--especially processes that involve involuntary muscles that must be driven by concept and not by command. This is not at all the same as avoiding analysis. His fear is well-founded and was based on lots of experience with technically proficient players who did not use that proficiency to achieve musical ends.
Pat Sheridan gave a master class a couple of years ago that I attended that explained this approach in a different way. He suggested that when we have a trouble spot in a piece of music, we keep hacking at it--incorrectly--with the result that doing it wrong becomes ingrained, and the feeling of doing it wrong becomes the trigger for doing it wrong yet again. He suggested that we analyze the source of the problem, and work on that mechanically away from the music. For example, if it is a fingering problem, we work on the relevant scales, as scales and not as music. If it is a flexibility problem, we work on relevant flexibility exercises. This would include identifying and addressing a mechanical problem, such as not curling the lips in to make high notes, that we would work on separately from the music.
My own teacher is mixing a bit of free buzzing, mouthpiece buzzing, and flexibility exercises to address my own mechanical problems, but when we are working on music, the focus is on the music and we don't discuss those other things. A good teacher may not explain the mechanical process fully, which will be unsatisfying to my engineering brain, perhaps, but I have to say that in daily life people as committed to analysis as I am are quite rare. The teacher who learns that certain exercises prohibit ineffective processes and reinforce effective processes may not understand or be able to explain why it is the case, but can still reach most students who do not learn but analysis but rather learn by experience. Klaus's method of laying on of hands is actually a variation on the experience approach--it demonstrates rather than explains, which is the whole point of doing targeted exercises.
I think some folks have extrapolated the notion that mechanical processes should not be in our conscious thought during music-making into the false notion that mechanical processes should not be thought about at all. That is absolutely NOT what I read in Song and Wind. But I suspect that most who seem to take that position don't actually do so in practice.
Rick "who doesn't practice what he speaks" Denney