Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

Along the same lines as what Prof. Alegant sent us in his last email… I’d like to concur that modern music is incredibly complex. When Levine gave us a presentation of his music… I began to grapple with another issue of modern music… the actual performance of it. Following the score and just trying to understand and follow the notation is very dificult… similarly it takes significant effort to understand the music as a listener. “But,” I thought, “to play it must be impossible!” I’m here at Oberlin to recieve a performance degree as a percussionist… and I can’t imagine how difficult it is to learn contemporary music. I don’t see how my journey as a performer will ever allow me to do such musically and technically difficult things. Basically, I’m insecure and don’t know if I can do it. However, I think I might be overanalyzing the situation. Levine described to me the polyrhythms that looks so complicated on the page as “written rubato” and in that sense… I feel they might be achievable. Further, I can imagine that with playing contemporary music… there are certain skills which you would hone and refine specific to that style of music. This happens in other styles too. For example playing 1 handed baroque trills on the marimba–if you don’t play lots of Baroque music… that particular skill is quite daunting. But, if all you do is play the Bach sonnata and partitas… you’ll foreseeably get quite good at one handed trills. Similaraly, if you play lots of contemporary music, the ability to decipher polyrhytms would become second nature. The strange alternate techniques would be quickly learned and mastered. You could learn to study the score efficiently, pulling out the important things–deciding what can and can’t be played. So, maybe my fear of playing contemporary music is nothing more than fear of the unknown… just like the fear I had of contemporary music before this class.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under matt m. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.