Local vs. big-picture dynamics

ByBret Pimentel

An important part of interpreting music is figuring out how to use dynamic markings. They aren’t as simple as just playing louder or softer.

It helps a lot to understand the difference between what I call local dynamics and big-picture dynamics. Unfortunately, they are marked in sheet music using the same symbols, so it’s not always immediately obvious which they are. When you study a new repertoire piece, ask yourself why the composer or editor has provided each dynamic marking:

Is it there to call attention to a major event in the music, like a new theme, a return to an old theme, or some other kind of climactic moment? If so, it’s a big-picture dynamic. In many cases there is some other evidence that this is an important moment: a double-bar, a fermata, a key or tempo change, an entrance after some rests, etc. (If you have studied musical form, you probably have some more ideas of what to look for.)

Or, is the dynamic marking there just to provide some shape and direction to a phrase? There’s no major musical event, just a hint about the momentary musical gesture. If so, it’s a local dynamic.

When you think in terms of local vs. big-picture dynamics, it’s clear that not all fortes or mezzo-pianos or crescendos are equal. If the composer uses dynamics to contrast two themes or sections, for example with one being soft and the other being loud, that probably calls for a dramatic change. (It may also hint that some other unwritten contrasts are appropriate, like nuances of tempo, articulation, or tone color.) But a one-measure decrescendo from forte to piano in the middle of a theme might be more of a suggestion from the composer about what direction that phrase should take, and should be handled with more subtlety.

Beware of the limitations of dynamic markings in music notation, and of careless editing, and use your best-informed musical judgment to interpret the meanings of those symbols.

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  • Musicians should embrace carry-on baggage fees

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    People are outraged over an airline’s announcement that its cheapest fares will no longer cover carry-on baggage. (This isn’t the first time that airlines have charged fees for carry-on bags.)

    My experience flying with musical instruments as carry-ons has been stressful at best. This passage from an economics textbook rings true to me:

    photo, Bradley Gordon

    The battle begins in the gate where air travelers elbow their way to the front of the line to board the aircraft as soon as possible in order to grab an overhead bin. Once on the aircraft, the real fight begins. Some passengers with seats in the rear of the plane toss their bags into the front compartments to be sure they get a spot. People with oversized bags cram them into the narrow bins, pushing the bags, coats, and hats of passengers with correctly sized luggage into the corners. People ask for help from the flight attendants but their pleas are ignored. The flight attendants say they are too short staffed to handle passenger disagreements concerning bags. Losers are left standing with their “homeless” bags. …

    Are people just selfish and rude? Most economists say no, they are just responding to the absence of market incentives. The overhead bins are a commons. It’s Dodge City. Nobody “owns” the space in the overhead bins. People can’t trust strangers to act with cooperation or courtesy. The result is “warfare.”

    Things could be different. Creating an overhead bin market would bring out the best of people. Here is how. Most of today’s airlines charge people extra to check a bag and offer the overhead bins for “free.” It should be just the reverse.

    Nobody likes paying more. But a carry-on fee is a small percentage of an airline ticket. And for most musicians it’s a small price to pay for better access (maybe even guaranteed access!) to the overhead storage. Is it worth the price of a box of reeds or two to know my saxophone will arrive in one piece? Or the price of a pound or two of cane to ensure that my bassoon reaches its destination? I think so.

  • Things that aren’t jazz

    ByBret Pimentel
    Photo, frawemedia

    Okay, first of all: what I’m talking about here is the “mainstream” jazz tradition, insofar as such a thing exists (you can make a good argument that it doesn’t, really). “Jazz” is a wide net to cast. To flip it around, if I were going to list things that aren’t “classical” music, I might say “use of the electric bass guitar” or even “microtonality.” Are those things really mutually exclusive with classical music? No. But they are not part of the tradition of the Viennese masters, not what your local community orchestra would play, not what most people think of when they think of classical music.

    One misconception that many classical musicians seem to have about jazz is that since it has strong improvisatory elements, it must be very free and unstructured. I think the opposite is true: improvisation, at least in the mainstream-bebop/hard-bop-influenced style, requires fairly strict structural underpinnings. None of the following works well when someone is trying to improvise:

    • Free forms. Form in jazz is much stricter than in classical music. Most common jazz tunes have one of two forms. The first is precisely 32 bars in 4/4 time, with four eight-bar sections: AABA. The second is precisely twelve 4/4 bars, a “blues” form. Anything that doesn’t fit exactly into one of these categories is most likely very closely related to one of them.
    • Free harmony. Bebop and hard-bop jazz are extremely tonal. While improvisers may play pitches that fall “outside” the chords, it is almost always within a tonal framework: the notes function as upper extensions of the chords, or at least they are used in a sort of polychordal way that has reference to the underlying harmony and will ultimately resolve back to it. The idea that “there are no wrong notes” isn’t exactly true; notes can definitely sound very wrong if they aren’t properly contextualized with regard to the harmony.
    • Free or changing meter. Jazz makes frequent use of polymeter and syncopation, which can give the impression of shifting meter, but most jazz doesn’t actually change meters, especially in improvisatory sections. The polyrhythms and syncopations work because they are overlaid on an unchanging metric pulse, and resolve to it.
    • Rubato. Tempi also tend to quite strict in jazz playing. A musician might “lay back” in the beat or stretch a rhythm, but the underlying pulse doesn’t change. (In my experience, jazz players generally have much steadier internal metronomes than classical musicians.)
    The freedom that improvisers do have is to create melodies over these fairly rigid structures. The rigidity gives the improviser a predictable framework to work with (or perhaps against). At a more detailed level, there are certain melodic characteristics that classical musicians tend to associate with jazz, that I don’t hear when I listen to jazz or play with fine jazz musicians: Read More “Things that aren’t jazz”

  • Did I play that “right?”

    ByBret Pimentel

    Sometimes my beginner students will play something for me, then ask, “Was that right?” What they generally seem to mean is something like, “Did I use the correct fingerings in the correct order?” A student who is slightly more advanced might ask the same question, but also wonder whether the rhythms were “correct.” A student farther along than that might take into consideration things like accurate observance of marked articulations and dynamics.

    Setting aside creative concerns and looking only at technical matters, when is a student’s playing “right?”

    I try to impress upon my advancing students that execution of musical passages isn’t really about “right” or “wrong,” but rather about degrees of rightness. To borrow an idea from manufacturing or engineering, we might think in terms of tolerances.

    In other words, for a beginner, a half-note rhythm might be “right” if the half notes are roughly twice the length of quarter notes, and a pitch of “D” might be “right” if it is closer to D than it is to D-flat or D-sharp. For a somewhat more advanced student, it might not be “right” until the rhythms can be played without wandering too far afield of a metronome and the pitches trigger the “in tune” light on a cheap electric tuner. For an even more advanced student, those tolerances wouldn’t be fine enough—we might expect the rhythmic ratios to be accurate to within a few percent, and the pitches to be accurate within so many cents.

    photo, Lewis Meyer
    photo, Lewis Meyer

    At the highest levels of musical technique, we question what tolerances are accurate enough for our audiences, or for someone with even more finely-tuned ears—a conductor, perhaps, or an audition panel, or collaborating musicians, or a record producer. Are my rhythms “right” when they are within a tolerance of a hundredth of a second? A thousandth? A ten-thousandth? Who will hear the difference if my pitches are within a tolerance of ten cents? Five cents? The more I think about it, the more I’m certain I can never really be satisfied, because as my execution gets more accurate, my ears get less tolerant.

    If your ears are currently “tolerating” your level of accuracy when you play, it may be time to listen more closely and critically. Don’t be satisfied with “right”—go for more right.

  • Written jazz articulation problems

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    Stylistically-appropriate articulation has long been under-taught in jazz education. (Or waved away with a “ya gotta listen”) . But that is changing , with some recent guides and method books starting to find some consensus about best practices. Concepts like which notes to accent, or how long to sustain certain notes, apply to all jazz instrumentalists. But wind-instrument players have the extra complication of which notes to tongue or slur. This distinction is critical to good jazz style.

    In classical music, wind players usually perform articulation markings with accuracy. But printed jazz music can take varied approaches to articulation markings.

    Some charts for experienced players have sparing articulation markings or none at all. The composer, arranger, and/or editor trust the performers to apply appropriate style:

    Jazz tune with no articulation

    Others, particularly more recent ones, use markings that reflect the crystallizing best practices:

    Jazz tune with best-practice articulation

    But may otherwise well-written charts, bafflingly, use markings that are not stylistically appropriate:

    Jazz tune with poor articulation

    Some red flags include long slurs and staccato markings. Experienced jazz players instinctively ignore these bad markings and use better articulation practices. (Long slurs can in some cases be explained away as “phrase” markings. But since they are visually indistinguishable from slurs, it’s better to omit them.)

    Occasionally a good jazz composer or arranger will use an articulation marking in a surprising or unusual context. It’s up to the performers to determine whether this is an intentional break from typical jazz style, or an editing error.

    In some cases, a composer/arranger might even choose a particularly anti-swing articulation as a kind of joke. This is usually followed by a figure that should be played with exaggerated, correct swing and articulation. This heightens the contrast between “good” and “joke” style:

    Jazz tune with "joke" articulation

    Jazz players and educators are responsible to know and apply correct articulation, using their best musical judgment to override the written parts when appropriate.

  • Counting rhythms with a non-quarter-note pulse

    ByBret Pimentel

    Sometimes my students are stymied by rhythms like this:

    subdivisions

    These rhythms are really not at all difficult to play—to actually execute—for an intermediate-level student. The problem is just one of unfamiliar notation. It is usually related to the all-too-common misconception that the rhythmic pulse is always equal to a quarter note. If you approach this example with a quarter-note pulse in mind, the rhythms are indeed rather complex.

    But even an intermediate student should be quite at ease playing subdivisions of a beat into twos, threes, and fours. For a student with the pulse-is-always-a-quarter-note mentality, that means this specifically:

    subdivisions-1

    So the key is to reframe the “difficult” rhythm so that it breaks down into subdivisions of two, three, and four. One way would be to rewrite it like this, using more familiar notation:

    subdivisions-2

    But often it’s enough for my students just to mark up the original to show an eighth-note rhythmic pulse:

    subdivisions-3

    If I walk them through marking the first few measures, they can often finish the project without much additional help. At that point, they are surprised to discover that the rhythms are really much simpler than they first appeared (and that 32nd notes are not necessarily “fast”).

    For me this issue comes up most often in the Romantic-period etudes I have my students play, most especially the oboe etudes by Ferling (which my saxophonists also play) and the 32 clarinet etudes by Rose (which are mostly based on the Ferling etudes), but also some of the Milde bassoon etudes and Andersen flute etudes.

    In each of these cases, by far the most common occurrence of a non-quarter pulse is the eighth note pulse, and some editions of these indicate an eighth-note based metronome marking (which should be a big hint to a student). In general, my students handle this less-familiar notation with ease once they learn to watch out for etudes or repertoire movements that have 32nd-note rhythms, and to count those with an eighth-note pulse. (The clarinetists run into this early in the Rose 32, as the first and third etudes begin with seeming quarter-note-pulse rhythms, then surprise the student with 32nd-note passages later.)

    A 16th-note pulse is also not unheard of (I run across this most often in Baroque repertoire), and certainly others are possible. “Cut time” (2/2) time signatures also fall into this category, though they seem to alarm my students less because they are generally easy enough to count in 4/4; they do sound much more poised if I can convince them to use a true half-note pulse.

    In summary:

    • If an etude or repertoire piece has 32nd-note rhythms, try counting with an eighth-note pulse. If it has 64th notes, try a sixteenth-note pulse, and so on.
    • If the composer or editor provides a metronome marking, notice what note duration is suggested (for ♩ = 50, count in quarters, but for ♪ = 100, count in eighths).
    • If it helps, mark in the pulse to reveal the familar two, three, and four subdivisions.
    • Don’t panic!

  • Sorry, but you still can’t bring your reed knives on US flights

    ByBret Pimentel

    There has been some buzz (no pun intended) among US reed players about an announcement from the infamous Transportation Security Administration that some knives will be allowed in carry-on luggage starting next month. But make no mistake—your reed knife will still need to go in your checked bag or it will be confiscated at a security checkpoint.

    There are a couple of catches to the some-knives-allowed rule that will eliminate virtually all common reed knives. One is that carry-on knives must be folding knives, with blades that do not lock into position. While there are some reed knives in common use that meet this qualification, the other catch is even more significant: the blade must be no longer than 2.36 inches (6 cm) and no wider than ½ inch (2.27 cm). Most reed knives fall somewhere in the 3–4 inch length range, and some push the width limit, too. (If you’re using a good-quality reed knife with a folding, non-locking blade that is small enough to qualify, I’m curious to hear about it).

    The newly-permitted knives seem essentially to be limited to those small keychain-type Swiss Army knives.

    Additionally, the TSA reserves the right to make judgment calls:

    The final decision rests with TSA on whether to allow any items through security checkpoints.

    Nope. Photo, APMus
    Nope. Photo, APMus

    Check out these resources for more information:

     Keep those valuable and razor-sharp reed knives in your checked bags.

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