Spoken introductions are best kept succinct, to the point, and somehow light-hearted. Through several years of performing, I have found that people are likely to find me funnier when I’m on stage that in other social situations. I think there is some sort of psychological trick at play—as an audience member, you’re expecting to be entertained, so you’re automatically more inclined to laugh and be amused by the guy with the guitar and fancy attire. The trick, of course, is not to outstay your welcome, and not to try too hard—it’s very easy to go from “funny musician” to “self-indulgent blabber who ceased being funny about five minutes ago”.

In terms of the musical content of your stage barter, make sure you’re not indulging in too much jargon and techno-speak—those are instant turn-offs for even the most benign of crowds. Rather than talking about the miraculous modulation that happens after the false entry of the secondary theme in the development, for example, you might want to direct your listeners towards the remarkable change of colors they can hear about two-thirds of the way through the piece.

Explaining a bit about the structure of a piece (again, using lay terms as much as possible) can also enhance appreciation. For instance, I always tell my audiences that Dowland’s Nocturnal is a set of reverse variations—they’ll be hearing the varied material first and the theme at the end, at which point they’ll realize the theme had been running through the music for the entire duration of the piece. That gives the public something to hang on to, and makes their listening experience a much more active and enjoyable one. Along the same lines, I also make a habit of telling people a ballpark figure for the duration of longer pieces—something that keeps them from getting restless and actually helps them enjoy the moment, rather than wonder “is it over yet?”

As with your other musical endeavors, the trick to being a successful speaker lies in practicing. When you’re running your program in preparation for your performance, you should definitely include practicing your spoken intros. Extemporizing is extremely hard and should not be taken for granted—keeping to a terse and to-the-point script will ensure you’re communicating what you want, without wasting time and boring the more sophisticated members of your audience.

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1. Play Lines
2. The Thing About Dynamics…
3. How to Voice Chords

Speak Up: How a Few Words Can Enhance Your Musical Presentation from Classical Guitar

Having warned about the dangers of excessively long programs in the first installment of this series, let me backtrack and suggest that sometimes a program might work better without an intermission at all. Some venues (either the most “sophisticated” ones, or those not accustomed to classical recitals) have a dispiriting tendency to empty out at midpoint. Even though the more cynical among us would be nonplussed—after all, those leaving early have already paid for their tickets—it goes without saying that coming back to a half-empty hall is a disheartening feeling that can undermine your confidence.

A short, 40-45 minute program (made of mini-suites and one larger piece, perhaps) can easily fill an hour’s worth of time, leaving the audience refreshed and actually wanting more—which should be the aspiration of any performer. If the venue is OK with that, you might suggest inviting the audience to stay for a post-performance informal chat about the music, or alternatively introduce the whole program with a pre-concert mini lecture (20 minutes top, in my opinion). That way you’re still providing an evening’s worth of entertainment, while keeping things fresh as opposed to the “same old” format.

Location, Location, Location

If you’re sticking to the two-halves approach, it might be beneficial to divide each half into two “quarters” when choosing the placement of your pieces. Of these four sections, the one I find most interesting is the one immediately following intermission. It’s an optimal time for experiments: You are hopefully still warmed up and in-the-zone from the first half, and you have also had a chance to regroup mentally by taking some private time backstage. The audience (or what’s left of it … HA!) is back from munching on cheese-and-crackers and eager for more music. If you have a newish piece you’re performing for the first time, or something particularly challenging for you and/or for the audience (a thorny contemporary piece, for instance, or a Pantagruelian set of variations), first-in-the-second half is a prime spot.

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, even if things are less than thrilling with your “experiment,” you’d still have the finale to end on a positive note and leave a lasting impression of success.

Making Suites, Breaking Suites

As I have written before, I am not particularly fond of playing short pieces in isolation: I find that weaving in and out of focus to be a little treacherous for my nerves and overall performance composure. The obvious solution is to create small suites out of short pieces: For example, you could pair a short Ricercare with a more elaborate Fantasia, or arrange a triptych of one-movement sonatas. These suites need not be by the same composer—you could contrast two related pieces by different composers by pairing them and playing them in succession.

Key relations between the pieces you choose offer another opportunity to enhance the musical flow of your program: “Strong” tonic relationships (such as a perfect fifth or fourth apart) will give the music momentum, whereas moving between two keys a major third apart will refresh the tonal palette while keeping a common tone (try playing C and E major chords back to back—you’ll notice a kind of modulation typical of 19th Century composers such as Schumann and Chopin). I especially like to make my suites obvious on the printed program, using headings such as “Four Pieces from the French Baroque” or “Three Scarlatti Sonatas.”

On a loosely related thought—while the current practice is to play Baroque suites in their entirety, these pieces were not necessarily so performed in their time. In that light, extracting selections from longer suites could be a valuable way to fine-tune the balance and flow of some programs.

Next week we will explore program notes and spoken introductions.

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How to Structure Your Next Recital Program from Classical Guitar

1. The Ecumenical Approach

Also known as the Senior Recital Program: a bit of everything, with selections from all major stylistic periods (for the uninitiated: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary). Nothing wrong with that, but even this kind of “catch all” program can greatly benefit from some thematic cohesion. For instance, you could fashion a program of music all coming from a particular country, or only program pieces that share folk-music influences. Ecumenical programs can be especially good for general, non-specialized audiences, but risk running into the “gee, not another greatest hits recital” reaction from a more seasoned crowd.

2. The Highly-Specialized Approach

An obvious counterpart to the Ecumenical approach above, highly specialized programs focus on a single repertoire, sometimes even on a fraction thereof. Examples: an all-Bach program, or one featuring only British Music from the 1980s. Needless to say, the risk here lies in the lack of variety: only the most hardcore of music lovers will enjoy the fine shades within such monochromatic selections. If you want to go this way, make sure to weigh the individual pieces in terms of tempo, character, and overall heft, ensuring the totality of the program has some kind of ebb and flow. It can be done, and it can be tremendously rewarding.

3. Hybrid/Thematic Approaches

These latter types are the ones I find the most fun. They can feature music from one or more stylistic periods, but the emphasis is placed on the inter-textual discourse between the pieces. The critical aspect lies in actually finding good themes that run through the pieces—avoid, as one of my teachers once warned me, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Music and politics, once again folk-music derivations, actual quotations or derivative works, music inspired by other arts: the list is basically endless. To be clear—themes don’t necessarily need to run through all pieces. Sometimes they’re best used to set pieces against each other—for instance in a program two main themes, each theme linking the works in each half.

More complex relations can of course be set up: the first piece might be linked thematically with the second, but share its country of origin with the fourth, which is in turn related with the finale…you get the picture. Once you make these links clear to your audience through some choice words, whether written or spoken, they will have something else to follow in addition to your interpretations. The web of cross-relations I am suggesting, rather than a scattershot collection of pieces, is one of the best ways to ensure a varied yet cohesive program, one that will enthrall the crowd and make your performance even more memorable.

Speaking of memorable performances, I remember a recital by cellist Bonnie Hampton in San Francisco a few years ago. Hampton is a champion of contemporary music, and has performed most if not all major cello works of the past century. What she did that night was sheer genius: she presented six modern works for solo cello, each introduced by one of the preludes from the six Bach Cello Suites. The resulting dialogue between past and present was simply fantastic, and the setup made each piece resonate in a new and powerful way.

Next week, some tips and tricks on program flow, optimization, and more…

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Three Ways to Build a Program from Classical Guitar

Programming constraints and considerations

First off, it goes without saying that you shouldn’t lose track of external constraints when considering a recital program. If you need to put together 30 minutes of music for a junior recital, you probably shouldn’t spend 25 of them on an entire Bach cello suite. Undergraduate recitals tend to emphasize breadth before depth, and as much as I love complete works and big pieces, I would ultimately defer to departmental and teacher guidelines when preparing such a show. On the other hand, Master’s, and Doctoral recitals often encourage (if not altogether require) specialization and cohesion, so some of the things I’ll be talking about apply more properly to them.

Balancing a Performer’s Needs…

Programming is first and foremost a balancing act between what you can do and what you’d like to do. Consider the technical, musical and physical demands of your pieces as you put them together: by way of example, I prefer to start somewhat easy, but I’m confident enough in my physical and mental endurance not to be too worried of putting two longer pieces back-to-back. Through years of dealing with performance anxiety, I have discovered I can stay in the zone more easily than I can get into it—because of that, I prefer to arrange shorter pieces in suites (more on that later), as opposed to having to acknowledge applause between each of them. Another example: I don’t love to start with complex polyphonic or otherwise “mnemonically treacherous” music. That’s a personal preference, but I am aware of it and keep it in mind when choosing program order—adhering to a strict chronology is not necessarily the way to go, especially considering how complex and intricate a lot of Early Music can be. Through an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses as a performer, you can use program placement as an extra “lifeline” and make life on stage just a bit easier.

…with Your Audience’s Needs

Similar consideration should be given to those loving and supporting souls who chose to spend their evening listening to you. You should remember that your experience of the performance is going to be significantly different from theirs, and that although time is likely to fly by for you, it might feel more like it’s grinding to a halt to them (this is assuming the canonical, audience-sitting-in-silence, recital-hall kind of setting. Perhaps we’ll talk about bringing “classical” music to unexpected places another time.)

To cut to the chase: attention can be sustained for 40 minutes at best, a timeframe that’s likely to be shrinking in this age of sound bites and tweets. I try to keep my programs to two halves of 25-35 minutes of music, which usually translates to 45 minutes with tuning, bowing, and talking (you can and should talk; more later). The second half should be shorter, especially if you’re planning to play any encores.

Keeping this simple physiological tenet in mind gives me the confidence to present more complex and challenging music to my audiences. I’ve actually found that people react positively to all sorts of music once the proper context is in place and the pieces are presented with care—which also includes being mindful of the limits of the human attention.

In the next part of this article we will explore some components of a successful and communicative recital program.

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The Realities of Programming from Classical Guitar

Rhythm can make a piece sound alive. It can take an ordinary phrase and turn it into something magical and moving. But rhythm only has that power if you are its absolute master. That starts with counting and understanding how the beats fit together.

Lessons Learned from Sight Reading

Anyone good at sight reading will tell you that the notes don’t really matter. It’s more important to keep the beat and keep moving. If you’ve ever been in an ensemble that had to stop every two bars to get people caught up, you know exactly why rhythm and counting are more important than hitting every not perfectly. Rhythm is kind of a big deal

On the other side of a the coin, Learning a piece is about developing and shaping habits over time. Nothing is perfect from the get go, but it’s your job to make sure every repetition is as close to perfect as possible. Develop a bad habit early only and you’ll spend hours fixing it later.

With an element as crucial and powerful as rhythm, it’s even hard to go back and reverse those bad habits. That’s why counting is so important. You cannot hope to push and pull a pieces beat, count and rhythm if you don’t fully understand it. So here are three ways to do that.

1. Put Down the Guitar

And Clap.

Too often we get so caught up in the finger mechanics of playing that we completely ignore the rhythmic aspect. Divorce the two. Your sense of beat and time should never be tied into the mechanics of playing the guitar, and one way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to practice reading rhythms separately.

Put down your guitar and try clapping the rhythms of each of the lines in your piece. Do it at tempo, slow, and fast. You should also clap rhythms while counting aloud (see point three).

2. Sing & Tap

Again, without the guitar, sing the musical lines of your piece in time.

If you do this without some sort of counting it doesn’t count (pun intended), so be sure to clap the beat or tap your foot while singing. The mechanics of music making should never be tied into your sense of time. This is another way to divorce the two.

3. Count Aloud

A teacher once told me that if you can’t count aloud while playing your piece, you don’t know it.

This is the only method of the three that involves your guitar. Count a loud while you’re playing a piece. But don’t just count when you play, keep a steady stream. In other words, pick the smallest subdivision in the piece and count that the entire way through. If that happens to be a sixteenth note, you’re count would be 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a etc. the entire piece or passage. In most cases this involves you counting more than necessary.

You should also try the opposite: count less than necessary. If you have a passage in 16ths, try counting only 8th notes

Counting Less Than Necessary

This is, like the previous two methods, about divorcing your sense of time from the mechanics of playing guitar. Counting a loud is a convenient way to do that.

Should I Use Metronome For These Things?

Sure. But know when to put it down. If you want to really have some fun, get your tempo from a metronome, then shut it off and play/sign/clap a passage. When you’re through, immediately turn the metronome back on. Did your tempo wander? Or did you stay in time?

Its never a bad choice to use a metronome, but be careful that it doesn’t become the only way you can stay in time.

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Three Ways to Perfect Your Rhythm from Classical Guitar

Every year, public school band programs enroll thousands of students. These students learn valuable musical skills that don’t often make it to the guitar world. It’s unfortunate that we completely ignore the world of large ensemble playing because there is so much to learn!

1. Breathe, Dammit!

You may not of noticed this, but to play guitar you don’t have to breathe. Well, except to live and all that jazz.

But breathing as a section and before entrances in the band room is a big deal. It helps make sure everyone is synced up and ready, and it helps ensure everyone comes in together.

Breathing while playing guitar is important to. It helps give you that perfect amount of space between phrases, and it can help navigate difficult rhythms. In short, performing demands some sort of choreography. You don’t have to plan out every breath, but it helps to think about the big ones (beginning of the piece, ends of phrases/sections, etc).

2. Sorry, Not Everyone is Important

In band, not everyone is in the spotlight all the time. You section might have to play a subservient role and just sit in the background now and again.

The classical guitar, like Segovia said, is like a small orchestra (or wind band). It’s your job as the performer to figure out what is important within the texture of a piece and bring it out. Hint: the melody is probably a big deal, and the rest of the texture should sit comfortably behind and support it.

3. You Didn’t Learn Your Part Well Enough

It’s a fact of band-room life that sometimes other people won’t work hard enough. They won’t learn their parts. Then those sections have to be worked on during rehearsal time.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is that the director wants something different and works with a individual instrument section, not to correct mistakes, but to shape their playing in the way she desires.

If the guitar is a small orchestra, you better make sure every part is up to snuff. When’s the last time you worked on a bass line by itself, shaping it into exactly what you wanted?

I’d bet it’s been a while. So instead of just running the entire texture at once, take out parts and get them perfect before putting the entire piece back together.

4. Color is the Best Part of a Band

If you’ve ever been to an orchestra or band concert, you’ve probably reveled in the massive amount of color and timbre on tap.

But here’s the thing: color usage (changing the instrumentation) is not random. It helps define the form and development of a piece; color is one of the tools with which the composer works to create a sense of progression and scope.

And it’s too bad that guitarists don’t consider color usage in the same terms. Remember that you can use color to build to a high point, or help differentiate phrases. Color use should never be random.

5. It Pays to Practice Some Stage Deportment

Before every band concert, a good conductor goes over all the logistics of the event. Then the dress rehearsal will often include walking in and out, sitting down, bowing, and all the stuff. This all falls under the category of stage deportment — how you conduct yourself on stage.

True story: people go to a concert to see as much as they do to hear. So practice these little logistical things. They matter, and, as a bonus, practicing them may help you feel more in control of the situation.

Were you in high school band?
Photo by Rob Lee

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5 Lessons From the High School Band Room from Classical Guitar

Look at Your Hands

There’s this weird stigma against looking at your hands while playing. Some people feel it’s a crutch. Others feel that looking ahead of your hands is really what good guitarists do.

In either case, there’s a universal truth about reading music: no one knows the fretboard well enough to read and find notes on the fly without the occasional look at the guitar fretboard.

This is especially true if you’re one that gets flustered and thrown off by a wrong note. You want to create an environment that makes it easy for your eyes to scan back and forth from stand to left hand to right hand and back again.

Move Your Music Stand

You can read music better just by moving your music stand. Put it to your left, in front of the guitar fretboard. This will give you a clear view of the music and your hands. Ideally the stand should be a bit lower as well.

Music Stand Placement

See the Music & the Neck

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How to Read Music Better in One Easy Step from Classical Guitar

With those questions in mind, here are the three types of musical curiosity.

1. Emotional Curiosity

The emotionally curious musicians seeks to understand the feelings behind the music.

Music, it’s often said, is a language. If that’s so, it’s a holistic language. Steven Mithen (aff.) suggests that music arose from a shared ancenstry with language. Namely that early hominids communicated with a relatively complex, multi-modal system in which utterances were complete in and of themselves and designed to generate some sort of action (they were manipulative). In other words, an utterance could mean, “give that to her.” But there wouldn’t be words in our sense, just one utterance.

Music today can be regarded as much the same. Certain musical gestures might convey a general sense of emotion or emotional meaning. Sometimes composers will make these explicit with a program, other times it’s more general.

Some musical elements are universally perceived as positive or negative. Look no further than the “Infant Directed Speech” for an example. There’s a surprising similarity when mothers from any cultural background speak to infants. Mothers use the same exaggerated prosody regardless of where they are from. And certain music-like gestures will mean love and support while others may convey ill will or disappointment. Again, these music-like gestures are surprisingly universal.

Our musical culture, starting from birth, tells us that music has a huge amount of emotional content!

The emotionally curious musician seeks out this content. They create a connection with the composer and piece by discovering the emotional content. If it’s not explicit, an emotionally curious musician will assign meaning to facilitate a connection.

2. Historical Curiosity

Some musicians are musicology buffs. They are interested in the composers life, times, and how a given piece fits into music history.

Historical curiosity can take several forms. Sometimes it just means learning about the composer. Other times, it can be an investigation into the socioeconomic conditions in which the composer, and his contemporaries, lived.

This curiosity may take the form of an interest in the art and literature from the time of the composer. In other words, how did the composer and piece fit into the larger artistic movement at the time?

By learning about where the piece and composer came from, the historically curious musicians creates a connection with the music.

3. Theoretical Curiosity

Some people are interested in how a piece works. That is, they care little about the historical background, but are more interested in how a piece was constructed.

Theoretical curiosity draws heavily on music theory and knowledge of musical style and practice. It learns to recognize patterns and when norms are ignored and deviated from.

The theoretically curious musician creates a connection by ripping a piece apart and seeing how it works. Such people create interpretations not by feeling, but more by logic and knowledge of what sounds good when a given harmonic pattern or musical idiom is presented. Such knowledge comes from good teachers and a lot of critical listening.

The Ideal Musician

None of us sit in any one of these categories alone. We all draw on a blend of all three when learning a piece. Sometimes we lean more heavily on one category, other times we blend all three. The truth is that all of us need to work to be more curious all the areas. As musician it’s our duty to try and understand the emotional content, theoretical construction, and historical significance of a given work.

These types of musical curiosity are universal. A rock musician can be emotionally curious (with Lyrics, it’s really easy to be so. Just look at art song!). It’s all a matter of what generates a connection. How can you be truly involved with a piece without making a connection with it?

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The Three Types of Musical Curiosity from Classical Guitar

The challenge with any fast gesture is figuring out how to group the notes. In other words, determining how you are going to count and think about the thing in a way that makes sense.

Enter Grouping

There’s a really extensive book on note grouping and playing expressively that can be summed up in a few works: thinking of notes in groups, rather than individual dots on a page can help you be more expressive. The book, of course, gives a lot of specific examples from famous performers’ grouping.

The same sort of thing can apply to gestural, out of time passages in music. This sort of thing can be useful for eingänge in 19C music (think of them as mini-cadenzas usually found between big sections of a piece). And for that one scale gesture in Villa Lobos’ second prelude, as shown below. You can take a look at pieces by Brouwer for examples of where a composer has done grouping for you. Nearly every time he includes a fast gesture (such as in the first Preludio Epigrammaticos around 45 seconds in), Brouwer is very precise about the rhythms and how you should think about it. In the Preludio example, it’s 4 + 4 + 5.

The idea is you take a big gesture, and break it into little pieces. So a 16 note gesture could be 4 notes+4 notes+4 notes+4 notes or 3+4+4+5 or 3+3+4+6, etc.

A Look at Villa Lobos

This scale gesture is meant to fit into the space of a beat, however, the strong cadence before it (not shown) and the fact that it’s leading into a recap of the first material suggests you can probably take your time with it (it’s “out of time”). The fact that the note values get smaller suggests that perhaps Villa Lobos desires a little bit of a speed up. So here’s how I would think about it: in groups of 3 + 4 + 4 + 5.

Doing so gives me a way to count the scale and thus a way to practice it (with chaining and slow fast alternation). I think it also provides a little bit clear sense of direction than playing it as fast as possible.

Why 3+4+4+5? It helps reinforce the speed up I want towards the end of the scale. Even without changing tempo there’s an automatic speed up built in with the last quintuplet.

Is This the Only Way?

Of course not. I can only explain how I thought about that particular scale — what worked for me. Chances are some of you will like it and some will not. That’s okay.

What you should take away from this post is a way of thinking about fast, gestural passages in music (stuff that’s “out of time”). Grouping is a great way to get a handle on practicing and interpreting those passages.

PS: if you don’t own the Heitor Villa-Lobos Collected Works for Solo Guitar book, it’s worth picking up. Should be part of your music library, but you’ll probably have to change the binding.

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Fast Scale Gestures and Grouping from Classical Guitar

1. Learn a Solmization System

Hearing music is about hearing hierarchy. Some notes are more important that others. As Reginald Smith Brindle said, “Melody is like speech. It has to have many unimportant words to build up the significance of those that really matter.”

I learned traditional solfege with movable do. I suggest this to those of you wanting to start your singing journey. It’s fairly easy to get a handle on. In reality the syllables don’t matter, and there are other solmization systems out there. What matters is that each note (including chromatic notes) gets it’s own unique syllable that has to do with it’s relation to the key. The leading tone (scale degree 7) is always Ti; tonic is always do, etc. This helps reinforce the hierarchy of pitches and the way tendency tones (including those that imply modulation/tonicization) operate in a key.

Get started by learning to sing a major scale, Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do, both up and down.

2. Sing Tonicization Patterns and Other Exercises

A tonicization pattern is just a quick series of notes that, when sung, helps fix a key in your head. You actually don’t need any instrument to practice singing. Just run a quick tonicization pattern and start singing. Here are patterns for Major and Minor. Note: this is La based minor.

Major Tonicization Pattern

Minor Tonicization Pattern

Notice that each of those covers all the notes in a key (here in C major and Minor) and outlines the harmonic progression I IV I V I, that’s what makes these so useful.

Next up are some exercises. Here are a few dealing with thirds.

3. Memorize Some Melodies

Take a few melodies you’re already familiar with. Memorize them using solfege. I have to do this for a class right now, so I chose Greensleeves, The Harmonious Blacksmith, and some Christmas tunes.

This gives you a musical vocabulary on which to fall back. Learning a complete melody is also one of the best ways to practice various intervals, and it’s more interesting than trying to just sing intervals all the time.

After you’ve got a few melodies memorized practice writing them while you sing. Do this in various keys. Why? It’s practice associating the written way musicians communicate (notation) and the aural. In short, it’s practice translating what you hear into what’s on paper. Writing it in various keys just helps reinforce how your solmization system fits into any key (movable do, again). This is also good practice for melodic dictation later on.

Wrap Up

This is the method outlined by my Pedagogy of Theory teacher. Of course, if you can’t do this stuff you can’t teach it, so the class has to pretty much be doing this curriculum. I can tell you that just practicing singing a little bit each day has done wonders for my ear. Try this stuff out for a few months and see what happens.

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Sing a Little from Classical Guitar