January

27

2010

Improvisation - It’s Not Just For Jazzers Anymore

Let's improviseThe idea of improvisation scares the beejeezus out of many musicians, especially those who learned to play their instrument side by side with learning how to read music. Knowing how to read music is a valuable skill. But when you stop and think about how you learned to speak your native language, you will realize that you learned to read well after you learned to speak the language.

This philosophy of learning is appropriate to learning the language of music as well. Today’s edition of Musician’s Motivator addresses how you can develop your musical speaking skills. For today, you can give your music reading skills a rest!

Benefits of Improvisation

It’s not just for jazz musicians. Bringing improvisation into your regular practice will enhance your ability to listen. And not just to music. I have found that as a result of practicing improvisation, I bring another level of awareness to conversations I have with people.

Regular musical improvisation naturally increases your attention in musical settings as well; whether you are in a musical group as one of the players or in the audience listening. In symphonic band rehearsals, I hear more of the other instruments playing. I have been pleasantly surprised by the sound of the tuba and bass clarinet playing softly in unison while I was counting measures to my next entrance; or noticing the oboe trilling above a clarinet choir. As an audience member, listening to the recent Washington Wind Symphony performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was a treat, enriched by my own regular improvisation practice.

But Wait, There’s More!

Another benefit to regular improvisation is enhanced creativity. You will find that a little bit of creativity, no matter how small, begets more creativity. It’s like smiling at strangers on your morning walk. They usually smile back!

After establishing a regular improv practice, you may find yourself drawing more, re-arranging items on your dresser aesthetically, wearing more colorful clothing, climbing a tree, writing a short story for your children, or planning the planting of your front garden area. All this as a result of improvisation!

A habit of improvisation practice also leads to composing and arranging music. After all, improvising is just that – composing music. It just needs to be written down.

Take ThreeHow To Practice Improvisation

Here are two exercises that anyone can do to develop the improvisation muscle. They are from my forthcoming book, Truly FUNdamentals – The Most FUN Musical Warmups Ever!

  1. Take Three
  2. On The Air!

Take Three

Choose any three tones that you can play on your instrument. Play those tones using any rhythm and note values. Play only those three pitches. You may include the upper and lower octaves of those three tones. Remember to use rests in your rhythms! Long note values, short note values, various articulations - all are welcome. Give yourself plenty of time to explore these three notes.

On The Air!

You are on the air!Turn on your radio and play along. Many radio stations specialize in one genre of recorded music. You can chose from jazz, pop, oldies, classical, folk, rock, opera, and many others. I recommend that you start with a style of music you like and with which you are familiar.

  1. Pick your channel.
  2. Raise the volume sufficiently so you can hear the radio music over your own instrument.
  3. Listen!
  4. Match the predominant tones first. This will help you establish the key center.
  5. Play the melody (if it’s a song you know) or play a blending melodic line.

If radio is too old-school for you, try these online music resources: Pandora, and Musicovery.

Speak Up

Share your improv fun on my blog or drop me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

If you liked this, you may also want to read: Fueling Up At The Inspiration Station. A few months back I wrote about this exercise designed to get you playing and making music on a regular basis. Fifteen minutes of blowing into your horn, an experiment to make practice happen.

January

13

2010

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand… Notes!

What if each pixel in an image corresponded to a specific pitch? What if the brightness level of a pixel determined the length of the note? What if the RGB value of each pixel created three-part harmony?

Seeing Music In Color

RBG Music LabMusic has many mathematical elements contained therein. The idea to apply pitch to pixels is the concept behind the free software, RGB Music Lab, by Kenji Kojima.

I downloaded RGB Music Lab to try my hand at composing with a picture. During my travels in Turkey last April, one of my traveling companions took this photo of me. Hmmm… I wonder what music I look like, er uh…can I see how I sound?

ontheboat.jpg In this image, I am boating on the Bosphorus Strait, the waterway separating Europe and Asia.

Pixelated Composing

To get started composing, open RGB Music Lab and drag an image onto the right panel, on top of the Mona Lisa image. The program reads the pixels row by row, from the top left to the bottom right pixel, and generates your music.

The settings can be fine-tuned on many levels. For my first piece, I kept most of the default settings and only changed instruments to 3 saxes (Sopr, Alto, Tenor) and increased tempo to 160 BPM. The result is a one minute and 24 second piece. It’s very twitchy, not at all what I imagined this image would sound like! Listen, if you are into twitchy music. ;-)

Reduce The Input

I wondered if I took just a snippet of the image; in this case the part of my face centered on my eyes; how would the song change? It turns out, I can’t just change one thing! In addition to changing the image, I adjusted the tempo, the intervals, the tonality, and the instrumentation. Now, this is getting interesting! The result is a 16-second piece, Eyes!

Now to really speed it up! Ooh, I like this two seconds of music.

A Monochromatic Soundscape

In much the same way that a composer works on her project by tweaking and massaging a beginning musical idea or phrase, I continued modifying the image source. After all, it’s the pixels and their RGB values that are providing the foundation for the sound of these compositions.

When listening to Eyes!, I found the last few rows of pixels were more interesting to me than the rest of the music. These rows were very monochromatic in their palette. For that reason, I cut a piece of the monochromatic water from the image and brought that into RGB Music Lab.

bosphorus.jpgThis time, I set the instrumentation to voices by choosing #54 Ooh Choir. There are 142 different instruments with everything from clarinet and trumpet and tuba to Rain and Gunshot and Dog. There are nine different types of drum kits, and about that many types of guitars, pianos, and basses.

I also changed the tonality to F harmonic minor. You can choose from major and minor scales, pentatonics, blues, and Gypsy scales. Or you can create your own scale! For a free program, Kenji Kojima has included many features.

In-Depth Free Program

You can have some serious fun exploring all the different settings. I wanted to continue playing with this application and enjoy the sound combinations produced. But if I did that, this edition of Musician’s Motivator wouldn’t get written!

Here is the final (for now) version of Bosphorus Strait by RBG Music and Meg Grace. Enjoy!

If you choose to download this program and compose with your own images, I’d enjoy hearing the music you create. Please send me a link to your composition or send the file itself. Also, let me know whether I can share it with my readers or keep it to myself.


Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator January 27, 2010.

December

24

2009

We Are A-Mused

I’ve long held the belief that music is essential to life. Music gives life; gives love; connects us with spirit. I don’t even want to imagine a life without music. Music is in life - everyone’s life, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

Inspiration of Muses

gr-muses.jpgThe English word music comes from the Latin musica and the Greek mousike, meaning an art presided over by the Muses. The Muses are nine sister Goddesses in Greek mythology directing song and poetry and the arts and sciences. The Muses inspire.

Inspiration, from the Latin inspirare is to breathe; also drawing air into the lungs; divine influence. Ah! When breathing in, I am inspired! Not only am I receiving life-sustaining oxygen, but I am influenced by the divine. I feel the spirit!

Spirit is from the Latin, spiritus, meaning breath. What has this trip through the dictionary revealed thus far? Music is art presided over by a Muse. Muses inspire. Inspiration is breathe and spirit.

Breathe in and out; we live. We become influenced by Spirit. Let’s look at another word that also means to breathe in: inhale. This is from the Latin inhalo, literally meaning in breath. Halo is from the Greek halos which is a round floor, the sun’s disk, and also a luminous ring. Hmmmm… Inhale the Spirit, become a Saint?

Hale is derived from the Anglo-Saxon hál meaning whole, sound, healthy, holy. Sound is from the Old English soun and the Latin sonus – a sound; that which is heard.

Sound of Music

gaia-earth1.jpg“I breathe but air and out comes beautiful music.” It is obvious how this is true for wind instrumentalists and vocalists. And it is also true of string players and percussionists.

The air around us is Gaia’s breath, the breath of the earth. Drawing a bow across a cello string causes it to vibrate, moving the air around it at a high enough frequency to create pitch and tone. In a similar fashion, striking the skin or membrane of a drum head causes the air around the head to vibrate and give rise to pitch. In this way, we can think of strings and percussive instruments as breathing the music.

Music! It is the breath and spirit all around us. Breathe in. Breathe out. Receive inspiration. Breathe out music.

Music For The Soul

Before my mother-in-law left this morning to return to her home in Southern Oregon, we sat down to breathe in and breathe out some beautiful music together. I offer you our rendition of the German carol, Stille Nacht; music from our souls to yours.


Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator January 13, 2010.

December

10

2009

What Makes A Memory?

What Makes A Memory?

Once Upon A Time…

Once upon a time there lived an instrumental music teacher who had recently joined and sung in a choral group for the first time in her musical life. It was an exciting time for her! She enjoyed learning a new instrument (voice) and the experience of making music with one’s own body. Also new was the memorization of all the concert music. That part was not so exciting and caused some small distress.

Memorize, Too?

Oh, sure, I’ve sung before - just not in an organized group setting. I sing along with songs on the radio or my iPod. I’ve even memorized songs not realizing I was doing so. I memorize songs easily enough. Like many of you, I know all the lyrics to Don McLean’s American Pie and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – without the karaoke screen prompts!

Singing with Aurora Chorus this term, I am required to memorize 16 songs that we will perform in the Dec. 20 concert. Yes, that is a lot of music, but some of the songs have simple repeated parts. Thank goodness!

Orishas of the CandombleOn the other hand, this being a choral group, the songs all have words, something I’ve never had to contend with when playing band and orchestra music. What’s more, of these 16 songs, four of them are in a language other than English. I am also singing in Yorùbá, the language of Candomblé (Brazil); in Mbuti, from the rain forests of New Guinea; in Spanish; and in Georgian, (Republic of Georgia).

That’s What I’m Talking About!

You might expect that the songs in these foreign languages would be more challenging to memorize. Not true! One of my favorite songs and the one that has been the most fun to learn, is A jí kí ire ni Èsù, the song in Yorùbá. The melody is engaging. The 4-part voices weave among one another in an intricate rhythmic dance. The harmonies, too, are exciting with minor 7ths and 9ths over major triads, voiced in a such a way that the tonic of the chord sounds like a color tone! It’s a great song and our concert opener.

On the other hand, one of the hardest songs for me to memorize is in English, Song of Stars. It employs ever-changing time signatures, moving from 6/8 to 7/8 to 3/8 and back to 7/8. The tessitura, or vocal range of the song, for the second soprano part is a bit high for me. Yes, I can sing those notes when I am properly warmed up. It’s just not the most comfortable range for me - so far. The text is a prayer of the Algonquin people.

No Meaning

Pleiades star clusterPerhaps the reason I had difficulty learning this song is that it had no meaning for me. In the beginning, I was just singing words, working on getting the rhythm correct and my entrances down. What if I read the words without the music and tried to understand what I was singing?

That helped a little bit. But the truth was, I just didn’t like the song very much. Do you remember what I reported in the previous edition of Musician’s Motivator? You retain new information better and remember it more strongly when you attach strong emotions to the subject matter, in essence, when you care about what you are studying. Well, I decided to find something to like about this song. And quickly, since the concert was just two weeks away!

telescopeI found it! I sat and listened to the song, as if for the first time, without any judgments about the lyric or the time signatures or tessitura.

I am an amateur astronomer, a devotee and enthusiastic pursuer of all things astronomical. I have relished the night sky since I was a young child. Then, I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut and explore outer space.

This song is about STARS! It even sounds like stars, with open voicings and an arpeggiated piano playing octaves and fifths. The opening piano arpeggios are tight clusters of root, fourth, fifth, and major seventh. Try that in any key on your piano. Doesn’t it sound like the stars twinkling overhead?

…And She Lived Happily Ever After.

The instrumental music teacher loved singing as much as playing her wind instruments. She sang in the concert, enjoying all the songs, and lived happily ever after.

Now the song has meaning for me and is easy to memorize. Lesson? Remember to bring Beginner’s Mind to my learning. ;-)

Are you learning something new? Struggling with a difficult subject in school? Finding something to like about the subject will make the learning more solid and you will retain more. And bringing your Beginner’s Mind to the table will help you be open to the learning along the way.

Share your learning discoveries on my blog or send me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

Some Quotes About Memory

What we learn with pleasure we never forget. - Alfred Mercier
The heart that truly loves never forgets. - Proverb
The true art of memory is the art of attention. - Samuel Johnson


Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator Dec. 24, 2009.

November

26

2009

Head and Heart of Music

In the beginning, there was music

I was 6 or 7 years old when I had my first music lessons. My family didn’t own a piano, yet, I was taking piano lessons! I practiced my scales and finger patterns on a flat, folding cardboard keyboard. I remember unfolding it on the dining room table to practice.

I couldn’t received any aural feedback from my practice. Only during lessons in which I played on a real piano did I get to hear what sounds my fingers were making. The desire to make music was strong in me even as a youngster, since I continued piano lessons for a year; all the while practicing only on a cardboard piano!

A few years later, I had the opportunity to learn a band instrument. I am grateful to my parents for renting me a real saxophone.

My first year of lessons on the sax were in a group class of five or six 5th graders, taught by a local college student. I loved learning to play the saxophone; reading music, not so much.

fingering by the numbers We were taught fingerings with a numbered diagram of the sax keys. Numbers one through six were used to indicate which fingers and corresponding keys to depress. These diagrams were placed below the staff, describing the finger position for the note above.

It didn’t take long for me to learn to read the fingering diagrams. They were quite easy, in fact. About six months passed before my teacher realized I was only reading the diagrams and not the pitches on the staff.

Aural, Visual, Spatial Learning

When I am teaching someone who is brand new to reading music, I encourage use of the finger diagrams, periodically checking note identity without the diagrams. I also encourage motivated students to test themselves by erasing their drawn-in diagrams after a short period of playing with them.

We learn in different manners and at varying paces. Some of us are more visual, others are more aural. Still others learn quickest spatially. Both the cardboard piano and the finger diagrams of my early music lessons demonstrate that I am a mostly visual learner.

I used to think that being a predominantly visual learner meant that I wasn’t destined to be a great musician; that great musicians are principally aural learners. What I’ve come to understand is that all types of learners, aural, visual, and spatial, make great musicians.

Your Brain on Music

listeningWe tend to think of music solely in terms of what we hear. But research on the brain about how we process music shows that a lot more than our hearing is involved. In fact, the Auditory Cortex is only one small part of the brain that processes the various input from musical activity. Further, those parts of the brain that are stimulated when a person listens to music are also stimulated when the person merely hears the music in her head!

When we listen to music there is a neural symphony of activity going on in various parts of the brain. Check out the interactive brain area of Daniel Levitin’s website for his book, This Is Your Brain On Music. Dr. Levitin writes, “Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about and nearly every neural subsystem.”

No matter what type of learner you are; reading, playing, and enjoying music are within your grasp. What’s more, studying music is great exercise for the brain! Practice of a new activity fires neurons and creates connections and pathways throughout the brain. Repeated practice reinforces the new neural pathways. Reading, playing and listening to music appears to stimulate more areas of the brain than any other activity, according to research thus far.

And something else, when you are studying something that is important to you or that carries with it a lot of emotion, the brain tags these new memories with more importance and you retain the information better. Caring about a subject (like the strong longing to be a musician) accounts for some part of how quickly you will acquire your new skills.

It’s a Win-Win!

Wanna improve your brain activity? Study music.
Wanna study music, but have doubts about your innate musical talent? Do it! Not only can you discard those doubts, a music practice is good for you!


Read the next edition of Musician’s Motivator Dec. 10, 2009. Subscribe now and receive each edition delivered to your email acocunt.