If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on the Art of Rehearsal.

“It’s been quite a year this past week.” With all of the surprises and major shocks in world events, a more light-hearted story has been the explosion of memes built the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. One of which, a charming story about told as an anecdote about some wisdom her mother often shared with her as a child.

This story relates her mother’s wisdom about recognizing one’s place in the world as a person, embedded with others in a community. In a context. And love it or hate it, it has become much beloved source of late summer memes.

But we’re not here to talk about memes or politics. I am here to talk about context. Earlier this summer I wrote about an influential concept from Robert Duke called the Rehearsal Frame.

Central to Duke’s framework is the idea that at its core, a large ensemble rehearsal involves taking a piece apart in order to Decontextualize passages, iron out musical challenges, before Recontextualizing that same music.

In other words, not unlike a mechanic replacing a part in a motorcycle: you remove an excerpt from its context, work on it, then put it back.

You find a musical stopping point and say something like:

“Cellos, please find letter C, and this time, can we make sure to _____? Let’s start at letter C please…”

After trying again, if that doesn’t work, you might break it down further by playing even less music, changing the rhythm, or even going note-by-note in some cases to check tuning, as just a few approaches. (For more sophisticated examples, see the Rite of Spring video below.)

In my exploration of the practices of conductors across a wide spectrum–from mentors to colleagues to students to clients; and from high school to university to professionals–I’ve found that decontextualization is a powerful way to efficiently address certain musical problems.

However, it does come with some important limitations. In the case of my example above, it means that the rest of the orchestra is left without anything to do while the cellos rehearse. Depending on your circumstance, this might be OK for a short period of time. However, whether working with young students with short attention spans, or working with professionals who hold certain expectations about the value of their time, it’s important to recognize the limitations of this strategy. This is just one small example.

Take Care

Like a knife, decontextualization is a powerful tool that cuts through what is in the way in order to address a particular problem. Also like a knife, it should be handled with care.

Why care? Because while our “rehearsal knife” can cut away the unimportant, it also runs the risk of cutting away the glue that holds the music together in the first place. Here’s an example: Last year, I wrote a little bit about the dangers of rehearsing under tempo. In it, summarized and commented on a great article by Paul Trapkus (originally appearing in the American String Teacher) on the topic. I wrote:

…slowing music down for string players is often not just a difference of speed but a fundamental difference of kind. That is, playing fast music slowly often requires a fundamentally different approach to the instrument in a way that makes it ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. –Read Original

Here, reducing tempo is a specific case of the larger point: be careful when removing context. You may find that you have decontextualized the music so thoroughly that you later find that you’ve solved a different problem than the one that the music actually requires, or that that context was a part of the problem to begin with.

Sticking with our “letter C” example, this applies in several ways:

• The human beings who play those instruments, came to rehearsal to play the music, together.

  • The individuals you may have asked to sit quietly, came to play, not to sit.

  • The musicians that you’ve asked to play, are used to playing their music in its context, with the rest of the ensemble, in a larger passage.

• The music itself is meant to fit together. Imagine taking a Swiss watch apart and being disappointed that the clock stopped ticking - each part is integral to and reliant upon every other part up to a point. Likewise, musical parts fit together to create a functioning whole. In the video linked below, Duke calls this interactivity.

So rather than starting from the logic of decontextualization, I like to think about the ways to accomplish my purpose that preserve as much of the original context as possible. For instance: Is it possible that I could allow the ensemble as a whole to play the music, but I could merely train my attention on the problem section or area? Or only remove a small number of players? I teach my students that this is rehearsal by subtraction (removing just a few players–percussion, say) instead of rehearsal by addition (starting from zero and only adding the minimum while most sit silent). YMMV, but for my money, this is the better default.

That doesn’t mean that a conductor should never stop the orchestra or ask just the violas to work out a tricky spot, or to get the piccolo and clarinet in tune on the exposed high note. But to the extent possible, we should try to make sure that the original musical context is always firmly rooted in your mind when you try to get at a problem. This is only one application, with hundreds of other possibilities. The question we’re left with, then, is what is the right way to think about context (and it's removal) so that we “swim with the river”?

Conclusion

Fortunately for us, Duke already has a ready-made solution to this conundrum, or an implementation of this “take care” approach, and I’ll give him the last word on the matter:

On second thought, let’s let the Vice President help us finish where we began, with music:

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