Or, how to play (a little more) in tune.
Welcome! My name is Jordan and this is my Conductor’s Notebook. This essay is part 2 in a short series on rehearsal tactics, techniques, and topics. Part 2 is here.
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As I continue digging into the world of rehearsal technique, I have found that even a question like “What is a Rehearsal?” is contested. (N.B. It’s not just music; this problem is pervasive in the performing arts. For instance, a recent example from the dance world.)
Another undecided question asks: how should we divide up a music rehearsal into parts so that conductors can cultivate skill in each area and develop an eye and ear for what their mentors are doing when they watch them on the podium.
I often hear phrases like “rehearsal technique” and “rehearsal strategies” used to point in the right general direction, but I have wondered if we couldn’t get a little more precise in our language. I think there are at least three good buckets we can use to sort different types of rehearsal behaviors from the standpoint of the practitioner: Techniques, Tactics, and Topics. This week, let’s tackle Tactics.
Theory
While the term “rehearsal strategy” is probably a bit more common parlance, a move to “tactics” seems more accurate when trying to dig into what’s actually taking place during a rehearsal, rather than before it.
Just to divert briefly, rehearsal strategy implies a pre-conceived plan. To be clear, a plan is a great thing to have!! However, I agree with Mark Laycock’s frequent use of the phrase “tactic” to imply a specific remedy or type of remedy that sits on the shelf ready to be called upon in the right circumstances, but deployed as the need arises and not in a premeditated way.
Every rehearsal is full of all kinds of highly unique circumstances that only the skilled craftsman can navigate, and only with finely cultivated intuition. Strategy shows up in planning at the level of season (or school year) programming, concert cycle rehearsal schedules, and even planning specific targets in each rehearsal. But after, that comes the tactical thinking that takes place moment to moment in rehearsal to make all of those larger plans come to life.
I’ll go on to describe the other two and contrast them with tactics, so what is a tactic if it is not a strategy, a technique, or a topic? I’d define it this way:
Rehearsal Tactic: a generalizable activity or sequence of activities designed to lead to a tangible improvement in performance. Tactics are generally combinable with other tactics.
That’s great, but what about some examples? Let’s start with four.
Tactic 1: when tuning a root position chord in tonal music, begin with the root, then add the fifth, then the third, and finally add any additional pitches such as the seventh or ninth (if applicable).
Tactic 2: when trying to improve overall intonation in a passage, start by tuning the chords in the cadence (e.g. V • I).
Tactic 3: when tuning a cadence, it may be beneficial to work backwards from the stability of the tonic to the instability of the dominant chord with the unstable tritone, before running the cadence forward.
Tactic 4: if you detect and address a problem and it is not addressed on the next repetition, consider getting at the apparent source of the problem by isolation: either asking fewer musicians to play, asking musicians to play less music, or both. (Be careful - don’t get too far from the original context for too long. More here and here.)
Practice
These four examples are generalizable, because they work in a type of situation (an out of tune passage in tonal music). And they are combinable, because you could use more than one of them in sequence or at the same time.
Scenario: in a working rehearsal, you play through a longer passage, noting that a certain passage is sounding fairly rough, and you determine that it is mostly to do with intonation. After giving the musicians an additional repetition, you decide that rehearsal time would be well spent untangling this knot:
First, you isolate the passage down to just letter C and gently remind the ensemble about the key area, possibly making note of any particular sections, pitches (E♯’s, let’s say), or other general features of the passage to watch out for (only as applicable - don’t remind them about things that they didn’t actually forget!).
When that doesn’t solve it, you further isolate the passage down to only the two bars containing the cadence.
With plenty of issues still lurking, you might hone in on just the tonic chord.
Still sensing ensemble unease with the key of F♯, you ask for just the root, then tune it with the fifth (C♯), adding the third (A♯) once the ensemble has fully settled into the perfect fifth. (N.B. - this is also a great time to tackle balance and blend! Although, be careful not to “guild the Lilly” or spend too long under the microscope!)
With the tonic fully tuned, you then work on the cadence, seeking to land the tonic when it counts, after the dominant.
With those things sorted out, you expand to those two measures from step 2, adding percussion, and adding back the actual contextual factors like ornaments, scales, and other rhythmic figures and features as written. But with the cadence highlighted and mastered, so that the ensemble has something to anchor itself to.
Finally, you zoom out to “Letter C” and finally back out to perhaps a larger passage in the work, each time seeking to ensure that at the very least, the cadence is still in tune, and that the music around that cadence is increasingly anchored to the key and polished with intonation in mind.
Notice that these could be combined and recombined in an infinite variety of ways, but each may be only useful in a narrow range of circumstances. For instance, at some point, you may find that many of the intonation problems boil down to a more specific cause due to the non-idiomatic nature of a pitch or key for only certain particular instruments, or something as dopey as a misprint.
At this point, a strategic plan, as good as that might sound, would lead you astray. What you want there as always is good situational awareness to lead you to a wise choice and sequence of tactics.
Craft
How do we get from here to there? Experience, observation, study, and self-evaluation, conducted smartly and consistently. George Sturt was a wheelwright trained in the late nineteenth century. A wheelwright was a craftsman woodworker who specialized in keeping wheels, well, round. Wood is not a forged element like steel or molded and homogeneous like plastic. It is living matter and every piece is unique. Sturt’s book, The Wheelwright's Shop was published 101 years ago in 1923. His wisdom is useful today:
“Under the plane (it is little used now) or under the axe (it is all but obsolete) timber disclosed qualities hardly to be found otherwise. “My own eyes know because my own hands have felt, but I cannot teach an outsider, the difference between ash that is “tough as whipcord,” and ash that is “frow as a carrot,” or “doaty,” or “biscuity.” In oak, in beech, these differences are equally plain, yet only to those who have been initiated by practical work.” (Emphasis mine)
This is also reminiscent of the patient wood chopping scene from the film Evil Does Not Exist.
If this paragraph is difficult to read, it’s not because it is difficult but because you and I are not wheelwrights.
More recently, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly co-authored a book which closes on a loving portrait of Sturt in his shop, describing the vagaries of wood in its finest details. In it, they draw a straight line between skill with the plane to “the running back who immediately sees the hole,” in other words, the expert tactician. The leader whose expertise is drawn towards skillful moves at appropriate times. David Sudnow wrote a book about jazz improvisation called Ways of the Hand in which he relates the process of discovering and landing in “handfully grabbed places” on the keyboard. I’ve written before about the parallels between jazz improvisation and the improvisation of the teacher or conductor working with musicians and/or students in a rehearsal or a classroom.
Tactics, then, are something like scales or arpeggios: small procedural groupings - perhaps “musical places to go” - places that “disclose themselves” only to the skilled practitioner. And in order to become skilled, we must first know about these tactics. The more of them we know, the more of them we can combine and recombine them in interesting and potentially useful ways as we intelligently move through music with others.
In future posts, I’ll try to differentiate tactics like the kind I’ve listed above from techniques and topics that are of equal value but contrasting structure in the world of rehearsal technique.
Bonus: Just Tuning
While tuning is used as an example area above, If you landed here looking for tuning advice, check out these great resources:
Joel Peterson Goes into exceptional detail on how to get string orchestras to play in tune. Bravo!
Great series - this one deals with juggling Just and Pythagorean intonation.
Evan Feldman demonstrates work with winds and uses singing to develop pitch awareness.
