“Remember, Time Is a greedy player who wins without cheating, every round!“
—Baudelaire, “The Clock”
This summer, as I was teaching a graduate course that dealt largely with orchestral rehearsal techniques for musicians coming mostly from the string area, we worked on things like metaphor and character in describing the sounds of different sections, figures, and themes.
As I looked for opportunities to help them develop their score preparation process and their rehearsal technique, I noticed how limited my vocabulary was at first as I tried to distinguish between perfectly serviceable descriptions and more musically satisfying ones. Between the good comments and the dare-to-be great.
Certainly, as challenging as the music may be, if you are working on Death and Transfiguration, Strauss has done quite a bit of the legwork for you, with a program, a poem, and his own recording.
The Big Story is right there for the taking.
But what about a Haydn Symphony with nothing but notes and rhythms? What about work on a piece of grade 1 literature for school band or string orchestra? What does Big Story mean when the music is already so small? Last time, I tried to explore what it means to be moved by this kind of music in the first place during our prep.
Of course, we can and we do invent all kinds of descriptors to help convey the sound we’re after. Words like buttery, brushed, Byzantine, birdsong, Bach-esque, and brazen are the kinds of words that show up at the tops of my scores. There are even words that start with other letters besides B!
But as I was teaching this course, I came to recognize that there are greener pastures still, and it all has to do with time.
The Greeks understood time in two distinct forms.
Kairos (καιρός) has to do with events like the weather and moments like an opportunity. It is more qualitative and is more about punctuation. It deals in snapshots and moments.
Chronos (Χρόνος) has to do with the passage of time and measurement of time. It’s fundamentally quantitative and has some sense of motion. It deals in story and motion.
Chronos becomes the root for words like chronometer and synchronous.
As I thought more and more about it, I recognized how often the best, most compelling rehearsal technique seems to try to move the orchestra through the specific kind of time that the music calls for. Note, I don’t here mean conducting, I mean the sense of the work as we think about it in our score rep, and as we talk about it. In this case, our comments in rehearsal are there to help orient the player, not merely towards what is happening in the moment, the Kairos, but what that moment says about motion or Chronos.
For example, you might ask for “more crescendo at m. 324” or “start softer at m. 308” to help increase the effectiveness of a phrase. And good teachers know that “start softer” is a step towards holiness.
But a more Kairos- or narrative-driven comment might ask the musicians to become increasingly insistent.
Insistent helps reach for an underlying mood or quality that will provide imaginative fuel to concepts like weight, aggression, or digging in. Alternatively, you might ask the musicians to become increasingly bold or increasingly generous, say. But the boldness or generosity would still only reflect the local quality of the moment, if not for the qualifier.
Increasingly characterizes the music’s Chronos, it’s unfolding over time.
We can take this one step further. Rather than speaking in abstract terms, we can speak in slightly more grounded terms about musical goal and musical reasoning:
“let’s start softer so that we can become progressively more nagging each time we repeat that idea until we reach the explosion.”
Or, in building intensity with vibrato instead of volume, rather than merely asking the musicians to start by playing with slow vibrato in that moment, consider this:
“Cello/bass, let’s start out almost lost in the dark, with minimal, slow vibrato. We will slowly wake up the sound as we approach the trumpet narration.”
Don’t forget - small nonverbal gestures while speaking can save valuable time just as they can while conducting. In this case, a "vibrato” gesture made with the left hand during the words “wake up the sound” helps to reinforce my intended meaning “wake up” is a contrast from “minimal, slow vibrato.”
Finally, the instruction must always be a two-way street: as I make the comment and show the gesture, I make eye contact and check for understanding and tacit agreement from the musicians. If there is confusion or dissent, perhaps I model the sound with my voice, ask a question, or make room for the concertmaster to add or amend. Once we’re OK, then we try it.
TAKE CARE: these types of comments must be swift, certain, and concise. Musicians quickly tire of flowery prose. A detailed, concrete, narrative plot may be exactly what you need, in some cases, to help build the musical narrative in your mind and bring it to life. But it is not always necessary to spend a lot of time talking about your narrative. Instead, invite the musicians to create that narrative.
The best conductors can connect the narrative directly to the sound, but they often can do it in eleven words or less. I’m as guilty as the next conductor. As much as I like my second example above, taken from the intro to the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, it clocks in at more than double - 25 words. On the other hand, “increasingly [adjective],” is a mere 2 words. So an average of 11 words is probably a good goal to strive for.
But take heart: Your motion-based rehearsal corrections don’t need to be literary enough impress Jonathan Franzen. They just need to express direction and purpose. Sometimes, it can be as simple as asking the musicians to motivate the phrase; the word motivate has to do with providing motion.
The next time you get a chance to observe a fantastic conductor of any level, try watching for descriptors that ladder up to a long-term story and which are more localized or static. And next time you sit down with your score, ask yourself: “what’s the Big Story here?” Oftentimes, there might be more there, if we can sit with our score and pay attention.