This week’s #MUS654 topic is Repertoire, and the music we play whether we call it songs, pieces, repertoire – it is the stuff that serves as the vehicle for our musical communication with listeners, each other, and ourselves. In thinking about repertoire, we’re encouraged to look back and see our own development as musicians. How have you come to know the music you know? What was the first music you knew? Maybe it had nothing or little to do with your instrument. How did you get into the music of your instrument and did you use the same mechanisms to find music there as you might have for other listening or music you engaged with?
When you begin to think about it, it is fascinating, and as a teacher it will have relevance. You are beginning to focus on the learning and become aware of the processes that you have undertaken. Sometimes through happy chance we find ourselves on a great musical path, but often it is through the dedicated guidance, planning, and nurturing of others – parents, teachers, and fellow musicians.
I’ve already presented a few different topics there and I’d like to start with this one:
How do we come to know the music we know?
As a child, I grew up with records – LPs, 33s, 78s. Yes, we even had a Victrola (as well as the fancy hi-fi record player). These were a mix of classic songs from the 1930s – 1950s, a good dose of Jazz quartets and trios, a very few classical records (1812 overture), lots of folk music, and a couple of very cheesy Christmas albums – one man with a deep voice singing to an orchestral accompaniment, with a touch of sleigh bells in the background… That was it. There was no piano in the house. There were no other instruments. Those records were magic.
That is a starting point. I remember walking around with a little radio and we would search the channels to find whatever there was – eager to hear new things. It still happens like that with much of pop music. People eagerly await the next single or album from an artist. When did that die with other styles of music? (responses please – that’s a real question, not just a rhetorical one) As a cellist my knowledge of music, certainly at the beginning, was very limited and nearly completely reliant on whatever the teacher gave me to learn. Having a background in the LPs in the sitting room and the pop songs on the radio didn’t help me to know about the cello, and in the beginning, my years of first position etudes didn’t come close to giving me a clue about the repertoire for the instrument. The first time I heard a cello concerto was when I was learning one. That is the wrong way around.
Now people aren’t reliant on the records in their house or the two channels that might have good reception on the radio. We have access to so many recordings it is really mindblowing. So the question – do we (and do our students) seek to expand what we know? Do you look for new music to play? That could be new old music – it doesn’t have to be modern. I think we do, but the impetus is different. Think about reading books. We are taught to search from a young age. Children are taken to libraries and talked through what there is. (How often do we start students by giving them a tour through great works for their instrument?) We are taught how to find it. We are encouraged to seek and read. And when we get proficient at the basics, we are allowed to have preferences and to suggest our own content.
I don’t like horror books. I prefer comedy or mysteries where I have to think.
Awesome!
If a young learner is asked what would they like to play/sing, would they have the same musical literary knowledge to say – I would like to do X because I enjoy that style or period or composer… It may be a different way of looking at it, and it may take more work on the teacher’s part, but think how empowering it could be for the student.
I wonder what is your experience with learning? Do you learn music and musical repertoire with the same relish you read or the same enthusiasm you find a new tv show to follow? Or the same way you follow popular charts? I wonder why or why not? Perhaps through understanding how and what we do, we can take the best bits from all our learning and bring those together as tools so we can be the best facilitators and teachers to guide ourselves and others.
Quite aside from the #MUS654 class, musician and author Bill Benzon blogged about his Jazz education in a series of posts, and it is fascinating. He did it the right way around and in these posts he expresses a breadth of listening, learning, and understanding that is noteworthy. I recommend you definitely read Bill’s first post:
My Early Jazz Education 1: From the Firehouse to Louis Armstrong
and if that sparks your interest, Bill is very articulate (in music and words) as he goes on in successive posts. He takes us through influential repertoire and how he came to it. I wonder if we could each do a similar thing? What shaped you? …if you are drawing some blanks, maybe it’s time to go to the virtual musical library and check out some tunes.
I have linked to Bill’s further posts on his education below, but am saving the last one for when we talk about observing lessons. You’ll have plenty to read and listen to with these first ones… enjoy! (image CC BY-NC by Allert Aalders)
My Early Jazz Education 2: Maynard, Miles, and Diz
My Early Jazz Education 3: Herbie Mann and Dave Brubeck
My Early Jazz Education 4: Thelonius Sphere Monk
My Early Jazz Education 5: Al Hirt and (again) Maynard
Featured image CC BY-NC-SA by Via Tsuji
YouTube! I spend hours browsing on there, I’ll search an aria and that will bring up particular singers, which then opens up their repertoire to me with a host of suggestions. As I’m only just starting out as a classical/operatic singer, my rep is limited and I’m not of fan of standard pieces that every soprano starts off with, so this instantaneously puts new and sometimes obscure material at my fingertips. Perhaps my loathing of bog-standard arias is just my defiant attempt to become something greater, to not just sing pieces because convention says they should be in my rep. Or perhaps it’s the Sagittarius in me that enjoys doing the opposite of others, going against the grain. I’ll happily learn the standards, but in honesty, I’m not happy unless I feel as though I’ve found a little gem, that’s all mine ❤ I agree with Will, I don’t have Apple Music, only iTunes but so much is there instantly! And not only that, there’s a multitude of artistes to choose from, it’s fascinating hearing how different each rendition can be, unique nuances, pronunciation, ornamentation etc!
Whoops! Here’s the link to the Mendez post.
Thanks for the mention, Laura.
Basically, to play it you have to hear it. Just how the sound gets in your mind’s ear, there are three ways. The easiest and in some ways the best, as you’ve said, is to listen to the piece you want to play, whether from a live performance or through recordings. If you have a lot of musical experience and are highly skilled in sight reading you can look at a score and hear an expressive performance in your mind’s ear; when you play the score in this way you are, in effect, playing it “by ear.” You can hack away without every having heard the piece and eventually something will form. If you’ve been listening to good music and take that as your guide, then you may get there through this route.
But really, it’s all built on hearing good performances of meaningful repertoire.
You didn’t link to my Rafael Mendez post, Laura. While he wasn’t a jazz musician, he was very important to me for various reasons. For one thing, he provided some of the repertoire I practiced in my lessons. For another, his own repertoire was wide and various, classical, popular songs, “folk” songs. The implicit lesson, of course, is that it’s all good.
Interesting post and something I’ve thought a lot about lately. In my case, my enthusiasm for finding new pieces/repertoire comes and goes in waves (I can go months not bothering to seek out anything new, then by chance (usually through teaching a student a particular piece from a syllabus – not through listening to radio etc) I find a new composer that I like and I’ll listen to and attempt to play, usually badly, everything they’ve ever written all at once, spending a small fortune on sheet music in the process!). When I do find something I like, I play and learn it with far more interest and enthusiasm than I ever have for reading books/tv shows – I’m almost obsessive about it!
I’d recommend my students listen to other pieces by composers they like in order to find repertoire they like, but so much has to come from them (many still have to be told by their parents to practise and won’t do it off their own bat – they’ll like a piece enough to want to learn it, but have other priorities!), and only a handful appear to have that obsessive trait for it. Maybe they’re too early-stage to want it enough, or I’m teaching them the wrong things!
Thanks Will! I don’t think you’re teaching them the wrong things – I think it has more to do with the social and cultural ‘norms’ of learning music and of expectations that we will (or need to be) led to new things… or maybe it’s just confidence? In the past I would say that access to new music was an issue, but now that is much harder to argue. Maybe part of it is confidence to follow curiosity? so many possibilities…!
all fair assumptions. The access to music thing is an interesting one. Spotify/Apple Music has been an absolutely massive eye-opener for me personally. In the past I’d play a piece I like, then go to the music shop, buy a score by the same composer only to get home and find I didn’t like it at all, or that it was way above my skill level. Now I just stream all their stuff until I find something I want to learn that’s relatively achievable! I wish it’d been around when I was about 14 – reckon I’d be a far better musician now simply because I’d have played so much more! Maybe I’ll start a listening thing as part of student’s homework.
I do that – and some of them do it! I’ve also started sending students videos of me playing their music for technical help – scales and things like that, and some engage with being able to review and ‘see’ the techniques as part of their practice. So many possibilities!! 🙂