by Ludmila Lazar
continues & concludes. . .
Perhaps because of my early conditioning in dance (which incorporated singing and story-telling), I find demonstration of dance movement and gesture, when appropriate, to be most powerful and vivid. Dance is freeing. It involves the entire body just as piano performance should, and this can be readily transferred to the choreography at the instrument.
For example, Mozart's Allegro from his Sonata in F major, K. 332 abounds in examples of gestures, postures and dances; the hunting-horn call motif in F major (beginning with the pick-up to m. 13) already suggests a country dance.
In m. 41 a minuet proper, in C-major (structure!), follows - with a lighter and more transparent texture.With the teacher's demonstration of the basic six-beat minuet step, a student will recognize its quality and use the image to feel and imbue the passage with life and elasticity of a toe-step.
This is followed by another minuet in m. 71, this time in F-major, recalling the horn-call quality of the country dance (m. 12). The end of the exposition (m. 90) recalls the minuet gesture one more time;
the sforzando on the second beat calling to mind the French Baroque Sarabande. The character of the sforzando now reveals itself as a noble gesture, not a mere attack on the second beat.
I encourage my students to learn some basic dance steps (I would very much like to see dance become a required subject for all our music students) - so that they can experience the movement, the gesture, the energy for themselves.
For a particularly shy and inhibited student who nevertheless wanted to play Debussy's La Puerta del Vino,
I devised the following: while walking the duple time, I have the student clap, pat, and snap this movement pattern:
To see a short video clip of this exercise done by Annie Artinian, a piano teacher and piano pedagogy/performance student at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, click below
462k, QuickTime movie file
When this pattern was firmly established, the melodic rhythm was introduced:
(pat on the R knee, RH continuing the move up to clap, LH glides down to pat the L knee, creating a sustained sensation; while the RH continues the move up to the snap above the head, the LH follows upward).
657k, QuickTime movie file
The difference between the first pattern - angular and persistent, and the second pattern - melodically rounded and resistant, is kinesthetically experienced. Listening to Spanish folk music and Flamenco style, seeing the gesture of guitar-strumming, further enhance and develop this awareness.
To hear Ms. Artinian play the excerpt, click below
267k, WAV sound file
Dance form is as present in 20th century compositions as it was in the repertoire of the 18th and 19th centuries. An obvious example are the Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (Mikrokosmos, Book VI) of Béla Bartók. These are easier to demonstrate because they are still danced today. Summer institutes, workshops, folklore ensembles, and dance teachers make them accessible. In my part of the country, Sanna Longden (an artist-dance teacher in Evanston, Illinois) comes to mind immediately.
The opening three measures of No. 2 (tupan is a double-headed drum) lead into a leaping dance step. The timing of this dance step is crucial in establishing the elasticity of the "take-off" (and its gesture at the piano), the suspension, the "landing" on the third unit of the measure, and the feeling for the quality of the time between these units - avoiding, again, a mere mechanical division.
Our bodies are bundles of many rhythmic patterns. We walk with a great variety of gaits - we leap, we skip, we jump, we dance, we make gestures while speaking. Why not incorporate into our teaching what we already "know"? Why not include and develop the relationships of time, space, and energy in our instruction?
The use of any or all of the above modes to energize and internalize the rhythmic structures of compositions will make a difference in how informed, understood, and communicative a student's performance will be. What a pity that, for many of us, our modern-day lives do not seem to provide a rich variety of such experiences outside music.
I believe that with rhythmic freedom comes body freedom and the release of unwanted tension. Musical concepts internalized through rhythmic movement will bring about melodic flow and an awareness of harmonic rhythm and form.
This article is © copyright by Ludmila Lazar and is printed here with her permission.
Ludmila Lazar, NCTM, Chair of the Keyboard Department at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, is a graduate of the Ljubljana Central Music School in Slovenia. After coming to America, she studied with Rudolph Ganz, obtained a Master's degree, and later earned a DMA from Northwestern University. An active performer, she has presented many workshops in the United States, Europe, and South America. She holds the Master Teacher Certificate from the Music Teachers National Association.
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