The Integrated Musician
The Integrated Musician will be published by the Oxford University Press in late 2009. Here's a brief description of the materials I plan to cover in it.
Every repeated physical action—snapping your fingers, walking, swimming—lends itself to being organized into a rhythmic pattern. By instinct or by habit, most people tend to coordinate their gestures into units of two elements, the first one relatively strong or heavy, the second weak or light. If you take a few steps around the room you may well notice how this pattern shapes your gait. This applies equally to the gestures typical of a musician’s technique, such as drawing a bow across a string, strumming a chord at a guitar, or tonguing notes at a wind instrument.
What is habitual, though, is not always inevitable or desirable. In walking, for instance, there are many different possible rhythmic patterns, some of which may actually be easier on the body (and therefore healthier) than your habitual one. Similarly for a musician: a violinist often draws her bow across the string with a strong/weak pattern, which creates two potential problems. The first is that her habitual gesture (of which she may not be fully aware) tends to be limited to one possibility out of many, and this one possibility happens to be, in itself, a comparatively awkward option. Second, and most important, the gesture only too often does not coincide with the rhythmic requirements of the musical text. The musical text may be written in units we would count as “two-ONE, two-ONE,” and yet the musician tends to execute it “ONE-two, ONE-two.” The constant fight between musician and music is visible and audible to the trained observer, and its consequences are potentially dire.
Ideally, a musician should show, in his or her every gesture, a deep, precise, and preferably reflex understanding of the rhythmic construction of the musical text. An excellent way of sensing, describing, and understanding this construction is through the vocabulary of prosody, the branch of poetics that studies all aspects of rhythm. These include attributes of tension and relaxation, the way syllables in a poem (or notes in a piece of music) coalesce in groups, the articulation and inflection of these logical groupings, and so on. The literary critic Paul Fussel writes, in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, that “at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem [the reader] functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.” Let us define prosody as the study of a poem’s underlying grid, its skeleton, so to speak. The poet Mary Kinzie sees prosody (in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry) as “the auditory logic or rhythmic style of a poem when viewed as the interaction of the other elements of style [such as rhyme, diction, and verse forms] with the poem’s meter.” The spinal column of a poem is its rhythm; all other poetic elements branch out from it and are inseparable from it.
Syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, diction, enunciation, and inflection all lead double lives, linguistic and musical. If one considers how musical language must be made understandable, one’s first impulse is to assume that vocabulary and syntax are its most fundamental aspects. It is not so. I believe that, for musicians as well as poets, for listeners as well as performers, the most important aspect of their language is prosody. It, not syntax or grammar, is the bedrock of musical comprehensibility. Were I to read out loud any one text disregarding its prosody—a sonnet by Shakespeare, a shopping list, the weather report—my listener would most likely fail to understand me. The same applies to music. To sing or to play unprosodically is to fail to communicate the meaning of music to the listener. The duties of the musician to the listener apart, to play unprosodically means to play awkwardly, therefore doing oneself quite a lot of harm.
Average musicians play either without any concern for prosody, or having made incorrect prosodic choices. They may well be unaware of all the prosodic options that exist for each given musical excerpt, and of the exacting process needed to make fully informed decisions. Musicians’ prosodic failings start at the level of the foot (the prosodic name for a small unit of one to four syllables or notes) and go on to the phrase and beyond. Musicians often blame their health problems on the exigencies of the profession, on instrument design, on chairs, on conductors. I am convinced that “backache” is the result of unclear prosody and its consequent technical and musical struggle.
To analyze a text prosodically means to find out which elements of the text (syllables, words, lines of verse and so on, or, in the case of music, notes, phrases, and movement sections) belong together, how the groups so formed are articulated, and how each element and each group are suffused with forward motion or relaxation. The tools of prosodic analysis, then, are integration, separation, and direction. They may be applied to all level of music analysis and performance, from the smallest units of one to four notes and the harmonic motion from chord to chord, to larger phrases, sections, and entire pieces—even to the juxtaposition of pieces as one builds a concert program.
In The Integrated Musician I wish to study poetic prosodies; to show the similarities and differences between musical and poetic prosodies; to examine every aspect of musical prosody, from the smallest units of one or two notes to larger groups, measures, phrases, sections, and full movements; to study how musicians coordinate themselves according to their perception of a musical text’s prosody, using the Alexander Technique as a prosody of the self, and referring to principles of movement from dance, sports, martial arts, and the behavior of animals both domesticated and wild; and to formulate ways in which performing musicians of all levels may free themselves from awkwardness, tension, and even pain by making their playing, singing, or conducting prosodically oriented.