Musicality by the numbers - latimes
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Can it be taught? Yes, says a bassoonist who believes in a method for making music that's movingly memorable. March 30, 2008 | Chris Pasles | Times Staff Writer Email
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Los ANGELES and cities around the world have been dazzled by young conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will take over the Los Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 and is leading it this weekend and next at at Walt Disney Concert Hall. When Dudamel made his U.S. debut with the orchestra 2 1/2 years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, Times critic Mark Swed wrote that he couldn't remember when a Bowl concert had been so focused from the start. We've since learned that Dudamel, Dudamel, now 27, is the product of of an innovative educational educational system in his native Venezuela that will teach any child who's interested how to play an instrument. He studied violin before picking up the conductor's baton that he wields with such authority. authority. But that raises a question: Can musical musicality ity be taught, or is it a gift from the gods to a lucky few? And if it can be taught, how?
December 29, 29, 1999
A recent book by Chicago Chicago Symphony principal principal bassoonist David McGill McGill offers one answer: "Sound "Sound in Motion: A Performer's Guide to Greater Musical Expression" says that a lot can be taught, even to players with considerable experience. experience. Other musicians are not so sure. McGill takes off from a m ethod created in the t he first half of the 20th century by Marcel Tabuteau:16080/publications/TWOboist/TWO.V2.1/TWO.V2.1.Tabuteau.html, Tabuteau:16080/publications/TWObo ist/TWO.V2.1/TWO.V2.1.Tabuteau.html, a onetime principal oboist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and a teacher at the city's Curtis Institute of Music. Tabuteau is widely credited with founding founding the American school school of oboe playing, but but his influence went far beyond that.
"I don't believe there was any single music teacher on any instrument who had a greater impact on the American way of making music than Tabuteau," Tabuteau," McGill says. "Almost all the principal principal oboe players in America by the mid-'40s and and certainly by the 1950s were were Tabuteau students who had graduated from from Curtis. And through a sort of osmosis, other musicians -- clarinet, bassoon, horn players, e ven violinists - were influenced by hearing this more pure, more expressive, more nuanced way of playing which was certainly due to Tabuteau's teaching." What Tabuteau did was develop a numbering numbering system to help instrumentalists instrumentalists phrase -- that is, divide divide and play the notes in a given score in meaningful segments -- musically and expressively. Rather than vague, poetic imagery such as "Play it as if you're looking at a sunset," his system uses numbers to group notes, create forward motion and suggest approaches to dynamics and color.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/30/entertainment/ca-musicality30
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Musicality by the numbers - latimes
4/24/16, 9� 54 PM
"We tend to think that what we se e on the page is music," says McGill, whose teachers included oboist John de Lancie, a Tabuteau student and himself a former principal with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony. "What it really is is a recipe for how to make music. You have to take that bare framework and turn it into living sound. This is where the Tabuteau number system and everything else he taught comes into play, because it helps you get from that point of looking at black notes on white paper to creating emotion in the mind of the listener." It's not a matter of good technique or of playing "just the way you feel," he says, but of dissecting a passage to understand the role each note plays. Is there a danger in approaching the process too intellectually? "Emotion and intellect do not have to be separated," McGill says. "In fact, they are not separated. Greater involvement of the intellect yields a greater e motion within the listener and within the performer. But the emotion that occurs should primarily be in the mind of the listener." Tabuteau was born in France in 1887 and came to the United States in 1905 after winning a first prize at the Paris Conservatory. He played under Walter Damrosch at the N ew York Symphony (one of the predecessors of the New York Philharmonic), under Arturo Toscanini at the Metropolitan Opera and, from 1915 until he retired in 1954, at the Philadelphia Orchestra, initially under Leopold Stokowski. He taught at Curtis from its founding in 1924 until he retired from teaching in 1953 and eventually returned to France, where he died in 1966. His legacy is preserved on a number of recordings, including a discussion of his ideas available on the Audio CD "Marcel Tabuteau's Lessons" (formerly "The Art of the Oboe" on LP). (See accompanying discography.)
The system was by no means a paint-by-numbers approach, however. "It's not just dynamics in moving from point A to point B," says Anne Marie Gabriele, a Los Angeles Philharmonic oboist who studied at the Juilliard School with two Tabuteau-influenced teachers and has also been coached privately by McGill. "It's k nowing the function of every note harmonically and melodically and making those things crystal clear. It's em otional content and a way of looking at music and having it sound very flexible and fluid even though you've thought out eve ry note. I use it all the time when I teach."
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