Lesson 3 - back story
It might be helpful to know how this gestalt approach came about:
I stumbled into the idea when I was in grad school, learning Schumann’s Adagio und Allegro. (Actually I was learning it again - I had worked on the piece in high school, but gave up because it was too hard for me at the time.)
For any non-horn players reading this page, Adagio und Allegro is a wickedly hard work for horn and piano that doesn’t seem to give horn players any less trouble now than it did when it was written in 1849. (Schumann kind of forgot to leave any places to breathe in the Allegro, for example). It’s often performed on cello.
While grappling with this piece I encountered a few issues mentioned in Lesson 2 - specifically, I found I was missing notes in context that I knew I could play well by themselves, and I found myself tensing up a lot during some passages as I “grabbed” for high notes, which was exhausting me and killing my stamina.
I decided I needed to get to the bottom of these problems if I ever hoped to perform the piece well, and although slow practice had not been a particular specialty of mine before this point, I knew I needed to practice it slowly in order to make headway. To my consternation, I found that virtually all the same problems I was experiencing while playing at full tempo also seemed to be present at my slower practice tempo. While I found this frustrating (because slow practice is supposed to make things sound better, right?), for once in my young life I didn’t just give up immediately and go back to banging away at full speed. Instead, I kept digging for answers.
I decided to slow the tempo down until I could play it perfectly, and it wasn’t long before I found that in some places I was struggling to play even one note with ease and accuracy - that’s how tied up I was over this piece. Determined to see it out, I started playing each note of the passage that was troubling me as a long tone. I decided that I wouldn’t move from one note to the next until each one felt easy and comfortable - as if I could play it all day long with no trouble.
As I undertook this almost microscopic examination of the various notes in a single phrase, I noticed two things.
First, some notes that should have “felt” more or less the same as the other notes around them, actually felt remarkably different to play: notes that were a half step or whole step apart felt drastically different from each other - some were quite easy and comfortable, and others seemed (emphasis on seemed) to require a lot of effort or tension to produce. Why should two notes so close to each other feel so different? I wondered.
Second, it was interesting to notice how the “difficult” notes - the ones that seemed to require more effort - gradually became easier to play as I disassociated them from the tricky passage and considered them one at a time. I always knew I could play them alone, and I began to see that it was their combination as a single phrase (plus, of course, all the emotional angst I had built up around it) which made them feel suddenly different and harder.
I worked my way through the Schumann in this manner, and made some progress by occasionally stopping to address individual notes in this way, but didn’t really think much of it. As I continued to reflect on this experience over the following years, though, I realized that while being able to play individual notes well is definitely an important part of learning any wind instrument, it’s not at all a guarantee that those notes will be equally “playable” in the context of actual music. The endless array of variables which make great music so interesting also make it impossible to jump immediately from simply learning to play notes on an instrument to playing a difficult concerto. Especially on a brass instrument, I think, the subtleties that accompany changes of register, various articulations and dynamics, the need to breathe, and a host of other considerations means that even very “familiar” notes can suddenly feel very foreign in a new context.
This feeling of “foreign-ness” on notes that, in a different context, feel “familiar” can be confusing, and usually the reason brass playing can seem drastically different from one day to the next. Perhaps more importantly, a feeling of “foreign-ness” can trap players into a cycle of focusing only on the individual notes themselves, rather than on a phrase, or larger musical statement.
This was brought home to me years later as I worked with a high school student on Camille Saint-Saën’s Romance for horn and piano. The horn part begins with an arpeggio which can be a little tricky to execute right out of the gate, and my student was struggling with it. I asked her to play only the first note, as a long tone, until it felt easy, comfortable, and accurate. She did this in short order. Then I asked her to play the first two notes of the arpeggio in time, and all her issues suddenly returned. So we worked on making the first two notes feel like “one thing.” We added the third note and the process repeated itself: all the progress made, individually, on the first two notes seemed to evaporate, and it took time, repetitions, and careful attention to detail in order to add a third note to what was emerging as a single thing (a gestalt) from a tricky series of notes.
In considering all this, I realized that a difficult passage will never become music by attending to each note, individually, in quick succession. (As if there were even time to realistically do that in a fast passage!) To become music, all the notes of a passage have to become “one” to the player in both thought and in execution - one thing, one whole, a gestalt.
Over time I learned to do first what I had done last with Schumann’s Adagio und Allegro: I applied the principles of gestalt theory to the initial stages of learning a piece in order to learn passages as gestalts, rather than as strings of difficult notes which seemed playable (or not) depending on the day.