RLPF.ar

Last Tuesday morning: "James -- Yo-Yo Ma is giving a master class in the conservatory at 11. Do you want to see some of it?"

YES!!!!!

I usually need morning time for final preparation for my afternoon lessons, but that would have to wait. It was the right decision; I had been struggling with what to do in the afternoon, but got the right inspiration from Mr. Ma. He is a better teacher than to teach only how to play cello. He teaches what it means to be a musician, and that's good for the cello students, electronic music students and, for that matter, myself.

The first student played Prokofiev. Mr. Ma wasted no time on the few, insignificant technical flubs. Instead, he seized on the interpretation of the first passage. Prokofiev wrote it to be ferocious, intimidating, and the student had tried to feign passion but the playing was just loud, nothing more. Ma seemed to suggest an image of a monster pursuing the listener, going as far as to jump down off the stage and put himself in front of the student, casting himself as the prey. (I'm guessing -- he spoke mostly in slightly accented Chinese.) While the student played, he gesticulated for eye contact and bellowed, "Look at me!" And the playing suddenly got my hair on end.

Same student, same technique -- the difference was expressive intent. Ma taught the student something to say in the passage, and got him over the self-consciousness that locks up the intent in an airtight box. For a minute, the student got a taste of the liberation of being consumed by the music he's playing. I hope he never loses the appetite for that.

So I talked with my students about using sound choices, production techniques, MIDI programming and all the other tools found in the software in service of an expressive goal. Go back a few years to Photek's "Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu (Two Swords Technique)" [youtube] -- a remarkably economical track. No wasted effort. Everything in it -- the finely chopped drum sounds, the right touch of distortion, off-balance rhythm programming, the near-total absence of harmony -- makes the body twitch and coil up, ready to strike as in the title's martial arts reference. That's a track that knows what it wants to say, and my students need to know that it's possible to approach production that way.