Geoffrey Thomas

A Summary of The Art of Delivery by Keith Hill and Marianne Ploger

The following  will techniques increase the listener’s understanding and enjoyment of the music you play. Approach them scientifically and pragmatically. Try them out and demonstrate them to a variety of listeners. The goal is to use them all; however, it can be useful to practice them individually to increase understanding of how they work.

These techniques are grouped into six general techniques, which apply to everything you play, and six specific techniques, which apply to certain notes and passages. This summary will not tell you why they work and why they are necessary. For that information you must turn to the source from which this is drawn: “Play from the Soul, Not like a Trained Bird” A new interpretation of the familiar phrase by CPE Bach by Keith Hill ©2001 pictagoras@aol.com

General techniques: apply at all times

1. Play hands apart

Mozart insisted that the hands should never play together. The reason to do this is to give each part independence, which means that parts will not always sound simultaneously and that they are easier to understand. The technique depends on the ability of the performer to hear, follow, and create multiple voices in the music; voices that are clearly independent of the others yet always manage to agree.

To learn this technique you can start out by deliberately playing a two-voice texture non-simultaneously. Try having the bass come first then do the opposite. It will feel awkward until you get the voice unhitched be having each voice follow its own logic. When you get the hang of it you will find it easier to hear the voices yourself.

2. Play flexibly, don’t be metronomic

Much of the music we play is like poetry that has clear rhymes and accents. But, don’t play music like a third grader reciting rhyming verse! Use irregularity because that produces alertness and attentiveness. The balance in tension between the feeling of predictability and the feeling of anticipation produces the highest degree of interest and attention in the listener.

To learn this technique start with the simplest figures, such as repeated notes, and vary them rhythmically. Go on to increasingly complex passages. The written notation is only a guide to the actual weight and length of individual notes. It is your job to discover the meaning; this must be done with flexibility and through experimentation. You must discover the logic that combines and separates the notes.

3. Make gestures

Think of typical shapes in nature: a parabolic curve like the egg is a good example. Think also of natural speech with its ups and downs, its pauses and flow. Think of the variety of inflection a good speaker, preacher, actor or storyteller uses to shape a narrative. What you don’t want to sound like is the electronic operator giving you a telephone number. Create shapes in the music which are like the hand gestures we use to accompany spoken language. Create ebbs and flows, waves, arcs and garlands of notes. Connect visual and aural gestures.

4. Group and separate

What belongs together and what does not? Where is the punctuation? Where do we have to push on and where do we have to wait? How do the harmonies relate? If we are reading or speaking a text we must be clear how the parts relate to one another and to the content, and we must make this clear to our listeners. So too in music. You can do this without these techniques but it is much harder and is quite strenuous for both you and the listener. A generalized technique, like today’s legato in which all the notes are acoustically connected, is not effective. Try saying this sentence with everything sustained, connected and regular. It sounds artificial and is hard to understand. Now, go back and say the sentence with a clear intent to communicate its meaning. The latter approach is a much better model of playing.

5. Attitude

The goal here is to have a clear attitude, emotion, frame of mind, and feeling about every passage you play. It is much richer for both performer and player when you select three attitudes. Attached to this article is a chart of possible attitudes or affects. You should add to this list. Choose one from each of the columns and apply them. It can be quite stimulating to have a listener choose them for you. You can think of them in many ways: as filters, as lighting, as costumes or as the central message.

Specific Techniques to apply at key moments

6. Juicing a note

The goal is to make a note stand out by the way it relates to the harmony. It often involves a feeling of scooping or sliding. Try spreading chords and intervals in various ways so that important notes come out. Various ornaments and arpeggios are frequently written in the music or should be added by the player to get this effect.

7. Distortion

This is a way of getting the listener’s attention by using something non-beautiful, ugly even. Examples include trills, cracking the voice, crushing the bow, altering the vowel, adding ‘wrong’ notes to a chord, sliding between pitches. All of these create distortion and attract our attention. They create moments out of control and in the right places they are powerful.

8. Don’t give a damn

“Don’t take all this so seriously! Live a little! Stop controlling! Let go! Be happy! Don’t worry so much! When notes are jumbled or played in an irregular or a staggering manner they create a careless effect. Go for a jazzy or disjointed feeling. Think of clowns skillfully stumbling. The purpose is to create an anxiety-free mental climate in the brains of listeners. Anxiety rubs off on all who observe it. Conversely, the right kind of ‘careless’ attitude is essential for putting an audience at. People love the feeling of watching others who have no self-consciousness.

9. Fade out

The fade out is a diminishing of the volume of sound at the end of a phrase until it altogether disappears or evaporates. The evaporation somehow forces the minds of the listeners to finish the phrase as it disappears. The part of the music which evaporates is not usually the most important. Evaporating the less interesting parts of the score makes them as powerful to the mind of the listener if not as obvious.

10. Hesitation

Hesitation is a great way to bring out a note. You set up the expectation that a note will arrive at a certain moment and then you defy that expectation by playing the note late; you leave the listener hanging in the air for an instance. This generates attention and is especially effective at climactic moments. You can also hang on to an important note longer than. Study the timing techniques used by comedians and actors.

The purpose of these techniques is to connect musical information into clear and meaningful phrases for the listeners to help them make sense of the score. Don’t worry about whether these ideas are right or wrong. Just be curious and courageous enough to try them. Decide for yourself but be sure to involve other listeners as well.