Poulenc: one month on

So, it's been about a month of the Great Poulenc Study Session of Late 2010. Rehearsals are coming up. At the start of the process documented so voluminously in my previous post, I didn't know what to expect in terms of results, but I hoped that the deep score study would bring a level of familiarity with the piece's harmonic language and ultimately my own part's place therein.

I've met with decidedly mixed results. There are a number of reasons for this.

• Life is complicated. Particularly around the holidays. You can have the best of intentions regarding regularity of practice/study and fall short. Travel, family plans, general stupidities related to JesusDay, etc. You just don't get as much time as planned.


• The morning commute often distracts; the tendency on the way in to work is for the upcoming tasks and problems to worm their way into your consciousness. This does not facilitate quiet focus on music study. Additionally, I found that if I left the house on time, my focus was likely to be much better than if I left two minutes late (in which case I had to hurry to make the train); in the latter case, I would get on the train with my heart rate elevated and my mind more active. A quiet activity requires a quiet start. Unfortunately, I'm late more often than not.


• Stubborness in prioritization: I've had trouble getting as much singing time in lately, so I wanted to keep my singing time strictly about focusing on technique; part of the score study exercise was to maximize use of commute time, which is otherwise a total life-waster, and to get more music in the day without actually making music. This meant that when singing time did arrive, I actively stayed away from the Poulenc. When your time is limited, you have to prioritize, make compromises, etc., so it's not unreasonable that I essentially said "this is Poulenc time, this is technical time." But the study would have been vastly improved by actually singing it more than I did.

Ultimately, I found that studying the score like this has helped familiarity with the harmonic language, the formal structure (to some extent; I don't usually find formal structure particularly interesting and this was no exception). But here's what I didn't get:

• Transitions: the whole point of the score study was to slow down and absorb at a large scale. While this is not incompatible with learning sectional transitions, it's biased against it; you study section by section, in manageable chunks. I didn't account for this, so that's one lesson learned: to get the transitions, you have to study the transitions. Duh. It's quite obvious when you're actively executing something on your instrument of choice. Less so when you're treating the score like a novel. Now I know.


• Mental hearing is not the same as physical hearing/doing. I found along the way that I might get flashes of clarity, where I really could internally hear the parts I was examining, without effort and without approximation. But they were only flashes: most of the time it took considerable mental effort and inevitably approximation would sneak in: you do your best to be honest about what you can and cannot internally hear, but time pressure and the desire to make progress are powerful forces, and suddenly you've gone on for two pages without being absolutely certain that you were really hearing those dissonances for what they are. This is as much a matter of managing mental focus and practice time, and at getting better at internally hearing, as anything else; it's not a problem inherent with the score study, it's a problem to be overcome through years of practice at this kind of score study.


• There are a few spots that stand out as having the greatest harmonic complexity, either from density or from the lack of functional/modal logic or both. I paid a lot of attention to these spots, but my own means of hearing music and experiencing music is so deeply rooted in functional progressions or modal relationships that I found certain progressions nearly impossible to hear accurately. Consequently, I have familiarity with all the parts in such sections, and have a nice academic/theoretical understanding of what's going on, but actually executing my part in context remains nonetheless challenging. And I just need to sing it to fix this problem, I can't study my way out of it.

So, the conclusion one month on: this is rewarding way to study, but it has to be integrated with regular execution. It would have made more sense to study things deeply on the morning train ride and then take 15 minutes after work to sing through what was studied in the evening. Now when I actually sing the stuff some parts still feel like I'm reading (though thankfully quite a few places do not feel like that) and there a few transitions that I need to work out. Additionally, there are two or three places where I just haven't been hearing the intervals correctly which now require correction.

So it goes. I'll keep going with this, because the only way to improve is to continue applying effort over time. What else would one expect on a first attempt but mixed results?