The Pilgrim's Progress

My dear fellow travelers:

First, an exciting announcement!  Next week, The Other 49 Weeks of Solfa will host its first appearance of a guest blogger!  Our guest is none other than my own much-loved and revered teacher, Dr. Cetto, who has graciously agreed to cover for me during the week of my dreaded exams.  We're in for a treat, and I'm so grateful for his help!

Over the course of this week, I've continued to immerse myself in exam materials, working with all my might to permeate my poor little brain with everything there is to know about the things I'm supposed to know.  And, I can already tell that it's going to be a tremendous relief in some ways to just finally sit down at that computer in the music library and start typing....I'm sure it'll be a relief to all of you when I finally stop talking about it (insert sheepish grin here).  In the meantime, I'll keep walking my path and doing my work for a few more days until it's Wednesday, and the only thing to do is open the floodgates and see what comes out.  It's sort of like a five-day performance, I guess.  I'm on the spot, I know what I know, and I just have to do it.

This is the nature of a test, and this is the nature of performance.  Perhaps this is why some of what we do as musicians makes us seem so insane to the non-musician world.  We lock ourselves in little rooms and play/sing scales and arpeggios for hours.  We go over the same 4 measures 97 times.  We go over those same 4 measures 97 more times in our private lesson with a person we pay a lot of money to tell us how those 4 measures really ought to sound...97 times!  The outside world has a point: this behavior is pretty darn crazy, but it's for a purpose.  We are on a journey unlike that of a lot of other people.  We live by what our minds and bodies can do to pay homage to the past, create beauty, and evoke emotions in other people, and often we must do it from memory, all alone on a big stage with only our instrument and our wits while a crowd of people sits across from us, waiting to hear and see what we will do.  This is extreme.  This makes Survivor look like a piece of cake.  This is our pilgrim way.

In order to be successful on our journey, we not only have to learn how to do something (for example, play a scale) once, we must learn how to accomplish that task in an infinite sea of musical variables (tempo, key, articulation, fragmentation, ornamentation, dynamics, register, etc.) as we swim in the infinite sea of extra-musical variables (room temperature, crying babies, head colds, low humidity, cell phones, performance anxiety, newspaper reviewers, bad lighting, etc.).  Knowing this makes us the neurotic people that many of us are, and it also means that over-practicing the basics is almost never a bad idea.  It's just part of our pilgrim's progress -- sometimes we're on the Hill of Difficulty, scrambling over boulders and scraping our knees.  Sometimes we're in the Palace Beautiful, putting up our feet.  Sometimes we're in the Slough of Despond, and we have to get a friend to come pull us onto dry land.  But all the while, we know where we're going.  We must keep to the narrow way, the pilgrim way, and trust that we got on the path for a reason.

All of that being said, I want to keep the workload simple and fairly light this week.

Rising Level 2's
Dig up your copy of "Our Tuning Forks, Our Selves" (if you can't find it, you can print yourself a shiny new one from the link on the right side of your screen), and locate your tuning fork.

Take a day to re-acquaint yourself with the methods for finding each key -- if something doesn't make sense, shoot me an email.

Then, on a daily basis, check yourself and your key-finding ability.  Sing songs in your classroom in odd keys that are more difficult to find.  When you're listening to music, get out your fork and see if you can figure out what key it's in (sort of the inverse of the key-finding process).  Ask a friend to randomly test you throughout the week (over the phone works just fine for this task).  Immerse yourself in the world of tonality, and make A440 your mantra for the week...just for fun!

Rising Level 3's
If you know that you have troubles finding keys in a logical, consistent fashion when you're put on the spot, use the same assignment as the rising 2's this week.

However, if you're completely confident in your tuning fork skills, check this out:

http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/9/9c/Moza-intr-kyr.pdf

Most of you will recognize this piece by reputation, if not by having sung/played/heard it lots of times.  What you may not know, however, is that the soprano solo (starting in m. 21) and the choral soprano line that immediately follows (mm. 27-32) have everything to do with pilgrimage: they are each a statement of the tonus peregrinus, or the pilgrim tone.  Tonus peregrinus is a psalm tone, used in Christian churches since the middle ages for chanting biblical psalms (a Google search will get you lots of interesting information, I'm certain).  This psalm tone differs from others because the reciting tone (the note used to articulate most of the words in a psalm, usually the same note in both halves of a psalm tone) changes from the first half of the tone to the second half, so those fanciful medieval types gave it a name (peregrinus, the Latin word for "pilgrim") describing that very characteristic.  So, sing through these two passages in a comfortable octave (I recommend B-flat do for that section), then tackle the remainder of the Introit movement (notice that it's a sloooooow movement).  What keys do you expect to visit?  Does the journey in fact take you there?  If you're feeling ambitious, feel free to check out the Kyrie that follows -- it's SO cool, and that way you can try your hand at something a little zippier.

Rising Level 4's
If you have any doubts on the tuning fork front, please avail yourselves of the rising 2's assignment.  However, I have another pilgrim-y treat for you:

http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/images/0/0e/Bach-suscepit.pdf

If you don't know the Bach Magnificat already, I recommend that you stop whatever you might be doing and go listen to it right, RIGHT now.  I like the John Eliot Gardner recording (though his tempo on this movement is soooooo sloooooow and his "Omnes generationes" might singe your eyebrows if you stand too close to the speakers....though it's really fun at that tempo!).  Anyhow, this piece provides plenty of fodder for sight-singing and key analysis fun.  It's not terribly straightforward, to be honest, and you'll probably find yourself moving within some odd key relationships.  Definitely take the time to listen to at least this movement, as it does all sound beautiful and make sense at the end of the day.  Now, how does this relate to the pilgrim theme?  Well, check out that oboe line.  Compare it to the soprano solos in the link listed for the rising 3's.  Any correlation?  Yup, this, too, is a tonus peregrinus sighting....isn't that neat?

All right, my little pilgrims...good luck to you, and I'll be back in the blogosphere in two weeks!  Cheers, and wish me luck!