![]() ![]() Chopin, who was himself an avid opera-goer, believed his students would learn more about playing the piano from listening to singers than from anything else. In her words, the book “highlights Chopin's conception that fine singing should be the pianist's model. She went on to say that one of her inspirations in this teaching style was none other than Frederick Chopin, referring to a title by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger called Chopin as Pianist and Teacher, as seen through the eyes of his pupils. In a recent e-mail conversation, she said, “I can say from my own experience over many years of performing and teaching I have found singing to be very helpful, even essential, to good piano playing.” Jill Dawe, associate professor of piano at Augsburg College, has come to a similar conclusion. Singing the Ave Maria made me think about the phrasing in a different way, and might influence how I choose to interpret it the next time I am asked to play it.ĭr. It is because of this that singing melodies makes such an excellent tool for exploring phrasing and musicality. It is, of course, possible for a violinist to create the same effect: de-emphasizing the beats and creating longer phrase shapes in the melody, but the airflow issue with the voice seems to cause those crescendos and decrescendos more automatically. These changes in airflow cause natural crescendos and decrescendos, and a phrase shape is born. Instead, the airflow would be steady while passing through beats, but would increase or decrease slightly when finding different pitches. In comparison, a vocalist is always conscious of air flow, and emphasizing beats would be a waste of valuable breath. My conclusion is this: because a violinist must mechanically change bow directions throughout the melody (most often on beats), the beats tend to receive more emphasis to the ear. When singing, the natural inclination was to smooth over the beats, and instead emphasize changes in the melody’s contour. In the violin recording, I found myself placing slight emphasis on beats, and supporting the emphasis with vibrato. When I played the recordings back, I noticed the difference again. I tried to play and sing with expressiveness, but also allowed myself to do so in whatever way seemed natural to the instrument. ![]() I recorded myself playing the tune of the Ave Maria on violin, and then recorded myself singing the same tune. ![]() Since then I have followed up with an experiment. ![]() I was surprised by the result: I found that following her phrasing felt very different from the way I would have played it alone on violin. I agreed to try it, and did my best to follow her phrasing and breaths. The family had asked for Schubert’s Ave Maria during communion, and my friend asked me to double the melody alongside her for added color. When I was in college I played a wedding alongside a friend of mine who is an excellent soprano soloist. My curiosity about the natural musicality of singing was piqued long before I began taking voice lessons with Nicole. In this final issue, I would like to explore how good singing can help develop an instrumentalist’s musicality. Both of these areas have proved highly useful to me when working with young string players, and have informed my understanding of the foundations of musical playing. In the first two installments of our series on connections between singing and violin playing, vocalist Nicole Warner and I delved into the subjects of body awareness and breathing. We had a great time exploring the commonalities between playing the violin and singing. Nicole Notes: Several years ago I paired up with violinist and orchestra teacher Katie Gustafson to write several articles for String Notes, published by the Minnesota String and Orchestra Teachers Association (MNSOTA), which is the local chapter of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA). ![]()
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