A very fine choral conductor that I had the pleasure to work with, Bob Simpson, exasperated by the choir dragging the tempo in a Palestrina Motet, said “music is not like Zen; we don’t live in the present, we live in the future”. With this thought provoking comment, he succeeded in getting us to look ahead, prepare for the next note and keep the music moving in a forward line.
How do we maintain a good line and forward motion in music while continuing to focus on the here-and-now of our sound, pitch and vibrato?
You may want to think of catching a moving train. A person who wants to jump on a missed train as its progressing out of the station at a rate of five miles-per-hour will need to move his body to that speed to come alongside the train and then propel himself on. Likewise, a flutist listening to the measures preceding a solo in an orchestra or in a chamber ensemble, will need to speed up her awareness so that she enters on time and keeps the same tempo of the music.
Another way to think of the constantly moving forward beat is to picture the actual movements of the conductor. In the seventeenth century, it was common for the orchestra leader to simply beat time with the use of a staff. This leads me to tragic story of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) who in his exuberant conducting of a Te Deum and probably in an effort to keep his orchestra moving forward with the beat, accidentally pierced his foot with his staff. The infection became gangrenous and cost Lully his life.
Although perhaps Lully did not die in vain, because it was ever after that conductors began the safer practice of using a smaller and less lethal baton and conducting in the air. As conductors improved their unique skills and technique a beat “pattern” developed, one that gave each beat a hierarchical rank. Beat one would always be down and the strongest. The upbeat would be up and precipitous, leading us inevitably back to one. The circular and poetic gyrations between these all-important beat positions would be left up to the individual conductors to polish and refine. For us as flutists, we can use the visual display of the conducting impetus to aid us in propelling the beat forward and “living” music in the future.
A by-product of the ability to look ahead and plan for the future is an improvement in our sight-reading skills. When sight-reading, we not only fall into the trap of focusing on the present note we are playing, but we invariably look backwards to the mistakes we may have made in the past. Ironically, our retreating eyes only serve as a reassurance that we did not falter in our sight-reading, and in so reassuring ourselves, we miss the upcoming passage!
