Ensemble practicing

The Bulletproof Musician has an interesting post this week on his blog: “Rehearse to practice or practice to rehearse”.  It’s about being well prepared for ensemble practices. It really spoke to me, because so often I think of ensemble meetings as “practices” and go thinking I will learn my parts as I practice them with the ensemble.  I do go over my parts during the week.  But I’ve never spent nearly as much time learning my ensemble parts as I have on pieces I am preparing for lessons.

This post really suggests a better way!  If one goes to an ensemble practice with one’s parts fully prepared, then the ensemble “rehearsal” becomes a time when you can truly focus on playing with others, listening to the other parts, adjusting intonation so it fits with the other musicians.  You can work on dynamics, watch the conductor and follow him, watch and interact with the other players, really work on playing the pieces, not work on learning the parts.  I agree with everything that was said in this article, and I’m hoping to live up to those ideals in my preparation when ensemble begins for the fall next week.

Rehearse to practice or practice to rehearse

 

Play along CD’s

Being able to play an ensemble piece with others (or a solo piece with a pianist) can be very hard to prepare for. Practice alone at home can cement the playing of ‘your’ part, but being able to play with the other parts, play in time and in tune, comes usually with those all too infrequent group practices. I’m learning pieces for both a string ensemble performance and for work in a larger cello group (as well as some cello/piano pieces). And there are no CD’s available for purchase for the things I’m working on. I decided to use Finale to make synthesized sound tracks of both piano accompaniments for the cello/piano pieces (which are all public domain) and the cello choir pieces.

Although the typing is tedious and time consuming, the resulting sound files (I’ve made .wav files for the CD’s) are pretty good, and because I can adjust the tempo, I end up with a very usable practice CD. I’ve used them over the past week, and they really help my practice. I would post a midi file here as an example, but blogger doesn’t allow uploading of audio files (at least as far as I can see). Too bad!

One added benefit of doing something like this is that each time I type in a new file, I learn how to do something new in the Finale program. I now know how to do things like add tied notes (rather than just slurs), insert various expressions, insert first and second endings, and just this week I discovered how to change the initial tempo indication. Finale is such a complicated program, that you don’t discover how to do many things until you end up needing to do something specific. A free limited version of Finale is available to anyone who wants to try using the program.
http://www.finalemusic.com/