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Practical Magic: What goes into winning the Canadian Commission Round?

Posted by Christy Mackintosh
Friday, 3 September 2010

Consider the challenge of learning a piece of music that you’ve never heard before. The piece has never been performed, and never been recorded. Factor in that the piece you’re learning is not tonal like Bach, or Mozart, or Rachmaninoff. It’s a piece of new music, with constantly shifting time signatures and complex rhythmic patterns which make it extremely difficult to read. Not only that, but when it comes time to perform the piece, you’ll be playing it at an international competition, and the composer will be in the audience!

This was, of course, the case when the Miró Quartet sat down to learn Chan Ka Nin’s String Quartet No. 3 in preparation for the 1998 Banff competition. The Miró received the Piéce de Concert Prize for their performance before going on to win the finals. Eager to learn the secrets of their success, I was fortunate to sit in on a coaching session they gave a group of young string ensembles during their follow-up residency at The Banff Centre in 2001.

There, the quartet advised the students to put their instruments aside and learn to vocalize their parts separately before working on the piece as an ensemble. Forget the notes. Clap the rhythms first, then learn to speak them, incorporating tempo and expression as you go. Start with the most simple and basic concepts of the piece and work towards the more complex.

“It may sound and feel silly at first,” violist John Largess admitted to the young players, “but it will prevent you from practicing mistakes once you’re working on your instrument, and that saves time.”

After learning to speak the part by yourself, you can experience the process as a group. All this work, still, without picking up your instrument. The quartet demonstrated by “speaking” a piece of new music together as an ensemble. Then they asked the students to participate, dividing them up into parts and having them follow along.

“By speaking the rhythms and feeling the groove of the work without our instruments,” violinist Sandy Yamamoto explained, “we can really internalize and familiarize ourselves with the piece. This way, we are not overwhelmed with the difficulty of the piece.”

Great advice to contemplate as we eagerly anticipate today’s nine world-premiere performances of Ana Sokolovic’s Commedia dell’arte.

Listen to a podcast on the piece and the quartets’ preparation.

Our intrepid BISQC blogger, Christy Mackintosh, is a music lover and freelance writer who lives and works in Banff. She holds degrees in piano performance and English literature, is a contributor to Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly, has written features for The Globe and Mail, and is working on her first book. She recently participated in The Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program, where (it could happen to you!) she got a little too used to the buffet at Vistas. She looks forward to feasting of all kinds throughout the exciting week ahead.

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