Resonance and intonation, connecting the ear to the body and teaching this all to the nervous system

I had a bit of an exciting discovery lately: that one doesn’t need much more pressure than what we use for harmonics to play a fingered note! I’ll say it again. I can’t believe how little pressure it takes to actually play a note. And how much better it sounds to be light.

In fact, when you find the sweet spot of just-right pressure (or weight, rather, as it really isn’t much), the note rings like crazy and it helps to guide and clarify one’s sense of intonation as well. You can actually physically FEEL the string vibrate under the finger this way, which I can’t say I’d ever been aware of before.

So I got on a scale kick to explore this. I’ve written about how I like to use the arpeggio as an anchor for the ear to build the scale around, to develop a kind of intonation that’s relational and contextual: one that’s based on a sense of tonality and harmony. So that besides the intervals being relational to each other, all the notes in the scale are relational to the core of the chord tones of do, mi, so, do; relational to the key.

So here’s a few things that I feel like are of note. Many people try to match their fingered notes to the pitches of open strings, but I think it adds a whole other layer to it if you try to get out of your pre-conceived notion of what you think is “in tune”, and really try to match the timbre and the ring instead. Almost simply to imitate rather than to match. It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but re-framing that intention changes the entire experience. Let that expand your idea of what good intonation means. Go for a bell-like sound with every note (and enjoy it!). As with everything else, try to find more of a whole-body experience - how you physically approach the note, how you leave the sound, how you physically feel like you’re traversing the distances of the intervals - it all adds dimensions to what “good pitch” is.

Matching of the harmonics has been a revelation for me. I would repeat the same-pitch fingered note after playing its harmonic equivalent. But instead of just, again, matching the pitch, I’d try to bring the entire visceral experience of lightness both in sound and feeling to it. And I feel like doing things like this has not only added a whole palette of colors to my instrument, it’s also brought a lightness and pitch confidence to everything else that I play.

I am beginning to think that there’s possibly a sweet spot between L hand finger weight, bow speed and/or bow weight, for every single note. That sweet spot-the rightness depends also on which note you came from and where you’re going from there. So what’s right for the moment is fluid, and I feel like practicing like this helps me connect my inner ear and my body to create that sound. It helps one learn (in a way subconsciously) all the possibilities of sound dimensions and colors and reacting to what one can’t name. It’s like instructing the nervous system what possibilities there are, so that it can take over to react when we actually play a piece of music. So this practice is working on gaining that freedom to feel, to respond spontaneously, rather than re-hashing an exact way to play everything identically every time. (What’s the point of that??)

This work has also helped me to not get as stuck in my practice. Especially when zoomed in with such detail, outside of the context of an actual piece of music, it usually sounds more flawed than you’d like. But especially because this work does center a lot on intonation, and intonation is contextual, so it really doesn’t make sense at all to get too stuck on a note. I’d notice that some notes are not ringing quite as resonantly as I’d like them to be, but I’d just move on. I’m sure the lightness of the harmonics help me with that. And I’ve found that everything does go better then when you do zoom out, in a way that feels really good, pleasurable. Because it’s been worked through from a deep, and more sensing, instead of thinking, place.

This kind of deep work that combines all the senses: the sensual (people don’t often talk about this, but the sensual element in how we touch an instrument is such a big part of playing and its pleasures), the listening, and the feeling - really heightens one’s awareness of how we play and how we move and how we feel. It’s all a part of what makes an instrument feel like an extension of a body, which is what we want. I feel that sometimes professional players get so pressured to learn pieces and learn our “notes” for jobs and gigs that practicing can become detached, disconnected. But even just brief re-visits of really deep, slow, simple work like this can make everything else not just easier. It also furthers our joy and pleasure in what we do, and maintains our relationship to music (not the job, just music), and to our instruments. For better or worse, these are two of the most important relationships in our lives.

For the corresponding video, please visit https://www.instagram.com/p/CYu9196p4IQ/