Practicing hearing voices simultaneously
This is a post about improvising - I am wondering if anyone can help with this. I am a jazz pianist and I have been working a lot on pitching things internally and can pretty accurately hear the notes of a melodic line when i hear it. I also seem to be able to hear melodys internally and translate them onto the instrument. I can also hear (both internally and from recordings) a "sense" of the harmony and relate the melody to it (e.g. I can hear that the harmony is IV V I /whatever and generally the chord types). However I am having a problem with improvising and hearing more than one voice simultaneously internally and translating it to the instrument. I have practiced a lot of pitching melodies by singing, but how can you practice hearing more than one voice when you can only sing one at a time??!! I have practiced a lot of contrapuntal music like bach as i am told this is good for this, but still when I am improvising i find it impossible to hear in my head more than one voice. Perhaps my question is more about just hearing the multiple voices at the same time rather than figuring out what all the notes are. It's more a problem of not being able to picture more than one part at once.
Does anyone have any suggestions for this?
My A Level students struggle with this same thing. We are currently looking at Jazz as part of the Year 13 syllabus and with a lot of the earlier pieces accurate scores are non existent. Their end goal is not the same as yours, as they are mainly rock/pop musicians, and they are trying to pick apaprt the vrious lines in pieces such as Livery Stable Blues. Coming at this from a rock.pop background their ears are less well tuned to differences in timbre/range between say the trombone and cornet, especially on recording where the quality is not always great.
I agree with Mike, in that to get inside the music and thus each line you need to play them. Even my guitarists get value from playing the seperate lines on piano as this give a much more immediate and visual representation of the movement and contour of each line. We start by looking at the top and bottom lines which are the most easily discerned and then through lots and lots of practice they become more able to pick out the inner voices.
We have been doing this for a while now, I often like to pose them some quite challenging tasks and last year they spent an entire lesson working out the harmony of the opening chord of The Betles' "Hard Day's Night", with some really valuable learning.
I'm a newbie student and this is a nice and interesting topic, I do had the same situation with sam but I'm just a plain pianist. Even though that I am not singing like sam, I can say that it was that hard to find the harmony inside especially when your starting to mixed the two sounds.
having two sounds at the same time is kinda hard, for for one that was really inspied, he can whatever it will.
Hi Sam, a VERY interesting post. I'll be interested to see what others might have to say about this.
It's a tricky question - principally because the situation you describe is something that few musicians will have to deal with. most players only need to pay/think about a single line at a time as that is all that is possible on their instrument. Exceptions would be conductors, guitarists and of course pianists.
As for improving this/practice. hmm. I'm wondering if the lines you are trying to think of are actually simultaneous. Is it not the case that our (the listeners) attention switches between 2 lines? These line may well be sounding at the same time and we may be aurally receptive to them both but focus and attention will switch, albeit very quickly, between the 2.Take Bach as an example. The lines in his fugues for example are separate entities. I would imagine that in his mind they were conceived as individual lines and not polyphony.
Maybe the practice/focus you need to work on is quickly creating seperate lines, playing them in parallel and then switching attention between the two. Don't know - just some musings out loud at this stage. I'll think on the points further and try to do some reading around.
Very interesting, thanks for raising the topic.
Enjoy your practice!
Mike Saville