SECOND SESSION
27/10/2021
This second session was structured around the first movement Andante composed by the French composer Eugène Bozza in 1957, again guided by the physiotherapist and stage director Carles Expósito. On this occasion, we used our saxophones at all times with the aim of focusing the work on one of the most important skills of the musician: listening. What role does the auditory factor play in the path towards abandoning our individuality as performers and achieving a union capable of forming a single instrument?
Not everything in music is sound; on most occasions, the visual factor has a huge importance and contributes, together with the other sensations, to the creation of a multi-sensory experience that the audience perceives as a unit. In chamber music, eye contact is very important to achieve technical precision, to express ideas or to convey a certain kind of energy. This is why sometimes the overuse of this sense results in a lack of listening.
In order to concentrate on the sense of hearing, Carles placed each of us in a corner of the classroom, facing the wall, blocking visual communication between us. In this situation, what resources do we have, for example, to articulate a note precisely together? This exercise led to a more conscious group breathing, with which we tried to express parameters such as tempo, character or dynamics. After a few minutes of work, we were able to achieve better precision and we were able to see that it is not necessary to depend so much on visual communication.
Sometimes each member of the group knows his musical line perfectly, but not the whole which all the voices together create. Aware of this common tendency, Carles proposed an exercise in which he individually told us when to stop playing, so that we could listen to the melody of our colleagues and make clear the importance of all the voices. However, even if we were not playing, we had to continue expressing our line through movement, which showed the importance of this extra sonorous factor in the performance.
Another of the benefits of attentive and conscious listening is the ability to adapt to the different roles that the members of the group must assume at any moment. In the following exercise, Carles proposed changing the usual hierarchy of this work, which is, adopting the dominant role when it does not correspond to you. The result translated into changes in movement, gestures and, above all, in sound, and even distorted the original conception of the music. He also proposed different arrangement changes of the saxophone quartet formation, as can be seen in the following image, with the aim of experiencing the sensations that these alterations provoke in us and in the musical result.
These experiments made us more aware of the role change that must take place in our ensemble and strengthened our ability to move from 'dominant' to 'dominated'. Finally, when we returned to playing the work as usual, we noticed a greater unity and a better fluidity in the exchange of the dominance role between us, due to more conscious listening.
