EIGHTH SESSION
22/06/2022
After the unstoppable inertia of the end of the course, we returned to work on body awareness and group dynamics in a new session with Carles Expósito. This eighth session marked the end of the first stage of our project Beyond Music, which we will continue to develop in the future. Our results show the multiple benefits of the work carried out during this course 21/22 on parameters such as movement, listening or group cohesion. After this experience, we learned that different objectives than those which are normally set in the chamber music field are necessary. Aspects such as feeling comfortable playing in a group, taking care of our health as musicians and improving stage presence are not as irrelevant as they seem to show the curricula of most conservatories.
On this occasion we used the Scherzo from the piece Andante et Scherzo by Eugène Bozza to carry out the different activities. The first of them consisted of placing ourselves in the farthest points of the classroom without visual contact and "catching" the pianos that our classmates made. When one, suddenly, played with less volume, the two closest companions had to accompany him in this nuance and the fourth, the one farthest from the first, had to play louder. Listening was essential at this point, since we had to pay as much attention as possible to the rest of the voices and achieve a very high reaction speed.
Next, Carles proposed to us a game in which we formed two pairs and each one established a gestural password to indicate to the partner that they should play louder. If one of the other couple detected the signal, they had to indicate it, thus forcing the “caught” couple to play softer. After this exercise, which activated our attention on the group gestures, we tried to play the piece without any kind of expression or movement. If we detected a movement in a partner, we had to imitate it in an exaggerated way for a few bars.
To end the session, we played the piece walking around the classroom, in order to try to return to the naturalness and spontaneity of the beginning, without the high concentration that we needed in the previous activities and that, in a certain way, conditioned our interpretation. Now we felt more liberated, with a better internalization of the previous work on the movement. Here's a little snippet of the final result of the session!
Thank you, Carles, for taking our music beyond the borders that are often delimited by the lines of a staff. Our expression now has many more dimensions and the final product does not simply have a sound interest, since the visual impact is added to it. Breathing together, sharing the same movement, knowing how to communicate and interpret ideas... All this is necessary to achieve the harmony we seek. Without a doubt, this path helped us get a little closer to our goal of being a saxophone quartet and not four saxophonists playing together. See you soon!
