FIRST SESSION
08/10/2021
Last Friday 8th October we launched a new project willing to explore new dimensions in chamber music, guided by the physiotherapist and stage director Carles Expósito.
In this blog we will show the work of each session so that you can follow our evolution and its results.
Are we a saxophone quartet or four saxophonists playing together? From this reflection is born the main objective of this first session: to connect. To breathe together and in the same way, to know how to communicate what you want to your colleagues, to create a joint movement...We need to be in perfect harmony to form, the four of us together, a single instrument.
To achieve this objective, we started with an exercise that consisted of guiding the movement of your partner by establishing a light contact on a point of their body using only one finger. The guided person, with closed eyes, tried to intuit and follow the movements of their guide, while the guide tried to find a way to make him/her understand what he/she wanted him/her to do. In a few minutes we began to understand each other better, to almost feel that we were thinking in the same way and making the same movements.
Then we adapted this exercise to focus on our breathing. The guide now had the task of making his partner understand, as in the previous exercise, where he wanted him to focus his breathing. Now the movement was much more subtle, which led us, unconsciously, to match the rhythm of inhalations and exhalations in order to understand our partner.
As the last activity of the session, Carles proposed that we put the palms of our hands together, first very close but without touching, and then touching each other minimally, in order to adopt the roles of guide and guided in order to experience the connection between us.
Just as we seek to be a quartet and not four soloists playing together, we do not seek to be a conductor and three musicians. Knowing how to adopt both roles in order to adapt to different musical contexts is essential to break with the hierarchy that often exists in chamber music ensembles.
