FOURTH SESSION
27/01/2022
Last Thursday 27th January we held the first session of our project Beyond Music of this year 2022, as always guided by the physiotherapist and stage director Carles Expósito (Fisio Taddeo). On this occasion, our main objective was to observe the corporal expression of our group and experiment with it.
Sometimes, in the search for musical cohesion, tuning and other technical parameters associated with the sound product, working on the visual aspects of the group is left in the background. But these aspects are not of minor importance; in fact, they are increasingly relevant in a world that is accelerating at a fast pace and in which the visual element is becoming more and more important. In our performance of Joseph Haydn's Quartet in F minor, Carles noticed that the gestures of the soprano, the melodic voice, were different from those of the tenor, baritone and alto, who accompany for most of the first movement. This observation led us to the first exercise of the day: the melody had to stop playing, but without stopping gesturing. As a result, we began to pay more attention to the gestures of our colleagues, to imbue the accompaniment with the tension that the melody adds to it, but without it.
From Haydn we moved on to Piazzolla and his History of Tango, a work full of contrasting passions that allowed us to experiment with the character of each voice. It is important to ask ourselves sometimes: what does my voice want to convey? Together with Carles, we briefly analysed the movements of each of us and discovered that, while some express themselves mainly through facial gesticulation, in others this characteristic is not so prominent in favour of body movement. And what does this movement look like? We realised the importance of knowing our movements: are they rigid, smooth, curved or sharp, do they start from a straight trunk position, is there mobility in the shoulders, are the legs positioned in a natural way? This body awareness is undoubtedly the first step towards internalising new movements and achieving a common dynamic that generates a harmonious visual product.
As a last series of exercises, we tried gesturing the lines of the other voices instead of our own voice, thus making movements unrelated to what we were playing. We also tried that only one of us played his part and the rest, without playing, had to gesture along with him. This helped us to listen much more attentively to the rest of the voices and to understand the gestures of our colleagues.
Undoubtedly, this work shows the need to listen to the movement in order to stop moving as 4 soloists and to achieve a unique gesture.
