This tip has to do with expanding your "musical vocabulary," learning more styles of music, and how players of different areas play, and it comes from Jonathan Boen. What you do is you take a piece you're working on and find about 3 or 4 different professional recordings of this piece. You then pick the same number of colored pencils and have one color for each artist. One at a time you'll go through and mark all the crescendos and decrescendos, accents, breathes, and all these nuances in a copy of the music.
- I started with Mozart's Concerto No. 1 in D Major and I was fortunate to already own a Dennis Brain recording of this work on my computer. I noticed how nothing was too powerful and most phrases ended with a decrescendo, typical Mozart stuff. Then I also realized how short he was getting some of his eighth notes so this was one option for me to experiment with. Next I went to YouTube to find some more recordings and I started with Radek Baborak since he is known for a rounder sound and overall much different than Brain. This proved to be true, and I noticed overall a much broader sound throughout the Concerto and many differences in articulations throughout the piece. Then I repeated this process with Micheal Thompson and Barry Tuckwell and found many more interesting ways of how to play Mozart's 1st.
So what does this all mean? It means that now if I didn't know the Mozart style of playing too well before this, I now have a much better idea of how this kind of piece should sound, because you wouldn't would want to play Mozart like Mahler, or vice versa. Also, since the Mozart Concertos, and many other works, are done so often you have to find ways to make them interesting and make them your own, and analyzing what others have done before you may give you great insight on where to start your journey into a piece of music.
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