Blog 4th entry 29 September 2019

This week has been very interesting in so many ways. I started off with my teaching work at Jubilee, then
went to Italy on Wednesday for some String Quartet playing. Both have the notion of groups. My work at
Jubilee consists of teaching individuals that I will see in groups afterwards or before. At that stage, we do
mention intonation, but not as much as when playing in a string quartet. The notion of intonation involves
stickers on the instrument for the beginners (in my case as a teacher), so the eyes more than the ears
sometimes. In a string quartet the intonation also involves the eyes as to playing together, yet involves the
ears in a more demanding way.

In these two cases (teaching groups and playing in a group), there is a very big similarity that I could notice
particularly this week as I have been doing both: the capacity or ability to adapt/adjust to the group’s
intonation. With the groups of children, when someone could not really play, he/she would try and
sometimes manage to mimic what his/her stand partner was doing. This is somehow the first step of
ensemble playing. What I have been doing in Italy for the second part of my week also consisted of adjusting
to what my colleagues were playing.

At this stage, I would almost want to include another threshold concept, which works in both circumstances:
ARTICULATION. Intonation is indeed a very big part of string playing, but to make music, you need
articulation. Right now, I am feeling once again rather confused regarding the term I would like to use for
my next threshold concept as articulation could also be rhythm. In literature or in particular poetry, we talk
about punctuation. Articulation in my sense could be the equivalent to punctuation in some ways, though
thinking about it, it could also be included in the punctuation. When playing a string instrument, we often
have to sing and find a way to copy what we sang so that we phrase it in a similar way.

Music becomes very much like a spoken language, and after watching some masterclasses given by Isaac
Stern (eg. “From Mao to Mozart”, documentary about his tour in China in 1979), we understand very well
the similarities between speech (even singing) and playing music in general. Music can be a reflection of the
language that the composer speaks (in the Western Classical Music) and can go beyond words. Once again,
this is just a personal statement based on my own upbringing and this time without many references...