In the last couple of days building up to the concert, I worked on refining the concert pieces and added musicality to them. For “Of Glorious Plumage,” I began by focusing on 23-27 for the musicality aspect. Here, the mood shifts and the contrast needed to be brought out, beginning with the crescendo at measure 23. I decided that the best way to add this contrast would be to get even quieter in as the notes go down in the measures before so that this pp to mf crescendo appears even more significant. At the same time, I worked on balancing the mf just high enough to where I could still make an observable crescendo to a fortissimo by measure 27. For refining the piece, I looked at measures 43-54. While the rhythm was just a simple pattern of repeat sixteenths, the simple nature of it made perfection paramount. Holding any note for too long makes the whole part seem shaky. To begin, I worked on open strings making my string crossing slow and getting used to the feeling of it. Then, I worked my way up to a faster tempo, keeping the constant rhythm. When I then added the notes, the piece sounded much more cohesive than originally, as I had a better feel for what even spacing should feel like when crossing strings at the tip of the bow.
For the first movement of the Rutter Suite, my primary focus was measures 152 -170. While I knew most of the notes, I would still fumble around with some of them and misplace certain notes. I began by slowing it down, playing one note at a time. I realized that I actually had a different idea of what it sounded like at the beginning because the fingering pattern wasn’t what I thought it was. I then practiced it at faster and faster speeds, and fixed I-J by changing the shifting I was doing. For the second movement, my only major focus was on musicality from the beginning to B. Being the start of a movement that so heavily emphasizes musicality, this part needed more interpretation, which I achieved by adding in decrescendos and changing bow lengths. Lastly, I looked at letter C in movement 4 for intonation. The second measure of the section had odd accidentals that I couldn’t just use my ear to figure out. I improved the intonation by comparing each note of the measure to lower octave equivalents, so that I could actually understand how it was supposed to sound.
For the first movement of the Rutter Suite, my primary focus was measures 152 -170. While I knew most of the notes, I would still fumble around with some of them and misplace certain notes. I began by slowing it down, playing one note at a time. I realized that I actually had a different idea of what it sounded like at the beginning because the fingering pattern wasn’t what I thought it was. I then practiced it at faster and faster speeds, and fixed I-J by changing the shifting I was doing. For the second movement, my only major focus was on musicality from the beginning to B. Being the start of a movement that so heavily emphasizes musicality, this part needed more interpretation, which I achieved by adding in decrescendos and changing bow lengths. Lastly, I looked at letter C in movement 4 for intonation. The second measure of the section had odd accidentals that I couldn’t just use my ear to figure out. I improved the intonation by comparing each note of the measure to lower octave equivalents, so that I could actually understand how it was supposed to sound.