So, I started a new piece this week — Bernhard Heiden’s “Solo for Alto Saxophone and Piano” — and I thought it might be interesting to chronicle my process as I learn the piece. I won’t go into all the minute-by-minute details, but aside from helping me to organize my preparation of the piece, I think it is valuable to see how other saxophonists go about learning new literature. As I go through this, I want to point out that this is my process, and far from the only way to go about learning a new piece. What my experience has taught me, however, is that it is important to have some sort of process, regardless of what that process is. Learning literature (or new skills, or etudes, or whatever) shouldn’t be a random process, but rather should be approached systematically. So, what is my approach….
Day One
For me, the first day of working on a new piece is THE most important day of the first week. I use the first day to really identify the things that I will need to focus on not only during the rest of the first week, but throughout the whole learning process. I start with the obvious: major structural sections, tempi, key signatures. I also look for anything that I need to do some research on (e.g., a strange, new term or new type of notation … pretty rare to run across these for me at this point, but every now and then, there’s a new foreign word to learn or some new, strange type of notation….) With that done, I look for specific skills or problems that I know I’ll need to work on in some way. Some of the key things I ran across in the Heiden:
Intervals
Many of the technical passages are fairly disjunct, with some reasonably large skips. A typical section:
I usually don’t have much difficulty with the leaps up … it’s the leaps down that can give me fits. Spots like this get turned into long tone exercises with the intent being to focus on embouchure and voicing so the intervals both speak clearly and are in tune.
Diminished scale vocabulary
Typical of most advanced saxophone literature, this is a fairly chromatic piece, and as I’m first starting it, there seems to be a fair amount of diminished scale vocabulary. Although the piece is far from being based strictly on diminished scales, no other specific scale vocabulary is immediately obvious to me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, I’m just not catching it on day one. Translation — good opportunity to review those diminished scales!
Articulation Patterns
There are several spots that make fairly extensive use of articulation patterns similar to this:
What I think is especially fun about these is the register and the dynamic marking. It could certainly be worse, but those first two E’s need to be crisp AND quiet — not the easiest thing to pull off. If I find I’m having problems with this, aside from isolating the sections, I’ll add some of the articulation patterns that aren’t as clean as I’d like into my scales.
Days 2-7
Depending on the overall difficulty of the piece, the remainder of the week on a new piece could be spent getting all the notes securely under my fingers so the piece can start to ‘gel’ (fairly easy pieces) to just focusing on a few of the most difficult sections and trying to gauge just how much time it’s going to take to learn the piece. This piece isn’t easy, but it isn’t horribly difficult either. My goal for the ‘Solo’ was to get the bulk of the passages to at least 75% of the performance tempo cleanly, and identify the sections that are most likely to cause problems. I came pretty close to the 75% of performance tempo goal.
So, now I’m on to week two. More to come….
