Disjunct Motion I
Allow me to begin with a word about terminology. I have long used the expression “disjunct motion” to refer to the relationship between one musical event and the next in the act of playing; this includes, but is not limited to, “non-legato.” The details of what I mean by disjunct motion are the main focus of this column; I will return to them at some length below. To avoid confusion and because it suggests an interesting thing to talk about, I want to acknowledge that the term “disjunct motion” is also sometimes used to mean something different—what I would call “motion by skip” (as opposed to “by step”), that is, melodic intervals that are larger than any kind of “step,” intervals where the two notes have other notes “in between.”
Skips and steps
Observe two Bach pedal lines, the first (Example 1) from the Prelude section of BWV 533, the second (Example 2) from the Fantasia section of BWV 542. In Example 1, the notes alternate skip and step, whereas the next group of sixteenth notes is all in motion by skip. However, as a musical/esthetic/artistic reality, they are the same melody, rewritten to create a difference in sonority, or perhaps in acoustics or registration, in effect, or something analogous to greater stereo separation.
Example 2 shows a pattern of eight notes descending by step, followed by a big upward skip. This happens three times in a row. What Bach was almost certainly getting at was the effect of a long descending scale with each of the upward leaps being somewhat concealed by acoustics, registration, and performance, so as to trick the listener into hearing an impossibly long descending scale, descending impossibly low. (This effect seems to have something in common with the phenomenon of breaks in mixtures, and also perhaps to be helped out by the breaks in the mixtures with which it is played.)
Sometimes the skip/step divide is taken to imply something about performance or execution, usually that stepwise motion should normally be played legato, and motion by skip should normally be detached. I doubt that anyone applies this slavishly or automatically, or would maintain that it should be an absolute rule rather than a guideline. I have always been skeptical of it even as a guideline. Articulation choices seem to be more about rhythm and harmonic direction than about melodic shape. Since non-stepwise intervals are more likely than stepwise intervals to form part of the same harmony, you could make the case that, all else being equal, they are more likely to work legato or even with noticeable overlap. (This also depends on registration and acoustics.) The point is that the relationship between melodic shape and articulation is fluid and changeable, very susceptible to being handled differently, with great success, by different players.
Of course on organ (manuals in particular) and harpsichord, some intervals are wide enough that their performance must be non-legato. This is, as far as any inherent link between “skip” and “non-legato” is concerned, a particular case that doesn’t imply anything about musical necessity in other cases. Interestingly, it will prove directly useful as part of the work on issues discussed below.
(Here’s another tangent. I did a bit of Internet searching to remind myself of what people were saying about certain aspects of melodic intervals. And I reminded myself that it is extremely easy to find someone saying in an overly simplified manner that such-and-such always should be done in a certain way—for example, that skips always ought to be detached. It is important to be aware that any student at any time may have unknowingly absorbed a too simple, too categorical, insufficiently nuanced way of looking at any aspect of what we do. This kind of thing has always happened, but it used to take a personal encounter with someone who seemed to be an “authority” combined with some inadequate communication. Often the “authority” didn’t want what he or she said to be taken too categorically, but the opportunity to explore nuance wasn’t there. It is just plain easier now for information to seem more solid than it is, or even to seem right when it is wrong. I write this as someone who is by no means anti-computer or anti-internet. I am continually astonished at the good that these technologies can do, and I use them all the time. But there are also pitfalls.)
Defining disjunct motion
For the purpose of this discussion, by disjunct motion I mean any playing situation in which a note is released not directly to another note, but to silence or space. This can be about articulation; any sort of detached playing is an example of disjunct motion, whether it is specified by the composer, a choice by the player, or physical necessity (very wide intervals or something to do with many notes in one hand). Disjunct motion is also found where there are notes followed by rests and at the ends of pieces, sections, or movements. Repeated notes, on organ and harpsichord but not on piano or necessarily on other instruments, also fall into this category, all but the last note of any string of repeated notes. There is disjunct motion that covers all of the prevailing sound, when there is only one note being played and it is released into silence, or when there are multiple notes being played and they are all released into silence, whether they are conceived of as a chord or as notes in different voices. There is also disjunct motion that occurs in one voice or one part of a texture, where the release into silence is conceptual, a release into the absence of a next note in that voice or that part of the texture, while sound continues elsewhere. Any release into silence is really a release into background sound, including the ambient sounds that we don’t think of as being relevant to our music, but most importantly including the sounds or reverberation created by acoustics.
Another way of looking at it is this: that disjunct motion occurs when notes are released to the feeling of not playing a next note, rather than to the feeling of playing a next note. That is, the feeling as distinct from the sound. This maps one-to-one onto the above way of describing it, I believe. But it gets at something important to the player. Every note that we ever play is going to be released, eventually, even the notes of this performance: http://www.aslsp.org/de/home.html. And the nature of the release of every note is important. That has to do with the placement in time of the conceptual moment of release, and also, in many cases, the timing of the release itself: how slowly or quickly the player carries out the act of releasing the note(s). But when the note is being released into silence, the stakes are different: maybe higher, since the actual release of a note that is being followed by another note is partially covered up. Or maybe not higher but just different: the release of one note and the initiation of the next note are part of a transaction, and the way that transaction is carried out is important (and can vary meaningfully). In any case, the experience to the player of releasing a note to “not playing” is quite different from the experience of releasing a note to “playing.” This difference is both physical and psychological. It doesn’t have to be physical. There is nothing about the absence of a next note that really, physically, dictates anything about the nature of a release. But it can feel and be different physically because of ways in which it is different psychologically. This difference is present regardless of whether the release is a result of an articulation decision or comes about because of the presence of rests or because a piece is over. It is the fact that releasing a note into silence feels different from moving into a next note that unites all of these situations.
Tension in releasing notes
When disjunct motion is a problem or an issue for a player—including when that player is our student—it is usually because that player has developed an unconscious tendency to approach the release of a note into silence with extra tension. This tension can occur right at the moment of release, or it can begin to build in anticipation. This tension can accumulate whenever it begins. When the disjunct motion arises from an articulation choice by the student (or given to the student by the teacher), tension will probably manifest itself in the release’s being both a bit early and a bit too quick. This is because of a sort of urgent desire to make sure that the articulation really happens. It can feel like “this is something I have to do, whereas up till now I have just been playing the notes as they’re written.”
When a note is released into the silence of rests that are part of a composition, the effect of this tension may well be the opposite, to make extra sure to hold notes long enough, “as written,” and thus to release some of the notes late. It can also lead to all such releases being too much the same, since they are all being measured and compared to a “correct” ideal. When the notes that we are talking about are released into the end of a piece, movement, or section, the result of this tension is (surprisingly often) to make the student manifestly quit listening or paying attention before releasing the note or chord, as if the impending end means that the prevailing sound doesn’t matter.
Problems in releasing notes
Not everyone experiences these issues, nor experiences them in the same way. As with other technical or mental performance issues, this only needs to be addressed as a problem when it is a problem. But I see many students who do one or more of the following: play a passage beautifully and with enviable relaxation, but then come to an articulation and make the release of that note with a nearly-whole-body gesture that breaks the rhythm and sounds awkward; hold a note or chord before a rest a bit too long into the time allotted to the rest and then release it by pushing down at the keys and rebounding off of them; look at me or even talk about how a piece or passage went before releasing the final note or chord. I don’t think that more experienced players are immune to this either: I myself am not, although an awareness of it has certainly led me to work on it and to avoid it most of the time. (I will confess that I am sometimes complicit in a student’s quitting mentally on the last note of a piece. I will nod, smile, point at something in the music, perhaps even talk, before the final note or chord has been released and the sound has died away. This is a significant mistake and sends the message to the student that everything that needs to be done is over and that the impending release doesn’t matter or is trivial to execute. I try not to do this, but do not always succeed. Writing a column about it should help!)
Next month I shall give several exercises and practice strategies for addressing these issues. I close here with one simple exercise, shown in Example 3, for noticing the difference in feel between releasing notes when the hand is moving on to another note and doing so when the hand is going into rest. Execute both of the following and notice how they feel.
This should be done lightly and not too fast, the first line basically legato, but without worrying too much about the exact articulation or other aspects of the musical shape. For some of us the feeling of the releases will be quite different, for others less so. This is a diagnostic tool or a way of beginning to engage with this issue. It can also be used when it seems to be a problem that needs to be worked on. I will take it from here next month. ν
Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
