Oh yeah, Monk is 100% right. Keeping time is far more important than both intonation and feel. (And intonation is more important than feel.)
Young music students in the US are usually taught in a pre-conservatory style (analogous to how young students are taught in a pre-academic style). This leads to the mental prioritization of playing the correct notes, giving recitals once or twice per season, and following the movements of the ensemble leader. These are all terrible habits if you want a society where lots of people can play songs together and don't take music too seriously.
If you've ever been to a kid's recital and all the pieces sound awful, it's not because they can't play their instruments, it's because their teachers taught them the mental habit of stopping when they made a mistake, and then assigned them pieces at the upper limit of their competence. You must play through mistakes like they're not there, keep the rhythm with your foot and the melody line in your head. Also don't play the hardest stuff you just learned in recitals, play stuff you can do with your eyes closed while holding a conversation.
If you're a hobbyist musician, stop focusing on scales, theory, improvising, and correcting miniscule mistakes and start focusing on keeping perfect time and memorizing a whole shitload of songs. If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube and basically watch every single thing he has to say you'll make more progress on your sound in one year than you did in the previous ten.
Music is meant to be played together, and to play together you need to keep time.
> If you've ever been to a kid's recital and all the pieces sound awful, it's not because they can't play their instruments, it's because their teachers taught them the mental habit of stopping when they made a mistake
Professionally I’m a collaborative pianist. My job is accompanying pre-college instrumental students in auditions, recitals, master classes. Trust me, there’s a near infinite variety of ways to sound awful, only some of which relate to the mode of practice you describe. (Stopping on mistakes is not an inherently bad thing, but it does require that you consciously reintegrate it, which most students do not do.)
I do agree with the observation that some of these problems relate to playing in isolation. This is true of the vast majority of piano students, most of whom will never in the course of their training play in chamber music settings, or even accompany others. This is a very neglected area of piano pedagogy. It also relates to the great difficulty of most chamber works for piano. There’s practically nothing out there for piano trio (piano, vln, cello), quartet, quintet, etc that’s not a RCM grade 10++ difficulty. By the time students reach this level, the rhythmic/collaborative horse is out of the barn.
> This is a very neglected area of piano pedagogy. It also relates to the great difficulty of most chamber works for piano.
You are SO right. I really wish that modern composers would come up with a bunch of chamber stuff that actually sounds good (i.e. like real baroque/classical/romantic music) but isn't incredibly difficult. I have never once played in a chamber ensemble as a pianist, and I was up to about the level of the easier Beethoven sonatas by the time I "quit" and started focusing on guitar. All of my favorite chamber piano pieces (Mendelssohn piano trios, Schubert Trout Quintet, Brandenburgs, etc.) would require 2-5 years of intense daily practice to even play a movement at speed with mistakes.
> Trust me, there’s a near infinite variety of ways to sound awful
Yeah, yeah, okay, fair enough. But I'd bet that the biggest improvement most of them could make right off the bat would be keeping time properly. (Maybe not if you're on a wind instrument and can only honk.)
Yeah, I was astounded by how quickly my singing improved when I started practicing with a metronome. Keeping time seems to me the easiest thing to improve if you focus on it (but that's just my subjective opinion). Once you can keep good time, the rhythm of the song imposes restrictions on you that actually help you figure out how to physically perform the movements demanded by the music and then subsequently groove them so that you can focus on all the other elements of making music.
My kids both went through music lessons, and I believe a lot of this "culture" is brought by hyper competitive parents. It's not inherent to the process. The Suzuki method (which is the dominant variant in the US today) starts kids playing by ear, and involves them in as much group playing as possible. You can't get in the habit of stopping, if nobody else stops.
Imposed on top of this is a culture of treating it like a contest. This is an easy trap to fall into, because the repertoire is organized by difficulty. But I quickly noticed that the most laid back parents were the ones who were performing musicians themselves. I'm a performing jazz musician so my kids have heard me play plenty of clams on the bandstand without stopping. ;-)
The parents have to get out of the habit of stopping their kids when they make a mistake. I read a comment from a famous teacher, that he doesn't stop his students when they make mistakes, because it kills their flow. Unless the mistake is repetitive. Isolated mistakes are not teachable, repetitive ones are.
My daughter's teacher had a really nice thing, an open recital at his house every Friday evening. Because it was so frequent, kids could just show up and play whatever they were working on.
There are alternatives to traditional classical teaching. In addition to their classical lessons, my family has gotten into fiddling. That's a totally different vibe. We went to a fiddle jam, and recognized one of the fiddlers from the previous night's symphony concert.
Now for my own opinionated opinions, not necessarily contrary to yours: 1) At least in classical and jazz, a player has to get over the hump and learn to play in tune at some point. In any event, intonation problems typically reveal technique problems. 2) "Feel" is not orthogonal to technique. Wherever the note belongs, your brain and body working together have to put it there. And "feel" is anything but absent from classical music -- you just have to listen harder for it because it's more subtle. You can hear it when it's too rigid.
I was just watching Rick Beato's interview with Billy Corgan and one of the things they dwelled on was that while the early band had intonation and feel sorted out, they were a mess with keeping time (i.e. "playing to a tick") and it caused a number of interesting problems for them as their popularity exploded and the production level of their albums increases. They all eventually had to learn to play correctly because it enabled them to bring in other musicians, and layer in other sounds more reliably. It also more or less became a requirement in the post "pro-tools" world that they transitioned into.
I agree with you on the vast majority of this, but I think it's a bridge too far to put intonation above feel unconditionally.
You are correct that keeping time (what an engineer would call "maintaining a common time base between transmitter and receiver") is necessary to play together with other musicians. But what musicians would call "feel" is what an engineer would call "phase modulation" -- whether a note is ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat; and by how much. Especially in Black American music (jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and a bunch of pop that's been influenced by those styles), there is a lot of crucial information there beyond what is conveyed in the "gridded" rhythms that are conveyed in Western musical notation. If you are not aware of this, you will still have problems playing with other musicians. From personal experience, it is anxiety-inducing to play with musicians who are ignorant of their beat placement and as a consequence have what an engineer would call "jitter" -- their timekeeping is correct on average, but on each given beat, they might be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind. You can play with a metronome for ages and never realize you're doing this wrong, as you're not consistently rushing or dragging, you're just inconsistent.
> whether a note is ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat; and by how much. Especially in Black American music (jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and a bunch of pop that's been influenced by those styles), there is a lot of crucial information there beyond what is conveyed in the "gridded" rhythms that are conveyed in Western musical notation.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I actually lump this in my head under "rhythm" rather than "feel". One of the reasons that black musicians tend to have on-average better <"feel" for you, "rhythm" for me> is that they often have spent a lot of time physically dancing or playing live gigs at church/with their adult friends, and had to learn how to place notes just by hearing other people do it. This is a more effective method for training feel/rhythm than showing someone note durations on a sheet of music and telling them to figure it out themselves.
I think the way to correct the bad "feel" habits you're talking about is to play a lot with talented, on-beat musicians who will correct your playing in rehearsal. They will also assign you parts that you can handle that serve the sound of the band, rather than serving the intentions of the composer per the sheet music. Another issue that young western musicians have is that they most often play with other players at about their skill level, which stops them from being able to quickly learn good habits from better musicians.
There's a video up of Barry Harris giving a class around feeling the and that this reminded me of. Not sure why you're being down-voted, because feel is super important to practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uMNrujMdJU
You must play through mistakes like they're not there, keep the rhythm with your foot and the melody line in your head. Also don't play the hardest stuff you just learned in recitals, play stuff you can do with your eyes closed while holding a conversation.
Brilliant life advice in general, keep your head in the game, carry on and maintain the flow.
OMG, yes. Any conductor will tell you they'd much rather you play or sing the wrong note in time than the right note with the wrong rhythm
I was at a recital of adult piano students. "Kill me now" was my reaction when one of the students had that habit of stopping and playing every note "right" before continuing.
I grew up with the same habit, and sometimes could actually see the wincing in the audience during recitals. It was so disheartening. Last year I started deliberately playing incorrect notes during practicing, ceasing to play, and getting back on the melody line without losing the beat. It's improved my live playing a great deal.
Cannot +1 this enough. I learned so much more when I took lessons from an improvisational jazz bass teacher who focused on
(1) Learning as many songs and standards as is reasonable each week
(2) Focusing on improvising along to my teacher playing the melody on piano. He wouldn't stop unless I asked, so I needed to keep time with him. If I made a mistake, and lost my place, he would keep playing and I'd listen to where he was and jump back in when I found it again
I've also been studying with a jazz bass player (I'm on piano) and from the beginning he always emphasized just getting back into the tune. He never interrupts me.
The other big one is singing the lyrics to every song I'm learning, which I really didn't like at first. He told me the story of Ahmad Jamal recalling a time playing with the sax player Ben Webster when Ben just stopped playing a tune: "Why'd you stop Ben?" "I forgot the lyrics!".
My son is learning the piano and I cannot seem to teach him rhythm. Aside from the habit of stopping at every error (which bugs me to no end), he can hear a song once or twice and pick out the correct notes, but rhythm is still a mystery to him.
I learned rhythm so long ago (it was a core part of my elementary school music class before I ever started learning an instrument on my own) that I have no clue how to help him.
Not sure how old your son is, but this is what I'm doing with my 5 year old with the same issue. Find some good old-school funk from the late '70s / early '80s with a four-on-the-floor type of drum beat. Zapp, Cameo, Gap Band, or something like that. Get your son to count along "1-2-3-4" with each of the beats and clap his hands on "2" and "4". Once he's reliable at doing that when you don't start it for him, then get him to stomp his foot on "1" and "3", or just "1". Once he's got that down, there are all sorts of things you can do. He can copy rhythms you clap, or if he's good with notation, he can practice writing down a rhythm you clap.
Alternatively, you could always get him drum lessons. This is the meat and potatoes of what a good drum teacher would cover.
I play professionally and still use the metronome every single day. I tell students if I can, they can too. Some may see it as a crutch that prevents one from developing an internal pulse. I disagree; but maybe it’s a fake it ‘til you make it circumstance.
If you set the metronome to accent the downbeat, it is difficult to allow yourself the luxury of stopping and restarting on errors.
The most frequent issue though is starting the learning process faster than you can consciously process the music. When a student asks me about the correct tempo, my answer is always the same: it’s the tempo of perfection. If you play a piece no faster than you can play it perfectly, most things take care of themselves.
I believed in this as well for many years, but I've taken some lessons with famous bluegrass guitarists and all three of them said that you can't really play fast (which in bluegrass is "blistering") unless your body has a feeling for what it's like to be moving quickly at speed without tensing up. All three recommended occasionally taking a swing a tempo that was too fast just to get the feel there.
I've ended up on the following practicing diet, all to metronome:
CYCLE THROUGH:
- 1 rep Slow, No Mistakes (you can think really deliberately about what comes next)
- 1 rep Medium, 1 Mistake Max (you're using mostly muscle memory)
- 1 rep Fast, 3-5 Mistakes Max (focusing on how your body feels moving this quickly without tensing)
Then at the end of the practice session I'll take one or two (or admittedly five or six) inappropriately fast just for fun. I've been informed that this is possibly undoing some of the work I did in the practice session, but I'm playing music to enjoy myself, not to get as good as possible as quickly as possible.
Also I'd have them try setting the metronome to half speed so it counts the 2 and the 4. It forces you to internally feel the downbeat. Plus it's nice to switch things up during your practice session.
Half. For instance, if the tune is at 100, set the metronome at 50. And that’s your two and four. The one and the three are in the silence/your body. It ends up at the same tempo.
If you’ve done all the standard stuff, clapping out beats, playing drums, etc and it’s not clicking. The best tool I’ve ever found is dance. Try to get him to learn how to move his body in time to music. Doesn’t matter what he’s doing or what kind of dance. Rhythm is something you feel.
It really depends what his temperament is like. If he's like I was when I was young and is really stubborn, resistant to practicing stuff that matters in favor of stuff that's fun, and doesn't listen to your advice, then you'll probably need to find a local talented adult musician that he latches onto and hero-worships to teach him rhythm. I don't know what they'd do so I can't predict anything there.
If he listens to you really well and wants to collaborate:
1) You can play a lot of rhythm games all the time. Here are a few starter videos with source material to improvise rhythm games off of:
As a game for when you're waiting around with him in line or in the car or whatever, I also recommend challenging him to try to keep time differently with different limbs--can he tap quarters with left foot, eighths with left hand, halfs with his right foot, and the melody with his right hand? Can he cycle these responsibilities randomly on his limbs?
You can also play songs and challenge him to identify the time signature and count along to it, or sing the songs and clap along at the same time.
2) Listen to a lot of music together, and dance/snap/tap/head nod to the music. Really rhythmic music is good in this case--Irish, Bluegrass, Gospel, R&B, and Motown are typically the most exciting and danceable.
3) Play "call and response" improv games. Sit at the piano with him, play a jazz backing track, and play and sing him simple rhythmic phrases to play back by ear alone. "Quarter Quarter Quarter Dotted-eigth-sixteenth!" etc.
4) Get him drum lessons.
5) If he's totally rhythmically deficient, let him have piano as just a fun random hobby and teach him to fight instead ;)
The most important thing to remember is that a good sense of rhythm can take 5-10 years to really develop. It's more important to attack the same thing every day until it's really mastered than it is to press forward for unearned progress.
Play with him together. Ask him to play a very easy bass line while you are playing / improvising a simple melody, and then change. Do no stop when he stops. Keep the time rigorously and request that from him. My teachers lesson always starts with such a simple improvisation together. It is fun and he will learn a lot.
As a music student at a conservatory, I believe this is true in that setting as well! (Though I would say feel is more important than intonation, as long as a baseline level of intonation is in place, and of course ideally you have both)
It's of course my own interpretation of what's important about music, but I've found that an arrangement sounds better if everyone's in tune and playing robotically than if everyone's out of tune and playing with a lot of passion. You kind of said it with "as long as a baseline level of intonation is in place"; if someone's playing way out of tune but with a lot of feel and passion... you get folk punk and "gifted kid" middle school folk ensembles.
I think the article takes the "discrimination is important" quote as cryptic and philosophical when it has a very real meaning. Compare it to an interview with the great Dizzy Gillespie:
> Interviewer: What’s it take to make a great trumpet player?
> Dizzy Gillespie: (long pause) Well, the first thing is to be a master shit detector. Detect what is valid and what is not.
And to the well-known Feynman quote:
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
What Monk is getting at is that when you're woodshedding (practicing by yourself) and trying to build up your playing and improvisation, you have to be your own critic a lot of the time. Are you really playing something hip, or are you playing something corny? Are you swinging? Are you making the chord changes? Are your time and intonation as good as you think? Amongst all the other musicians you hear, live and recorded, are you selecting the influences that are really going to build your playing in the way you want? If you're coming up with ideas on your own, are they really fresh and valid, or are they just the first thing that came to your mind?
Right, and it also connects to what he wrote about not playing all those fancy notes, and about how what one doesn't play is important. An undiscriminating musician plays everything that comes to mind. A discriminating musician chooses what notes to play.
>Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
As a conductor and director in my experience this is the hardest one for many musicians to learn, and it even goes a bit against the “keep the time is #1“ rule.
As accompaniment, harmony, etc you need to understand who the lead is at any given moment and follow it. If you just keep the time robotically and don’t pay any attention you will destroy any possible magic. If you are homophonic harmony but you are out of time with the lead, it won’t be tight and may be bad (unless a loosely hinged style is what you want). The lead may be taking micro beats of time here and there with the line and you’ll want to follow this.
Even this has nuance though. Sometimes the lead might be taking time (or rushing time) and actually expect you to be keeping time, to stay in the pocket, to give him a landing zone to anchor back to once he’s decided he wants to come back in time on a cadence or a downbeat or something. And you need to know that too, as the lead goes in and out of the pocket what is his intention there?
In this way it’s beautiful how the really best music doesn’t require only experienced musicians, or even musicians experienced with each other (understand each others styles, tastes and intentions) but also requires a level of trust between them to be able to leverage those experiences in a special way. And that could be generalized to other areas of work and life
I don't think I ever met a conductor who would openly disapprove of foot tapping unless it were loud or maybe someone sat on the very end directly in front of the audience and did it in a very distracting way. The alternative of musicians keeping poor time would be far worse.
it's considered very bad form, especially in orchestra's , _especially_ by the conductor because it means 1. you're not following them 2. it's very distracting for the audience/other members of the band 3. it's a 'beginner' tendency, shows lack of self-control.
I've played in a few orchestras in my life and never heard that opinion (other than the part I previously mentioned, when it becomes a distraction to the audience), but I suppose some conductors may feel differently.
Perhaps a different culture between string players and brass players? Or maybe just different parts of the world? Eastern US here. I play trumpet and from the earliest years was heavily encouraged by all band directors and conductors to tap my foot at all times. No conductor ever corrected the practice later or pointed it out as an error, but I often heard the advice repeated for everyone to do it. Maybe they viewed it as a necessary evil though, like in Mr Holland's opus when when he is beating the tempo into the guy's head with a mallet while he wears a football helmet.
"Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!"
Of all these thoughts, this is the one I have found most applicable, and applicable to many areas of my life:
a lot of what I do as an artist is not for a general audience, but for the people I am working with directly.
When I write songs or come up with a set list, I focus a great deal on what the other musicians will want to do.
The same is the case with my other projects: what kind of projects can I do that are going to attract the kind of talented people with whom I want to work?
I love jazz music. I've spent two years learning Jazz tunes and some theory after 20 years focusing on rock and other genres. Something I've realized is that everything was already done in Jazz. Anything you can find in modern music that you think sounds innovative was probably already done in Jazz before the 70s. These guys were really pushing the limits of music. It's sad so many of the greats died so young because of drugs and other health issues.
Jazz pushed the limits of what could be done by human performers improvising live on traditional instruments. There's still plenty of novelty left to find if you relax those constraints. Even back then, people were pushing beyond them, e.g. Conlon Nancarrow wrote piano music at the same time as Thelonious Monk, some of it inspired by jazz, but it sounds completely different because he used a machine to play things beyond human ability.
Now we have computers and digital audio workstation software, the possibilities are still greater.
There's a quotation, which I think may have been Monk, which I've been trying to track down the exact source. It's along the lines of "All I want is a simple melody, and I gotta go through all the bullshit again."
Ring any bells? I had someone tell me that I was completely high and it was Ellison, not Monk, but I cannot confirm.
I dont know for sure but it doesnt sound Monk—like to me. He wasnt the type to complain about music much. He was generally positive, collegiate, etc as here
which makes perfect sense to anyone who believes a band is there primarily for the benefit of those dancing to its music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk suggests Monk belonged to this confession: ... during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
Young music students in the US are usually taught in a pre-conservatory style (analogous to how young students are taught in a pre-academic style). This leads to the mental prioritization of playing the correct notes, giving recitals once or twice per season, and following the movements of the ensemble leader. These are all terrible habits if you want a society where lots of people can play songs together and don't take music too seriously.
If you've ever been to a kid's recital and all the pieces sound awful, it's not because they can't play their instruments, it's because their teachers taught them the mental habit of stopping when they made a mistake, and then assigned them pieces at the upper limit of their competence. You must play through mistakes like they're not there, keep the rhythm with your foot and the melody line in your head. Also don't play the hardest stuff you just learned in recitals, play stuff you can do with your eyes closed while holding a conversation.
If you're a hobbyist musician, stop focusing on scales, theory, improvising, and correcting miniscule mistakes and start focusing on keeping perfect time and memorizing a whole shitload of songs. If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube and basically watch every single thing he has to say you'll make more progress on your sound in one year than you did in the previous ten.
Music is meant to be played together, and to play together you need to keep time.