hi my name is Joseph Conyers and you're about to watch a
preview of my course orchestra chops volume 2.
Mozart 40 is probably the most athletic of all the excerpts in this course not because of what
the left hand is doing like in the Heldenleben that the going up and down the fingerboard
the left hand but because what the right hand is doing and the high level of staccato that is
required to successfully play this excerpt that coupled with what is always expected of Mozart
the nuance and the phrasing can make it very difficult hopefully as we go through this lesson
we'll find ways to make approaching this excerpt easier and more successful at your next audition
the opening of Mozart 40 probably one of the most recognizable tunes whether
you've heard it on this as a piece at a concert hall on a cell phone
hopefully we make it a little bit more musical than a cell phone uh and that's exactly
what i want to talk about is the opening phrase of this two things one it's forte
and in this part of the music it should be forte i know some people are sometimes a little
afraid to play Mozart with a little edge this can have a little bit of extra edge
given the context of the whole of the g minor symphony again if you don't know that piece highly
recommend it it's a great piece of music so the phrasing it's very easy to want to put an accent
because the up bow up bow disease is something all string players suffer from whether you are just
beginning on your instrument or you're a little long in the tooth like myself uppo disease is
something we always fight upon disease means as we play an upbow we get louder simply because
of the physics of our instrument when you play an upbow you get closer to the frog the frog
is closer to your hand your hand is where the weight comes from and it's very natural to play
louder going on an upbow we want to try to avoid that if at all all possible now having a slight
crescendo going to the b is okay but we what we don't want to do is hit
because that's not the correct style of Mozart as a matter of fact um there is a very
well-known base pedagogue in the united states named Paul Ellison and he actually came up
with words for this opening of Mozart's 40th symphony excerpt and the words are 'it's a bird
it's a plane it's a Mozart' for those of you who are familiar with superman it's a bird
it's a plane that superman is the the commonly known phrase but it's a bird it's a plane and
it's a Mozart i like this because the rhythm of those words and where you land on those words are
how you should play this excerpt it's a bird it's a plane it's a Mozart sorry i'll do that again it's
a bird it's a plane it's a Mozart and that's what you want to think so i'll do it slowly
and that is the phrasing you want to have
i have the good fortune of working with a lot of young people i i conduct a youth orchestra and i'm
always advocating for finding words or phrases in whatever language you speak that fit the phrase in
the music because if not for notes I believe the notes on the page are actually in many ways words
sometimes they're they they mean something and sometimes it's just the gesture of
the words that bring about the affect or the feeling of the music that we're trying to play
so i would highly recommend even if this has a joke it's something really hard to get out of your
head and i think i first heard that phrase about 20 years ago and it still sticks with me today
i choose to play the opening of this excerpt on the d string because the d string is a little
richer in tone um and have that warmth and the resonance of that that deeper register kind of
helps so it doesn't sound necessarily bright now i know you can say it's the bass it never
sounds bright but to the bass to a bass player's ear it can sound particularly bright if it's
that's a personal decision i'm sure there are many who can play it very successfully
on the g string um so again i play this on the d string i use uh two in one two one
just allows my hand to be open to play the three with my uh the three harmonic with my
third finger on the g harmonic uh we one could actually
that actually before two could possibly work too but i i felt like i could control the quality
of the decay which is something we should talk about the the third note of this excerpt the b
can can be played and i've heard sometimes in many classes i've given that the
that there's a sustain in previous um lessons and courses you've heard me talk about this decay
in Mozart having that decay is the ambiance of the music so we really want to focus on releasing the
weight of the bow so that as we draw the bow we aren't sustaining the same amount of weight
when we release that weight we get a richness or an ambiance of the
sound so the sound doesn't sound um stuck so for me the sound stuck
it doesn't have finesse it doesn't it's not it's not um super special it's actually quite plain
versus i'll actually try to stop using vibrato so i'm not gonna enhance one versus the other
but you see as i scoot the bow when i say scoot the bow i move the bow a little quicker
after i've gotten the the pitch of the note and i release the weight so i get this
the students who studied with me when the they know this as my comet
effect this is like the comet tail the tail of a comet in the sky
and that's kind of the the my fake or false acoustic that you can create i mean if you do
it for a long period of time you can actually make it make the room sound very resonant
and really draw the the sound and color um uh to yeah make your instrument sound more
resonant than it might be particularly if you're in a dry room so you want to get that
release the last thing i'll say you'll notice i'm playing more out in the
boat versus close to the frog the frog is the chunky part of the bow if you're playing
Heldenleben or the Mahler 2 you might play those fortissimos and um fortississimos
right at the frog because that's where there's a lot of energy to get finesse and
um just a little bit more liberty and freedom to start further out on the stick
gives you more of that sound versus this it's very hard to do it one could do it
but it is very hard to do at the frog so i would really recommend doing this
closer to the middle part of the bow the next section of this are the eighth notes that go
to the quarter notes they're very similar to the opening where you have a slurred pair of
eights going to a quarter note and in that way they should sound exactly the same so and then
you want to have the same the same exact gesture so these are slurred and then that release
so
and something and while doing that i realized i haven't talked about even the overarching
phrasing which is in that it's a bird it's a plane as a Mozart that's one big phrase so it's a bird
it's a plane it's a Mozart so there's direction so you'll notice i'll do a crescendo as i play
and that's what you want to the gesture and the phrasing you want to make
when playing this extra at all times with that decay it's really really important
thanks so much for watching if you would like to learn more from me check out the link below