JOHN LARGESS: Hi there, friends and fans of the New York Phil.
This is the Miró Quartet.
And though I know a lot of you, and other musicians,
haven't been able to get together to actually play
in groups, chamber music, and orchestra
because of the pandemic, the Miró Quartet,
we've been lucky enough to be isolated with each other.
And we're actually rehearsing for our Beethoven cycle
that we're performing online in the next couple of weeks.
We thought, today, we'd share some of our practice techniques
with you to help your 30-day practice challenge that I
know you guys are all doing.
And one the things that we really
believe in, as a quartet, is practicing scales together.
A lot of us think that scales are
something that your teacher will make you do only by yourself.
And it's good to practice scales on your own.
But practicing scales as a group helps
us hear each other's intonation as well as
listening to balance in our sound as a quartet,
and feeling the ensemble and the leadership shift in a quartet.
That's really important for us in all the pieces we play.
So we thought we'd show you a couple of different ways
of playing a scale.
We're going to just do a C major octave scale, where each of us
plays in octaves with each other.
And you can see how we're listening, leading,
and blending while we're trying to match intonation.
[ORCHESTRAL OCTAVE SCALE]
Do you notice that we had to look at each other
and listen and actually correct some of the intonation?
That's the point of practicing scales,
is to develop that ability to quickly adjust
and quickly respond.
So playing scales and octaves maybe
might be the thing we think of first, but you know,
a string quartet can arrange a scale in almost any way.
So we could really play a scale where we all
play exactly the same notes.
Let's try one we play in unison instead of in octaves
[ORCHESTRAL UNISON SCALE]
Do you notice how different the blend and the sound
of the quartet is?
So practicing this scale is also really useful
and really challenging.
We could keep on making variations
to keep this interesting and fun.
For example, why play all the same note?
Maybe we could even play chords.
We could put the root of a chord in the cello.
[CELLO PLAYS] The 3rd of a chord in the viola,
[VIOLA JOINS] And the 5th of a chord [2ND VIOLIN JOINS]
in the 2nd violin.
And Daniel plays the octave.
[1ST VIOLIN JOINS] We could even play a scale in chords,
like this.
[ORCHESTRAL CHORD SCALE]
Or maybe Will could play the root of the chord.
[2ND VIOLIN PLAYS] I could play the 5th,
[VIOLA JOINS] Josh could play the 3rd,
[CELLO JOINS] and Daniel, why don't you play a 3rd, too?
[1ST VIOLIN JOINS]
[ORCHESTRAL INVERTED CHORDS]
There's really no end to the variations
that we could come up with for playing
scales and different chords and different arrangements
together.
In fact, if you're lucky enough to have a friend or family
member that you can practice with,
I challenge you guys to get creative and play some scales
together.
Keep your ears and listening skills alive.
JOSHUA GINDELE: For 30 days.
JOHN LARGESS: 30 days.