Linear phrasing: 7
I discovered Leo Brouwer’s playing in 1978 and I have been a fan ever since.
What is so special about Brouwer’s playing?
It’s his sense of rhythm and timing.
One of the things that differentiates piano players from guitar players is their sense of timing.
If you listen to any great pianist, you’ll find that they almost never play on the beat.
This is the one thing that sets them apart in terms of their artistry.
And if you listen to guitar players, one of the things you’ll notice is that they almost always play on the beat.
Except for Leo Brouwer.
Listen to this performance. As you listen, try to conduct to his rhythm and you’ll find that he almost never plays on the beat. He is either holding back or pushing the beat.
Why is this kind of playing so special?
Because rhythm and timing is the key to expression in music.
It comes down to one basic principle.
If you want to create tension and movement, play with the audience’s expectations.
To create tension, do not play when they expect the notes to be played, instead, hold back just a little.
That slight holding back produces tension in the listener because it is not what they’re expecting.
In passages that require extreme tension, hold back the tempo and then push it to create what I call the ‘jagged rhythmic effect.’
This is a standard pianistic device.
Listen to Horowitz or Rubinstein or Schnabel play those thunderous fortississimo passages in romantic repertoire and you’ll notice they never play right on the beat or subdivisions.
I became aware of this effect years ago when listening to Glenn Gould’s harpsichord recordings of the Handel suites.
His rhythm in those recordings is extremely subtle. You’ll have to try to conduct to them to appreciate the subtlety.
He explains the concept in his interviews with Jonathan Cott and calls it using ‘rhythm in lieu of dynamics.’
In other words, due to the limited dynamic possibilities on the harpsichord, he had to resort to using rhythm to create dynamic effects.
Along the same lines, when a passage is soft and delicate, and you want to produce an easy languid feel, keep the pulse simple—don’t do anything special with it.
So the principle is, to create tension and suspense, play with unpredictable jagged rhythms.
And in soft expressive passages, keep the rhythm simple and play predictably and lightly on the beat.
All these expressive devices hinge on one thing—linear phrasing.
Linear phrasing frees you up and allows you to manipulate the pulse any way you choose to create any expressive effect you’re trying to achieve.