The Personal Etude
By Jeffrey Agrell
We never give it much thought, but the fact is that we are
trained and conditioned to be passive consumers of music.
We play only other people’s music, not our own. We learn to
recite, but not to converse. Art students paint pictures,
language students write essays, actors do improv games, but
musicians learn from the first day that they can only play
something that has been composed by some distant and
probably long-dead expert. It is rare that even our
teachers or anyone we know have this miraculous gift of
deciding what we should play and writing it down for us.
It’s not that we believe we’re bad composers – it’s that
the question of creating never even arises because it is a
tacit assumption woven into the fabric of our musical
culture that players are not composers. Or improvisers
(improvisation is just composition, only faster). The door
of personal creativity lies directly before us, unlocked.
We have only to go in. But it never occurs to us to turn
the knob – we have always assumed that it is permanently
locked.
It was not so long ago that it was otherwise in Western
music tradition. Until the arrival of the era of the huge
orchestras of the Romantic era, musicians throughout
history were trained to ‘think in music’ and to be able to
embellish or vary existing tunes or make up new ones. Folks
back then took spontaneous creation as normal. Bach,
Beethoven, Mozart – all centerpieces of the Canon now –
were known as the hottest improvisers of their day.
Teachers routinely wrote material for their students. The
Paris Conservatory, for example, has long had a tradition
of horn professors who wrote methods, etudes, and solo
pieces. There have been some wonderful exceptions to the
players-never-compose rule in modern times, but their
numbers are still relatively small.
I’d like to propose a return to a new tradition: everybody
composes. Everybody. All the time.
Why? Why not regain our lost heritage of knowing music and
the instrument well enough to make some personal decisions
about what to play? Reflect for a moment: how might
composers write for us if they knew that we had the ability
to create, develop, ornament, extrapolate, converse, and
discover musically? Why should they have to do all the work
– and have most of the fun? Imagine for a moment how this
new/old ability of ours might change the audience’s
perception and enjoyment of our performance if they knew
that there would be moments where the outcome of the game
was not predetermined? They could experience the thrill of
the chase along with us if imagination and not pitch
accuracy were the measure of success performance. Why not
harness our brains and imaginations and bring to light and
life countless new insights to enrich ourselves and our
culture. Why? Because we can. Because it’s fun. Because
it’s not as hard as you might think.
What shall we compose? A: Write what you would like to play
and like to hear. Write for a celebration (birthday,
anniversary, graduation). Write to tell a story to
children. Write a piece for a recital of yours or your
students. Write to charm and delight your sweetheart. Or
your grandmother. And, as the title of this article
suggests, write to help you work on the points of your own
technique that need attention. You have played those
wonderful etudes that Herr Kopprasch and Mssrs Gallay and
Maxime-Alphonse thought useful, but there is nothing
stopping you from creating etudes that are custom made for
you, by you.
Choosing a Theme
The first step in writing your etude is to decide on what
it should focus. Your choice should come from a
self-assessment list of those things on which you need to
work – there is little sense in working on areas that you
already do well. The fact that etudes commonly emphasize
one technique is a limitation that makes it easier to
compose them. Following is a list of topics of possible
technical areas around which to build the etude (feel free
to expand the list):
Accuracy
Scales (major, all minors, chromatic)
Arpeggios
Atonality/12-tone
Bass clef
Bravura style
Chords & Chord progressions
Dynamics
Echo horn
Extended techniques
Fingerings (awkward, alternate)
Triads (major, minor, diminished, augmented)
Intervals
Jazz style
Legato
Natural horn/overtone series
Tonguing (staccato, legato, multiple tonguing)
Lyrical playing
Odd meters
Patterns
Range – high, low
Rhythms, Syncopation
Stopped horn
Transposition
Trills (half step, whole step)
It would be useful to write more than one – write a series
of etudes based on your personal technical needs. Make a
prioritized list of what you would like to work on and
write a new one every week.
Level
After you’ve decided on the technical area for the etude,
you need to choose a level of difficulty. Too easy and you
will be bored and won’t get much out of it. Too difficult
and you will be frustrated and may learn bad habits. Just
right would be a piece that requires steady and consistent
work to conquer in a week or two. You might even write
several etudes on the same area, each a little more
difficult than the last.
Length
Keep your first etudes fairly short, somewhere in the
neighborhood of a half a page. It’s better to write a
shorter etude and conquer every difficulty than to write
overlong ones and either take ages or do a halfway job. (I
don’t know what Maxime-Alphonse was thinking in the later
books when each etude consumed a barrel of ink. I guess
they had more free time in an era without email or
Internet). However, a longer etude might still be useful if
the difficulties were not too extreme.
Form
Etudes may have a tendency to be somewhat ‘mechanical’, but
remember they are also music: whenever you can, tell a
story, i.e. have a beginning, middle, and an end. Simple
forms: ABA (do something, do something different, go back
and do that first thing again), AABA (song form), or ABAC,
where C is a short coda. ABACADA is rondo form. You can
also write them through-composed, where the repeated
technique itself is the glue that holds it together.
Style
Anything goes: the mechanical style of Kopprasch, the
bravura style of Gallay, swing, blues, lyrical, polka,
march, waltz, calypso, dirge, it’s up to you. However, pick
a style that matches the technique you are focusing on. It
might not help much to pick lyrical style when you want to
work on your double-tonguing, or march style when you want
to practice wide-interval slurs.
Etude Writing Techniques
•Unit and Variety. Compared to ‘normal
music’, etudes typically are stronger on unity (repetition)
and less insistent on variety. The etude, after all, is
drilling you on one aspect of technique in a semi-musical
way. You can create unity by 1) using repeating patterns.
Kopprasch is the pattern king – many of his etudes are
constructed using melodic patterns, such as [scale degrees]
1 2 3 1, which are repeated at different diatonic steps,
usually in ascending or descending sequences. You can add
more variety to your melodic patterns than Kopprasch by
taking the patterns through many more (or all!) keys than
Kopprasch did.
•Combine elements. You might write a low
range etude that uses odd meters and varied articulation.
You might write a middle to high range study that uses many
different intervals played legato. You might write an
atonal, lyrical melody that emphasizes a particular
interval. Okay, Decker has done this already. Don’t let it
stop you. Originality is highly overrated as a virtue. It’s
very easy to be very original and very bad. Don’t be
original – be practical and imaginative. As a matter of
fact…
•Imitate. Use etudes that you know (and
investigate more that you don’t know), analyze them for
what they do well, and use those ideas and techniques in
your own etudes. It is possible to copy an existing etude
in considerable detail, but change a few things: change the
pattern, mode (e.g. major to minor), key, and/or
articulation.
•Quote. Another way to get started is to
find a motif from a solo, excerpt, or even etude that you
are working on and re-cast it in various ways in a personal
etude.
•Build in some flexibility. Kopprasch (or
his subsequent editors) did so by suggesting other
transpositions and alternate articulations. You could do
the same, and perhaps do more by including a short section
that encourages the player (i.e. you again) to improvise a
bit, using material from the etude, or even play it as a
duet, with one player improvising a second part.
•Write it first in the air. Instead of
jumping immediately to the blank sheet of manuscript paper,
explore the etude first with your horn. Take the technical
feature(s) and play with it, playing by ear. One good way
to practice this is to take an etude that you know well,
select 1-4 measures, and start changing things. For
example, the beginning of Kopprasch #8 features slurred
triads with a repeated note. Change the major triad to
minor. Then to augmented, then diminished. Try new
intervals, such as perfect fourths instead of thirds.
Change the legato to staccato. Play it descending instead
of ascending. Change the steady eighth note rhythms to
something with imagination – dotted rhythms, syncopated
rhythms. Start before or after the downbeat. Change the
direction of every other slurred pair. Add rests. Change
the meter to 5/8 or 7/8. You get the idea. After a good bit
of fascinating messing around with the tune, you will be
ready to write down one of the versions as your personal
etude of the week (which by this time will bear little or
no resemblance to the original inspiration). Don’t forget
to send me a copy.
When
One last question to answer: when should you write your
personal etudes? Answer: now. Every day. Lifelong, or for
as long as you play your horn. Share your etudes with your
friends. What will happen is that you will learn to ‘think
in music’ and, in the same way you once learned to walk and
talk, you will become fluent in the process and such
creation at short notice will become second nature. And you
will be able to guide and encourage your students to do the
same. And you will one day think back: “Why did I ever
think that Kopprasch and those guys were the only ones who
could do this?”