The Elusive “Commodo”
NB: this piece is not by Charles Wuorinen.
I made a joke the other day that if 2003-2013 was my “compulsive” phase, I now seem to be in a “mystic” phase. This has been my experience with the Wuorinen thus far, however. I go to work around 7:30-8:00 PM with an ounce and a half of liquor, and practice until it runs out, typically between 9:30 and 10:30 PM. I don’t warm up. I haven’t really played anything except Wuorinen, and I usually focus on one or two pages, getting through the whole piece about every three days. I never practice any passage longer than ten minutes, and even that is pretty rare; I usually do five minutes for difficult problems and three minutes for simple ones. At the end of the session, I frequently post one minute or so of whatever I’ve done, good or bad, on Instagram. All of this is completely different from the way I used to practice.
I’m at the point now where I have to slow down and really analyze the videos to make sure I’m working on the right things. As I leafed through them last night, I noticed that some of the earlier, slower, and more inept readings actually have good character, while the recent, more disciplined work with the metric modulations feel a little wooden. This piece is so full of character that I really want it to “swing,” and while the metronome work is necessary, I want to go beyond the “obedient” sound I’m getting to something more “in the pocket.” So, after the booze ran out, I was back with the 80/20 Drummer on YouTube, looking for tips on improving “feel.”
One of the things I’ve always felt lacking in my playing is the “commodo” feel. Commodo means “unhurried” (Cf. commodious = roomy, spacious), and I first encountered it in the Fauré sonata above. For me, this means playing fast without sounding as though you're playing fast. The groove in Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” is one of my favorite examples of the commodo feel. Sonny Rollins also plays like this: his rhythm and his highly inflected articulation are my despair.
Nate Smith, the 80/20 Drummer, had some really good tips for me, and I was really motivated by his comment that playing “in the pocket” is more about seeing clearly than focus and concentration. This is just what I needed. In weightlifting terms, I very often try to “muscle up” the problem instead of moving around it. I didn’t have to listen very closely to see that my shifting disrupts my flow: I tend to move explosively and “grab” the notes (muscling up the weight) instead of incorporating the shifts into a larger gesture (moving around the weight). My teacher (Alan Harris) used to say that we should use the elbow to “paint” our way around the fingerboard. I expect closer listening will also reveal Nate’s observations that we tend to rush upbeats, etc.
The reminder to simplify and give the brain one thing to work on is something I can’t hear enough. This is why I deliberately work in short time scales. As I worked with the metric modulations, though, my focus got a little blurry; in order to get the proportions right, I started at quarter = 80 (which kept the triplet pulse to a reasonable eighth = 120), but there were still some technical challenges in playing long shifts, awkward string changes etc. In spite of that, after two sessions I was able to start and end reasonably close to the same speed; at least I achieved that goal. Next week I’ll go back and try to get the tech. stuff more in the pocket.