Phil Gelb said:
>= Yokoyama Katsuya did tell
> >me at one of his workshops that one should memorize the
> honkyoku in order
> >to make them one's own -- if you have it in your mind
> without the notation
> >in front of you it perhaps makes it easier to shape it
> eventually into your
> >own honkyoku
I think memorization is often a good first step to internalizing music, but
attitude toward the material is significant as well. It is possible to
memorize and yet still avoid making the music part of one's body. I also
think it is possible to "make the music your own" whether improvising OR
strictly following a score.
Coltrane, the Watazumi of sax, so internalized the performance/composition
idiom of his time and place that his music is both completely his own and
clearly jazz. But this internalization had a lot to do with his passion and
his attitude toward the music--remarkably similar to Watazumi's attitude.
The '80's and '90's squeakyclean "historicists" (Marsalis and his ilk) may
have spent as much time studying their inherited idiom--memorizing
transcriptions of Parker solos!--but the music sounds to my ear frozen
rather than internalized. In other words, the Marsalises of the world make
"iemotos" of their pioneering predecessors when that's the last thing their
predecessors may have wanted!
I sometimes think that "improvising" versus "playing the score" is a false,
or at least irrelevant, dichotomy. Internalizing the music--whether it is a
score or a set of idiomatic techniques, devices, and structures--seems of
overriding importance. And by internalizing I mean getting to the place
where the music's really singing through the body. That and a dedication to
paying attention to the passing moment--bringing attention back again and
again to the "is" of sound.
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