Over the past two years, I have worked in numerous ways and settings to help bridge the NEC communities, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes deliberately. For this internship, I found a unique way to serve the NEC student population: start a chess club!

What makes this different from other clubs? My chess club has ulterior motives. I’m interested in interdisciplinary connections, drawing inspiration for musical events from other structures. Specifically, I’m setting out to compose music inspired by and informed by the game of chess. As a composer, I want musicians to understand the game, in order to enrich their experience playing the music.

Moreover, having an “army of chess-playing musicians” gives me the ability to write new music that draws its compositional structure directly out of the game: I can use the board as a kind of improvised graphic score! Thus, by teaching musicians the game of chess, I am simultaneously preparing them to play my music.

Over the semester, I hope to put on three performances. The first will be on the Music-In-Education Department Concert (which I am curating), to take place on March 7th. This will be a “small piece,” examining just a small microcosm of the chess universe. The second performance will (hopefully, curator permitting) be on Jordan Hall stage on April 9th, as part of the “Beckett Play” concert (put on by the Contemporary Improvisation Dept.). That piece would be a little bit bigger, and also relate to the writing of Samuel Beckett (especially “Endgame”). Finally, I hope to stage the largest version of the piece—the full-blown game of chess—on my recital: April 28th, in Brown Hall. This would require thirty-two musicians, all of whom play chess relatively well, so I hope people show up to the club!

Right now the club is in “stage one”: building critical mass. So far there’s been a steady crowd of musicians each week, and the cast usually has a mixture of rotating players and steady regulars. On our first day, there were thirteen people! The challenge each week is to find ways to teach each person on an individual basis, while simultaneously introducing concepts that will be relevant in my compositions.

Starting in the next couple weeks or so, I plan to introduce my first piece in the club, teaching about that.

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a series of three by MIE student Valerie Thompson, a cellist studying Contemporary Improvisation at NEC.

The focus of my Music-in-Education internship is to transform my pre-existing private cello studio to incorporate new ideas that I have been exposed to while studying at New England Conservatory.  These ideas come mainly from my explorations in the Contemporary Improvisation Department, Intro to Music-in-Education/Seminar in Music-in-Education and Magdalena Richter’s String Pedagogy Course.
I am currently teaching about 15 cello students ranging in age from 7-50+.  Some of my students have been studying with me for as little as a month and some have been studying with me for over 8 years.  Some have had previous musical and cello experience before studying with me and some are complete beginners.  It really runs the gamut.

One big thing that I wanted to get started with all of my students is a vocal connection to the instrument.  This mirrors much of the work that I am personally digging into and I find it really intriguing and challenging and potentially transforming to attempt to model my playing after the human voice.  This has proved to be a little challenging for a few reasons.

1. I will be hosting a studio recital for my students on March 11th and as such many of my lessons as of late have been primarily focused on preparing their concert pieces.
2. My students are at many different levels, though mostly beginner/intermediate and as such this approach hasn’t yet felt right for some of my students’ ability on the instrument.
3. I teach the cello from a mainly classical standpoint (at least in the beginning and in regards to technique) and I want to use vocal models that connect to my students personally and many of my students just do not listen to traditional classical vocalists.  (It is interesting that in classical music the instrumental and vocal traditions do not sound as similar as in other genres, such as blues or jazz.  I have more ideas on this for my future posts that will include transcript of a discussion with Hankus Netsky on this subject.)

Redirecting How to Use the Voice to Connect with the Cello

With those examples of how my ideas for vocal modeling haven’t been as an ideal a part of my lessons as I had desired, I’ve started to reformulate how to approach the vocal connection in a way that might meet the student where they are and their interests lie.  I’ve found that asking my students to use their voices in lessons to sing back problematic phrases has become a way to get students to slow down and listen for good intonation.  I’ve also had students sing or even imagine singing passages that they’ve often had a hard time playing with the metronome in order to help them connect to the tempo of a piece.  I find that when students’ sing their parts they start to focus more on the sound of what they are playing rather than the mechanics of what they are playing.  This seems to be a great balancing tool as I’ve found many of my students lean on the mechanics of the playing experience in order to know whether or not they’ve played a passage correctly.  I have started to ask students to pick a vocal song that they’d like to learn on the instrument and even if an in-depth vocal modeling project may not be what the song will turn into, I believe that learning vocal melodies will help students with ear-training , learning by ear and developing observational skills and hopefully be another way to connect music that they enjoy listening to an instrument they enjoy playing.

The Approach I Had Hoped For

One student’s (Noah, 17) interest in “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen was like a dream come true, however.  He asked me about the piece of his own accord and was excited that I just happened to have it on hand in one of my anthologies of cello pieces.  I saw it as the perfect, organic opportunity to introduce the idea of vocal modeling to him.  I entrusted him with the task of finding 3 youtube performances of Habanera that he enjoyed.  He came up with a few that he seemed tepid about and then I introduced him to an old-school classic, Maria Callas.  He was taken with how expressive and fiery she was while barely moving during the performance.  We found the lyrics online to compare to the written rhythms we had and then we immediately started reshaping the written melody that we had to take into consideration the many slides, accents, rhythmic variations and ornaments that Callas used to make such an intriguing performance.  We still have much exploration to do on this piece but I’ve found that his sound and vibrato are already starting to be more expressive and interesting by using the Callas model than by me prodding him with descriptive phrases or asking him to imitate my cello sound.  In addition to developing a new sound, I’ve found that he is taking an active part in figuring out how to do vocal modeling.  We’ve many had discussions about the challenges of this and the process of identifying what you are hearing and translating that to the cello.

Follow this link to see Maria Callas at Covent Garden performing “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen.
Callas’ performance begins at 2:50.

Another goal of my internship is to get my students improvising or composing in some manner as a way to develop personal connection to the instrument.  I have used my Rainstorm Brainstorm Project as the main vehicle for this exercise.  The group improvisation of The Rainstorm will happen both at the MIE Concert on March 7th and as the finale of my studio recital on March 11th.  After the recital, I will need to access my students’ experience with it.  I am curious to see what composition/improvisation assignments might be of use with a focus more on the individual, rather than this large group project post-recital.

Go to this link for a collection of Rainstorm sound ideas that some of my students’ have come up with.

I feel that the focus of my studio recital has thrown off course some of the other goals that I had for my teaching such as using more resources to teach a concept and I may need to continue to adjust some of my goals to better meet the abilities and interests of my students.  I need to better document some of the feedback that I am getting from students but I’ve found that just having the goal of assessment in the back of my mind is causing me to ask more questions of my students in order to assess their take on their experiences.  I think this means there are definitely some post-recital surveys to be created and passed out to my students on March 11th!