SION DAFYDD DAWSON:
The Rehearsal Space (2) August 2014

As this project develops, we are focusing more and more on the unheard, unseen and unnoticed in processes. By attempting to highlight them we are considering what is labelled useful or worthy of attention, and how a change of stance can bring about interesting and useful developments.
Listening to a virtuoso string player produce a seemingly effortless performance it's very easy to forget the hours and years of painstaking repetitive practice that leads to that point. So I began considering my own hours of solitary practice. I have recently found myself very deliberately making unmusical, raw, sometimes even beginner-like sounds - all in the eternal pursuit of becoming a better musician than I was yesterday. Here is one place where the unheard and never-noticed of the musician is found, a place where the easy idea of linear progression is confounded.
Another is in the trance-like and repetitive sounds. These range from perfecting minute changes in tone with the bow, to squeezing every last overtone my cello can produce, to training fingers to do exactly what I want them to do in complex passages. All of this painstaking sound-making is generally confined to the practice room - simply because it does not conform to the expectations of the concert stage. Eventually, following all these unmusical activities I re-apply some 'musicality' and have a piece worthy of performance. I've also become an improved musician for it.
'Musicality' refers here to the human element needed to give life to 'music'. During the last hundred years or so the definition of 'music' has been challenged, and extra-musical sounds are now used extensively. In my exploration of the unnoticed I realised that I needed to bring to the foreground sounds that have been part of cello playing since the first instruments were made and the first cellists learned to play, neither the extra-musical nor musical - but something in between the raw and the refined. Thus, the central aim for me as the instrumentalist in the group, is to find a way to meld what sounds I can produce with a bow and four gut strings with recorded sounds of our Baroque cello-in-making in an engaging, reactive manner.
In collaborating with the other members we have found parallels in the development of the musician and the development of our cello. Musicians are always on a learning curve and experimenting with new ways to do things - sometimes even as we are performing. Once our project's cello is 'finished' and ready to be played, its development as a musical instrument will continue for as long as it exists, through further human interventions and natural changes in the wood and gut.
Listening to a virtuoso string player produce a seemingly effortless performance it's very easy to forget the hours and years of painstaking repetitive practice that leads to that point. So I began considering my own hours of solitary practice. I have recently found myself very deliberately making unmusical, raw, sometimes even beginner-like sounds - all in the eternal pursuit of becoming a better musician than I was yesterday. Here is one place where the unheard and never-noticed of the musician is found, a place where the easy idea of linear progression is confounded.
Another is in the trance-like and repetitive sounds. These range from perfecting minute changes in tone with the bow, to squeezing every last overtone my cello can produce, to training fingers to do exactly what I want them to do in complex passages. All of this painstaking sound-making is generally confined to the practice room - simply because it does not conform to the expectations of the concert stage. Eventually, following all these unmusical activities I re-apply some 'musicality' and have a piece worthy of performance. I've also become an improved musician for it.
'Musicality' refers here to the human element needed to give life to 'music'. During the last hundred years or so the definition of 'music' has been challenged, and extra-musical sounds are now used extensively. In my exploration of the unnoticed I realised that I needed to bring to the foreground sounds that have been part of cello playing since the first instruments were made and the first cellists learned to play, neither the extra-musical nor musical - but something in between the raw and the refined. Thus, the central aim for me as the instrumentalist in the group, is to find a way to meld what sounds I can produce with a bow and four gut strings with recorded sounds of our Baroque cello-in-making in an engaging, reactive manner.
In collaborating with the other members we have found parallels in the development of the musician and the development of our cello. Musicians are always on a learning curve and experimenting with new ways to do things - sometimes even as we are performing. Once our project's cello is 'finished' and ready to be played, its development as a musical instrument will continue for as long as it exists, through further human interventions and natural changes in the wood and gut.
image from F Geminiani's 'The Art of Playing on the Violin'