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"Teaching Moyse's 'Tone Development' Using Operatic Recordings"
by John Bailey
Professor of Flute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The following article was originally published in the Moyse Society Newsletter, Volume 13, p. 6. Address: c/o Wendy Webb Kumer, 136 Fairfax Rd., Pittsburgh, PA 15221, marcelmoysesociety.org.
It is a well-known fact that Marcel Moyse was principal flutist of the Paris Opéra-comique. Less known, perhaps, is that his major musical experience as a young child was being taken to the opera by his grandfather in Besançon--according to his biographer, Ann McCutchan, by the time he was ten years old, he had seen forty operas and knew many of the arias by heart.[¹] For musicians in Moyse's time, and for European musicians today, especially those on the continent, opera was then and is still is at the center of their musical life. Consider the Vienna State Opera--an institution with a long history, dating back several hundred years. The Vienna Philharmonic (founded in 1842 by the opera composer Otto Nicolai), whose members play for the opera as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, gives only ten subscription concerts a year in Vienna, but plays every night of opera season from September through June. The orchestra maintains at least three principal flutists so that these nightly performances can be rotated and maintained despite touring and recording schedules. The Dresden Staatskapelle actually has no performance hall for its concerts, but rather uses the stage of the Semperoper, for which it functions as the opera orchestra. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, founded in 1781, and known internationally as a concert orchestra through touring and recording, plays nightly for Leipzig Opera performances, the lion's share of its yearly schedule. The Berlin Philharmonic, a comparatively young ensemble, indeed (founded in 1882 from Bilse's Concert Orchestra) is one of the only orchestras in a major German-speaking city entirely separate from the opera in that city (the even younger Dresden Philharmonie is another).[²] In Paris in Moyse's day, the two major musical institutions were the Opéra and the Opéra-comique. The concerts provided by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and the three concerts series of Lamoureux, Colonne, and Pasdeloup, while important, were limited in number and much less prestigious.[³]
It follows then, that opera was central not only to the musical life of audiences, but to the musical training of any qualified musician. Such is most definitely NOT the case in U.S. music schools, where undergraduate instrumentalists can graduate without ever being required to attend or study any opera in depth. Many instrumentalists know few opera arias (even to recognize them), and do not know of the great artists who interpret them. In an attempt to rectify this situation for my flute students, and to expose them not only to the riches of the operatic repertoire but of the transporting artistry of the great singers from whom we as musicians can learn an enormous amount, I turned to Moyse's Tone Development Through Interpretation. Moyse himself said that he listened to and modeled his singing sound on the great operatic performers of his day, including soprano Nellie Melba, with whom he toured in America for six months in 1913-14.
I require my flute students at the University of Nebraska to prepare three melodies from Tone Development per semester--but they do not learn them from the page alone. These melodies were common currency for musicians during Moyse's career, and musicians knew them and their performance traditions very well. Attempts to learn these melodies from the naked page usually produce only a pale copy of their true expressive potential. My students, therefore, are to listen to a recorded performance and then attempt to imitate the nuances of the performer, including rubato, phrasing, breaths, and dynamic shaping. Moyse never intended the melodies in his collection to be self-sufficient, as beautiful as they are. Rather, they are like a lead sheet to a jazz standard: only a skeleton, which needs to be fleshed out by knowing the accompanimental texture, basic style, and traditions behind the tune. Moyse knew them intimately, and he used the notated melodies in his practice to recreate the total operatic experience in his mind. In the lesson, I also try to explain to the student the dramatic context and therefore the emotional content of the text--this, then, helps deepen even further the expressive possibilities and emotional range for the aspiring interpreter.
Moyse's Tone Development Through Interpretation, originally published in 1962, contains dozens of melodies from the opera repertoire, and is organized so as to help the flutist explore expression in the low, middle and high registers, and then mixed registers, at various dynamic levels. The repertoire covered includes excerpts by the great trio of early 19th-century Italian bel canto composers, Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, as well as very well-known middle-period Verdi (Trovatore, Traviata, Rigoletto). It also contains excerpts from late 19th-century French opera (Massenet, Délibes, Bizet) and now-forgotten, or little-known French gems. In addition, it contains several instrumental works that obviously have vocal models (cantilena), including those by Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, and Chopin. What this work does not contain are operatic works of Mozart, Puccini, late Verdi, and 20th-century composers. I encourage my students, when they have had several semesters of study of these pieces, to compile their own Tone Development, and bring in arias that they love and from which they can strive to wring the utmost expression. These assignments, by the way, are a contrast from the finger-busters which generally make up the undergraduate curriculum--and students learn that control, and deliberate shaping, are just as worth achieving (and often harder!) than all the pyrotechnics in the world. Moyse encouraged transposition of the melodies (he often wrote the initial bars out in several keys), which aids in basic understanding of the melodic structure independent of any key, and which forces the student to conquer the idiosyncrasies of any one particular interval or note response--because the expression that the melody demands is independent of whether it starts on F or F-sharp. Students who study these melodies on a regular basis have a much firmer knowledge of operatic literature, a better sense of melodic tension and shape, and a much better understanding of the need for technical control (tonal, dynamic, intonation, vibrato) in the service of the music. And the melodies themselves are such a joy to study, to hear and to play, that, I must confess, I look forward every semester to a new set of performances.
¹McCutchan, Ann, Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute, Amadeus Press, 1994, p. 36.
²Radio orchestras, such as the Westdeutscher Rundfunkorchester, and the Berliner Rundfunkorchester, which are of excellent quality and fulfill the role of performing new and rarely-heard works, have generally always been secondary in major European cities. An exception is the BBC Symphony of London--but then London has had a very strong tradition of concert orchestras alongside its two major opera houses (Royal Opera House Covent Garden and The English National Opera).
³Paris's radio orchestra, L'Orchestre Nationale de la Radiodiffusion, founded in 1934, took on real significance only after WWII; The Orchestre de Paris was founded in 1967 as a reorganization of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.
© 2004 John Bailey. All rights reserved.
Dr. John Bailey is a Larson professor of flute and a member of the Moran Woodwind Quintet at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music. He is principal flutist with the Lincoln Orchestra Association. He received his undergraduate degree from Indiana University, where he studied with James Pellerite. Both his masters and doctorate were earned at Northwestern University, where he was assistant to Walfrid Kujala. He also studied at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Austria, with Louis Rivière, piccoloist of the Vienna Philharmonic. From 1982 to 1996, he was program annotator for the American Institute of Musical Studies (AIMS) in Graz, Austria, where he was also co-principal flutist with the festival's orchestra. He has been principal flutist with the Illinois Philharmonic, Opera Illinois, the Illinois Chamber Symphony and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. He has performed at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Chicago Public Library; Unity Temple, Oak Park, IL; Oberlin Conservatory; and in recital in Leipzig, Dresden, Vienna, and in Sans-Souci Palace in Potsdam. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Flute Association and past president of the Beta Chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda and of the Great Plains Chapter of the College Music Society.
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