TENSION AND RELEASE

Tension and release are vital to musicianship. Heidi Castleman once told me, “you know, it’s funny. Equality doesn’t really work in music.” Karen Tuttle is famous for numbering each note in a piece to show how relatively tense they are to each other.* Music exists when notes exist in relation to each other, but not alone. If someone said, “I love F#” you would think they were a strange, inexplicable person, or that they had a special brain with synesthesia. But if someone said “I love that F# in measure 25 when the G resolves down and you finally arrive…” you’d understand that the F# meant something relative to something else. This is what we are always talking about with tension and release—the way music leans. Many violists miss the opportunity to couple their musical and physical releases (almost a freebie!), or neglect to practice creating musical tension without squeezing something. You can practice integrating these things in your warm-up and create habits and tools for your musical endeavors. In order to avoid technical tension, I tend to think of these ideas as musical relative weightiness, leaning in and leaning out, verticality or horizontality of the pulse, ebb and flow.

Pacing tension and release is the key to a LONG MUSICAL LINE, a pillar of elegant musicianship. At work I spend essentially all of my creative energy thinking about long lines, which I sometimes think of as “keeping the audience’s attention for as long as possible.” Do not overlook the release side of the equation. Explore this overlooked sibling! Find ways to elide things which should not drop, take a breath without giving up the phrase (as we do so often in speech), and connect things that have actual rests between them so that the rest is part of the musical line.

There are many opportunities to develop this skill and you should find thinking about it very interesting. If you don’t, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work. Ways to consider it: I like to listen to Johnny Cash sing and think about what he does to have huge gaps in sound without losing the long line. Sometimes in music, the energy can be shockingly vertical, which sometimes seems like the opposite of a long line, but the idea still is to keep the line alive between sounds. Glenn Gould plays around with this in his later recording of The Goldberg Variations. Do you feel convinced the whole time? If not, do you think he is convinced the whole time? How long can the space be before the line drops? Ebb and flow are fun to think about with your right hand, too. When I got a bow that actually worked at the tip I started engaging it as a game in the Allemande of the sixth suite: how slow could my bow be with all those tiny notes in the upper half that really need no weight? I think I could get them to sound with maybe three inches of bow, so that I had plenty of bow for the weighty notes I wanted people to hear as the footfall of the pulse! How fast could I use my bow without adding weight when I needed to get to another part of the bow? Consider your bow’s limitations, how you can manage them, ways to be extreme in bow speed without sounding like a cartoon, and create the longest musical lines you can—big arcs up and down, paced, full of breath in and out musically—inviting the audience to physically travel with you (their body chemistry, the way they sit in their chairs, can actually change with your compelling ideas!) around musical corners, up crescendo hills and down decrescendo hills, off subito cliffs. Do not let them go for one moment of your musical offering. The whole piece must be connected to itself—fully integrated. This is so satisfying for you and your audience. Enjoy this beautiful project, and practice applying it in your warm-up, where the stakes are low.

TECHNIQUE NOTE: Every time you hear someone talking about tension and release in music, be sure you apply those words ONLY to musical hierarchy, not to technique.

* I did not study with Ms. Tuttle. She may have different language for this idea, which has been communicated to me by several of her students.