What does it mean to play in tune?
Updated: Sep 3
“Playing in tune.” This ominous, restricting phrase.
The moment I think of it, I think of that game with sand bags, where you need to toss them and it's either hit or miss (cornhole?). Or a game of darts, where there is a definite center and you need to get as close to it as possible. A Lego set where you can't veer off track, where you absolutely need to build the model on the box.
This is not creating, building, or designing.
This is all along the lines of following a script, executing a preconceived plan, "delivering the product" — essentially, replication.
On the other hand, you can write a poem that has never been written, improvise a melody of your own, scribble a unique, honest, personal mess in the margin of a page.
Is violin intonation any different?
No.
I once heard the great violinist Régis Pasquier say during a class:
"If you play the music of J.S. Bach truly in tune, you don't need to use vibrato."
A striking statement.
Vibrato is typically used to add expression. And now suddenly Pasquier is telling us that if your intonation is expressive enough, you don't need to boost it with vibrato. If the tuning is built properly, it shines with the intended feeling.
Intonation is personal. Like a sculpture, it is built, from note to note.
Why else would we go through the ordeal of learning a string instrument without frets?
It's extremely difficult, there is no doubt about it.
So there must be some prize. Some payoff.
And it isn't only vibrato.
The ability to craft your own sense of tuning, your own intonation, is the gem offered by fretless left-hand hardships.
To understand this, let's go further.
There are two types of intonation:
Vertical (as in a double stop, or a chord)
Horizontal (as in playing a melody, one note at a time)
Horizontal intonation offers more flexibility than vertical.
But vertical tuning shines with its own questions.
Although octaves, fifths, fourths, and unisons don't offer any tuning flexibility whatsoever, thirds, sixths, and sevenths do.
Since there are numerous ways to tune a piano (equal temperament, meantone temperament, well temperament, just intonation, Pythagorean tuning, etc. — although equal temperament is what we encounter most often), there must be just as many ways of tuning notes while playing.
Except you don't tune before playing.
You tune as you go.
Imagine deciding on the tuning system for each note, one note at a time...
But the way I recommend thinking about it is not mathematically.
It's a question of feeling and color.
Itzhak Perlman once said that, in the case of a student playing out of tune, Ivan Galamian would identify this or that note as being too sharp or too flat, while Dorothy DeLay, on the other hand, would ask the student:
"Darling, what's your concept of this F#?"
Intonation needs to come from within.
You need to hear it before it happens.
And then, with a soft hand, barely doing anything, feeling the soft, mushy tips of the left fingers, slowly but lightly pressing down the strings, completely relaxed, the hand and fingers can adjust at light speed to the pitch you hear inside.
And because you're so focused on the pitch inside you, you don't even notice that your finger adjusted, or that originally you hadn't placed it correctly.
In order to hear intonation from within the self, one first needs to become deeply affected by it.
One needs to sharpen one's sensitivity to pitch.
For example, a leading tone F# resolving into G:
That F#, you can play it slightly sharper, and while still being in tune, it will have a noticeably different feeling from an F# that is slightly lower.
One might feel brighter, happier, narrower, zestier.
Another, duller, deflated, settled.
One F# will feel dense and driving.
Another, soggy and still.
Intonation = feeling.
Things become even more interesting when you realize you can alter a pitch while playing it, all while staying in tune.
But again, before being able to execute it, you need to first sharpen your sensitivity to it.
Sensitivity first, performance second.
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