Transcription Project - Post #6

Project Description

Throughout this semester, I have pursued a number of exciting performance opportunities. Not the least of which is my first solo recital, an event that I really wanted to use to highlight my personality as a musician and show off my interests. Part of that goal was to program music by living composers as it is a commitment of mine to engage with the music of today. One such piece that caught my attention was Pajarillo con Bulería by Huascar Barradas. The only issue: No part existed in writing.

This launched the enormous project detailed in these posts to transcribe the work by ear, arranging it for flute and percussion, so that I could perform it for my recital. As it draws nearer, I have formed an incredible collaborative relationship with the percussionist Katelynn Ward and am proud to be constructing this passionate reproduction of Barradas’ work.

This Week - Combining Ideas

I roped Katelynn into the project a couple of weeks ago and she was enthusiastic to start putting it together. She is incredibly knowledgable in the area of Latin American Percussion and shared my enjoyment of the source material. After some logistics discussion, we narrowed down the instruments that she’d be using and got to work rehearsing.

The work is largely improvisatory in its original performance, hence the issues that arose when I transcribed it. Alas, notes and rhythms are notes and rhythms and can, though inefficiently, be somewhat corralled by Western Notation. The percussion, however, is based in what Katelynn referred to as Grooves, necessitating more of a style and form understanding than exact notation. Pictured below is a page of her outline of these grooves and her ideas for instrumentation in each section.

Katelynn’s Percussion Outline

When it came to rehearsing the piece, I can’t overstate the joy that I find in musical collaboration at this level. It puts into perspective Barradas’ own journey, having incredible experience in the study of the flute at top institutions but sticking with his love of improvisational and community collaboration that speaks to his roots. While my method of reproducing his work is not quite what he intended, I consider it a great honor to experience the excitement of playing this piece that drove him to create it initially.

Rehearsal Moments

One of my biggest challenges in transcribing the piece was understanding the metric organization that it utilizes. For Katelynn, this component is her comfort zone and she was very helpful in shedding light on how I could better organize the transcription and think of the melodic figures in relation to the underlying units of time. Finding these points of alignment between our collaborative contribution was very rewarding and it was inspiring to watch her go back and forth referencing the recording, her notes, and her playing, as I had in crafting my part. Following are a few clips from our first rehearsal. We weren’t aiming for perfection, rather we were developing a shared understanding of our intentions for the piece and finding the best ways they fit together.

This clip is early in the rehearsal. We figure out Katelynn’s entry point and establish the groove of the first section.

In this clip, Katelynn walks me through her maraca figure and explains where I can pick out the subdivision to play along. This is a tricky spot for the both of us!

In this final clip, Katelynn and I run through a bit of the middle section and figure out the pacing of the final transitional trill. This is the third time we’ve hit this section and it is so cool to hear the spots where we come together from the groove into a unison rhythm.

Reflection

Any amount of fun that I have had up until this week pales in comparison to the excitement of putting this together with Katelynn. It is my first time playing alongside percussion in a chamber setting like this, a combination of two longstanding musical passions. The piece is lovely and her enthusiasm for it fuels mine even more. This is a rewarding challenge and I am so excited for the performance. The coming weeks will see the refinement of our shared interpretation and the final performance during my recital.