Findings #3 - Intervals (part two)

This post was intended to come before my previous post as a primer for Steve Lacy’s ‘Intervals’ exercise but the other post just came out of me first so I’m following it up now. In the chapter ‘Bases’ of Lacy’s book ‘Findings - My Experience With The Soprano Saxophone’ we get introduced to an exercise for dealing with each individual interval on the soprano saxophone. I’ll copy my previous summary of this exercise here:

“(Lacy) constructed this exercise by writing out every single interval on every distinct pitch on the soprano sax from a minor second starting on low Bb (of which there are 32 if one presupposes the average natural range of the horn from low Bb to high F#) all the way to minor tenths (which there are 18 of) for a total of 373 intervals. He then took all these intervals, cut up the piece of paper and shuffled and reassembled them into a random order… Lacy did this because he believed that practicing all of a single type of interval chromatically became monotonous and too homogenous so he did this to randomize the process and to treat each individual interval as a distinct unit”

On the accompanying CD Steve plays through an example of his process with this exercise; picking one interval, playing it back and forth, singing it, varying the rhythm and inflection. This is the place to start with this concept. According to Lacy he would practice intervals sometimes for hours on end without playing any other notes. Clearly from his prolific and influential output you don’t need to go anywhere else with this exercise if you decide to go this deep on every interval, I have however compiled a bunch of other things to do to expand on and embellish this exercise. Back in 2021 I took some lessons with the great cornet player Kirk Knuffke who, alongside Josh Sinton, have a Steve Lacy repertory group called ‘Ideal Bread’, and who has spent a great deal of time working through ‘Findings’. Kirk gave me a bunch of ideas for how to work on this section of the book, many of which have become so intertwined with my own ideas that I can’t remember which came from him specifically and which I derived later on so I’m just going to give him a broad amount of credit for opening my mind to the possibilities of this chapter of the book.

When I work on this exercise I work through a loose process which I’ll elucidate below but first I’ll list the tools I find indispensable to this process. You will need your instrument, your voice, a chromatic tuner, something to provide a drone (a shruti box, youtube cello drones, tanpura app, etc), and a metronome or drum machine/drum machine app.

First, I begin the process much like Steve by singing and playing the chosen interval back and forth with a variety of rhythms to get the sound deeply in my ear. I may do this for up to ten or fifteen depending on how comfortable I feel with the particular interval. Kirk encouraged me to practice hearing each pitch as the “tonic” using different articulations, rhythms, and emphasis to convince your ear that each one could be the “home” note. This is easier said than done for certain interval types but it’s valuable to train your ears to be flexible in their perception of pitch relationships.

Next I will fire up a drone of some kind to fine tune (pun intended) my intonation. I use a variety of sources for this each with their own pros and cons. Some of my favourite drone options include the app ‘Tanpura Droid’ from Swar Classical, Cello Drones on YouTube, or Dr. Richard A. Schwartz ‘Tuning C.D.’. Some of these have more prominent overtones, others feel more like interacting with another real instrument, all of them are beneficial and I recommend changing it up every now and again. I start this process by setting my drone to the lower of the two pitches I am working with. I will spend several minutes playing the interval slowly back and forth and focusing on micro-variations of the tuning, experimenting with changes in intonation and internalizing how it feels to be slightly flat or slightly sharp. After this I do the same with the drone on the higher of the two pitches and repeat the previous step, then I start to set the drone to other pitches that may recontextualize the interval I’m working with. To use an example from my previous post, if we are working with the interval of a perfect fifth between the pitches D and A, I might set the drone to F# or F♮ in order to imply a major or minor triad respectively, or possibly a G to imply a Dsus4. There are numerous options at this point in the exercise and it is up to your discretion and interest to explore this part.

Once I feel very comfortable with the interval I will introduce “time” into the equation either by setting a metronome to a tempo, often chosen at random, or by selecting a “groove” using the app ‘Drumgenius’. I will often switch tempos, time signatures, and styles a few times over the course of another ten minutes or so to get very comfortable with the experience of playing the interval in time as if playing with another musician.

By this point I may have spent anywhere between fifteen and forty five minutes working with just a single interval. This is enough to tire anyone out but I recommend taking Steve’s guidance and playing a single interval for an hour or two, even if you just do it one time with a single interval, you may be surprised with what you find out about yourself, your instrument, and the interval in question.