Expression is Everything
by Steve Charles
Daring to adopt new techniques from a Chicago blues artist at a Wabash master class, these students changed their music for the better.
Have you ever heard an oboe breathe?
The first time I heard it was in Salter Hall last November at a master class taught by blues harmonica player, pianist, and composer Corky Siegel.
A bearded 74-year-old man from Chicago wearing jeans and a tan Blues Bus T-shirt with the imprint of a howling singer across his chest, Siegel began the session with a blues piano piece and more energy than any three people in the room.
“Dynamics are the key to expression, and expression in music is everything,” he insisted. He broke it down into physical terms.
“Open your hand,” he said. “Now lightly touch your palm with the fingers of your other hand, as softly as you can.” He told us to gradually increase the pressure until it almost hurt. Then he asked everyone to jump up as high as they could reach. He demonstrated it first—nothing shames 18- to 22-year-olds into action quite like watching a 74-year-old trying to leap into the air.
“So much of what we do musically on stage moves horizontally—pitch, rhythm, they’re all up here,” Siegel said, pressing his hands with a mime-like gesture against an imaginary wall. “It’s two-dimensional. But dynamics breaks that plane, reaches into the audience. Dynamics are how the musical conversation takes place.”
He demonstrated how those changes in pressure translated into changes in volume when applied to the piano, how they drew listeners into even the simplest of pieces.
but for the wabash students in the class—two oboists and two singers—it would be all about breath. So Siegel sang “Amazing Grace,” putting the emphasis and volume into the words “grace” and “sweet” in a way that turned the cliché back into song.
Then he invited oboist Neil Dittmann ’19 to the front of the class. The blues player asked the Wabash sophomore to play as quietly as he could.
‘That’s the hardest thing to do with an oboe,” Dittmann would tell me later. And he struggled at first. “Softer,” Siegel said each time the Dittmann blew into the reed. “Don’t worry if it squeaks, don’t be afraid of how the note sounds.
“Softer.”
After several more attempts he did it—played so softly the note was almost lost.
And that’s when we heard that oboe breathe. Heard the air swirling around in that tube as if it were resonating in the skull of some ancient beast, half bugling elk, half velociraptor. When Dittmann increased the volume, the creature rose with him.
Composer and singer Alejandro Reyna ’17 was next up with “It Must Be So” from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Siegel pushed him, too—urging him to sing so softly he was barely audible and so loudly his voice nearly broke.
As Reyna experimented with changing the dynamics of the lyrics, each word took on gravity, and the line “My master told me, that men are loving kind/Yet now behold me, ill-used and sad of mind”—revealed the person behind the notes.
Then it was Siegel’s turn. He nearly blew out his harmonica on a blues piece, then played so quietly we could barely hear him as he lay down like a man having a heart attack. Leaving it all, literally, on the floor. Seconds later he was laughing at his own spectacle, as the guys in the front row helped him back up.
Siegel had proven his point: Expression, even playfulness, created a deeper connection with the audience than striving for perfection ever could.
the students got it.
“I’ve never been asked to play that softly or play so loudly to the point of breaking,” Dittmann said. “It adds a third dimension to my playing. I was reminded of what makes music music—there’s a feeling you’re trying to evoke.”
“Sometimes we get so focused on diction, on pitch, on rhythm that we forget what the instrument can really do,” said Reyna. “He really helped us remember that. We have all this room for expression.
“If you’re constantly afraid of making mistakes, you’ll never really know how expressive you can be, how you can sound.”
Reyna applied the same lessons to his compositions, which he presented during a recital April 8.
“I went back to those pieces, marked them up, and left a lot less for the conductor to decide, being more specific about how expressive I wanted it.”
“He gave us a great structural way to come at it,” said oboist and singer Rory Willats ’17. “It’s a lovely way to think about expression that gets you out of the usual heady conversation about expression being intangible. He made expression something you can practice.
“It’s not a way I’ve sung in front of people before, and it puts me in that gap between just being able to do it and the place where something goes wrong. That’s what makes live performance special: putting something at risk.”
The students got to watch the man practice what he preached during that evening’s performance by Siegel and his Chamber Blues ensemble.
“His performance was fantastic,” Dittmann said. “The guy we met is just who he is, and what he tells us to do is exactly what he is doing.”