Pulse Patterning For Pianists

CHARLES ASCHBRENNER

Recently retired from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, after a career of 45 years, Charles Aschbrenner now holds the appointment of Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music. He has lectured and performed both as soloist and collaborative pianist throughout Michigan and the Midwest as well as in Mexico, Portugal, France, and Russia. With degrees from Illinois and Yale he continued his studies with renowned teachers Nadia Boulanger in France and Adele Marcus in New York City. He has presented lecture-recitals numerous times on the composers Chopin and Schumann, most recently on Robert Schumann’s Carnaval.

His piano students have entered graduate programs throughout the country and ultimately have entered careers in teaching, performance, church work, and opera and musical theater direction.

Also a licensed instructor from the New York Dalcroze School of Music in 1974, Aschbrenner continues to teach the required Eurhythmics component of the music and dance major programs at Hope College.

Additionally trained in the Taubman, Alexander and Feldenkrais work, Charles Aschbrenner has long been interested in the use of the body in its most efficient, unified and creative manner leading to a virtuoso and musical technique free of limitations, stiffness, pain and injury.

His innovative presentation “Pulse Patterning for Pianists” was first given nationally at the 1993 national conference of Music Teachers National Association in Spokane, and has continued to serve as a basis for articles, a website, and presentations at international conferences, most recently for MTNA in Toronto, World Piano Pedagogy Conference in Las Vegas and for European Piano Teachers Association (EPTA) in Novi Sad, Serbia. In June, 2008, Aschbrenner presented workshops at the 23rd Annual Music Institute for Piano Pedagogy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

About Me—the Early Years

My earliest childhood memories of musical activity were of dancing and marching about the house with my toy drum to the recorded music on the radio or the stereo. I rocked myself to sleep at night to the lilt of my mother’s piano playing in the living room. Clearly there was an early kinesthetic response to music that later surfaced in many small and large ways. In college I improvised for modern dance classes and then enrolled in the classes myself. (I would later take ballet classes as opportunities came along.) To fulfill my composition requirement, I took composition for the dance, creating works in collaboration with a dancer. I was also extremely intrigued by the “how” of piano technique as taught by my piano professor Stanley Fletcher at the University of Illinois, who first introduced me to the concepts of rotation and in-and-out, and of rhythmic pulsing of the elbows in passage playing.

In university analysis classes, I studied the theoretical concepts of rhythm that included phrase rhythm and hypermeasures. At Fontainebleau, I further honed my musicianship skills under Nadia Boulanger, et al, learning to do multiple musical tasks separately and at the same time. I still remember, from among Boulanger’s many pithy remarks, “3/4 time is just the same as 2/4 time, except the first beat is twice as long.” Then some years later I discovered the writings of Abby Whiteside and found them to be absolutely illuminating in regards to rhythm with her emphasis on “felt” rhythm.

My first teaching career sabbatical took me to New York City to coach with Adele Marcus—but also, and after years of curiosity, to the Dalcroze School where I became immersed in, and hooked on, the rhythmic movement training of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, the complete course of study consisting of eurhythmics, solfege, and improvisation. I became a licensed Dalcroze instructor more than thirty years ago and have been teaching college level classes in eurhythmics ever since.

It is interesting that I have always watched pianists and organists with an eye to how they move or do not move as they perform. I have taken note of their postures and their movements that appeared musically and physically natural and creative, as well as those that seemed to be awkward and counterproductive. I noticed that there often appeared to be a slight rise and fall, and/or a forward and back movement that originated literally from the piano bench, or in other words from the lower torso: the hips and the pelvis. This would come to have a revelatory significance and meaning after later studying the Feldenkrais clock exercises seated on a chair. Pulse Patterning for Pianists was finally about to be born.