The Rudiment With No English Name
A student brought me a Joe Tompkins etude last spring and played it clean. Every note in the right place, every sticking as marked.
It sounded wrong and neither of us could say why.
I sat with it for a week before I worked out what was happening, and the answer turned out to be about two hundred years old.
There is a rudiment in the French tradition called the coup de charge — the charge stroke. It looks like a flam and it is the opposite of a flam. In a flam, the quiet grace note comes first and the accent lands after it. In a charge stroke, the accent lands first and the soft stroke follows it, immediately, like an echo you didn’t plan.
The French sing it “ta-la.” A flam is “ga-DA.” Say both out loud and you’ll hear that they are not the same gesture at all.
There is no American rudiment for it. It isn’t in the NARD twenty-six. It isn’t in the PAS forty. If you were trained in this country you have almost certainly never been taught it, and if you meet it on a page you will read it as a flam, because a flam is the only thing in your vocabulary that it resembles.
Which is exactly what my student did. He played every note correctly and translated the figure into the nearest thing he knew.
I’ve been reading the French method books this summer — Tourte, who wrote the Paris Conservatoire’s official method in 1946, and Guy Lefèvre, whose technique studies from the eighties turn out to be the direct source Tompkins was composing from. The whole nine-etude set reads differently once you know that.
They aren’t hard American solos. They’re translations. And like most translations, they lose something if you only read them in the target language.
The fix is not complicated, which is the frustrating part. Play the accent. Let the soft stroke fall after it. Start slow enough that the two are clearly separate, then close the gap until it stops sounding like two notes and starts sounding like one thing with a tail.
My student got it in about ten minutes, once he knew what he was aiming at.
Ten minutes, after a week of practicing the wrong thing perfectly. That ratio comes up more than I’d like in this job.
