You're not hearing loud enough

TS turned me on to a set of exceptional videos on YouTube from Hal Galper,  a jazz pianist and teacher at Berklee. This one is I think my favorite, an excerpt from a master class. He explains that you play exactly and only precisely what you hear. If it's not coming out the way you want it to sound, it's because your aural imagination isn't strong enough, isn't vivid enough. I've experienced glimpses of the same thing myself, but not to the same level. It's about your hearing, and your imagination.

YouTube Symphony Finale

The YouTube symphony is almost done, and will have their final concert, live streamed over the net with a few soloists "docking in" their solos from all over the world. The project is producing lots of great video; here's one of the bassoonists working out in the wild with a keyboard player. Very nice playing in fantastic locations.



Test of the projections on the exterior of the Sydney Opera House. Wow, this is going to be a show.  The program is available on their channel: Mothership is in the middle, it closes with Firebird, and lots of cool stuff in there. I'm not sure I'm willing to stay up until 3am, but oh man.



Updated: My 12 year old insisted on being woken up to watch it live. I watched some live with him, and more on the rebroadcasts that seem to be looping right now.  A fabulous show, on all levels.

A DIY profiler

Here's a profiler made out of particle board, old pipe, and a Dremel tool. You'd think this wouldn't be stiff enough to meet the specifications required for high quality profiling, and you'd be right: the maker thinks 0.1mm is required, and this doesn't meet it. Hertzberg's profilers were made to a tolerance of 1/10000 of an inch, which at 2.5 µm is about 40x higher than 0.1mm. To me this seems silly, you're still going to be dominated by variation in the cane even at a much lower tolerance. Still, this profiler is a 2D profiler, mimicking the template both along and across the blade, and might conceivably be superior to no mechanical profile at all.

The rest of his site is interesting too. He's an analytically minded amateur, like myself.

Another rehearsal

I was pretty relaxed this week. Maybe too relaxed: if we don't count rehearsals time, lesson time, and reed testing time as practicing, then I missed four full days of practice in a row. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised it didn't go well. When it came time to play Mozart in rehearsal, I found myself getting distracted, and losing flow. Anytime I'm thinking to myself, "Oh no! I'm thinking, and not in a flow state! How do I get focus back?" instead of "Bump bahh, bee-de bump bahh..." you can be certain that it's not going well. I got totally lost in the middle of a solo once, mixing up the first and second statements I think, and had to almost stop playing until I could figure out where the orchestra was. Another time I tried following the conductor's beat, even just for a moment, which created another train wreck. Maybe a bit of nerves is a good thing, if it can help keep me in the moment. It might also help encourage me to keep some steam up on practicing Mozart: just to keep it at its current (and rather mediocre) level, I've got to continue to put time in. Preparation, again.

Back to reeds

This is my favorite reed tool. It's the ultrasonic cleaner I got awhile back, designed for jewelry, but used by many players. Since I became convinced that the primary aging mechanism for reeds is becoming encrusted with foreign matter (mostly skin cells from the lips), I've been pretty religious about cleaning my reeds with this after every use. Hot water is better, with a bit of dish soap to help cavitation get started. Last fall sometime I found that one of my reeds played much better than the others. Mindful of the advice to practice only on good reeds, rather than treasuring it and continuing to spend hours making new reeds, I decided that I'd progress faster by spending my time practicing while playing only on my best reed. I started this in I think October, and played that reed basically exclusively until mid-February, so perhaps 16 weeks. At ten hours of playing a week, it was good for some hundreds of hours of playing. Not bad, I should post a picture of that hardy little reed. (It came from a piece of Neuranter cane, so I ordered some more of this today.) This reed did start to die, though, and adjustments seemed to start fraying the tip, so I moved on. At my lesson last night M tried to smooth out some of my work on the newer one. The E kinda dropped, and F was unstable. something I'd noticed in my tape of the Mozart rehearsal too, though I didn't notice at the time. Cropping it back didn't help much, and we eventually decided it was just too soft cane. Next week we'll only be working reeds, so I'd better try and finish a few to bring in and fix up. I have a few sitting on tips, waiting for finishing, and I also have a few pieces that have been soaking for weeks, waiting for me to find time to form tubes. Too many projects, not enough energy.

Second rehearsal

Last night was the second time playing it with the orchestra, and my first time playing it in front of our conductor B. I'd just given blood in the afternoon, so I was a little concerned that I might not be at 100%. When the time came, I grabbed my things to go stand up at the front. B went to chase me a stand, and while stopping him, I realized that not only was I planning to play from memory, but I hadn't even brought my part with me. Absentmindedness or confidence, who knows. In any case, knowing the part went (mostly) fine. And though I sometimes felt a little spacey, this wasn't entirely a bad thing. I think it helped me to not rush the sixteenths, which probably helped them be a little cleaner. The worst part was probably the few minutes spent woodshedding the strings without me. I stood the horn up and leaned on it, trying to look cool, but mostly I was just concerned I might keel over and ding the horn.

I still don't have a cadenza. There's time, but still, I'd better get on that.