My wife took a video of the Mozart performance, and I watched it the next morning. All the mistakes I remembered were there, plus a few other ones too. But that's not what struck me. What surprised me was the sound, especially my intonation. It was terrible! A sustained tenor F4 at the end of the cadenza, a note I'd milked for impact, was incredibly painfully flat. Not the impact I was looking for. But it wasn't just one note or two: every bar, starting with the opening statement, had a few notes which were only vague approximations of the right pitch, or which did such wonky things over the duration of the note that you'd be hard pressed to describe them as simply sharp or flat. I didn't remember being that bad while I was playing, I thought I'd sounded fine. And I've been listening to lots of recordings of myself recently, so it's not the novelty of hearing myself. Was I good while practicing but bad at the show, or have I somehow been deluding myself that I was close to okay? Kind of a shock, really. Searching for something positive to think, all I could find was, "Well, at least there's something basic I can improve on! No worries that I've peaked yet!" I chatted with my wife about it, and she helpfully pointed out that I sing out of tune too, so maybe it's connected with that.
Later I watched it again, while trying to prepare the file for uploading. Maybe I was ready for it, but this time the intonation didn't bother me. I could still hear that it wasn't right, but somehow it didn't seem as severe. Weird. This stuff seems like it should be absolute, but in terms of how it gets perceived, nothing is absolute.
Here's a plot (using Melodyne) of that last bad F. Yeah, 27 cents is pretty flat. Worse is that the big preparatory open F before it is sharp, so you've got an octave leap which is a full quarter tone out. Maybe pain is the only rational response, and all else is delusion.
Here's the whole thing, in case you'd like to hear it for yourself. A year of work.
The show happened - last night I played a movement of the Mozart bassoon concerto with orchestra. Here's a pic, taken just as I went on. It went well, about as well as could be expected, given who and where I am. One odd squawk, one concentration slip just before a tricky bit, those are the flaws I remember, but overall I was pretty pleased. Everyone clapped at the end and said nice things to me afterward. My daughter was in the front row, about a foot away from me since the stage was a little cramped, and she was giving me feedback and a thumbs up after every passage. Once I have a recording I'll put it up, in case either of my readers wants to listen. It was a lot of work, and while the end result was not perfect, I learned a great deal along the way. We'll do the whole show twice more over the next few weeks, after which I can put this piece away for awhile. I think everyone around me will be grateful when that happens.
I was complaining to my wife about the Mozart yesterday. I know how I want it to sound, and I'm almost there, in the sense that every passage, in isolation, can go well at least occasionally. But running it does not magically staple together the best performances that I ever had in practice, rather I'll be lucky if everything is typical. So I know already that the final performance will leave much to be dissatisfied about. Kinda depressing, really. She made a rather wise remark: the people in the audience are not there because they are expecting an amazing show, perhaps because some famous international soloist is coming. (Is there such a thing, on bassoon?) Rather, they are there to watch a bunch of amateurs having fun. So have fun -- look like you're happy to be there, and play it happily. That's something simple to keep in mind. Enthusiasm is infectious.
The thought process, the internal tape loop of negativity, reminds me of an essay by bassoonist John Steinmetz I read awhile back (before I started this blog in fact). The whole thing is worth reading. Why do musicians look like they're unhappy? Well, after spending thousands of hours practicing self-criticism, naturally you get pretty good at it. I don't know the right way to deal with this. He offers some advice, but it's more easily said than done. And besides, I'd like it to be good, and it's not clear to me that spending time trying to accept my flaws will improve the performance faster than spending time trying to correct them. I guess that's the core of the problem, and it's infinite. So better to go back to my wife advice, keep it simple, and have fun (despite the inevitable flaws).
I've taken to saying that there's a fairly narrow range for how a show can go. There's a limit to how badly it can go, determined by your preparation, and also a limit as to the best possible you can do, given who you are and where you're at. Psychologically, you may feel sad, or happy, depending on where in that range you end up, but in terms of the impact on the audience, on the listener, the difference between best and worst is not that large. To be honest, I have no idea if this statement is true, but if it helps me process the pressure of performance, I might as well believe it.
I almost took it back at the dress rehearsal last night. Mozart went first, so I pulled on the shoulder strap and went. Somehow I ended in a slightly uncomfortable posture, with too much weight not just on my left hand, but forward onto my fingers which were trying to play the notes. They ended up slipping and not sealing, nor feeling right. I ended up muffing entire *bars* of sixteenth notes, not exactly an auspicious beginning. And it's hard to phrase and sing beautifully when you're presiding over a train wreck in progress. So yeah, while there is a range for how badly it can go, that range might not be "narrow".
Still, I listened to the tape later. It sounded rough, like the bunch of amateurs we are, but not as bad as it sounded in my head. And while things improved as I got myself sorted out, but there's no time for that at the show. It occurs to me that when I practice at home in my room, I get set up standing, warm up with scales, then work hard passages up slowly, so I have lots of opportunity to get balance issues and everything else ironed out. At the show, I'll have to get up, put on the shoulder strap, walk to the front, and do it. I'd better start practicing doing that.
Here's what I put on the door of my office this afternoon. You can tell it's a serious concert, since we're charging admission, even if all of the proceeds are going to some worthy cause.
Had a rehearsal tonight. The sub for our conductor got a surprise gig, so we had a sub for the sub, a student conductor who carefully videotaped his performance. He did great, except maybe on time management, and we didn't do the Mozart. We have our last rehearsal next week, then the show the week after. It'll be fine.
Here's the practice chart I made for Mozart. Each snippet of a few bars gets a name ("regal opening", "F arpeggios", "trilly bit"), and every date gets a column. Performances are circled. After I work on a snippet, I mark it off, usually writing the metronome mark I achieved. Mostly I'm putting the metronome on 8ths, so my full tempo is 210+. The idea is not that I expect myself to deeply practice every bar on every day - I find it pretty easy to blow 20 minutes or more on two beats, and I don't have enough time or energy to spend the hours required. Rather, the chart lets me see at a glance though what bits I've been neglecting. If a passage hasn't been worked from slow to fast in a few days, it could probably use some attention. Also important, filling it out gives me a feeling of accomplishment, a record of small victories, however transient, over the notes.
For the trilly bits in Mozart, starting at the pickup to 51 and again at 120, I long ago decided I wanted to do 32nd notes, something like this:
Three turns, starting from the bottom. The advantage of straight 32nd notes over something like a 7-tuplet is that it's easier to practice slowly with a subdivided beat. When I crank up the metronome, I don't always manage to get all three turns in, or maybe there will be two clean ones plus a little bounce near the end, but this is the plan anyway.
There are lots of ways to play these, of course. My teacher I think told me he played 5 turns, which seems like a lot to me. And of course, when he demonstrated, they went too fast for me to count. With recordings, we can slow things down. Here's that section from Klaus Thunemann's recording, which has pretty fast trills:
It's too fast for me to count, unless I slow it down: Kt slowed by TFox17
From that, it's pretty easy to write out what he is doing:
I count four turns, starting from the top, for straight 32nd notes all the way through. So not, on paper, any faster than my plan, although faster in practice, since he both takes a faster tempo, and is able to execute the whole thing beautifully.
Now, how fast can a trill go? It turns out that there are limits in principle, not just practice. First of all, there are limits as to how fast fingers can move. Kochevitsky's book on piano technique goes through some of the studies. Apparently the 2nd and 3rd fingers can make 5-6 movements per second, 4-5 with the other fingers. Training doesn't help peak speed: great pianists and members of the general public were about the same, with some untrained participants able to make 7 per second, which some pianists were only able to do 5. For a trill on piano, you can alternate two fingers, so 6 movements per second can give you 12 notes per second. On a wind instrument, you can only move one finger, but each full movement cycle, up and down, gives you two notes. So it's more or less the same, 12 notes per second. It turns out that there's a limit to what the ear will perceive of as distinct notes. Passages played faster than this will blur together. This makes sense: after all, every note is just a cyclical progression of pressures, and A0, reachable by a contra with an extension, has a frequency of about 22 Hz. The limit of hearing notes depends on several things: the pitch of the notes (low notes get muddier faster), the complexity of the passage (scales, trills and tremolos are easier to perceive than more complex passages), and the listener. This limit is typically around 12 notes per second, sextuplets at 120 BPM, which interestingly corresponds to about the limit of what's possible to produce. For a trill, the limit quoted is more like 15 notes per second, which is around what Klaus Thunemann is performing his trill. We can test this ourselves, though, by shifting the tempo on the recording, and seeing what happens.
Here's the tempo shifted to about 150 bpm, which gives us about 20 notes per second:
And again, to about 180, which gives us 24 notes per second: Kt 182 by TFox17
For me, at 150 it still sounds like a trill, though I certainly can't count the notes. At 180, it's degenerated into a sort of fluttery effect on a sustained tone. At 240, the 16ths become indistinct.
From this I think we can conclude that Klaus Thunemann's trills are, not just fast, but essentially at or near the limit of being the fastest possible, either to perform or to hear.
There was some discussion awhile back about whether, and which, rock bands played to a click track, ie used a metronome to keep their drummer precisely in time. Post-recording quantization is also used, and, like pitch correction, has percolated down to consumer software such as Garage Band. I thought it would be interesting to use the same software to see how steady my beat is. Here's the version I used, which allows you to upload your own track for analysis. (Or, if you just want to look at tracks found online, this is slightly more advanced.)
This is a plot of the tempo during the rehearsal last night. Our maestro picked a rather bright pace, compared to previous rehearsals, perhaps because we had only a couple minutes of rehearsal time left. To be honest, it felt a little too fast to be in control for me, although on an absolute scale it's a reasonable speed. There's some wandering up and down, but it ends up about where it started. After the rehearsal I was guessing the speed at 116, but in fact it averages more like 106, which is around where I'm aiming. When you're working with the software, you can have it play sections, and watch the marker move on the plot, so you can see and hear how the tempo change affects the music.
For comparison, here's a plot of Dag Jensen's recording. It's much faster overall, around 120 average, and steadier, with certain large deviations for effect.
Finally, here's the recording itself. I'm not happy with it, but being pseudonymous is what lets me post stuff like this. And while I did screw various things up, the final show is probably going to sound a lot like this, so I can consider it a preview.
I've been having some trouble this week with the pad on the G key (right hand ring finger) sticking. A couple times I opened up the case, and found the key stuck entirely closed, and during playing, sometimes it would stick a bit and open slowly. After consulting with my tech who did the repad a few weeks back, who unfortunately lives far away, I've been trying to clean the pad with a dry Q-tip and various kinds of paper (cigarette paper, Kimwipes from the lab), closing the pad firmly against the paper and pulling the paper out. Whatever has gotten into the pad and tone hole surface that's causing them to stick, I'm hoping that this can remove it, and let it close. Probably the pad has gotten wet, so I've also changed how I clean the instrument out. Now I swab the boot first, although this requires juggling the wing joint while I'm working with the boot. And being careful to be sure that the G key is not being pushed closed in the case, so it can dry. Blocking open the other keys which can attract condensation is also a good idea.
It occurs to me that lots of short practices is worse for condensation than continuous practice, just because the horn has time to cool off and hence condense moisture again. That might be part of my problem too.
Also I'm probably using too much force on the key, but that's not easy to fix. I can get it to stick if I press hard, just about every time.
Here's Mozart from this morning. Different mistakes, every time.
