Picking pieces

I need to buckle down and get serious about what pieces I'm working on. I no longer have one big future event to prepare for, so there's no natural organization of my effort. I have a vague plan with a flutist friend to do a movement from the Gabaye Sontatine, but that'll be next spring, lots of time to prepare. We've read it over, and I think it'll be mostly fine, except for a high E at the end. Oh well, take it down or figure it out later. M is looking for a recital for me to crash near the end of the year, so that'll be my next performance opportunity. So really I'm looking to pick one piece for that. Here's what's on my stand at the moment:

- Pizzi, Ode to a Toad. I love it, and my family doesn't mind listening to it. It has its challenges, which I'd like to sort out. It doesn't seem serious enough for a formal recital, but it's fun enough it'll be useful. I'll probably try to get this worked fully up first.

- Boddecker, Sonata Sopra La Monica. I've spent some time on this, but the gnarly bits never got up to performance level. I'm a little tired of it, though, maybe I should let it sit for awhile.

- Villa-Lobos, Ciranda das sete notas. It's got some big leaps, like the Pizzi, and some other technical stuff, but hopefully overall doable. I think this'll be the next piece to get serious work.

- Alex Kotch, Techno Music. Fun, but I've read it, and it's harder than it looks. I think this one is going to sit as well.

- Milde scale studies. I put a lot of time into these, and they only get "performed" at lessons. Hopefully time well spent. At the rate I'm going, it might take me another year to finish getting through them again.

In other news, I listened to my Mozart recordings again. The second performance is still my favorite. I still find it hard to listen to myself and not feel terrible, though. Even at my best, so full of mistakes.

More books I'm reading

Arthur Weisberg, The Art of Wind Playing. I blogged this before. Actually, this got recalled so I had to give it back, but I'm still thinking about the things it said. Mostly working on trying to play in tune all the way through a note, from the attack to the release.

Walter Piston, Harmony. I tried skimming through this in high school, but you can't learn harmony by skimming. It's not for a class, so I can take as long as I want. Another book, a jazz piano book my wife is editing and producing a new edition of, suggests that harmony be learned slowly. So I'm taking it slow, trying to do all the exercises, and integrate the new material into what I know and play. That way, even if I don't finish the book, I've still learned something useful. Inspired by this book, I've started to play some harmonic minor scales, instead of just melodic.

The Inner Game of Music. A classic, which I found randomly browsing in the music library. I read the Inner Game of Tennis many many years ago, which was the first in the series. It advocates an intuitive, almost unconscious approach to teaching and learning, and argues that traditional analytical instruction techniques create many more problems than they solve. Victor Wooten's The Music Lesson, which I read awhile back, is along similar lines, as it The Perfect Wrong Note, which I mentioned before. Interestingly, both these books are by bass players. I think at least some of my flaws in playing are due to my relentlessly analytical approach. When working on etudes, I've been focusing on legato, and trying to learn how to play scalework evenly without accenting every note, as I strain to play each note clean. (Here's the Matsukawa masterclass that talks legato.) Music teaching is full of tactics to get people to think and not think in the right ways. Play this arpeggio as one gesture, says M, as opposed to my natural tendency to see it as a dozen distinct slurs, each of which I can screw up in its own way. We'll see if reading the book can help me.

As a side note, I had a lesson yesterday. I got sent on to the next etude after only one lesson on this one, Milde Scale Study #13 (E-flat scales). First time that's happened, which is cool, although I have to say, I played it better during the lesson than I ever did at home. I'm still all over the place on solo pieces. We worked on Ode to a Toad, which has some painfully big leaps. M's going to look for a recital I can crash around Christmastime, so I'll have a performance to work towards, which should help focus me a bit.

Alien reed making

Looking for reed instruction, I found this set of videos (here is complete set), showing how to make a bagpipe reed. It's very strange to watch, because some things are the same: it's a double reed, and shares the same physics of sound production, so on any planet, there'll be certain things which remain constant. The bagpipe is a different instrument than the orchestral double reeds, so some things have to be different: the reed is enclosed, so there's no interaction with embouchure; the air comes from a bag, the range is small and uses no overblowing. However, there seems to be no overlap with the cultural history of double reed making. In particular, there's a near total absence of specialized tools: no reed knife, no gouging or profiling machine, etc. The tools he does have he's made himself: a forming mandrel for the staple, which he filed out of a nail, the easel, the bed he gouges the cane in. Very interesting.