Merry Bassoon Xmas

From my daughter's Christmas card for me. Yeah, I guess that is what I look like.

Reviewing the Milde scale studies

My teacher once mentioned someone who, preparing for a job audition, made the practice of playing every one of the scale studies, every day. Then he (or she? I don't know whose story this is) played through all 50 of the Milde concert studies. Seems like a lot of work, to me, but, so the story goes, the player won the audition. Yesterday, with some holiday time and energy and no desperate need to be practicing anything in particular, I decided to try it out. I started with Number 1, C scales, and played slow enough to try and be clean. I stopped to review bits that were no longer under my fingers, then continued. I was surprised at how much I remembered of each one. I could remember the discussions of each phrasing choice, even though I hadn't looked at some of these in years. And playing through many of them, back to back, certainly gave me a unified outlook on the Milde style. The whole thing took a long time. Much longer than I expected, really, hours and hours, long enough to attract comments from my family. I can only assume that the person who was doing all of Milde every day knew them better than me, and could get through them quicker.

Buried in bassoon reeds

What an odd video. I don't think I've ever seen that many reeds together in one place before. The whole thing makes me think of Rule 34.

Nice multi-bassoon arrangement

The piece is Celine Dion's All by Myself. Great work on the arrangement, the playing, and the video. Parts are available, says the creator.

The trials of being a high-profile symphony musician

Here's an article about the chatter facing the principle horn player for the CSO. Horn is a famously difficult instrument, and this player is having a difficult time, to read the reviews. Sports analogies seem appropriate. I'm reminded of legendary hockey goalie Jacque Plante who, in response to someone's complaint about their work stress, replied "How would you like a job where, every time you make a mistake, a red light goes on and 18,000 people boo?" We're used to top athletes making mistakes, and we're used to top athletes being forced into retirement by the demands of the game. I think it's actually kind of cool to see this kind of news coverage, orchestral performance as athletic event, with all the inherent drama that that entails. I just wish it was enlivened by some replays, so that those of us who weren't in the audience could see what happened.

I went to a wind quintet concert on the weekend, and chatted a bit with the horn player afterward. He'd studied with one of the CSO horn players, and had spent a couple weeks living at her house when he was between residences. A really interesting experience, because he got to hear precisely how a top player practices in the privacy of her own home. He was impressed by how perfect she was. Not one wrong note, not one split attack, from the first note of the day to the last. Lots of slow playing, to be sure, working out and learning the music. _The Perfect Wrong Note_, which I've read, got mentioned as describing the philosophy. I can't do this, or at least that's what I tell myself, but every time I try I feel like things get better.

Vivaldi Largo

Today's attempt at the Largo from Vivaldi's Sonata for Cello #3, A minor, RV 43. It's a representative take, despite the ill-thought through ornaments I added in the repeat, and a few muffed notes. All comments appreciated. I plan to play this at a student recital in about a week.

University Symphony and a Légére reed tryout

Had my first rehearsal with the local university orchestra last week. I've played with them before, and it's always a little nerve-wracking, since the standards are higher. I get invited back, though, so maybe it's not so bad. My best-laid plans to arrive early and get a good warm-up were messed up by dinner delays and weather, resulting in me entering the room with perhaps five minutes to get set. I had a new reed I wanted to use (about which more in a bit), but I wanted to give it a trial before the actual rehearsal. Unfortunately, while unpacking, I dropped it. It didn't chip (thank goodness), but the blades did slip. I've never seen that before, at least not so badly. One blade was displaced 3 or 4 mm. I poked at it, but mostly focused on getting my mainstay reed soaking and my horn together. So much for the new reed. The conductor called for the Bizet, the one piece I'm playing first on. So the other bassoonist and I switched spots, and he asked for the Minuet. Fine, here's the minuet. I hadn't managed to play even a note yet, but that's okay, I essentially never make any adjustments during tuning anyway. For the first section he called, I had rest, so that was fine. Unfortunately, the other bassoonist was playing, everyone else was playing (it was a wind sectional) and my rest didn't make any sense. What? It turns out there are _two_ Bizet Carmen suites, we're playing them both, and they both have a Minuet movement. Oops. I didn't figure it out because I didn't have the music for the other suite. It was in the other bassoonists folder, so we switched the necessary parts, the conductor called the next section, and I'm supposed to enter on a long pp C4 (the one above the staff). I'm not a big fan of this note, I gotta say. Always flat, hard to control, dead sounding without excellent embouchure and reed. Yuck. And playing it soft makes it even worse. I glance at my reed, which I hadn't been planning on using, and it's wide open. Probably great for belting out a tutti forte, but I'm really regretting not getting to rehearsal earlier. I pinch down, trying to close the reed enough to play soft, and do everything I can to keep the pitch up. A horrible, fuzzy, dead, duck-like sound emerged. Pain crossed the conductor's face. It turns out I'd managed to get it sharp, in addition to just sounding awful. After a couple of minutes of playing, things normalized, and the reed behaved fine.

I have been wanting to move on from that reed, though. I've been playing on it for I think six months, which even with my cleaning seems like too long. I've been looking forward to the Légére reeds for awhile. I kind of had dream-like fantasies of synthetic reeds, every one machined to perfection from homogenous engineered material, which would respond beautifully, give control in every register, play in tune with great tone always. Légére has captured a lot of the high-end single reed market, and I didn't see why it couldn't apply to double-reeds too. Because the Légéres were almost here, I'd been postponing putting effort into cane reedmaking, since these skills would soon be outmoded. A couple weeks ago I finally had my chance to try a couple. These had been ordered by a fellow student of my teacher's, an amateur who has done extensive research and investigations on reeds. He had the medium strength, and two to try out. I was really looking forward to it: finally, the end to reed difficulties. The price ($125 ea) is a little eye-popping, but compared to the cost of a bocal or a horn, not totally out of line.

My first impression was terrible. Stiff, and unresponsive. Compared to my mental fantasy, or even my existing mediocre reeds, it was quite difficult to even get a sound out, much less control the sound. I spent a while working with them, since I'd gone to the trouble to get there. They did play, and once the sound was going, the tone was nice. We did some recordings, and comparisons to my cane reed. I'd call the synthetic tone rounder and warmer, where my cane reed was a little more nasal and perhaps a bit buzzier. The synthetic was also louder, which ought to help in projection. The recordings sounded fairly similar: I'm the same player, regardless of the reed, and the tone difference is subtle. But it was just tremendously more work to get the sound out of the synthetic. And I felt it was difficult to control the sound: hard to make beautiful releases, hard to pitch tones where I wanted them. With working that hard just to get a sound, there's not much room left for making beautiful music.

Now, this is not necessarily the reed's fault. My friend had done a certain amount of adjusting of the Légéres, something which they discourage you from doing, but he's definitely a tinkerer. And perhaps it's simply and completely a question of strength: maybe I need soft, and would love a soft Légére. But I think to my son's experience with Légéres on clarinet. He loves the sound, and refuses all other reed types. But he does have trouble with clear articulation. To some extent, that's just something which is hard on clarinet, and perhaps requires more skill than he has. But I wonder if there's a characteristic of the Légéres which makes articulation more problematic.

So there we have it. Légéres exist, they do work, and have a beautiful sound. They don't work well enough for me, though, in the sense that I was hoping that they would solve my issues with responsiveness, not make them worse. I'd be interested in trying a Légére soft at some point, but I'm not sure I want to invest in the experiment just yet. With this tryout in mind, I headed back to the reedmaking room. Worked on getting my knife sharpened, worked on finishing a couple of blanks I had around, one of which was the new reed I wanted to use at the university symphony. The synthetic reeds aren't magic, they exist in the same world as cane, and face the same acoustical problems. If I can figure out how to address these problems with cane, I won't need to worry about synthetic.

Bassoforte article and video (with sound!)

There's a new article (autotranslation linked) on the bassoforte. It has a bit of mention of a collaboration with TU Dresden, and a mild notice by a player about the new keywork (there are no open toneholes, if I understand right). Quite interesting. Even better, there's a video, with sound! I had to skip the German interview, but there's some audio of the instrument at the beginning and end. To my ear, it sounds a bit blatty, but no doubt that will just help it "keep up with the tuba', as Guntram Wolf says.

Previously: 1, 2.

Waterlogged!

I think everyone has heard to not let reeds soak too long. "Getting waterlogged" was supposed to wreck the reed, although exactly how was never clear to me. I read something in the IDRS Journal, awhile back, that more or less convinced me that this wasn't possible, that "getting waterlogged" was basically an urban legend. The cane is fully hydrated or it isn't, goes the story, and if it takes on too much water (and how much is too much?) it would suffice to let it dry again. Since then I haven't worried too much about soaking reeds. I'd just soak the whole reed in water for a few minutes before playing, and dip occasionally. I would let them dry after I was done, but if I forgot and left the reed in water overnight, I'd just take it out and play, not obviously the worse for the experience.

Last week, I was away for a few days, and accidentally left my reed in water the whole time. In fact, I took it out only while packing for my rehearsal. Our usual conductor was away that week, and we had a sub, D, a bassoonist. She saw my reed, and remarked on it, saying that just looking at it made her lips hurt. Indeed, it was quite dark with water. I gathered that getting waterlogged makes the reed stiffer. Maybe it was just psychological, being jinxed by her remarks (plus four days without playing) but the reed really bothered me the whole rehearsal. After it dried, the tip looked like the picture: almost entirely flat, and separated and curled up at the corners. I soaked it again, and now it seems to play fine. But still, I don't think I'll let a reed get that soaked again.

A bassoon piece in a young composer competition

Check this out: there's a bassoon/piano piece in the finals of a Conservatory Canada  creative music competition. The next round is determined by popularity, so vote early, vote often. Bookmark the vote page, set a reminder on your calendar: you can vote up to once per day, until the end of October.

Another bassoon support option

A custom piece by John Schoeder; his website shows it in use. Reminds me a bit of the Vonk.

An unusual reed

Hard to believe that even plays -- someone posted it to the bassoon reddit, perhaps it was made as a joke. For comparison, the smallest reed in the IDRS Reed Project collection is this one, by Arthur Grossman.

Absolute pitch

The short story is, I don't have it.

Absolute pitch, formerly called perfect pitch, is the ability to name a pitch after hearing it. It's to be distinguished from relative pitch, which is the ability to name intervals after hearing two notes in succession, or at the same time; or copy melodies etc. There's different kinds: some people can do it in some contexts and not others. It's said to be rare: possessing "perfect pitch" is often included in the litany of inborn genius characteristics of the young prodigies, "one in ten thousand". People are studying it, though, and it's a little more complicated than just being a God-given gift to the chosen few. Learning music when being young helps, speaking a tonal language helps. Nearly everyone has some aspect: eg if you ask musically untrained members of the general public to sing a currently popular song, they start in the right key much more often than you would expect from chance. I've known people who had it, in a useful sense: my junior high orchestra director, for instance, would hear an airplane flying overhead, and announce that it was an E, but somewhat flat. And my son's AP is pretty good. I've never had the sense of having perfect pitch, but I feel like I do have some aspects of it. I can imagine playing any note of the bassoon, for instance, hearing the pitch and the timbre in my head, and imagining what my fingers and air column are doing. I'd be surprised if the pitches I'm imagining were that far off. And once when I was trying to learn intervals, with my wife playing them at the piano, she noted that I was always getting major and minor wrong, but was quite accurately calling white notes major and black notes minor. It's wrong, sure, but your brain can't make that kind of mistake without knowing, in some sense, what the absolute pitches are.

So I was intrigued when I read about an online study of AP. Here it is, out of UCSF. They are interested in the genetics, so there are survey questions about family background, musical training, and languages, before they hit you with an online pitch recognition test. I found the pace pretty quick, you get maybe one second for each tone, and I didn't feel like I was doing any better than guessing. About halfway through it switched from pure sine wave tones to piano notes, and I felt like I was doing even worse. I didn't care, I just wanted to finish. The results reflect that: I scored 14.75 on pure tones, and a 3 on piano tones; this is out of a best possible of 36. The average score in their test-taking population is a touch over 17, and random guessing would give you 7.5. Their cutoff for having AP is 24.5. There's a plot of where I fit in:

A couple of interesting things here: the responses cluster in two places: top right, where you mostly get them right, but with some errors; and middle lower left, around random guessing. So it does mostly look like a "you have it or you don't" binary proposition, though there are lots of intermediate people as well. There's a pretty good correlation between the scores for most participants: if you can do it for one type of tone, you can do it for the other. There are outliers, sure. Mostly these are above the line: people whose AP is pretty good when you play piano notes, not so good for sine waves. This could be a practice effect, people who get better at taking the survey during the survey itself (since the piano notes come second), but I think it's more likely people who grew up playing piano and can just recognize the notes better when they are played by a piano. People like me, who are better at the sine waves, are rarer. I'm not the furthest outlier in this direction, there's a dot way off in the lower right for someone who actually has perfect pitch on sine waves but was as bad as me at piano notes. He or she might have unusual characteristics, or perhaps they just didn't take the second part seriously. My personal results do look pretty funny: definitely better than guessing for sine waves, but worse than guessing for piano notes. Huh. I feel like if the survey had been bassoon notes, or if it has at least been notes in the bassoon range or my singing range, I would have done better. There were a lot of high notes, and I just feel totally lost up in the treble.

Velocity

Summer's almost over, with a new year almost begun. At the beginning of the summer, I'd had great plans to make lots of reeds, go busking, get new experiences, and so on. Almost none of that has happened. I did play with that chamber orchestra, and that's about it. Haven't had a lesson in more than a month... unless you count the tabla lesson from my brother, which we did over the computer. Very hard to make that work: the compression algorithms for video conferencing are optimized for speaking voices, and totally chopped off the resonant ring, making it hard to tell whether I was hitting the drum correctly. Really, I should find a local teacher.

One thing I have been trying recently is changing how I practice scales. When I first started up, I wrote out a chart of gradually speeding up scales, starting at 16ths a little under MM=60, and progressing to MM=120 over a year. Just a metronome click or two per month, I thought. How hard could that be? I kept track of how I was doing, and made the plot above. You can see a linear increase for awhile, followed by a big setback, where I got dissatisfied with the beauty and cleanness of the scales, and reset the metronome. I got up again, working faster for a bit, but not much faster overall. I kinda topped out at 70, and found it hard to do more, playing every key, major and minor, full compass. I then got sick of how much of my limited time I was putting into scales, and stopped recording the speed progress. Overall I tracked this for maybe 8 months total. Since then, I've still played scales, but mostly in the 60-70 window, and experimented tried adding different articulations, etc., but generally trying to not spend too much time on them.

So my new idea is that if I want to be able to play smoothly fast, then I should work on doing just that. New plan: start at MM=100, but very restricted: only C, F, and G, and only five notes at a time, if that's what I can do cleanly and beautifully. I'll try to work my way to playing one octave, up and down, then expand from there, in range and number of scales. If I want to play clean and fast, then do that. We'll see what happens.

Back from a break

I had two weeks off, which was mostly spent driving. My dad's 90th birthday was this year, which turned into a kind of family reunion. Driving down for that, plus dropping my wife at a jazz piano camp, and general tourism on the way out and back resulted in about 7000 km behind the wheel. I didn't bring the bassoon, just because I didn't want to fret about it. Not very much bassoon-related happened; the closest thing was wearing a bassoon T-shirt while hiking in Zion National Park, and getting greeted by a clarinettist. We chatted briefly, he went to school with some Canadian bassoonists that I've heard of. After google-stalking him, it seems that I met Richard Peck, of the Houston Symphony.

The downside to not practicing is that I have a rehearsal tonight, with a fairly high level group, and have to be able to play. I've had just over a day back, enough time to play a few long tones against a drone, but that's about it. Hopefully I won't embarrass myself too badly. This is the last rehearsal before the show, and I missed the previous rehearsal due to being away.

The other music-related thing was being given a set of tablas by my mother. It's not the first hand-drum I have, my wife gave me a small djembe for Christmas a few years ago, which I play occasionally. Tablas are different though; they are a vital part of Indian classical music, which has its own traditions as serious as Western classical music. My mom made me promise to take at least a lesson or two on them before she let me take them away. We'll see how that goes.

Update: The rehearsal went fine. I even got singled out for praise at the end, which was an odd kind of feeling. There was a solo-ey phrase (Dvorak 8, 2nd movement), which I was trying to play out, and heard a violin. I glanced over, being reminded that this bit was doubled with a solo violin. (Or, depending on where you sit, the solo violin is doubled by a bassoon.) Our student conductor, who'd spent the last part of rehearsal importuning the winds to listen more to our rather overbalanced strings, caught this and pointed it out as an example of what we ought to be doing. Okay, so I did end up a bit embarrassed, but not in the way that I feared. I also found out that the conductor knew my name, so that was nice too. I'm terrible with names, so I'm always impressed whenever anyone uses mine.

Behold the magic powers of awesome bass

DARPA (you know, those guys who actually did invent the internet) has a piece on using "acoustic fields" (ie, killer bass) to snuff out flames. Looks like magic to me!



It's totally not clear to me, from the video, what the sound spectrum being used is, or (perhaps more importantly?) what sound pressure levels are required. All I hear is a buzz. It's not so loud that there can't be a person standing next to it (perhaps wearing ear protection), but it seems to require two huge speakers on either side of the flame, attached to ginormous tubes. Also, after the flame is out, the sound switches off, accompanied by a loud click, as if a huge relay is required to maintain the "acoustic field". Here's what they say about it:

Performers also evaluated the use of acoustic fields to suppress flames. In the video below, a flame is extinguished by an acoustic field generated by speakers on either side of the pool of fuel. Two dynamics are at play in this approach. First, the acoustic field increases the air velocity. As the velocity goes up, the flame boundary layer, where combustion occurs, thins, making it easier to disrupt the flame. Second, by disturbing the pool surface, the acoustic field leads to higher fuel vaporization, which widens the flame, but also drops the overall flame temperature. Combustion is disrupted as the same amount of heat is spread over a larger area. Essentially, in this demonstration the performers used speakers to blast sound at specific frequencies that extinguish the flame.

My reaction: yeah, I know lots of those words. It's still magic.

The Audition

Here's a great article about the audition process at a Big 5 orchestra. The BSO had not one but two percussion positions open, a highly unusual circumstance. The article follows the preparations of one of the candidates, following through his getting cut in the first round. It also covers the story of why there were two positions open: a previous job winner, a former classmate and friend of the main candidate, didn't get tenure. The article gives the public a lot of detail about that process, a lot of comments about what went wrong. Very unusual, I think, and very informative.

I have a number of reactions when reading about this. Sympathy, number one. Sympathy for all the participants in what seems to me to be a terrible system. Relief is another. Had I made different choices as a teenager, that could have been me. Maybe I would have been one of the lucky ones, who knows, and ended up with an orchestra job. And then spent my life performing the standard repertoire, over and over, to increasingly gray-haired audiences. Imagining it, I'm not sure "winning" is the right term for this outcome.

Finally, annoyance. Do these people really not see that the audition process is at the root of the cultural ossification of classical music? Maybe one could defend the process as necessary to find the best musicians. Classical music performance is demanding and conservative, I get that, and you want to find and train people who can do it well at a high level, making as few mistakes as humanly possible. But classical music performance is by no means the only profession where mistakes are to be avoided. Off the top of my head, I can name other demanding, high risk job: venture capitalist, jet fighter pilot, and heart surgeon, say. Every mistake a VC makes costs $20M, or whatever they risked on their investment. Fighter pilot errors cost about the same, assuming they eject and survive, and the only loss is the taxpayer's plane. Surgical errors are even worse: they kill people. Does anyone really think that a few wrong notes in a marimba solo have anything like the consequences for society as errors in these other fields? And yet, somehow, we are able to train and select VCs, pilots, and surgeons in a manner that's both more humane and, I expect, more effective than the one classical music uses. Yes, more humane, and yes, I know about residency. These fields work the trainees extremely hard, in the name of having them as prepared as possible for their high risk, high impact jobs, but the existence of the careers themselves are not at risk. Once you get into med school, to pick one example, you're basically guaranteed, barring some disaster, to end up a physician. Classical music puts the selection bar at the very end, after people have invested decades, and grants a sustainable career entirely on the success of a single artificial performance.

Moreover, the process has bad implications for the art itself. People will seek to achieve their pinnacle at whatever metric is the most critical. Success at the job audition, because the stakes are so high, is that most critical metric. Get better at some other metric, pleasing audiences say, or convincing them to come and pay, and you risk being beaten by candidates who are better at pleasing audition committees. The more competitive the environment, the more risk adverse the candidates and the committees become. And once people are in the system, having passed through the hazing, they become captive to the system, serving on committees, defending the system that granted them a job against any efforts to change.

Can you imagine what pop music would sound like if performers were selected in the same manner? Lots of really fabulous, high quality renditions of Elvis tunes. And they'd require government support, since only handfuls of devotees would turn out. It's no wonder, as Sandow points out over and over, that classical audiences are both dwindling and greying. I don't know if the audition process is the entirety of the problem, but I feel confident it's a large part of it. For every organization, how you hire defines your culture. Is the audition process creating the culture that classical music needs to thrive?

Bassoforte photo

From an article found by 'ljhendren':

Guntram Wolf is holding the contraforte on the left, and his son Peter is on the right, holding the Bassoforte. Hard to tell too much from this one photo, but: similar form to a conventional bassoon, consisting of a conical tube folded once. It looks long, so maybe goes down to an A1. And the diameter near the bell looks pretty fat, so I'm guessing the bore angle is a little bigger. This could be the source of the "greater dynamic range". Heckel widened the bore angle a bit in 1922, with the large bore aka short bore instruments having more projection. Fox sells both wide and narrow bore instruments. The saxophone has a wider bore angle yet, and no difficulties projecting. I'll be interested to hear how the new horn sounds.

The Bassoforte, a new bassoon?

My twitter feed brought me news of the Bassoforte, which is apparently a new bassoon design from Guntram Wolf. He's well known for having introduced the Contraforte a few years ago as a wholly redesigned contrabassoon-like instrument,  with dramatic improvements in dynamic range, sound, flexibility, and range. Guessing based on the name alone, one imagines that the Bassoforte promises to do the same for the bassoon. I have no details, though, and no access to the German magazine with the article. So instead, here's a video of the Contraforte:

Longer reeds

Last weekend was the annual bassoon event. I played the Telemann again, I'll have to get audio of that up here. Besides that, there was lots of chamber music, recitals, and workshops. One interesting aspect was a piece played by our esteemed guest clinician/soloist. It was a work for solo bassoon and narrator, a retelling of a fairy tale in music and story intended for young audiences. It's a new work, but one not quite done yet, and in fact, we were expected to contribute. After he performed the piece, he went around the room, and asked everyone present to make a couple of comments, one positive and one critique. I gotta say, I paid a lot more attention to the music when I knew I'd have to make a public statement about it! I also learned other random things, such as that you can half-hole the top line A, instead of flicking; and also that our esteemed guest no longer performed the Telemann, due to its endurance demands. I guess that explains why I was so wiped out after performing it.

On reeds. I was chatting with a fellow adult student. He doesn't make reeds, he buys them from a variety of vendors, and adjusts them according to his own theories. Fair enough, gives him more time to practice, I guess. He told me he spent $1500 last year on reeds, which seems like a lot to me. I'd be surprised if I've made even a dozen in the last year. He gave me one of his old reeds to try out, an unwrapped reed from Forrests of a kind that he particularly admires due their very hard cane. It's not new and stock, of course, but rather used, and adjusted according to his theories, which he documented in a thick document he was handing out. I found it unplayable: high crow, stiff, nearly impossible to articulate in the low register. Were it one of my reeds, I'd start shaving off the back, but I think I'd rather leave it untouched as an example of a reed that works for somebody else.

Leafing through his reed document, I was struck by the remark that trimming the tip back to adjust length was a bad idea. He quoted a KJI reeds document, stating that the stability came from the length, and another source along similar lines. This agrees with how I first learned, where you cut off the tip, then weren't supposed to touch the length; only trimming as a desperation measure which would involve remaking the tip region and probably also wrecking the reed. However, when I started with reeds with my current teacher, that went out the window. The cycle is to remove cane, looking for symmetry, response, strength, and balance of sound, and take a sliver off the tip whenever the E drops. Trimming is part of the standard adjustments, so you start longer than you typically want to finish. The end result is I think more or less Philadelphia-style: light and short. However, here was a collection of comments suggesting that shortness leads to instability. This aligns with a remark passed on from the local professional 2nd bassoonist, who suggested to my teacher that he might try out longer reeds.

Inspired by that, I took a reed off my rack that's been being ignored for a few months. I must've done some work on it, because the tip was cut off, but the opening was wide and likely there was lots of cane. I squeezed both wires a lot to get the tip opening reasonable, and tried playing it for awhile. It worked surprisingly okay. More stable? Quite possibly. I measured the length, something I rarely do, and it was 30 mm from 1st wire to tip. My basic reed for the past few months measured at about 26mm. Huge difference, but both entirely playable. Very interesting.

Légère bassoon reed photo

From their site. Still no word about availability or pricing, and I never received any confirmation about actually getting on their waiting list, but their page is being updated, and adding details, including this photo. 16 mm wide tip, three strengths, thickness about half of a cane reed. Their guarantee page says that they are "very difficult to make", which isn't a great sign for those of us who want to try one out.

The Telemann F minor sonata

I've been working on the F minor sonata for awhile now, and got a chance to perform it today. I started working on it because Thom Zantow's site gave it a good review, and because it seemed a little easier than the Fasch, which I'd worked on a bit but the technical bits never came together. I worked off an IMSLP version, but I since I had a performance coming up,  I figured I needed to put my hands on a professional paper edition with a realized bass. I bought the International edition, edited by Simon Kovar. Kovar is a famous guy, so I figured he might have some useful ideas with respect to articulations and ornaments too. I also found an edition from the Swiss publisher Amadeus, edited by Winfried Michel. When my International edition finally arrived, I was dismayed to discover that Kovar had changed lots of notes from the original, mostly taking out big leaps, and had filled the part with slurs. Looking over it with my teacher, he pointed out that it was published in 1949, which is before the "historically informed performance" movement started. So basically, it was a Romantic interpretation of a Baroque piece. Hmph. The piano part also looked a little thick. The Amadeus edition, on the other hand, looked very much like the original, and in fact very much like the IMSLP edition I'd worked on.

The editor of the Amadeus edition had a few remarks about the piece. He called it the first serious piece in the bassoon repertoire; apparently before this the bassoon had been thought of as a supporting player in the continuo, or the comic character, "clown of the orchestra" role. But with this piece, Telemann started with a slow movement, marked Triste, and set the piece in a serious key, F minor. I have no idea if any of this stuff is true, but it gave me something to say while I was getting myself set up.

My performance today was at a student oboe recital that I crashed. I'll play it again next week, at a bassoon event. I gave the pianist for today's event a free choice of editions to play off of, when we had our run through this morning. She picked the IMSLP version, so she could realize the continuo herself, in real time. She did a great job, and the whole thing went pretty well, I thought. Lot of notes though. It was my first time playing all of anything, and I'm not used to having to play so long in one stretch. Let me know what you think; I have a week before the next show.

The architecture of the bassoon reed

Barrick Stees has a great series of posts up on the physical mechanics, kinetics, aerodynamics and acoustics of the bassoon reed: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I've read many of the same sources, and I'm not sure I'd agree with every statement there (eg, the larger cross section of a more rounded wires would, I'd guess, lead to lower flow rates, less vorticity, and lower flow resistance, contrary to the statement in the "wind tunnel" post, but aerodynamic resistance may not be the same as what a reedmaker/user means as "resistance"), but nevertheless, I think we desperately need this kind of thinking to guide new ideas in reeds. More later, I hope.

The Baroque Bassoon

Lovely video with demos of Baroque, Classical, and modern bassoons. (h/t The Heckler.)

 

Music in space

Can you play music in space? Absolutely. This video shows flute playing (actually, an Earth-space duet, which must have made for interesting sync difficulties), but people have played keyboards, guitar, and so on. Here's a NASA article on what's involved.

"When I played the flute in space," says Ochoa, "I had my feet in foot loops." In microgravity, even the small force of the air blowing out of the flute would be enough to move her around the shuttle cabin. In fact, even with her feet hooked into the loops, she could feel that force pushing her back and forth, "just a little bit" as she played.

Zero gravity would be convenient for bassoon playing, where performing standing up has always presented a challenge of holding up the instrument.

A staging of L'après-midi d'une faune

The students of U Maryland, in one of the most inventive stagings of a classical music work that I've seen. Odd to even use the word "staging," rather than performance. In the groups I'm in no more thought goes into stage presence than a reminder to stand up when so directed, and quickly, before the audience stops clapping. ("Sometimes the window is short!" we were told by a conductor recently.) But here, the work has been turned into a performance of dance as well as sound. And yeah, you have to be able to play while walking and moving. And have the music memorized. Marching bands do this routinely, of course, but you never see it in the concert hall. It's a lot more work for the orchestra, but I think it's really effective for the audience. It is, after all, a show.

Sightreading a show.... in Carnegie Hall

I have to sightread a concert tomorrow. I can tell you, this was not the plan. I'm fairly good at reading, at least for things inside my comfort zone, so I ought to be able to survive. I've always been good at reading, even when I was a beginner, to the extent that for many things I've wondered if practice has any effect on the quality of my playing. Still, even if the notes are not a problem, that doesn't mean that rehearsal is useless. There are always questions of interpretation and ensemble, not to mention basic matters like is this in two or four, are the repeats good, what's going on during this rest so that I can feel confident on the entry. There are always questions, and even once through can address most of them. So yeah, I'd prefer to not sightread the show. Optimal for me, for the kind of amateur groups I play with, is one or two rehearsals.

And that's how I set up the performance tomorrow. I got asked to fill in on 2nd, I could make the concert and the final rehearsal, I said yes, I showed up to the rehearsal... and the principal player didn't make it. And he'd carefully collected all the 2nd parts from the librarian, in preparation for me coming. Uhh... I hung around for awhile, reading bassoon cues off a trombone part, hastily printing out things  off of IMSLP, so at least I've heard a bit of a couple of pieces, but it was almost entirely a write-off. (And I'd missed my son's concert to be there, very annoying.) Tomorrow I'll have to have my wits about me. I hope the principal shows up, and brings the music with him.

This is nothing compared with what my teacher had to do. He sometimes subs in our local professional symphony, typically playing contra. This august ensemble is celebrating a major anniversary, and so managed to score an invite to play in Carnegie Hall at the Spring for Music festival. Taking a symphony on the road is a massive undertaking, but also a massive opportunity. They did tons of publicity, in the end convincing more than 1000 locals to take a trip to NY with them. (I hope they thought to get a cut of the travel packages!) And they ran a very interesting program, full of new pieces and commissions that they've done. Complicated pieces. But no worries, they're pros, they've had a year to plan and prepare, and scheduled a couple of local concerts with the same program, to benefit locals who couldn't make the trip. Well, the principal bassoonist had a bit of a health issue, so just in case, they had my teacher sit next to him during the last rehearsal, looking over his shoulder, to cover the unlikely event that he'd be required to sub. The principal played the local shows fine, but didn't receive clearance to fly. And so, my teacher ended up playing principal in the Carnegie Hall concert, a historic occasion for the orchestra. After watching a rehearsal and single soundcheck. I'm sure it went wonderfully, but jeez, talk about pressure.

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Légère bassoon reeds!

Check it out: Légère will be adding bassoon reeds to their commercially available synthetic reeds. Their clarinet reeds have been very successful. James Campbell is a strong advocate, and told me that for some European orchestra (Berlin?), Légère had converted not just one player, but the entire section. But the architecture of a single reed is simpler than a double reed, and the last time I checked, they hadn't been able to solve the complications in manufacturing the reeds. Evidently, that has changed. I've added my name to the waiting list. I'm pretty excited, this could be big.

Playing bassoon on the subway.

No, not the subway station, on the train itself. With the rest of your orchestra. Jeez, and I complain when the chair's not quite right.




The group is Copenhagen Phil, with a Peer Gynt Suite flash mob.

Can classical musicians groove?

 A tuba player, with a solo encore. My goodness, perhaps the best unaccompanied solo I've heard, any instrument.


A pre-LA Dudamel, leading the Simon Bolivar Orchestra. Danzon Number 2, by Arturo Marquez. Hadn't heard of this piece, but boy I have now.

Morbid thoughts

A few weeks ago, slightly bored with the solo pieces I had to work on, I started playing through the Bach Cello Suites. Famous famous pieces, transcribed for every instrument, subject of a new book, and near the top of the charts in terms of recognizability  by the general public. The bassoon transcription is well known too, I think the standard is Arthur Weisberg's, but I'm reading one of the old engravings on IMSLP. The Praeludium to Suite #1 is very cello-istic, filled with down-slurs that work poorly on bassoon, and essentially no reasonable place to breathe. I'm not sure that I could ever bring it to a place to where I'd want to listen to it. Still, it's gorgeous, and a joy just to work on. I remember being struck by the thought that, if the universe were to be ending in five minutes, I'd want to spend my remaining time doing exactly that: practicing the prelude to Bach's first cello suite.

Looking back, it's a strange thought. Why exactly five minutes? If I'd had half an hour, would I have had to work too hard? And not just me dying: it's the entire universe being destroyed. Was, say, the destruction of the planet insufficiently melodramatic? Apparently. So, music for the end: Bach Cello Suites for the destruction of the Universe, Nearer my God to Thee for the sinking of a ship, and something else for the planet, Penderecki maybe. Or Messiaen. For a single, personal death, I'd pick sentimental: Bridge over Troubled Water, say, or Travellin Shoes.

Our time is finite. The husband of the concertmaster of my orchestra died this week. Not young, but not yet old, I guess I'm getting to the age where sixty-something is more of a peer than an elder. And I had a weensy scare myself: a funny bump appeared on a freckle, and the internet, purveyor of all knowledge, had nothing good to say about new bumps on freckles. The first hit showed a small unassuming dark bump next to the phrase "At this stage, it was destined to be fatal". Yeesh. That sentence, plus getting rejected as a blood donor because of it ("Let us know what the doctor says") got me in to see someone. The good news is that it's nothing interesting, but there are various kinds of nothing, and the jury is still out on which kind of nothing my bump is. To be a melanoma, you have to be dark, and my bump isn't. Still, I had a couple days of What if I had 30 days to live? fantasy going on.

It's an interesting exercise, no matter how unrealistic. It gives a chance to think about what matters, and what doesn't, in a very selfish sense. If I had 30 days to live, would I waste my precious time practicing? Actually, I would. My gut reaction would be to practice more. Not because the practice is building towards some long-term goal, evidently! But as an end in itself. What about making reeds? I was kind of surprised by my reaction to this one: I would. Both because I feel like I have unfinished projects in understanding how reeds work, and also because good reeds making the instrument respond more readily, sound better, and make better music. So yeah, I'd keep working on reeds. What about work? Actually, I'd keep doing this too. There's stuff I'd want to finish. I can kind of see a pattern forming, not sure where I'd find the time to do all of these things, but that too is a helpful insight. But blogging, obviously stop that? Well, hard to say. There are some half-formulated posts that I'd want to finish. Plus, the whole dying thing would give lots to write about, wouldn't want to miss out on that. So blogging might end up in the plus side too.

Is there stuff I'd do less of? Absolutely. I can think of a bunch of things that I'd simply stop worrying about, since after 30 days they'd be somebody else's problem. Anything in the bureaucratic paperwork category. Meetings, committees, reports. Money. Or things preparing for a long-term outcome. And people. There's people I'd spend more time with, and people I'd spend less. Kind of a silly exercise overall, but amusing.

Overthinking, and putting the behavior on command

Here's a nice post on how to avoid overthinking. Basically, you can think about anything except what you're trying to do. It meshes nicely with what I've been working on, which is basically relaxation, following the Kenny Werner book I mentioned before and which I've slowly been reading. There's a lot of exercises and specifics that you're supposed to do. It's actually quite hard -- just play one note, but totally relaxed? And then accept that whatever nasty sound that comes out is the most beautiful thing that you've ever heard? That you're already a master, and the only reason you don't sound like it is maybe a lack of familiarity with the material? It's very strange, trying to adopt an attitude of loving acceptance towards my sound, rather than the analytical, critical attitude that comes naturally to me, and that seems inherent in all of my training. I think it may be slowly having an effect, though. Sometimes I can play things, and they can come out smooth, rather than the notey effect that normally characterizes just about anything I play. I think the issue is that if I'm thinking and struggling, trying to make the slur and the fingers precise, my air naturally forces the next note, resulting in a lump in the sound on every note. A Zen-like state of meditative relaxation, on the other hand, has the possibility for a smooth sound.

I found another effect, working one of the Werner exercises. Basically, in a state of total relaxation, do a free improvisation. Play anything, make any sound. And the goal of the practice is to love what comes out. Whatever it is. Very hard, to love every squawks, rough slurs, missed attacks, and weird pitch and tone color. After a bit, though, I got interested in those sounds. That's kind of interesting, that noise between those two notes. That squawk. Can I make that sound again? Hm, that note didn't speak, resulting in a breath of air in a tuned air column. Interesting sound. And by loving the sounds, or trying to, I was then drawn to trying to repeat them. And boy, that's not easy either. Apparently, without even trying, I'd succeeded in creating an interesting and hard to reproduce sound. I ended up playing with lots of attacks that didn't speak, or were on the edge of speaking; exactly how to move my fingers to squawk or not, playing with the sounds that I could make. This had a few interesting effects. One was learning a bit of acceptance: once I can accept that the sound is part of the tonal spectrum that I can make, I don't get so freaked when I make one. It's a bit of reprogramming, turning a mistake into a variation. The other is that I learn control over that aspect of the sound. It's a bit like the dog training technique, called putting the behavior on command. If the dog does something you consider undesirable, eg yipping at the neighbors all night, then invent a command for the behavior, tell your dog to do it when they are about to, let them do it, and reward them. Soon, you can have them do the behavior whenever you want. This is counterintuitive, since it's an undesired behavior. But actually, you've achieved communicating with the animal about the behavior, and given them the skill to control it. Often this is sufficient to reduce the behavior (yip all night? Not unless I get a treat!) or as a step to telling them not to. So, practicing squawking is a kind of putting a behavior on command.

Seems like a lot of thinking, in service of thinking less, and that all in service of "playing less notey", which has been a longstanding issue for me. Maybe it'll help, though.

Milde 20

Here's the Milde Study, Op 24 #20, the B arpeggios. I did this one a phrase at a time, so this is not a single take. I'm done with it though, so I think this is about the best I can do.

Microphone and flute listening tests

A few years ago, I was into amateur astronomy in a mild way. To be honest, I think I enjoyed reading about optics and telescopes as much as, or perhaps more than, actually looking through them. (It didn't help that it was usually extremely cold here when it was dark enough to look at interesting things.) This isn't an uncommon problem: you see it in the photography world, computers, guitars, etc., "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" it sometimes gets called. At some point, I think I ran across Ed Ting's site, which is primarily of reviews of telescopes. I ran into again recently, reading up on pianos, because he also has an extensive set of piano reviews. Buried in there, are some lovely, carefully engineered listening tests on recording gear:  a Rode NT1 microphone vs an ancient cheapo Radio Shack mic, an inexpensive digital recorder vs a full professional recording setup, a portable recorder shootout, and a test of two flutes, same piece, both played by the same professional on the same occasion.

I actually really enjoyed the cheap vs. expensive tests, because it's first of all, much easier to hear differences than when comparing two more or less equivalent pieces of new equipment, and second of all, you learn pretty quickly what exactly it is that the fancier equipment is getting for you. Most of the tests were of electronic equipment, with the expensive one being maybe 10x more than the cheap one. The musical instrument test had a larger financial gap: a $200 30-year-old student flute vs a >$10k Brannen Brothers high-end professional instrument, so almost a 100x difference in price. And, interestingly, that was the only test that I got wrong: I could hear they were different, but apparently my judgement of flute tone is not well refined. That, or a great player sounds great no matter what they play on. It's the player, not the horn.

Tips from a master class

My son and I went to a clarinet master class, given by James Campbell to the university players. Very interesting, listening to all the music students play, and listening to how they sounded, and what he worked on for them. Here are the tips I remember, given to the various players.

• Tongue position. Exercise: play open G, then up A, B. Feel what the tongue does, don't try to control it. Let the clarinet dictate where the tongue should go. And that's the right position (at least in that register.) The piece was Debussy. They also worked some musical things, including noting Debussian features, like whole tone scales.
•  Embouchure. This player needed more firmness on top, and tighter at the corners. Sound dramatically improved when the clinician held the student's embouchure in place while the student played. Piece was Hindemith, I think, and they worked some of the harmonies between clarinet and piano.
•  A visibly nervous first year. They worked on breathing. Exercise: put a barrel (just the barrel) into your mouth, and inhale. Then exhale. Repeat couple times. Then replace the barrel with the clarinet, and immediately breath and blow, just like with the barrel. The barrel forces a big, wide opening, the tongue has to get out of the way, and I imagine the throat opens too, allowing air to flow in and out, unimpeded. A slightly less silly looking version of the same exercise has you place your open hand vertically against your open mouth, like a karate chop.  The piece was Weber. They also worked some aspects of the piece, which I think I'd gloss as working towards a big soloistic performance, rather than accurately but meekly playing the notes.
• Finger motion. An advanced player, playing something with zillions of fast notes, with blown out chops from too many hours of rehearsal earlier in the day. He discussed pinned and moving fingers: the ones that change, and that don't change, over a passage. Visualizing the pinned fingers as static and fixed help control motion of the horn. This allowed the moving fingers to not need to provide any support whatsoever, so they could just move quickly and fluidly. He also had her play the passage without blowing, just popping the fingers down with enough firmness to sound the notes. It worked surprisingly well. The fingers need to make the rhythm.

In every case, the player was sounding much better by the end of their time than they were at the beginning. But also, in every case, the things that made the improvements, the things that they needed to work on, were described as at least a one or two year project. This, for the music majors practicing four hours a day, which was about the median in that room. Another interesting thing was how easy it was for me to project every suggestion onto the subject of my current obsession with relaxation. In every instance, forcing things makes things work badly, from tone to breathing to playing fast. And I think the way we train musicians doesn't help, so much of classical music pedagogy is negative, about not doing things wrong, and opening player's ears to whole new worlds of things that they can do wrong. With one of the players, I remember some careful and successful work on tone and phrasing go right out the window when the clinician called one of the notes "wrong", because it had the wrong kind of accent. And yeah, it's accurate and maybe useful, to say a note badly played in phrasing is just as wrong, and unmusical, and a note that has the wrong pitch. It's a good thing to remember. But I also couldn't help notice that making that point came at a cost. It's a tough job, teaching.

Telemann Sonata

The first movement of the Telemann Sonata, from my lesson a couple weeks ago. Recorded, edited and uploaded entirely on my iPod.

Tuning system wackery

Here's someone who believes that A=440 is a bad idea, not because they like baroque instruments, or because Verdi knew singer's ranges best, but because "432hz vibrates/oscillates on the principals of natural harmonic wave propagation and unifies with the properties of light, time, space, matter, gravity and electromagnetism." Um. Okay. But even that makes sense, as compared to this maker of a microtonal keyboard, who somehow mixes Pythagoras, chakra/pitch identification, Georg Cantor, Egyptian pyramids and 666 together in search of a tuning system.

This is what I get for working on reeds

Split all the way to the wire, before it had ever been played. I don't even know when it happened, I flipped it over and there it was. Maybe (evidently?) I was using too much tool pressure, I was trying to take material off fast.

More cowbell

I hadn't played in a band for 25 years before last week, when I got called to sit in two bands in two days. One was  subbing for a rehearsal with a fairly high-end group. The group's site calls it "semi-pro", which I think means that they don't get paid, although they are good enough to be. Indeed, of the several acquaintances I knew there, all but one made their living in some music-connected way. They were good, the tempos were fast, and there were a lot of time changes and a lot of flats. A lot. It's been awhile since I needed to sightread Gb.

The other band was an adult amateur ensemble, sharing a concert with a junior high honor band. Each band got a few pieces, then there was a couple of joint pieces. The rehearsal went fine, but at the sound check at the venue, an hour before show time, things started to go wonky. The venue was a largish modern church, lots of seating, sound, video, and lighting. The back of the stage area had several large video screens, displaying continuous loops of abstract animations, with a dozen or so big screen TV's around in case you couldn't see one of the giant screens. The band I was in got positioned up on the stage. We were well lit by bright spotlights onto the stage, which were angled down from above. I'm sure the audience would've been able to see us well. Unfortunately, the conductor's podium was placed in the shadows near the audience, and we couldn't see him at all. Various permutations of lights were tried, to no avail. I gather that the techs were not used to trying to deal with masses of musicians, who not only need to be seen, but who also need to see, and need to see music as well as a conductor. The techs struggled through, trying a wide variety of variations while getting feedback from the scores of musicians, strobing through the colors on the disco lights ("I'm sorry, I can't see my music with the purple, go back to the pink"), trying different angles ("Stop  there! I can see from the reflection off the tuba!") and lights. Eventually they managed to bring up a spot at the rear, and point it straight at the conductor, but then he was blinded, and couldn't see us. And the minutes for the sound check ticked by.

For the joint massed band pieces, the conductor got it figured out. He got an 8th grader percussionist to come to the edge with a cowbell ("No, you don't need your music!"), to a spot where he could make out the baton. "Now bang it on the beat. Yes, the whole time. No, louder. More cowbell. Everyone else, listen to the cowbell!" For the adult band, we relocated to the floor in front of the stage at the last minute, where we could be under the house lights. The show went on, only a few minutes late. And it was fun, I got to blow hard and listen to a lot of brass and drums. Still, I don't think I'll be joining a band routinely.

Forte

I've already written about my struggles to play softer, but recently I've been trying to see if I can play louder too. Such basic things. The standard exercise, given to beginning students to convince them that they can, in fact, play louder, is to put the lips over the entire reed, so the blade isn't hindered or even touched by the lips at all, and blow. The sound is ugly and out of control, but loud. The principle of playing loud well is similar: the less embouchure pressure on the reed, the more vibration and more volume. There've been a couple of things that made me think that louder is something I need work on. One was sitting next to the bassoon student in the university orchestra, and trying to say something useful to her as she worked through an exposed technical bit in a Haydn symphony. ("Helpful" advice is always risky, I know, but you'll have to take my word that we know each other well enough that it was appropriate.) The only thing I said was play louder. Project to the back of the hall. Make the conductor tell you to shush. Let the fingers ride on a stream of air. I was also thinking, although I didn't say it, that even if the notes aren't perfect, if the sound is good, and loud, and played with conviction, the audience will accept it, despite the errors. In a sense, error in tone is worse than a wrong note, since inadequate tone affects the entire passage, whereas a wrong note passes quickly. When my son is practicing clarinet, I'm constantly on him about tone too. Blow through the horn, I say, sounding like the conductors of my high school marching band. I thought that was lame advice at the time, only appropriate for playing in the middle of a football field, but I'm a little more mature now. So, having advised my son and my sectionmate that louder sounds better, I slowly developed a sneaking suspicion that perhaps I too could use a little more "projection", which is to say, volume.

A related experience came at a lesson a couple weeks ago. We were looking at my part in the same Haydn symphony, and my teacher played through it. And he kept on playing after the exposed fast bits, blowing through fortissimo tutti whole notes. And man, I was taken aback by how loud he could play. And yes, the tone does shift at high volume, spreads a bit, but that's not necessarily a negative. Think of the characteristic brassy sound of a trumpet playing loud, filled with high harmonics generated by a supersonic shock in the bore. This isn't a flaw, but another tone color to be cultivated. On bassoon, there's also a lot of junk noise you can hear from a foot away, particularly some hiss from losing air around the reed. This could be considered a flaw, but I don't think it'd be an audible problem in a full orchestra. It's more important to get volume into the bassoon tone color of the chord.

The other inspirational comment came from my wife. We were quibbling a bit over something or other, and she admitted me that, despite having gone to my concerts for years, she could hardly ever hear me, even during solos. Ouch! And it stings more due to likely being true. I think one of my problems is hearing the balance authentically. I think I tend to get comfortable, and play to what sounds good to me. And I like hearing a bassoon-rich orchestral sound, but since I'm a few inches away from the bassoon, and many yards from the strings, what sounds bassoon-rich to me is totally inaudible to the audience.

So, how to play louder? Part of it is reed. The reed has to vibrate well, and has to be open enough at the tip to accept a large flow of air. Embouchure is important. A hard embouchure, that will not dampen the vibration, and as little pressure as possible. (Note the distinction between the firmness of the lips and the pressure exerted by them. You can press either soft or hard using a marshmallow or a screwdriver, and these four cases (high pressure/soft implement, low pressure/soft implement, high pressure/hard implement, low pressure/hard implement) will all have different effects on the vibration of the thing you're damping. I should really try this with a cymbal or something.) And lots of high velocity air. Control the pitch with the air stream, since the lips aren't doing it. Easy enough to say, I guess. Doing it is another matter.

Fagonello, another small bassoon

Haven't heard of this one before. The Fagonello seems to be the latest of a number of attempts to build a bassoon which works for kids (mini-bassoon, fagottino, tenoroon, etc.). This one is nontransposing, and is basically the same as a full-sized bassoon, it just simplifies and moves some keywork, and cuts off the bottom couple of notes. The result sounds pretty good to my ear, at least compared to the other ones I've heard on YouTube.

Trimming a clarinet

I'm fascinated by the construction of instruments. I tend to think of instruments as expensive and permanent, with acoustics fixed in form and unchangable. They're not of course. Someone made them. And to the maker, adjusting an instrument is no scarier than making it out of wood in the first place. Here's Morrie Backun tweaking a clarinet for Ricardo Morales, jamming a reamer into a $8k piece of wood as casually as any reedmaker, making reeds.

Relaxation

One of my problems is tension. It's a very common problem, exacerbated by the critical atmosphere in classical music training and performance, not to mention my own hyper-analytical attitude. The tape loop in my head is commenting: hard part is coming up, try and get it right this time, nerves on high alert, try try try... ooh, just screwed it up again. It's pretty clear that the response to the problem is part of the problem itself. There are a variety of approaches to trying to deal with this. I've mentioned some before, and Barrick Stees comments on the unsuccessful Cleveland audition are relevant too: in a high pressure situation, pretend that you're giving a lesson. My son's piano teacher suggested playing while talking, as a path to effortless playing. (It has to be something you can talk about easily, though. The teacher asked him what he had for breakfast, and he totally couldn't remember. Eventually he replied "A carrot", which seemed like an unusual breakfast to the teacher -- I don't think the passage he was playing came out very effortlessly. My wife suggested changing the topic to the properties of bismuth, something my son has been interested in, and that worked much better. Not sure how you'd do the playing while talking on bassoon, though.)

Recently I've started reading jazz pianist Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery, which seems to be concerned with this effect. Early on he describes his experience with a vaguely mystical teacher, this is already after he's been through Berkelee and is a working pro, who only lets him practice one note at a time. One note, one finger. Aiming for total relaxation of that finger and motion. And not as some kind of quick warm-up, before setting into hours of intense, high-tension "real work" in the practice room. Rather, no more than five minutes of this, per day, and no other playing. After some weeks of this, spending most of his time hanging out at the beach in Brazil or whatever, he went to a party, and got asked to play. After many apologies about being out of practice due to his crazy teacher, he did. And everything sounded wonderful. Much of the problem is in our heads, in particular, in the parts of our brains responsible for analytical critique. The part that decides, is it Right, or is it Wrong, the Manichean fallacy. Nonjudgmental should be the goal. "If you can meet with Triumph, and Disaster, and treat those two Imposters just the same." (Kipling) Or alternatively, in words stolen from forum, you're not as good as you think you are. You're not as bad as you think you are, either. At my lesson, we did a few things along the lines of relaxation. One was to exhale in time before inhaling, both to get a fuller breath, and also because deep breathing is a relaxation exercise. Another was to listen to the tone from the room, trying to ignore the direct sound of the instrument coming through the mouth and jawbone. This morning I spent my practice trying to figure out how to practice that mental state, how to play effortlessly and relaxed. I ended up playing scales at MM=48, which I'd just picked to be slow, but is probably a good tempo to establish a slow breathing and a slow heartbeat. Pulse is physical, and relaxation is physical.

Lighter reeds

I wasn't entirely happy with how the slow pp chorale in Egmont went. I don't think it was nervousness, although that didn't help. And I know it's physically possible, even for me. In fact, I think I nailed it fairly well at the sound check a couple hours before the show. I think the right attitude is that this kind of playing, slow, pianissimo, smooth and in tune, is just not sufficiently inside of my comfort zone to allow it to be reliable. Part of the problem could be reed. The reeds I've been making tend to be on the stiffer side, at least compared to my teacher's. There are nice things about that: I think I can make them sound good, all I have to do is support them sufficiently. And maybe the reedmaking process is a little less sensitive when making a stiffer reed. My algorithm has basically been to stop once I have a reed that plays okay, with adequate symmetry etc., then to spend my time practicing, and work on making it play. Another approach is to try and get a reed to be as light as possible, to remove as much material as you can while still doing what it needs to do. My old teacher said that basically everyone ends up going light, in the end. He related a story of an LA player whose backpressure was so high, his neck used to expand dramatically when he played. Very notable for people sitting behind him. This guy eventually developed an aneurysm in his neck, and had to give up playing entirely. I don't think my problem is so severe, but I do have fatigue issues. I can't play all the way through a Milde study without feeling blown out at the end. And my Egmont problem, I think is related to fatigue. At the sound check, we started basically right on the hard part. Totally fresh, I could pull it off. At the show, after having just spent a couple of minutes blowing hard through the first part of the piece, I was unable to control myself and the reed. I'm hoping that trying to learn to make and play on lighter reeds will help things like that.

How a cleaned bassoon reed ages

The upper reed is my main reed at the moment. Actually, because I'm lazy, it's basically the only reed I've been using. I've been playing on it for months, probably at least hundred hours or so. I'm careful to sonicate my reeds after every use, so I can get away with this. In high school, before I cleaned reeds, I remember them going off much more quickly; going first stuffy and then dead. I think the usual aging mechanism is that the reed surface gets clogged with dead skin cells from the lips. This slimy stuff deadens the vibration, and maybe contributes to bugs growing which can eat away at the reed.

The lower reed is a new reed I'm working on finishing. The old reed is still working, but I'm getting worried about it. The color is getting darker, maybe the pitch is rising, and I'm feeling like some of my problems are the reed's fault. Having a new one on hand gives me a comparison, to see how the old one has aged. I arranged the light in the picture to try and demonstrate the difference in texture between the reeds. The old reed has developed grooves between the white cellulose fibers. I'm not sure what the material between the fibers is, maybe lignin, but whatever it is, it seems to be lost faster than the white fibers. I should check the interior of the old reed when I discard it, see if a similar effect is occurring on the interior.

The hard part

This is my hardest part in the concert coming up on Sunday. The piece is Beethoven's Egmont overture, and I've clipped out woodwind part (oboe, clarinets in Bb, and bassoons) from the score. In the fermata bar, the violins cut off the King's head, with a dramatic C-G! Then the woodwinds enter, with second clarinet and bassoon (that's me) on octave F's, then adding parts, in the shocked quiet after the decapitation. After this, there's a rousing finale, but I'm worried about the notes before.

That opening F is marked ppp, and it needs to be very quiet, mysterioso. There's no other sound in the hall. The clarinet I'm playing with can play with a subtone anywhere down to zero; the bassoon, not so much. The first rehearsals, he was playing really quiet, not only because it was ppp, and because the conductor wanted it quieter, less and less, but also because he felt insecure about the pitch, so he kindof wanted to sneak in and hear how it sounded. You'll bury me, I told him, and asked him to do what he could to help us match dynamic-wise. (Ie, play louder, please!) I'm doing what I can: tons of support from lips and diaphragm, slow air, muffled fingering (add low D and E). I think the conductor has gotten the idea after watching me struggle, and hearing the pops, cracks and dropouts when I get too soft: at the rehearsal last night he asked clarinet 1 to meet us on dynamic. It's sometimes described as a knife edge, playing a double reed as soft as possible, but a better metaphor is a cliff's edge. Things are fine a comfortable distance away from it, it's fine creeping up to it, it's even okay balanced right on it, but any jiggle, and down you fall, with no hope of recovery. I'm also slurring the whole thing. My part has each note rearticulated (even the Db, unlike the score here), but adding tongue is just too risky, and I don't think the articulation is needed.

Intonation is a struggle too. I've played this lots against a drone. The F I'm playing as low as I can, without it drooping, the Db needs to be up and supported, the Bb down, with open throat, and the C fully supported. If I'm reading the chords right, the harmonies are F, Db major, G half diminished, C major, making the key change to the final section. So I'm usually the root of the chord, except for the Bb, which is a third, and should therefore be a little extra low. I guess you could also call that G chord a Bbmin add 6, to emphasize the bass line and the descending thirds F-Db-Bb, but calling it G helps recognize it's relation to the C following.

Looking back, I see I've mentioned this passage twice before. Ah well. I guess it's a hard spot. But I'll say this: even though it's hard, and even though I still can't play it as perfectly as I can hear it in my head, I can say that practicing it has helped. It really works, practice. Imagine that.

Bocal brush!

About a year ago I picked up a bocal brush, figuring it was a standard piece of equipment, and I ought to have one. I didn't use it immediately, and somehow misplaced it. I figured I probably didn't need it too badly, since I'm careful to keep my mouth and reeds clean, so what gunk was there that could end up in the bocal? I'm well aware of what can end up in bocals, though. I remember the first bassoon I played, a student horn belonging to my junior high school. (Speaking of which, a junior high with an orchestra? And a bassoon to lend? We didn't know how good we had it.) Anyway, it was tough to make a sound. I didn't have a brush, didn't know special brushes existed, but I did run tap water through the bocal, and was astonished by the large chunks of crud that came out. Really, I was mostly surprised that I could get air through at all, given how packed it was with crud. And yeah, clearing it out helped that horn a lot. So brushing out bocals seems like a good idea, and I was annoyed that I'd lost my brush before ever using it. A month or two ago I even spent awhile searching, without success, and made do with running water through it.

Today, while tidying, I found my unused bocal brush! I immediately brushed out my main bocal, curious if there would be any gunk, though I didn't really expect anything. But lo, check this out:

Not huge hunks, but some substantial slime, to be sure. How exactly a slime coat would affect the acoustics isn't obvious to me, but it can't be good. Trying it out afterward, it felt like maybe it was a little more resonant, and a little easier to reach very high notes (D-D#-E), but I can't be sure if that isn't just psychological. Worthwhile in any case.

As an added bonus, I used the same principle to fix my dishwasher later in the evening. So: two wins for brushes in one day.

Intonation and temperment

Here's a master class video on intonation, for violinists but interesting for everyone I think. The violin presents an interesting case for discussion of temperament, because they have both melodic and harmonic use, and because pitch is completely under the player's control. The speaker advocates different temperament depending on the context: Pythagorean for melody, just for harmony, and figure out a workable compromise when it's more complicated. Examples mentioned include a melody with double stops, playing with an equal-tempered piano, and playing  as a soloist with an orchestra with a range of pitches to choose from.

For myself, I'm happy if I can tend to be in the general neighborhood of the right pitch, or should I say, a right pitch. I've added bending long tones against a loud drone to my routine practice, and while it's no panacea, I think I've become better as listening and adjusting.

Dealing with cold

I live in a cold place. Mostly this winter has been unbelievably mild, but we're now back to the arctic conditions that are more typical for January. This is the kind of place where the hockey rinks get put indoors, so the ice is warm enough for the skates to work. Last night it was -26 C when I was coming home from rehearsal, and the low tonight is supposed to be -31, or -47 with the wind chill. Not pleasant for the people, even with appropriate clothing, but what about the instruments?

Indoors, while playing, winter is not that big of a deal. Mostly things are just dry. The outside air is bone dry, so everyone has a humidifier, but these are set on the dry side to keep condensation off the windows. Barry Stees blogged recently about humidifying cases and reeds. I'm constantly redipping my reed, so keeping the reed wet isn't a huge problem for me. I have noticed that the bassoon joints fit a bit looser, particularly the long joint. It doesn't seem that big of a deal, but maybe I should keep my case closed, with the swab in the case, just to up the humidity a bit. I have been leaving it open to help with a sticky pad problem I once had.

But what about outside, while traveling to rehearsal? There are horror stories of woodwinds cracking, particularly oboes, due to exposure to cold. Ed Neilsen has a great article about the causes and solutions. The short story is to avoid sudden changes in temperature. I have had to cart my bassoon around in cold weather, but I've never been happy about it. This Christmas, my lovely wife bought me an insulated Altieri case cover from Miller Marketing. It's robust, with tough looking nylon, big straps, and a music pocket big enough for a large folder, a bassoon stand, a music stand, reed tools, and a laptop. It gets pretty heavy and unbalanced with all that stuff in it, but it's nice to have the option. Last night was my first chance to see how well it did with serious cold. From the bus stop back to my house was maybe 10 minutes, at -26C. Since it wasn't outside long, I figured I wasn't risking much to open it quickly to see how cold it had gotten inside. The outside of my case, inside the cover, was cool to the touch, maybe fridge temperature. Inside my case, the horn was at room temperature. So yeah, looks like an insulating case cover helps. For really serious conditions, eg shipping oboes in winter, I guess I'd add room temperature gel packs outside the case. These would freeze slowly, slowing the shift to deep cold, then melt slowly, slowing the shift back to room temperature.

Back from winter break

Over Christmas, and almost to New Year's, I was down at my parent's place. It was really nice, a very good trip. I brought my horn, in the hopes of practicing, having my parents hear me play, and seeing my old teacher. Some of that worked out: I played for a bit, almost every day. But I did discover that it was essentially impossible to practice in the usual sense. There were always people around, so of course they would listen. And if they are your aged parents, they don't want to listen to you work on your scales, even if that's what you would normally do. So I could play, as long as that playing was a performance. Okay, out comes the pieces I've been working on; out comes the Bach cello suites, I can try and sightread my way through. And out comes the book of Christmas carols. My wife played on the piano and her melodica, my son played some clarinet, and Tim, one of their caregivers, played my mom's guitar. He was amazing, actually. Turns out he led a church choir for 20 years back in the Philippines, and nearly went to a conservatory in Manila, in composition, before his scholarship fell through.

I did get a chance to take my horn to my old teacher. He put it on his machine, checked the seals, and adjusted a few pads. A touch-up is usually required after an overhaul, which we did in May, which is one of the reasons I wanted to see him. It's sealing better now, and I feel like it's helping the low register. We also put my son's clarinet on the machine. It has issues, to be sure, and my son and his teacher have started to make noises about it. The leak tester showed some of the problems, but there's no way to tell how much the work it needs (a full repad/overhaul) would help it without investing in the instrument. And the clarinet, labelled "La Sete", probably a stencil from German maker, likely has some inherent issues unrelated to its seal and setup. I guess we're in the market for a decent Buffet R13 at a decent price. We also sat down and read some music. We did the first Mozart divertimento for two clarinets and a bassoon, with my son on clarinet 1 and my teacher transposing the clarinet 2 part. That was really wonderful. I haven't played with him since, hm, must be 1987. He's got a gorgeous sound, and I learn a lot just playing in the same room as him.


My first rehearsals are next week. I want to be ready, particularly for the university symphony, which has been a challenge for me. I guess I'm doing okay, though, since I got seated for the next block too. Haydn 104 (2nd) and something called Legend (1st). Not sure what that one is, I guess I'll find out.