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.