A language that can be whistled or hummed

This piece in Slate led me to Pirahã, an Amazonian language with odd characteristics: no numbers, no colors, and very few consonants and vowels. The simplicity of sounds is compensated by complex tones, stresses, and syllable lengths, such that speakers can supposedly converse  entirely with whistles or humming. Astonishing, if true: I wonder sometimes how many of these amazing anthropological discoveries are simply natives playing jokes on credulous adventurers. Still, in the context of the "music is a language" idea, here we have a natural language which can not only be entirely translated into music, but which itself remains entirely comprehensible if the non-musical aspects (ie ordinary phonemes) are removed. Wow. There's also a long New Yorker piece from 2007 that the Slate story is based on.

Nobelist: I owe it all to bassoon

There are lots of famous people who are secretly bassoonists. Thomas Sudhof, who just got the Nobel prize in Medicine for his work on vesicle trafficking, is one of them. Here's a quote from a 2009 interview:

Who was your most influential teacher, and why?My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.

h/t Slipped Disc

Never cry wolf

The film adaptation of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf features the bassoon prominently. This is a fictive addition by the filmmakers, as Mowat never mentions a bassoon, but it's a small change to an already somewhat fictional book, and it makes us bassoonists happy. Here's one of the appearances of the bassoon:



Wow, I can't sound like that in my living room, much less outside in the snow. Still, gorgeous playing --- David Wells says  it's Rufus Oliver of the SF Opera. David also writes quite a bit more about the movie. There's also a discussion of it on the excellent and new-to-me blog, Dr. Pierce's Bassoon Studio.

How to annoy the bassoonist

It's totally unclear to me how this is working, exactly. With the valve slides gone, we're left with a fairly short, cylindrical bore. Why does that sound anything like a bassoon? Hm.

And, for those who'd like to sing along, here are the lyrics:

"I... am not an english horn. // I am not an english horn, I cannot play so high // I am not an english horn..."

The Savary bassoon

The Savary Bassoon refers to instruments made by the Parisian maker Jean-Nicolas Savary. His dates are 1768-1853, so I guess these would count as classical or early romantic instruments, coming just before the changes of Heckel and Almenrader. The photo above shows an x-ray of the wing joint of one of the remaining examples. I love this image: you can see the long tone holes that give the bassoon its unique sound, as well as the subtle changes in the taper of the main bore that the maker used to balance various characteristics.

There's been  a recent effort to reconstruct one of these instruments, documented in the video below. I'm not a big fan of calling anything the "Stradavarius of X", unless X is a violin, but the instrument has a gorgeous sound, quite different from the modern bassoon.

Michael Jackson's Beat It, performed on a contra

Is this possible for anyone to play?

From Saxton Rose, music by Philippe Hersant:

Looking at that, I have a hard time figuring out what sounds the composer wants, and why he thinks the bassoon will make them. Perhaps there's someone who can play that as written, but I'm quite sure I never will. The leaps are too large, and too quick. Surely, we're not meant to interpret the notes literally,  are we??

Wait! There's also flutter tonguing? Really? Now, if it's possible, I'm even more confused.

Looping with Google Glass

Nice, catchy little piece. And the first person view of the whole process is fun.

The Heckelphone

I've seen pictures of the Heckelphone, but I don't think I've heard it before. Here's a recording of the Hindemith Heckelphone trio:

Paid to play

I got paid to play last week. Not a giant deal, in the grand scheme of things: a mostly pick-up orchestra, accompanying a community choir at their big concert. (All Mozart -- a fun program.) But it was a big deal for me. I felt the expectations were very high. My fellow musicians were very good, and had generally been gigging together on the various musicals that come through. And the quality was much better than my usual orchestra, and better still than the university orchestra I get to play with. But the big difference to the university orchestra is the amount of attention we received. We were the ringers, the hired guns. We're supposed to show up, play really well with no rehearsal, and then go home. The small number of rehearsals we had before the show were almost entirely spent on the choir -- the choir, who had been rehearsing this music for months already. The hired guns were supposed to figure out how to sound great on the fly, just by listening to each other. In the university orchestra, the rehearsals are pedagogical, with the conductor acting as professor and coach, instructing the students what to do. In this orchestra, we were professionals, and were supposed to figure it out ourselves, without wasting the choir's rehearsal time.

It wasn't the first time I've been paid to play. I'd done a few gigs in high school. But that was a long time ago -- I was probably 17 the last time I got a check for playing bassoon. I gotta say, it was incredibly fun. Stressful, sure. I tried to be in top form, as focused, prepared and professional as possible, but before and during the sessions. And being around excellent playing makes it easier to be excellent, as well as making it more obvious when I wasn't. It was great fun to do, to just be there, being a part of it. And then there were times my mind wandered away from the music, to giddily thinking, "I'm being paid to do this!" An incredible feeling.

I didn't learn the amount until after I'd gotten home. It's more than I expected, to be  honest. I would have been happy if it had covered the cost of parking. But I can do the math, and be reminded of how difficult it would be to make a living as a freelancer. Still, it was fun to do, when I don't need to try and make a living from it. Hopefully, I did well enough that I'll get a call again sometime.

SF oboist dies in hospital

William Bennett, the San Francisco Symphony principal who collapsed while playing the Richard Strauss concerto on Saturday night, died today in hospital. He was 56 years old

Sad news.

[h/t Slipped Disc]

Bassoon lamp

I've often heard of "lamp-quality" bassoons, but I've never actually seen a lamp. Here's one you can buy on Etsy:

The bocal's backwards, sure, probably an artistic choice for the photo. I'm more curious about the lack of whisper key. Did it fall off, or is the horn old enough that it never had one? Regardless, this horn seems to have entered a new phase of life as a decorative object.

Practicing joy

There are a few thoughts that have been on my mind while practicing recently. One came from an off-hand remark from the university oboe instructor to one of her first or second year undergraduates. He'd played a piece at a master-class like thing I happened to be present for. He'd worked hard, the piece had improved since the last time. My overwhelming impression, though, was from the tremor in his tone. Nervousness? Physical issues like I struggle with? How was the teacher going to handle it? You can't just yell at people to not be nervous, obviously. What she said was something like this: "There's a bit of tremor in your tone. That's just endurance, and it'll go away with more practice. We'll take a look at your schedule." Practical, reassuring, with a straightforward answer. All you have to do is practice three hours a day, and it'll sort itself out. Comforting! This kind of combined with my worries that in fact I'm not progressing, and have instead reached some kind of equilibrium, more or less, in how I play. The "10,000 hours to mastery" viewpoint is that practice is cumulative, and every hour adds to the total. I'm currently thinking this isn't quite true, not that simply. Some skills you lose in a week without working on them, and others you can't begin to develop unless you're maintaining a baseline of excellence requiring a couple hours a day to keep up? Would my playing and progress be any different if I practiced three hours a day, instead of sneaking in 30 minutes before getting the kids to school? I made a schedule, just like the oboe teacher suggested, and if I followed it, I would be playing 3 hours a day. Over winter break I did play a fair bit more than usual, and things did start to feel different. So play more: more is not just more, more is different. That's the first idea.

Another is "No clams". I mentioned the CSO horn player's practice, with every note, from the first to the last, being beautiful. Sure, I could try to do that, I thought, but I'm not a world-famous professional. Ha ha, they probably didn't play everything perfectly during their decades of practice while getting to where they are! Or so my thought went. But seriously, does that make sense? Did they get to where they are by practicing playing badly? Playing wrong notes, or notes unbeautiful in any sense? Put it like that, and my thought is very stupid. They got to where they are by practicing playing well. As gorgeous as possible. Every note, every day, from the first to the last, attack to release. Well fine, my brain continued, all well for them, professional or future professional, but you're a permanent amateur, you don't have time for that! ...right, brain. Because I, an amateur, know how to practice more efficiently than these world-class performers? And my more efficient practice, making better use of my more limited time, involves playing badly? Does that make sense? No, not at all. I have even more need to be as efficient as possible. So every note needs to be as beautiful as possible, in every sense. No clams. I still make mistakes, obviously, and accepting them, not beating myself up over them, is correct. But no tolerance for lack of beauty in anything I play. If that means I spend 20 minutes playing three notes of a scale, because the tone I hear with my ears doesn't match the tone I hear in my head, so be it.

The latest is really simple. Joy. I just read Born to Run, which is largely about the Tarahumara tribe of primal runners.  Lots of fun inspirational stuff in there, we are all born runners, except maybe me, with my wonky feet. But the greatness of the Tarahumara, along with other ultra runners from other traditions, seems to result from their joy of running. The Kenyans, one expert wrote, run like kindergarteners. As fast as they want, on the balls of their feet, when they feel like it, and stopping when they wish. My little jog home from work the other day, instead of slavishly following the instructions of my heart rate monitor (a new Christmas present), I tried to run while maximizing joy. It was a different perspective, analytical along a different axis. Certainly I was much quicker, at times, than usual, but that was not the point. I was more sore the next day, too, but that was not the point either. The point is joy, the internal feeling, and any external outcomes that flow out of that are just exernalities. I think that much of my practicing is in fact counts as practicing joy: I'm looking for sound, and the pleasure of playing. Only rarely am I practicing out of fear: fear of embarassment at a lesson or rehearsal, or fear of failure. And only rarely do I practice things out of obligation, or suffer on the assumption that suffering will make me a better player, or a better person. I play a lot of scales, it's true. But if I'm honest with myself, I play scales largely because I enjoy playing them, because I'm fairly good at playing them and they sound good, and because I enjoy working on making them sound just a little bit better. I think children are better at practicing joy than I am. My son, in particular, when he gets going on improvising piano, you can hear the joy flow out of him, through the keys, and into the sound. And he's been able to maintain this, despite the exams, the lessons, the external commitments and imprecations to practice for them. Or perhaps in part because of them. You have to love your playing, and maybe it helps to have defined avenues for development. Still, practicing to optimize your internal sense of joy: for me, that's a cue to remember.