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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christmas shows and sightreading

I have three shows in the next few days, I guess it must be Christmas. One is chamber music, a noon-hour fundraiser. Another is a senior's concert with my main orchestra, the first of our two Christmas shows. It'll be fine, my main concern is that I'm still looking for another bassoonist for the second show a week later. The third is tomorrow night, sitting in with one of the other community orchestras in town. I only got asked to do this on Tuesday, so I'll be doing the show on zero rehearsals. Even if the music is easy, and the standards are low (they must be, or they wouldn't ask me), I think I'd still prefer to have at least one rehearsal under my belt. I'm a decent sight reader, and some of the music I've seen before, but still, I never know what the tempos will be, is it in two or four, are those repeats good, where does that DS go back to. I'll be the only bassoonist, so there won't even be anyone else to lean on, but the multi-instrumentalist who asked me will be playing clarinet next to me, so hopefully she can keep me on the right page. I shouldn't feel too sorry for myself, though. Whoever I find for the second show next week will have to do the same thing.

Performance

Had a few days off of bassooning for a work trip. As it turns out, I ended up with a bit of performance experience: I had to give a brief commendation as part of an awards ceremony. Shouldn't be a big deal, but I still feel like an imposter in my area, and the audience consisted of hundreds of the top people in my field, so even brief spots of visibility can be important. Worse, the format of the event had me standing awkwardly around on stage under the lights for a long period waiting to give my piece. And in some ways something short is more difficult than something long: if it's long, you can get used to being up there performing, but if the entire performance is thirty seconds, then your only impression you leave is your initial impression. Still, I was pretty happy with having had my musical performance experiences to draw on. I knew that what I was feeling inside is almost unconnected with the audience's experience of the event. I knew that the physiological feelings of racing heart rate etc were just that, invisible internal physiological reactions, and not harbingers of a debilitating career-destroying panic attack. I had practices to draw on: stand up straight, smile, and breathe. And I knew the importance of preparation and practice. Unfortunately I drafted my words on my iPod, which decided to get confused and unreadable when I put it on the podium under the lights. I was left with being completely ex tempore, which is to say improvising, but I got through it with only a minimum of stumbling. I felt fine afterward, happy about the performance, which is probably the most important thing, after being willing to do it in the first place.

Grateful

Here's our performance of Grateful this morning. Basically my wife's arrangement, and she's on piano. Our son is playing clarinet. Lotsa fun.

Grateful by TFox17

Last Mozart show

The last performance of the Mozart has come and gone. We were playing in a school gymnasium in a small town a couple hours away. We had a good turnout, it was a benefit organized by a few local teachers, with dessert served at intermission, and an auction afterward. We were set up fairly close to the audience, so there was maybe two feet between my bassoon and the people in the front row. Right in front of me was a burly biker type, he scowled and crossed his arms during my entire performance.  It was the attack of the bassoon soloist, I'm not sure I would have been happy either, with a bassoon in my personal space. Nevertheless, I was satisfied with how things went.

Here's the reed I used. In the end, I used the same reed for all three shows. It was starting to get a little old, but I felt like the pitch was a little more stable with this reed than the other one I was considering, even if that one was a little brighter.

And here's the recording. I left my iPod out propped against a video camera case from someone who was recording. Unfortunately, they came by and tidied up, resulting in my recording having been taken from *inside* the foam camera case. Not the best mic location, but you can still hear what happened.

I'm not yet sure which performance was best. I'll have to listen carefully at some point, and see if I can't put together a canonical, souvenir version. Something I can show to my parents, or listen to later.

Overall, it was a great experience to have had. I learned a lot while doing it, and had a lot of fun.

  Mozart Bassoon Concerto 2011-06-12 by TFox17

Second Mozart performance

Different hall, different night, different flubs. Overall better than last week, I think. I felt like I was able hear and stay in time with the orchestra a bit better, maybe I was rushing a little less. And I feel like my intonation was improved. I'm happy with it. One more to go, in about two weeks.

  Mozart Bassoon Concerto 2011-05-31 by TFox17

On listening to recordings

My wife took a video of the Mozart performance, and I watched it the next morning. All the mistakes I remembered were there, plus a few other ones too. But that's not what struck me. What surprised me was the sound, especially my intonation. It was terrible! A sustained tenor F4 at the end of the cadenza, a note I'd milked for impact, was incredibly painfully flat. Not the impact I was looking for. But it wasn't just one note or two: every bar, starting with the opening statement, had a few notes which were only vague approximations of the right pitch, or which did such wonky things over the duration of the note that you'd be hard pressed to describe them as simply sharp or flat. I didn't remember being that bad while I was playing, I thought I'd sounded fine. And I've been listening to lots of recordings of myself recently, so it's not the novelty of hearing myself. Was I good while practicing but bad at the show, or have I somehow been deluding myself that I was close to okay? Kind of a shock, really. Searching for something positive to think, all I could find was, "Well, at least there's something basic I can improve on! No worries that I've peaked yet!" I chatted with my wife about it, and she helpfully pointed out that I sing out of tune too, so maybe it's connected with that.

Later I watched it again, while trying to prepare the file for uploading. Maybe I was ready for it, but this time the intonation didn't bother me. I could still hear that it wasn't right, but somehow it didn't seem as severe. Weird. This stuff seems like it should be absolute, but in terms of how it gets perceived, nothing is absolute.

Here's a plot (using Melodyne) of that last bad F. Yeah, 27 cents is pretty flat. Worse is that the big preparatory open F before it is sharp, so you've got an octave leap which is a full quarter tone out. Maybe pain is the only rational response, and all else is delusion.

Here's the whole thing, in case you'd like to hear it for yourself. A year of work.

  Mozart Bassoon Concerto Allegro by TFox17

The big show

The show happened - last night I played a movement of the Mozart bassoon concerto with orchestra. Here's a pic, taken just as I went on. It went well, about as well as could be expected, given who and where I am. One odd squawk, one concentration slip just before a tricky bit, those are the flaws I remember, but overall I was pretty pleased. Everyone clapped at the end and said nice things to me afterward. My daughter was in the front row, about a foot away from me since the stage was a little cramped, and she was giving me feedback and a thumbs up after every passage. Once I have a recording I'll put it up, in case either of my readers wants to listen. It was a lot of work, and while the end result was not perfect, I learned a great deal along the way. We'll do the whole show twice more over the next few weeks, after which I can put this piece away for awhile. I think everyone around me will be grateful when that happens.

Just have fun

I was complaining to my wife about the Mozart yesterday. I know how I want it to sound, and I'm almost there, in the sense that every passage, in isolation, can go well at least occasionally. But running it does not magically staple together the best performances that I ever had in practice, rather I'll be lucky if everything is typical. So I know already that the final performance will leave much to be dissatisfied about. Kinda depressing, really. She made a rather wise remark: the people in the audience are not there because they are expecting an amazing show, perhaps because some famous international soloist is coming. (Is there such a thing, on bassoon?) Rather, they are there to watch a bunch of amateurs having fun. So have fun -- look like you're happy to be there, and play it happily. That's something simple to keep in mind. Enthusiasm is infectious.

The thought process, the internal tape loop of negativity, reminds me of an essay by bassoonist John Steinmetz I read awhile back (before I started this blog in fact). The whole thing is worth reading. Why do musicians look like they're unhappy? Well, after spending thousands of hours practicing self-criticism, naturally you get pretty good at it. I don't know the right way to deal with this. He offers some advice, but it's more easily said than done. And besides, I'd like it to be good, and it's not clear to me that spending time trying to accept my flaws will improve the performance faster than spending time trying to correct them. I guess that's the core of the problem, and it's infinite. So better to go back to my wife advice, keep it simple, and have fun (despite the inevitable flaws).

Dress rehearsal

I've taken to saying that there's a fairly narrow range for how a show can go. There's a limit to how badly it can go, determined by your preparation, and also a limit as to the best possible you can do, given who you are and where you're at. Psychologically, you may feel sad, or happy, depending on where in that range you end up, but in terms of the impact on the audience, on the listener, the difference between best and worst is not that large. To be honest, I have no idea if this statement is true, but if it helps me process the pressure of performance, I might as well believe it.

I almost took it back at the dress rehearsal last night. Mozart went first, so I pulled on the shoulder strap and went. Somehow I ended in a slightly uncomfortable posture, with too much weight not just on my left hand, but forward onto my fingers which were trying to play the notes. They ended up slipping and not sealing, nor feeling right. I ended up muffing entire *bars* of sixteenth notes, not exactly an auspicious beginning. And it's hard to phrase and sing beautifully when you're presiding over a train wreck in progress. So yeah, while there is a range for how badly it can go, that range might not be "narrow".

Still, I listened to the tape later. It sounded rough, like the bunch of amateurs we are, but not as bad as it sounded in my head. And while things improved as I got myself sorted out, but there's no time for that at the show. It occurs to me that when I practice at home in my room, I get set up standing, warm up with scales, then work hard passages up slowly, so I have lots of opportunity to get balance issues and everything else ironed out. At the show, I'll have to get up, put on the shoulder strap, walk to the front, and do it. I'd better start practicing doing that.

Here's a recording of the final runthrough.
  Mozart dress 2011-05-18 by TFox17

Focus

Here's a great masterclass by Daniel Matsukawa, talking mostly about the Firebird solo, and how to play legato. I have great trouble with smooth legato playing, so this is something I'd like to work on. But at one point he also talks a bit about focus, and how he deals with nerves when approaching a big solo. It's not just a matter of "I get nervous" or "I don't get nervous", everyone does, to a greater or lesser extent. He says he prefers to focus on the music, to be present, to be in the moment. This certainly resonates with my experience. Many times I have been playing, and thinking aloud to myself about the fact that I wasn't present, or in a total flow... Really, if you're thinking about your level of focus, or thinking verbally about anything, then pretty much by definition you've lost focus. I don't know of any tricks for getting it back, I wish I did, no doubt it's a matter of, um, practice and focus. And the damage to losing focus can be immediate: I recall when recording Mozart runthroughs to check my memory work when losing focus for just a beat or two was sufficient to get the fingers fumbling. Maybe it's easier for people who meditate, or who have less analytical personalities, I don't know. Unfortunately, that's not how I am.

I had an experience trying to regain focus under pressure recently. I was subbing in on 2nd for a community orchestra playing at a retirement centre. For reasons too embarrassing to detail, even pseudonymously, I was very distracted when I began performing. Every nerve was tense and alert, brain on overdrive, fingers shaking, full fight or flight response. Fortunately my music was straightforward and unexposed. The analytical part of my brain was able to say, it's okay, the half-life of adrenaline is 2 minutes, it'll be like this until the adrenaline is gone, and there's nothing to do but wait and do your best despite everything in the meantime. And eventually, I was able to get sufficiently into the moment to be able to play my part. So maybe that's a useful trick: being able to relax about being unable to relax.

University symphony concert

Awhile back I wrote about subbing with the university's symphony, but I haven't written about the concert. It was my first time playing in our town's fabulous concert hall, so I was looking forward to that. It was built only a few years ago, in a town that has money but not so many people that it needs a huge classical hall. So the builders could focus solely on acoustics, and had the budget to do. The result is, in the opinion of many proud locals, probably the best concert hall in Canada and one of the finest in the world. I've been to many concerts there, and also backstage, a couple of times when my son was performing, but I'd never played there myself. So just that was exciting. The lead bassoonist performed the whole Mozart concerto. And my teacher was playing contra on Toccatta and Fugue, so it was fun to see him.

The performance went largely fine. Only one big screwup: I was struggling to play quietly enough, in the soft accompaniment to the opera singers. I complained to the first about it after the runthrough, and he showed me some new mute fingerings (the main one I think was for low G, add low E and B-flat keys). I tried it, and it seemed to help. So I decided to use a new fingering, for the first time during the show. Hm, now there's a failure in judgment,  even if the part looks easy. And yep, I got my fingers tangled, resulting in some odd sounds and a look of surprise and alarm from the conductor, for something that was totally unnecessary. The rest was fine, though, a lot of fun. And Tocatta and Fugue, with three bassoons, contra, and a ginormous organ shaking the rafters -- truly a concert to be remembered.

Nerves!

Played a charity benefit last night, some chamber music with a few other people from the orchestra. The piece I was most looking forward to was Mozetich's Duet in Blue for flute and bassoon, a cute little postmodern thing. It's not too hard, Mozetich describes it as a "pedagogical piece of medium difficulty". Done well it's a nice treat, and we'd spent some time practicing and rehearsing it, so I had high expectations. We were amplified, and all was fine during the sound check. Then when we actually got on stage, I was terrified. I made a number of brain mistakes, miscounting, or counting correctly but deciding that I was off and not coming in, then having to figure out how to get back on while continuing to play. Terrible. The audience doesn't know the piece, so they don't know when we're supposed to be together, and when we're supposed to be alternating, and any discordance might be written off as "modern" (even though the actual piece is totally tonal), but still, the piece sounds much better when played as written.

I'm not entirely sure what happened. The performing environment is much different from the practice one, and I think has a lot to do with it. In rehearsal, we sit down, chat, get everything sorted out, talk about what tempo we're going to do; then stop, relax and prepare, and then and only then, enter. To go from that to this performance, where I'd spent the previous 20 minutes standing uncomfortably in the blackness of offstage, listening to a series of fabulous performances including a trio of professional tenors right before us, who bring down the house. Then the MC announces us, we walk on into bright lights with the audience in blackness, I trip and nearly fall on a piece of electronics left on the stage, sit down, and start to try to get all my gear sorted out... By the time the rest of the quartet has already tuned, I don't have my reed on, and the delay between the two acts has already stretched longer than is really comfortable (or so it seems, in my panicking brain). I pip one note, look at the flutist, and start the piece, totally not in the right head space. Maybe it's no surprise what happened.

Second public performance

I performed the Mozart allegro at my wife's music club last night. Any giant train wrecks? No, not really. Did I remember all the notes? Most of them. Did I rush the tricky bits? I think not at all. Did I have fun, did people like it? Yes on both, I think. The pianist, an amateur like me, did a great job with only a few days of preparation on a rather unfriendly piano reduction. So, all things considered, should be pretty good, right?

Well, actually, there are a ton of things which make me cringe, now when I listen to the recording. It got worse after I put it in iTunes and listened to it next to the professional recordings I have. Still, I think there's a virtue in reality. This is where I am. And if my blog is a diary, I might as well be honest with my diary and myself: this is what I sound like.

Mozart bassoon concerto, first movement by TFox17