Weekly lessons are going to be tough. It's now fall, so schedules will be more regular, so I'll miss fewer lessons due to mismatches, and will need to be prepared on a weekly basis for whatever I'm presenting that week. This isn't very many practice sessions to develop and learn whatever major concepts or changes I need to do based on the previous lesson. So maybe being specific week-to-week will help.
This week, my goal is to not spend a week slowly ramping up the metronome, then get stopped after the first note to talk tone for half the lesson. So relaxation, embouchure, air, throat, conception of tone and hearing the goal before playing. Probably this means everything slower than I'd like, *sigh*, but maybe the sound will be better.
Started working reeds again. Threw a couple away without much work, which is a milestone. I had better blanks on which to spend my time, and I guess I've learned that construction problems can't really be fixed. G9 was one, it felt giant, I guess it was one of my wide experiments. XX was the other, the cane slipped at the shoulder. Currently fighting Nxx, trying to get it acceptably soft without killing E3. At the moment it's both tubby and too hard, which seems like a contradiction, but there it is.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Embouchure and relaxation
Played Milde 3. Went a little better than I was expecting, but since I was expecting pretty terrible, that's not saying much. M then complained about my tone, and we spent 10-15 minutes working on the first note, G3. I guess my worry about the notes turned into tension, which turned into bad tone. So I spent that time in relaxation and breathing exercises. I have a hard time believing that tension, say in my shoulders, can affect the tone directly; after all, how much are my shoulders vibrating? But I guess everything is connected. And the way that the air moves matters. I know that the oral cavity has an impact, and can consciously arch my soft palate and open my throat, but this is an intentional tensing of certain muscles, not a relaxed state. So it's all a little confusing, if you think too hard about it. The right approach is to have a conception of the sound in your head *before* you play, and then everything comes naturally.
We also spent time, yet again, on my embouchure. Wrapped around teeth, thin, to dampen the vibrations as little as possible. If I take a "natural" position, just put my lips on the reed, I get the fleshy red part of the lip, which is wrong; I need to have them drawn in further, so that the outer edge, where the skin begins, is just touching the reed. I can do it if I'm thinking about it, but that's kind of the problem; if I'm struggling to play something it'll slip and return to the incorrect posture. I should really record my lessons, to see if I can hear all these changes on tape. I think the overall effect is positive, but it goes away the further off the lesson becomes. I guess that's why lessons are recurring.
What else. Started playing Mozart. Lots to learn there. And oh yeah, Milde 3 got reassigned, so I'll have another shot in a week.
We also spent time, yet again, on my embouchure. Wrapped around teeth, thin, to dampen the vibrations as little as possible. If I take a "natural" position, just put my lips on the reed, I get the fleshy red part of the lip, which is wrong; I need to have them drawn in further, so that the outer edge, where the skin begins, is just touching the reed. I can do it if I'm thinking about it, but that's kind of the problem; if I'm struggling to play something it'll slip and return to the incorrect posture. I should really record my lessons, to see if I can hear all these changes on tape. I think the overall effect is positive, but it goes away the further off the lesson becomes. I guess that's why lessons are recurring.
What else. Started playing Mozart. Lots to learn there. And oh yeah, Milde 3 got reassigned, so I'll have another shot in a week.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
A bad job on Louchez 7
Was feeling a little frustrated at the lack of progress on my project to record all the Louchez studies, so I turned on the mic for #7. At first it was a total disaster, but after a number of runs, I got one that was merely terrible. I've posted it below. It's frustrating, because it's a pretty piece, but I'm not able to take it quickly enough to give it a light, 6/8 allegretto air, plus all the goofs (and worse yet, the *fear* of goofs) make it feel stodgy. So it sucks. Maybe it's the best I can do, right now today? Fine, whatever, but why should that affect how the listener hears it? It's either effective and works, or it's not.
Louchez7 by TFox17
Louchez7 by TFox17
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Lesson notes
So let's see. Played some of my scales. We talked about tone in the upper register, and tried to fix my embouchure again. Apparently I tend to press straight down with the lips, rather than having lips wrapped around teeth, and just placed against the reed to seal, basically without pressing. This lets the reed vibrate as much as possible, like a cymbal, which is damped by something soft like a finger, but can ring and ring when placed against something hard. And we changed one of my fingerings back, B4, putting back the Eb vent that we removed a few weeks ago, trying to get the pitch correct when doing D minor scale. So that'll be some weeks of practice to work through. I'm still not totally comfortable with the other fingering changes, in particular adding the Eb vent on D3 and D#3, so there's plenty to work on. We added one more scale, Bb, plus its relative (melodic) minor and arpeggios.
We spent a good deal of time on Milde 2, which I knew reasonably well since it's been three weeks. Stuff I learned: the bottom notes of the arpeggios should be treated like a cello, which would let them ring on a low string while completing the notes on another. We can't do that exactly, but with a certain amount of weight and lengthening of note (but not accent) you can kind of give that effect. Pay attention to where the cadences are: the line needs to resolve, and the big note is the first note of the bar ending the cadence, not the top of the run which leads from it.
Spend some time on Elgar too. I played all the way through it without stopping, and with little in the way of clams; it's mostly not that hard. The runs I'm to practice v.e.r.y.s.l.o.w.l.y, I guess my faking wasn't clean enough. Still lots of detailed phrasing that I don't get until after it's been freshly demonstrated; it'll be work to internalize it. The fortes need to really open up, open throat, tight embouchure, breath support. Marlon Brando shouting "Stella!" at one point (C?), a reference I don't get, but I guess I could google it. I'm starting to feel like this piece is approaching an equilibrium, not there yet, but getting there. Some parts make no sense without the piano, hope to get that sorted out some time.
We spent a good deal of time on Milde 2, which I knew reasonably well since it's been three weeks. Stuff I learned: the bottom notes of the arpeggios should be treated like a cello, which would let them ring on a low string while completing the notes on another. We can't do that exactly, but with a certain amount of weight and lengthening of note (but not accent) you can kind of give that effect. Pay attention to where the cadences are: the line needs to resolve, and the big note is the first note of the bar ending the cadence, not the top of the run which leads from it.
Spend some time on Elgar too. I played all the way through it without stopping, and with little in the way of clams; it's mostly not that hard. The runs I'm to practice v.e.r.y.s.l.o.w.l.y, I guess my faking wasn't clean enough. Still lots of detailed phrasing that I don't get until after it's been freshly demonstrated; it'll be work to internalize it. The fortes need to really open up, open throat, tight embouchure, breath support. Marlon Brando shouting "Stella!" at one point (C?), a reference I don't get, but I guess I could google it. I'm starting to feel like this piece is approaching an equilibrium, not there yet, but getting there. Some parts make no sense without the piano, hope to get that sorted out some time.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Tables of scales
I find combinatorial categorization almost pathogically compelling, so I couldn't resist pushing a little further about scales and tetrachords. I made a table with every tetrachord I've run across, picked abbreviations for them, and included synonyms from Arabic (Maqam) and Turkish (Makam) traditions, then tried to lay out as many scales as I could in terms of those tetrachords. For the scales, I looked at the seven modes of each of several source scales (major, melodic minor, harmonic minor, harmonic major, and double harmonic), including the fancy mode names and synonyms where I could find them (mostly from Wikipedia, especially the modes article).
Finally, I made tables of what scales get produced by combining tetrachords. Here we can see the names that get attached to all the combinations, and also all the blank spots on the map, scales we can play that have no name.
I had to draw some limits. I ignore the microtonal tetrachords, limiting myself to scales that can be played on an ordinary Western instrument. I had to include several tetrachords that don't give a perfect fourth: the Lydian tetrachords, which fill a tritone, and the diminished tetrachord, but I didn't write down every permutation or rotation of intervals to invent new tetrachords, I just included the ones I found reference to. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out why Lydian #2, m3-s-T, is in the canon, but the just-as-reasonable-looking m3-T-s is not. The perfect fourth tetrachords can be combined arbitrarily into scales making an octave, separated by a tone, but we need to do something different for the non-perfect ones. Either we need to combine a Lydian (tritone) tetra with a diminished, separated by a tone; or we need to put a Lydian with a perfect and separate by a semitone. Similarly, there's a couple places where an augmented second joins the two.
I also skipped some important scales. The major and minor pentatonic scales, and the related blues scale, an elaboration of the minor pentatonic, don't fit easily into a tetrachord concept, both because they have the wrong number of notes (all the above scales are heptatonic, ie have 7 notes) and because they don't have a fourth. I'll skip the bebop scales, despite their awesome names (A Doriolian ♭5? B altered quintal?) for a similar reason: they are octatonic, basically inserting a passing note into another scale. You can of course outline four note patterns in these, but it's hard to see the scale as being constructed of them. Or maybe I'm just lazy.
At some point, of course, this kind of exercise becomes silly: mapping out and analyzing parts of harmonic space which are unused, not because they are great new territories for invention and creativity which you and you alone have realized, but rather because they suck. The world's cultures have been making music for a long time, and if a scale is undiscovered, there's likely to be a good reason for that. Still, it's kind of fun to try and get a global picture of the possibilities, patterned after the scales we are used to.
Oh, yeah, the table is here, done up as a spreadsheet so it's easy for me to fix.
Refs: Wikipedia, http://www.tonalcentre.org/, various jazz harmony books, http://docs.solfege.org:81/3.9/C/scales/modes.html
Added: Another mammoth list of modes is here, 1200 of them, part of the astonishing microtonal scale analysis and construction program Scala. It's written in Ada, and has a 9/11 Truth icon at the end, just in case you need additional evidence that the author is looney, but really, I think that list of scales should be sufficient.
Finally, I made tables of what scales get produced by combining tetrachords. Here we can see the names that get attached to all the combinations, and also all the blank spots on the map, scales we can play that have no name.
I had to draw some limits. I ignore the microtonal tetrachords, limiting myself to scales that can be played on an ordinary Western instrument. I had to include several tetrachords that don't give a perfect fourth: the Lydian tetrachords, which fill a tritone, and the diminished tetrachord, but I didn't write down every permutation or rotation of intervals to invent new tetrachords, I just included the ones I found reference to. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out why Lydian #2, m3-s-T, is in the canon, but the just-as-reasonable-looking m3-T-s is not. The perfect fourth tetrachords can be combined arbitrarily into scales making an octave, separated by a tone, but we need to do something different for the non-perfect ones. Either we need to combine a Lydian (tritone) tetra with a diminished, separated by a tone; or we need to put a Lydian with a perfect and separate by a semitone. Similarly, there's a couple places where an augmented second joins the two.
I also skipped some important scales. The major and minor pentatonic scales, and the related blues scale, an elaboration of the minor pentatonic, don't fit easily into a tetrachord concept, both because they have the wrong number of notes (all the above scales are heptatonic, ie have 7 notes) and because they don't have a fourth. I'll skip the bebop scales, despite their awesome names (A Doriolian ♭5? B altered quintal?) for a similar reason: they are octatonic, basically inserting a passing note into another scale. You can of course outline four note patterns in these, but it's hard to see the scale as being constructed of them. Or maybe I'm just lazy.
At some point, of course, this kind of exercise becomes silly: mapping out and analyzing parts of harmonic space which are unused, not because they are great new territories for invention and creativity which you and you alone have realized, but rather because they suck. The world's cultures have been making music for a long time, and if a scale is undiscovered, there's likely to be a good reason for that. Still, it's kind of fun to try and get a global picture of the possibilities, patterned after the scales we are used to.
Oh, yeah, the table is here, done up as a spreadsheet so it's easy for me to fix.
Refs: Wikipedia, http://www.tonalcentre.org/, various jazz harmony books, http://docs.solfege.org:81/3.9/C/scales/modes.html
Added: Another mammoth list of modes is here, 1200 of them, part of the astonishing microtonal scale analysis and construction program Scala. It's written in Ada, and has a 9/11 Truth icon at the end, just in case you need additional evidence that the author is looney, but really, I think that list of scales should be sufficient.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Tetrachords
So I sat down at the keyboard, deciding that I would figure out major and minor scales, and what triads they contained at each position, and got lost just in the major scale. See, the whole TTsTTTs thing always bothered me -- so asymmetric. Why two tones, then a semitone, followed by three... never made sense. Why not the other way around, or some other pattern. And the whole layout of the piano keyboard contains this pattern. The structure of the major scale is built into the interface. It's mathematically unpleasing, which is one of the reasons why, when extending my interval practice into scales and arpeggios, I often stuck to the totally symmetric ones, built entirely from a single interval: chromatic, whole tone, dim7, augmented.
While diddling, I remembered reading a claim that the scale is in fact symmetric, being built from two identical four-note tetrachords, each consisting of a perfect fourth divided as TTs. That claim confused me at the time, too, since it's clearly not symmetric. Still, it kinda is, since you've got the same note pattern in each half (approximately half, anyway) of the octave, separated by a whole step.
So what happens if you start minor, eg C-D-Eb-F, ie TsT? Does repeating that in the upper half give you one of the minor scales? Well no. You get a Dorian mode, which has a minor feel, from the flatted third, but is not one of the classical ones (natural, harmonic, or melodic). To get melodic minor (going up melodic, TsTTTTs, sometimes called jazz minor if you're planning on playing the same notes going down) you put the major tetrachord on the top, TTs, since those notes are the same as the major scale. Fine, so different scales can get built by combining different tetrachords. That's kind of interesting, since we can therefore use the tetrachords as an organizing concept to relate different scales which have parts which sound the same. To build a natural minor, we use the last tetrachord, sTT, on the top. If you build a scale from two of those, you get the Phyrgian mode, C-Db-Eb-F G-Ab-Bb-C. I guess it's almost obvious that building a scale from two of the same of any these tetrachords (what wikipedia calls diatonic tetrachords, and names the three Lydian, Dorian, and Phrygian) has to give you a mode of the major scale, since the semitones are the same distance apart. But there are only three of them anyway. I suspect pianists learn those shapes, and use those patterns in playing.
The asymmetry of the major scale comes from placing the upper tetrachord a whole step above the lower tetrachord, but not vice versa. So we can distinguish upper and lower. This is not the only choice, and other choices give us other scales. Each tetrachord covers a fourth, so to make a complete octave, we need to add a total of two semitones. We can put them both between lower and upper, giving the major scale, so that the last note of the upper tetrachord, C, is the same as the first note of the lower tetrachord; or both after the upper tetrachord, so that the last note of the lower tetrachord, F, is the first note of the upper tetrachord, giving us the Lydian mode. Conceivably we could divide them equally, with a semitone between lower and upper, and another between upper and lower. This gives the eight note scale, C-D-E-F-F#-G#-A#-B-C, a scale for which I don't know a name. It sounds kinda like a whole tone scale, but with passing tones inserted. Like the whole tone scale, it is symmetrical, or at least, more symmetrical than the major scale. Might be worth looking at what scales are generated by those choices for the other tetrachords.
We could also symmetrize by not demanding we end up with an octave. You lose the idea of the scale as a closed circle, but maybe it could work anyway. Without adding any gaps, just extending the TTs (Lydian) tetrachord, two fourths make a m7, and you start moving through the circle of fifths as you go up the scale, every part sounding kind of in a major key, but mutating as you go: C-D-E-F, F-G-A-Bb, Bb-C-D-Eb, and so on. Or if you put a whole step between both upper and lower, you get something similar, but moving up by fifths instead of by fourths: C-D-E-F, G-A-B-C, D-E-F#-G, A-B-C#-D, ...
You might have noticed I skipped harmonic minor. It's that minor third, which doesn't occur in any permutation of TTs. Wikipedia puts this into a separate class of tetrachords, calling it chromatic, with two semitones and a minor 3rd. Lots more scales can come out of here no doubt, and almost certainly as well from another class of tetrachord that I wouldn't have thought of, because you can't play it on a piano: major 3rd, quartertone, quartertone.
Finally, why a fourth? This, at least, I have a good answer for. It's the smallest perfect interval, and the perfect intervals are unique, not because they have simple integer ratios of frequencies (though they do), and not because we call them a special name (though we do), but rather because it is for perfect intervals alone that we have hardware in our brains to measure. Perfect intervals are innate, all other intervals are learned and cultural. And the fourth is the smallest one.
So I didn't figure out major and minor, but I did manage to clear up a longstanding confusion of mine over the symmetries, and lack thereof, of the basic major scale. Seems like enough for an evening.
While diddling, I remembered reading a claim that the scale is in fact symmetric, being built from two identical four-note tetrachords, each consisting of a perfect fourth divided as TTs. That claim confused me at the time, too, since it's clearly not symmetric. Still, it kinda is, since you've got the same note pattern in each half (approximately half, anyway) of the octave, separated by a whole step.
So what happens if you start minor, eg C-D-Eb-F, ie TsT? Does repeating that in the upper half give you one of the minor scales? Well no. You get a Dorian mode, which has a minor feel, from the flatted third, but is not one of the classical ones (natural, harmonic, or melodic). To get melodic minor (going up melodic, TsTTTTs, sometimes called jazz minor if you're planning on playing the same notes going down) you put the major tetrachord on the top, TTs, since those notes are the same as the major scale. Fine, so different scales can get built by combining different tetrachords. That's kind of interesting, since we can therefore use the tetrachords as an organizing concept to relate different scales which have parts which sound the same. To build a natural minor, we use the last tetrachord, sTT, on the top. If you build a scale from two of those, you get the Phyrgian mode, C-Db-Eb-F G-Ab-Bb-C. I guess it's almost obvious that building a scale from two of the same of any these tetrachords (what wikipedia calls diatonic tetrachords, and names the three Lydian, Dorian, and Phrygian) has to give you a mode of the major scale, since the semitones are the same distance apart. But there are only three of them anyway. I suspect pianists learn those shapes, and use those patterns in playing.
The asymmetry of the major scale comes from placing the upper tetrachord a whole step above the lower tetrachord, but not vice versa. So we can distinguish upper and lower. This is not the only choice, and other choices give us other scales. Each tetrachord covers a fourth, so to make a complete octave, we need to add a total of two semitones. We can put them both between lower and upper, giving the major scale, so that the last note of the upper tetrachord, C, is the same as the first note of the lower tetrachord; or both after the upper tetrachord, so that the last note of the lower tetrachord, F, is the first note of the upper tetrachord, giving us the Lydian mode. Conceivably we could divide them equally, with a semitone between lower and upper, and another between upper and lower. This gives the eight note scale, C-D-E-F-F#-G#-A#-B-C, a scale for which I don't know a name. It sounds kinda like a whole tone scale, but with passing tones inserted. Like the whole tone scale, it is symmetrical, or at least, more symmetrical than the major scale. Might be worth looking at what scales are generated by those choices for the other tetrachords.
We could also symmetrize by not demanding we end up with an octave. You lose the idea of the scale as a closed circle, but maybe it could work anyway. Without adding any gaps, just extending the TTs (Lydian) tetrachord, two fourths make a m7, and you start moving through the circle of fifths as you go up the scale, every part sounding kind of in a major key, but mutating as you go: C-D-E-F, F-G-A-Bb, Bb-C-D-Eb, and so on. Or if you put a whole step between both upper and lower, you get something similar, but moving up by fifths instead of by fourths: C-D-E-F, G-A-B-C, D-E-F#-G, A-B-C#-D, ...
You might have noticed I skipped harmonic minor. It's that minor third, which doesn't occur in any permutation of TTs. Wikipedia puts this into a separate class of tetrachords, calling it chromatic, with two semitones and a minor 3rd. Lots more scales can come out of here no doubt, and almost certainly as well from another class of tetrachord that I wouldn't have thought of, because you can't play it on a piano: major 3rd, quartertone, quartertone.
Finally, why a fourth? This, at least, I have a good answer for. It's the smallest perfect interval, and the perfect intervals are unique, not because they have simple integer ratios of frequencies (though they do), and not because we call them a special name (though we do), but rather because it is for perfect intervals alone that we have hardware in our brains to measure. Perfect intervals are innate, all other intervals are learned and cultural. And the fourth is the smallest one.
So I didn't figure out major and minor, but I did manage to clear up a longstanding confusion of mine over the symmetries, and lack thereof, of the basic major scale. Seems like enough for an evening.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)