Friday, October 29, 2010

Injury

Lesson went okay, I guess, considering my practicing. Got some compliments on phrasing in the study, got criticized for not pushing tempos. Flip sides of the same coin, I think, and both a consequence of practicing slowly sans metronome. I'm supposed to push the tempo on the scales when "it gets boring", but I don't find a scale boring at any tempo, there's so much to think about with tone, so I better start pushing tempos regardless. Still accurate, but challenge speed as well as every other aspect of playing. And I'm never supposed to practice a scale without a metronome again.

The big news is medical -- my teacher ripped some tendons in his left hand while working on a bicycle. He can't play at all at the moment, or is stopping to speed healing, anyway. Good thing it happened after his big recital, but still scary. My first teacher once got a viral infection, which basically paralyzed half of his face. It was caught quickly, and he recovered, but still, if you're relying on your physical condition to make a living, even thinking about these things can be frightening. I sometimes have nightmares about losing a pinky, maybe in an accident, or through some weird Yakuza ritual, and I don't even rely on playing. I hope he's healing quickly and well.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Busy

Lesson tonight, and I don't think it's going to be a good one. Unfortunately, the rest of my life is severely cutting into my practice time. Hopefully it's transient, but annoying anyway. I feel like it takes something like an hour to just get reacquainted, and before that the fingers are unsmooth and imprecise, the half-hole notes crack, and it's hard to make progress. I've still gotten some practice everyday, but on Tuesday I wouldn't have had any practice at all had I not played some scales during the break. And I haven't been able to do the 2x/day thing that was working well. Ah well, consistency is key, I guess, just keep on going. But nothing is seeming easy at the moment.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

A recital

M had a recital this afternoon -- Dutilleux, Saint-Saens, and the premier of a brand new sonata, written by the piano player. It was a nice show, for a small but appreciative audience heavy in the bassoon players in town. I quite liked the sonata -- it had very vocal parts at times, with a nice sound from the bassoon. The Dutilleux is not a piece that I'm familiar with, though I knew he'd been working on it (especially the high F, which is probably easier on the French bassoon it'd been written for). The Saint-Saens is a lovely piece, and he took the 2nd movement crazy fast. All in all a lot of fun, and good conversations at the reception afterward. The third orchestra in town is playing a piece that requires four bassoons, and they only have two, so I might have scored a gig later. That'll be fun if it happens.

easy.

my lesson went fine. i chose to move on from milde #5, though I had the option to spend another week "polishing it". i guess i kinda felt like i'd learned everything in a musical sense that i could, and the technique has reached a long slow plateau. doesn't mean it can't be played better, doesn't mean i can't play it better, but it does mean that i felt ready to work on the next one.

this one is #6, full of F arpeggios. i tried it kinda slow on friday, and yesterday, after almost missing a complete day of practice during a day of chaos, i forced myself to sit down and play, if only briefly, before heading to bed. wanting to take it easy, i soaked my most vibrant reed, played some relaxed scales, then took a look at #6. looked pretty easy. and i wanted to take it easy, so i played it as if it *was* easy. no metronome, since the notes were all so easy i wouldn't need to spend hours in metronomic practice, laboring to work up a few bpm, straining for every note, then struggling to calm the fingers and everything. no, it's all easy, so i could just focus on making a beautiful tone, and a beautiful line, and finding beautiful music. sure, i didn't know all the notes, since i'd just starting, but since it is so easy, they would come naturally, i wouldn't need to worry about them. if i'd goof on one, i'd run over it a few times, they are all easy, so that should take care of it, and keep the fingers from interfering with the phrase. and because it's easy, i could start thinking, right from the beginning, as to how to stretch and pull the phrases, where the dynamics should be to bring out the changes, how the articulations and leading tones can be used to outline the key notes of the phrase.

it's all a crock of course. i don't actually think it's any easier than any of the others, but this is a conscious attempt to work it up while being beautiful the entire way. no straining, no struggling, no fighting to relax the fingers and fighting to get the notes, just easy, the whole time. we'll see how it goes.

(i tried playing the mozart as if it were easy too. and maybe it helped, inside of my head anyway, although i certainly didn't hit every note.)

Thursday, October 14, 2010

YouTube Symphony

YouTube did a symphony thing last year, auditions by uploaded video, putting together an international orchestra to play a newly commissioned work (I think it was anyway). Interesting process, and for schmucks like me, there was a great set of masterclasses recorded, by members of the London Symphony, which are basically all worth watching, whatever you play. They're doing it again this year, with classes for both orchestral players and improvisors. The piece is some kind of electronica-classical fusion, by Mason Bates. Here it is, with the composer playing producer/DJ on the laptop:



And I gotta say, I love the concept. I spent quite a while listening to dance oriented electronica on YouTube, when I was getting back into music. I really think there's stuff to do here. But at least on a first listen, this piece, or maybe this recording of it, doesn't work for me. Groove is maybe the word I'm looking for, to describe what might be missing. Maybe it's familiarity -- we like music we're used to, which is why making pop music hits requires a positive feedback loop of massive radio play. But I dunno. Maybe I'll try again when it's not 4am (but when better, really, to test club music?)

Or maybe it's just because a few minutes earlier I ran into Elgar's Nimrod again, in this amazing recording, a piece which I probably haven't heard since I played it in some band decades ago. And I wasn't trying to pay much attention to it, but damn, what a piece.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Room acoustics

Listening to recordings of myself, I'm struck by how much notes pop in and out, with different volumes and colors even for close notes. Most of that is me, of course, and some of it will be characteristics of the reed, as well as inherent properties of the bassoon as an instrument, but I got curious how much is controlled by the space where I'm recording. It's a basement home office, basically a small converted bedroom. Reading about recording acoustics, and generally, bigger is better, room dimensions matter, and acoustic treatment is the first place you should look to improve your recordings. I guess small rooms tend to have modes which are further apart, since the fundamental is higher. And if you get unlucky with the ratios, modes will line up, giving you a really strong response at one frequency, and much less at another. Better is many modes all together. So I found a mode calculator, and a nice discussions of room acoustics, and plugged in my room measurements.


That result is not pretty. The 250-400 Hz range is where the fundamental lies for the tenor range. And some of those joined resonances basically turn into ringing for some notes but not others.

For reference, here's a plot for a nice room, designed by plugging ideal numbers into the calculator. So that's what good looks like.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Well-prepared

Another week, another lesson. I'm in a cramming mode right now, because I don't think I'll be able to get these practice sessions back later. Maybe you can't cram at the last minute, you have to start now. (Kind of different from cramming for an exam.) If I'm going to stand in front of a group and try to play Mozart, in just a few months time, I'd like to not suck, or at least, suck as little as possible. So I have to cram now.

So how do I practice, given the constraints of my life? Well, every day, obviously, zero exceptions, since a lost day requires days to recover before you make progress again. And multiple sessions per day are better than one giant session. Sleeps probably count more than sessions, since new neural connections are formed during sleep. My well-read wife tells me 20 minutes is enough, so if I can sneak a short nap in between the practices, that should help. And basically, I get up early, and try and do a good practice before I need to do other things, and then practice again in the evening. Mornings sometimes I'm late, and only get to scales, and sometimes the evening gets missed, for one reason or another. Scales, etude, Mozart, that's it for the moment.

Oh and reeds. The extra wear from more practicing has I think started to degenerate my reeds faster, despite the cleaner. So I did spend some time this week trying to frantically trim a reed or two closer to playability. Especially since M blamed over-closed reed for some of my sound problem, so I've been trying for a more open tip, yet controllable. Difficult. I blew most of yesterday evening fiddling with G11, lightening it up dramatically (the spine and heart had gotten out of balance with the rest, and needed reducing, since I'd done lots of previous work just shaving the sides and tip). I felt comfortable enough with it that I played it at the lesson, though. And I guess it worked well enough that M didn't feel the need to examine it, try it, or fix it.

Anyway, the scales went fine at lesson. I'd move the metronome up to 61, and have been trying for 16ths, but just played 8ths at the lesson. So maybe it's not surprising that M said they were "well-prepared". Lots of practicing, and quite often, scales is all that I get to. Hopefully it'll pay off in everything else.

Now if I could only apply the same skills to my day job. I wouldn't mind being well-prepared there too, but somehow it's not so easy.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Checkin on tone

To see if my recent activity has had any impact, I decided to rerecord XXVI, which I last looked at back in January. First time through was terrible, was probably as bad as it used to be. This is attempt #3:

XXVI-2010-10-04 by TFox17

And the old one, now copied onto Soundcloud:
XXVI-2010-01-31 by TFox17

Listening critically, I think my tone is not as much improved as I'd hoped, but maybe it's going in the right direction.

A cadenza



A YouTube commenter remarks that this style of cadenza, where the performer is quoting contemporary material, pulling bizarre stunts, and doing their damnedest to impress and entertain the audience, is actually more spiritually authentic to Mozart's era than playing anything "Classical" would be. I've no idea if that's true, but it sounds good. The main remark I can think about cadenzas, made by M, is that everyone is dogmatic, but no one agrees. So really, you can do whatever you want.

Friday, October 1, 2010

This is my favorite blog post!

Lesson went fine, I guess. No time spent on tone exercises, and not much on scales, so my sound was either okay, or hopeless. For the etude, Milde 4, I tried to really charge into it with energy, hoping that the time I've put in (has it been 3 weeks?) was enough to get me through it with some cleanness and at speed. And it wasn't clean, but it was faster than the rather relaxed tempo I'd chosen last week. After I was done, M picked apart my phrasing, intonation etc. I was able to fix things, but I noticed that I wasn't doing the fixing at the same speed as I'd played it. Then it was on to the solo work, and he didn't want to hear the opening of Mozart again, instead starting on the last passage before the development, just after the first trilly part. Which was kind of too bad, since I had spent all my time practicing the opening, and didn't have the notes under control for this part at all, especially the long squirrely bit before the big cadence and high G trill. Still, we got some good work done.

The squirrely bit starting a m. 67 (John Miller calls it the melismatic section in his master class the concerto) is nasty for me, fingerwise, and always has been, back to when I first saw it in junior high. I'd been putting off practicing it, so that I could clean up the opening. I'm reminded, though, of a blog post I read not long ago, with a piece of psychological advice for handling surprise audition excerpts: whatever they hand you, say to yourself, "This is my favorite excerpt!". Enthusiasm is contagious, and your thoughts affect you. Positive thinking is hard, especially in domains which are dominated by trying to avoid failure, so you spend your time thinking about mistakes and avoiding them. Positive thinking is hard, and needs to be practiced too, but it's absolutely essential. I think it works, too. When later, I looked at that bit while practicing, I caught myself hesitating, stopped, thought "This is my favorite part!" (the exclamation point is important), and really, it helped.

There's another school of thought which holds that the student should come to the lesson with the notes prepared, so that they can then learn the art of music at the feet of the master. I certainly thought about that, when confronted with a section of the piece that I'd explicitly *not* prepared. But I think this is wrong. I've been well convinced by a book (The Perfect Wrong Note) that musicality and vivacity is not some kind of surface glitter, that you can sprinkle on the piece at the end once the solid but dull framework of 100% perfect notes has been painstakingly constructed. No, musical life has to be there the whole time. Every scale. Every slow long tone. Every pitch exercise. Every first reading, and slow laborious woodshedding. The thing is, the musicality comes from microdetails like pitch, intensity, timing variations, inflections, and if you've practiced the notes 100 times without thinking about or trying to feel those details, you've simply locked them in wrong. So, make beautiful music, at every point, even if it's full of "mistakes". And, the thing is, learn to accept mistakes, because even later, it'll still be full of mistakes, although the number and type of mistakes may change. It'll always be full of things that could have been better. And it can still be beautiful music all the same. (Or so I'm trying to convince myself.)