New iPod

So I got a new iPod. My old one, a touch 2G, I've been using heavily to listen to music, and also to record lessons with the help of a thumbtack microphone. Unfortunately, I dropped it while listening to a lesson recording while putting air in my tires, and the screen cracked. A week or so later the screen stopped working entirely, for a total of about 13 months of use. What is really annoying is that it was supposed to have come free with my new laptop, but I guess I filed the rebate form late, and ended up paying full price. I traded the broken unit back to Apple in exchange for a discount on the new one, a 32G 4G, which covered some fraction of the cost of the case that I got to hopefully allow this one to last a little longer.

The new one has a camera (see the pic above) and onboard mic, so it ought to be even more convenient for recording things. To test it out, I recorded the Tchaikovsky except, you can hear it below. It could use some reverb, and the mike is too close to the bassoon (it was sitting on my music stand), but I think the sound of the recording is not too terrible. The playing, on the other hand...



T4-excerpt-2010-11-20 by TFox17

Scales, or lack thereof

Wasn't much looking forward to my lesson. The week hadn't been great, practicewise, and I blew some of my little time trying to figure out how to record a video in a reasonable way. (Turns out it's hard.) The reeds I've been playing on are getting old, and I haven't found much time to work on them, or better yet new ones. After spending some time on tone (I'm still not bright enough, I know), M said to skip the scales, because "they're always fine". Sure, they're fine because I start my practices with scales, and not so rarely that's all I get to. And I'd even bumped up the metronome mark, because he'd kind of gently suggested that I ought to. So I was left facing the study, the same study I've had for like four lessons, which probably reached its peak a couple lessons ago, and which I'd started to try to get the metronome mark up, but hadn't really finished. And I began.

Well, I got through it, with some stumbles, and without even the excuse of missing days that I'd had last week. I checked the tempo, and at least I was more or less in the ballpark of where I was aiming. Then we started going through it. By the end, I actually felt much happier, as if I wasn't playing terribly. We then went through one of my excerpts, the ones for the YT symphony audition which I'm now pretty certain I won't end up doing, and then worked on the first few phrases of the 2nd movement of Mozart. It was a nice change, and it was good to play something for which the suggestions weren't "work through this slowly, with a metronome". So I felt reasonably happy after my lesson, much more so than before I went.

Lesson after absence

I did get some practices in after I got back, but it all felt very weird. Only in the past day did the reed start to feel normal, and whether that's the reed becoming accustomed to playing again, or me, I don't know. I spent most of my practice time on scales, focusing on tone and fingers. Current tempo is 16ths at quarter=63 (I got encouraged to start moving the tempo, gradually, at my last lesson two weeks ago). We spent time on the etude, and it was musically improving, though my fingers didn't know it even as well as they did at my last lesson. I brought some excepts, the repertoire for the Youtube Symphony auditions, which I have half a mind to enter even though I think I have no chance of winning. Tchaik 4, Figaro, and Sheherezade, a pretty canonical set of pieces. Oh, and Mozart for the solo. I came home from the lesson feeling pretty happy. It's not that my playing was all fine, it wasn't, but I had a good excuse, and I sounded pretty good despite the technical flaws. And M's hand has been healing, and he played a bit too, so I had some examples to work from. Not bad, as lessons go.

Added:
Joost Bosdijk's master class on excerpts vaguely related to the ones asked for:


And Stephen Paulson, talking about Scheherezade:

Unprepared.

The rest of my life has been taking a toll on my practicing in recent weeks. First, my early morning practice started to get cut short, so I could get to work, then it would get cut entirely. Or I'd miss my evening practice for one reason or another, leaving me with only one practice in a day. Finally, on Wednesday, the day before the Telemann performance, I missed an entire day of practicing. Terrible. I practiced during the day briefly, but it was hard to make anything work. It reminded me of unhappy memories of trying to cram practicing, starting too late to advance too much, trying to figure out how to best improve an impossible situation in too little time, on the day of or before a lesson or an important event. Not a good feeling. The show? Well, it went, probably about as well as could be expected. I put my music stand too high, and my glasses kept slipping down so I couldn't see the music. Which didn't damage things too much really. I'm currently missing about 3 days in a row, on a trip, though I did get about 10 minutes of scales in at 5 in the morning before I went to catch my plane, just to remove one of those days of zero practice. I'm slowly starting to realize what a difficult instrument this is, at least to be able to play it the way I hear it in my head.

Speed, speed, and more speed

I went looking for something to play with my wife at her piano club. After a number of false starts (no orchestral reductions, nothing that was "bassoon solo and accompaniment", nothing where all the notes were locked down so that there was nothing for her to improvise on) I found the Telemann bassoon sonata, TWV 41:f3, which I discovered perusing the repertoire reviews on Thom Zantow's site. It's baroque, so more-or-less straightforward musically, a fairly good piece (based on Thom's review and the number of transcriptions), and the piano part is just a figured bass, the 18c equivalent of a lead sheet, so she can do whatever she wants, just like the jazz stuff she mostly works on. We picked the last movement to do, a 3/8 Vivace. I was a little intimidated by the 32nd notes at first, but we can do whatever tempo we want, and I could play them reasonably cleanly at eighth=65 or so, about where I'm playing my scales. I made her a recording to practice against a little quicker than that, but I had endurance problems, so I did the repeats digitally. She complained that it was too fast, but she slowed it down with software to practice against. When we started trying to put it together a few days ago, I played it in a stately three, and eventually she decided that it had to be much faster, definitely in one. And, it almost worked for me, except the tricky bits, and the 32nd note sprung rhythms sounded very different fast, more percussive and less melodic. I wrote eighth=117 on my music, and practiced it once or twice. I thought I was ready today, and started out at a brisk tempo, but she complained about speed again. Based on her preferred speeds during her solo verses, I think we're now at about eighth=145+, or about 50 bpm for the bar. We're now about twice as fast as the recording I made that was too quick. Faster is nice in one respect: it's no longer a challenge to find a spot to breathe, since the whole verse can be done in one breath without trouble. The 32nd notes turn into something that would sound good played on a snare drum, like some kind of drum rudiment. It'd be no technical problem for a percussion player, who would just need to decide whether to play alternating hands or just let the stick bounce. And yeah, it's fast, and no, it's not clean, but it's far better than I think I would have expected, given how fast it is compared to how fast I usually take things. I think it'll be good enough, given the low standards of this recreational pianist club, and kind of exciting just due to the speed.