Alex Ross notes the passing of Milton Babbitt, one of the many important 20th century composers who I've never heard of. It's much easier now to sample new and unusual music, what with YouTube, than it was in the before-time. In high school my musical horizon was basically limited to what was played on the radio and what I played in orchestra, and I didn't listen to the radio much. Once I was reading about serialism, and desperately curious as to what it actually sounded like, I called in a request to some contemporary classical radio show on the local college station, asking to hear Pierrot Lunaire, which had been mentioned in the book I was reading. "What part? It's kind of long..." asked the radio show guy, to which I had no reasonable answer, since I didn't know the work at all. To my astonishment, he put it on, or some of it anyway, no doubt driving away most of the few listeners he had. And I too, couldn't sit through the whole thing, even though they were playing it for me. It just didn't make any sense, particularly on a first listening.
Now, of course, if I want to hear what a few minutes of Pierrot Lunaire sounds like, it's a click away. The Dag Jensen recording of the Jolivet bassoon concerto has shuffled to the top of my iPod almost enough times to start to sound listenable. And YouTube allows me to post this lovely video of an arrangement of Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations by the avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus. It doesn't really explain the work as Babbitt saw it, which to me seems to be more mathematics than art, but drums, bass, and dancing women goes very far in turning it from math into actual music. For more on the math, you can try reading the 43 page paper Ross cites, but since the author didn't seem to reference the mathematical meaning of semi-simple, one has to wonder how deep the analysis could be. As music, though, it's so dense, with so little repetition, that it's not easy to listen to. (Isn't music repetitive by definition?) But it's short, and that makes it easy to listen to over and over again. And slowly, the ears start to adapt, and gradually accept what was previously random sounds and rhythms as its own kind of music.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Bassoon is cool (or at least, I think that's what they're saying)
Non-spanish speakers will have to click through and hit CC to turn subtitles on.
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.
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.
A prewar Heckel bocal for $100? That's eBay! (Updated)
Seriously, check this one out: the seller claimed to have picked it up at an estate sale, isn't a bassoonist and doesn't know what it is other than a bocal that says Heckel on it, and helpfully points out the crack. Starting price, $100, which sounds like a lot for a cracked corroded old bocal with a busted cork.
But to me it looks like a prewar Heckel bocal, like the ones shown here. These are both prized and a bit rare, worth at least ten times the starting price. I saw one with nice provenance sell on eBay for more than $2000. But the crack? Apparently, those can be repaired. So, a gamble, but not an unreasonable one. I've bought a number of bocals off of eBay, since there are no dealers within a thousand miles of me, and I've been reasonably happy overall. You don't get the experience of trying for the "best" one out of dozens, but you get the feeling of getting a deal, and the chance to play with it extensively before deciding to resell or keep. And this one, it's even reasonable as an investment, if the price doesn't climb too high before the end. If you want it, bid as late as possible, and bid to win. Good luck!
Update: it went for $1125, to a bidder whose first bid was in the last 10 seconds. Ah yes, that too is eBay, the land of broken dreams.
But to me it looks like a prewar Heckel bocal, like the ones shown here. These are both prized and a bit rare, worth at least ten times the starting price. I saw one with nice provenance sell on eBay for more than $2000. But the crack? Apparently, those can be repaired. So, a gamble, but not an unreasonable one. I've bought a number of bocals off of eBay, since there are no dealers within a thousand miles of me, and I've been reasonably happy overall. You don't get the experience of trying for the "best" one out of dozens, but you get the feeling of getting a deal, and the chance to play with it extensively before deciding to resell or keep. And this one, it's even reasonable as an investment, if the price doesn't climb too high before the end. If you want it, bid as late as possible, and bid to win. Good luck!
Update: it went for $1125, to a bidder whose first bid was in the last 10 seconds. Ah yes, that too is eBay, the land of broken dreams.
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
First rehearsal
The first rehearsal of the Mozart happened tonight. And now, yeah, I'm slowly starting to believe it's going to happen. Kind of surprisingly, I wasn't nervous at all. Especially considering that, instead of our regular conductor (a trumpet player), we had D subbing in, whose main job is bassoon instructor at the university, and who's always intimidated me a little. But she was enthusiastic, really positive about the piece and everything.
It went terribly, of course. Very dirty, most of the runs and passages, I could tell they weren't clean as I played them. Nothing to do play on with a smile, focusing on tone and phrasing, trying to model how I want it to sound. It's true, I was cleaner than the strings, but they were sightreading, and I've been practicing for months. In some sense, playing dirty, it's kind of embarrassing, like being seen by a girl in your underwear; but if you're doing things right, she's in her underwear too, and you can both smile and make the best of it.
Everyone said nice things, though. They were impressed, unduly I think, by the memorization, which didn't take that much effort compared to trying to learn to play the notes. But when I listened to my recording later, on the way home from the pub, I thought I sounded cleaner than I remembered. Strange, how perceptions shift. I should try listening again in the daylight, and see what I hear now.
Mozart rehearsal excerpt by TFox17
It went terribly, of course. Very dirty, most of the runs and passages, I could tell they weren't clean as I played them. Nothing to do play on with a smile, focusing on tone and phrasing, trying to model how I want it to sound. It's true, I was cleaner than the strings, but they were sightreading, and I've been practicing for months. In some sense, playing dirty, it's kind of embarrassing, like being seen by a girl in your underwear; but if you're doing things right, she's in her underwear too, and you can both smile and make the best of it.
Everyone said nice things, though. They were impressed, unduly I think, by the memorization, which didn't take that much effort compared to trying to learn to play the notes. But when I listened to my recording later, on the way home from the pub, I thought I sounded cleaner than I remembered. Strange, how perceptions shift. I should try listening again in the daylight, and see what I hear now.
Mozart rehearsal excerpt by TFox17
Saturday, February 19, 2011
A splash of cold reality
So I played through the Mozart at my lesson the other night, a good thing since I've been practicing little else. It went okay, I thought, more or less the same as the runthrough I posted earlier. M said nice things, then wondered if maybe the tempo I'd picked was a little faster than I was comfortable with. I'd played it within spitting distance of 102, which is where I'm aiming, but no question it's a hard piece, and is a stretch for me to play perfectly there. We slowed the tempo down a bit, to about 94 or so, cleaned things up, and spent awhile working on really emphasizing phrasing. I have to admit, it probably sounds better slower, for me right now anyway. Not only is it cleaner, it sounds more in control, not so much at the edge of what I can do. (Or at least, what I can do, in isolation, on my best takes on my best days. A performance is not a compilation of the best times you've ever played every passage, but rather something more like an average, or including all the mistakes which typically occur.)
Still, though. Tempo changes the character of the piece. It feels different, faster vs slower. It sounds fine at 94, I know, it's a lovely set of notes at any speed, but it just sounds so... moderato. My pride would like to play it allegro, spritely and brightly, even if it's some kind of allegro ma non troppo per la fagottista mediocre, and it's not perfect. Taking some pity on the audience, though, I'd probably be served by putting pride aside, and playing the heck out of it at a tempo where it's easy enough, rather than pushing it to where it's a technical exercise. And to keep working on the technique. A few months ago I would have been delighted to be able to play it clean at 94. If I keep working up the tempo, by the time I think I can almost play it at 116 or 120, then maybe 100 will be an acceptable performance tempo. But that's no small change, I really need to continue to level up as a technician to do that. And every improvement requires increasing levels of work. Back to the practice room, I guess.
Still, though. Tempo changes the character of the piece. It feels different, faster vs slower. It sounds fine at 94, I know, it's a lovely set of notes at any speed, but it just sounds so... moderato. My pride would like to play it allegro, spritely and brightly, even if it's some kind of allegro ma non troppo per la fagottista mediocre, and it's not perfect. Taking some pity on the audience, though, I'd probably be served by putting pride aside, and playing the heck out of it at a tempo where it's easy enough, rather than pushing it to where it's a technical exercise. And to keep working on the technique. A few months ago I would have been delighted to be able to play it clean at 94. If I keep working up the tempo, by the time I think I can almost play it at 116 or 120, then maybe 100 will be an acceptable performance tempo. But that's no small change, I really need to continue to level up as a technician to do that. And every improvement requires increasing levels of work. Back to the practice room, I guess.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Two performances today
One's already done, an hour-long talk at work. I know this one matters more than my other "performance", my Mozart rehearsal tonight, but somehow I seem to care less about it, at least in terms of the ratio of hours invested in specific preparation to the duration of the performance. One's an hour, and I spent a day preparing. The other lasts five minutes, and I've been preparing for weeks (or months, or years, depending on what you count).
Still, it's interesting to compare the two. For the Mozart, essentially every note has been written down for two hundred years, and the articulations, phrasing etc planned for months. It's not easy to execute, especially execute well (I've spent my recent practicing focused on rhythm, trying to maintain a steady beat), but it's all known. The talk, on the other hand, is essentially all improvised. Yes, it's structured, cued off the slides I prepared, and I know more or less what I want to say, but in the moment, it's all about flow, about communicating with the audience. Never once did I worry that I might stumble over a particularly difficult to pronounce bit, the analog of messing up the notes in Mozart, my thoughts were all on a much higher level -- what did I say last, what will I need to say next, is this making sense, is it getting through. I suspect that I'm a much better speaker than a musician, even if one person slept through the whole thing.
Update: and after all that, it didn't happen. (Last minute conductor sub, *sigh*) There's always next week, I know, and the week after that, etc., but I can't say I'm not a tiny bit disappointed. I'd been trying to peak for today, and I doubt that I'll be able to get the same energy into it for next week. Still, I can give you my runthrough from this morning.
Mozart-runthrough-2011-02-15 by TFox17
Still, it's interesting to compare the two. For the Mozart, essentially every note has been written down for two hundred years, and the articulations, phrasing etc planned for months. It's not easy to execute, especially execute well (I've spent my recent practicing focused on rhythm, trying to maintain a steady beat), but it's all known. The talk, on the other hand, is essentially all improvised. Yes, it's structured, cued off the slides I prepared, and I know more or less what I want to say, but in the moment, it's all about flow, about communicating with the audience. Never once did I worry that I might stumble over a particularly difficult to pronounce bit, the analog of messing up the notes in Mozart, my thoughts were all on a much higher level -- what did I say last, what will I need to say next, is this making sense, is it getting through. I suspect that I'm a much better speaker than a musician, even if one person slept through the whole thing.
Update: and after all that, it didn't happen. (Last minute conductor sub, *sigh*) There's always next week, I know, and the week after that, etc., but I can't say I'm not a tiny bit disappointed. I'd been trying to peak for today, and I doubt that I'll be able to get the same energy into it for next week. Still, I can give you my runthrough from this morning.
Mozart-runthrough-2011-02-15 by TFox17
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Oops
We already had music arranged, but while surfing sheet music sites, I found that Mutopia had typeset parts for K. 191. I sent a sample to the conductor, and after learning they were free, he decided to use them, rather than the rental. I then decided to take a look over them before printing, since I've been fooling around a bit with Lilypond, just in case there was anything I wanted to change. Big mistake -- I should have either kept my mouth shut, and used the rentals, or not looked too closely at these parts. Because once I started going over them with a fine toothed comb, and comparing every dynamic and articulation with what's given in the NMA edition, there was a *ton* of stuff to change. I can get pretty persnickety when I'm in the mood, years of writing computer code will do that to you. Sometimes I think I missed my true calling as a copy editor. There were very few actual wrong notes, fortunately, at least that I've caught so far, but many markings didn't make sense. Reading the parts or the score, I'd find something that looked wrong, and check the NMA, and the 1881 Breitkopf & Härtel edition on IMSLP that the Mutopia version was transcribed from. A good fraction of the time there was an error, sometimes one introduced by the transcriber, and more often it was already in the B&H edition. When published editions disagreed, I mostly (but not completely) went with NMA, since not only do I expect it was more carefully edited, but also the choices made seem to largely make sense to me. I checked every one though, and kept a list in case I want to revisit them later. The whole thing took far longer than I expected, and kept me up late (and away from practicing) for three nights in a row. The good news is that I'm now more familiar with Lilypond.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
NMA critical report on K. 191: a terrible translation
Since I can't read German, the NMA's commentary on their edition of the Mozart concerto isn't much good to me. Well, except if... I run it through a free online OCR (thanks, http://www.onlineocr.net!) and Google Translate? The results are pretty bad, and maybe only usable while looking at the German original, but maybe better than nothing? Here's what comes out:
Monday, February 7, 2011
Free sheet music collections
There are a number of sites which collect public domain sheet music on the web. Here's a few which I've found useful, or which look interesting.
- IMSLP Large, mostly scans of old commercial printings. They seem quite careful about documenting the public domain status of things.
- Digitized Scores from the Sibley Library at Eastman. If they've got it on paper, and it's out of copyright, they'll scan it for you too.
- Mutopia An archive for music typeset with LilyPond. Either CC or public domain.
- NY Phil Digital Archives You can't print or perform from these, but you do get to look at, say, Leonard Berstein's markings on the Vivaldi Bb concerto
- Tuben A selection of early music, handset in TeX by one guy.
- Werner Icking Music Archive Also see their list of other music archives
- Digital Mozart Edition Online version of the definitive (?) NMA edition of Mozart's works.
- Danish National Digital Sheet Music Archive Reicha quintets, Nielsen, lots of other things too
Saturday, February 5, 2011
"Of course, you can't use our bowings"
Mozart rehearsals start the week after next. I'm no longer terrified of the first rehearsal, since I got through a small performance of it the other week, but I have started to practice it again. The "audience" at the rehearsal will be 5x larger than the music club, and all people whose opinions matter to me, so I'd like to be prepared. And besides, it's another opportunity to practice performing under pressure, so I might as well mentally build up the pressure as high as possible.
Of course, the orchestra needs music to play on as well. Our conductor found a set of parts in the library of our city's symphony, and the librarian showed him the parts to confirm that it was "the right" Mozart bassoon concerto. (Is there another one?) Permission to borrow them was arranged, and a rental fee negotiated. Then the librarian added, "Now of course, you can't use our bowings." Interesting the things which people care about: I don't think that copying their bowings would make our strings sound very much like the symphony! But perhaps they just want to encourage us to do our own homework. Or maybe it's just a view into a different universe, classical music's version of IP, an echo of policies like this one, where large companies want to look through your financials to determine the absolute maximum you can afford before they quote you a price to play a piece by someone who's been dead for 200 years. Still, are we supposed to erase their bowings? Will they do that for us? Or are the players just not supposed to look? Are they allowed to write their own in? Not my problem, really, and I have enough to think about.
Of course, the orchestra needs music to play on as well. Our conductor found a set of parts in the library of our city's symphony, and the librarian showed him the parts to confirm that it was "the right" Mozart bassoon concerto. (Is there another one?) Permission to borrow them was arranged, and a rental fee negotiated. Then the librarian added, "Now of course, you can't use our bowings." Interesting the things which people care about: I don't think that copying their bowings would make our strings sound very much like the symphony! But perhaps they just want to encourage us to do our own homework. Or maybe it's just a view into a different universe, classical music's version of IP, an echo of policies like this one, where large companies want to look through your financials to determine the absolute maximum you can afford before they quote you a price to play a piece by someone who's been dead for 200 years. Still, are we supposed to erase their bowings? Will they do that for us? Or are the players just not supposed to look? Are they allowed to write their own in? Not my problem, really, and I have enough to think about.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
On listening to tone
I have a lot of trouble with finger mechanics. Very common, no doubt, but still, my problems are my own, something that I've got to sort out myself, somehow. In the past few weeks I've switched to playing my scales full compass, from Bb1 to C5, which puts a lot more emphasis on the outer ends than the two-octaves-if-I-feel-like-it scales that I'd been playing before. The bottom fifth, constituting half the length of the instrument, controlled by thumbs and pinkies only, is particularly painful for me, full of lumps and irregularities. Slow work, and altered rhythms, is the canonical solution, and while I'm making progress, it's slow.
The other morning, however, as I was walking through one of the nastier ones, I think it was B major, near the bottom of the horn, I noticed that the tone was sounding good, pretty rich and full. I don't know if it was catching a room resonance, or the mood that my ears or reed happened to be in, but it sounded resonant, dark, and nice. Huh, I thought. And tried playing the scale at speed with the metronome, just listening for and enjoying that sound. The tone was there, up and down the part of the scale I was working. What I didn't expect is that the lumps went away: the evenness I'd been trying to force my fingers to do suddenly appeared when my brain was focused elsewhere. Very cool. And I don't think it's just distraction. Rather, I think my brain had a clear, positive vision of what it wanted to hear, and even minor finger goofs would interfere with that vision, with that tone it wanted to hear. There's a lot of finger mistakes which seem to only have an effect on sound quality, particularly in the high register. How delightful to find that focusing on the positive can work.
The other morning, however, as I was walking through one of the nastier ones, I think it was B major, near the bottom of the horn, I noticed that the tone was sounding good, pretty rich and full. I don't know if it was catching a room resonance, or the mood that my ears or reed happened to be in, but it sounded resonant, dark, and nice. Huh, I thought. And tried playing the scale at speed with the metronome, just listening for and enjoying that sound. The tone was there, up and down the part of the scale I was working. What I didn't expect is that the lumps went away: the evenness I'd been trying to force my fingers to do suddenly appeared when my brain was focused elsewhere. Very cool. And I don't think it's just distraction. Rather, I think my brain had a clear, positive vision of what it wanted to hear, and even minor finger goofs would interfere with that vision, with that tone it wanted to hear. There's a lot of finger mistakes which seem to only have an effect on sound quality, particularly in the high register. How delightful to find that focusing on the positive can work.
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