The hard part

This is my hardest part in the concert coming up on Sunday. The piece is Beethoven's Egmont overture, and I've clipped out woodwind part (oboe, clarinets in Bb, and bassoons) from the score. In the fermata bar, the violins cut off the King's head, with a dramatic C-G! Then the woodwinds enter, with second clarinet and bassoon (that's me) on octave F's, then adding parts, in the shocked quiet after the decapitation. After this, there's a rousing finale, but I'm worried about the notes before.

That opening F is marked ppp, and it needs to be very quiet, mysterioso. There's no other sound in the hall. The clarinet I'm playing with can play with a subtone anywhere down to zero; the bassoon, not so much. The first rehearsals, he was playing really quiet, not only because it was ppp, and because the conductor wanted it quieter, less and less, but also because he felt insecure about the pitch, so he kindof wanted to sneak in and hear how it sounded. You'll bury me, I told him, and asked him to do what he could to help us match dynamic-wise. (Ie, play louder, please!) I'm doing what I can: tons of support from lips and diaphragm, slow air, muffled fingering (add low D and E). I think the conductor has gotten the idea after watching me struggle, and hearing the pops, cracks and dropouts when I get too soft: at the rehearsal last night he asked clarinet 1 to meet us on dynamic. It's sometimes described as a knife edge, playing a double reed as soft as possible, but a better metaphor is a cliff's edge. Things are fine a comfortable distance away from it, it's fine creeping up to it, it's even okay balanced right on it, but any jiggle, and down you fall, with no hope of recovery. I'm also slurring the whole thing. My part has each note rearticulated (even the Db, unlike the score here), but adding tongue is just too risky, and I don't think the articulation is needed.

Intonation is a struggle too. I've played this lots against a drone. The F I'm playing as low as I can, without it drooping, the Db needs to be up and supported, the Bb down, with open throat, and the C fully supported. If I'm reading the chords right, the harmonies are F, Db major, G half diminished, C major, making the key change to the final section. So I'm usually the root of the chord, except for the Bb, which is a third, and should therefore be a little extra low. I guess you could also call that G chord a Bbmin add 6, to emphasize the bass line and the descending thirds F-Db-Bb, but calling it G helps recognize it's relation to the C following.

Looking back, I see I've mentioned this passage twice before. Ah well. I guess it's a hard spot. But I'll say this: even though it's hard, and even though I still can't play it as perfectly as I can hear it in my head, I can say that practicing it has helped. It really works, practice. Imagine that.

More books I'm reading

Arthur Weisberg, The Art of Wind Playing. I blogged this before. Actually, this got recalled so I had to give it back, but I'm still thinking about the things it said. Mostly working on trying to play in tune all the way through a note, from the attack to the release.

Walter Piston, Harmony. I tried skimming through this in high school, but you can't learn harmony by skimming. It's not for a class, so I can take as long as I want. Another book, a jazz piano book my wife is editing and producing a new edition of, suggests that harmony be learned slowly. So I'm taking it slow, trying to do all the exercises, and integrate the new material into what I know and play. That way, even if I don't finish the book, I've still learned something useful. Inspired by this book, I've started to play some harmonic minor scales, instead of just melodic.

The Inner Game of Music. A classic, which I found randomly browsing in the music library. I read the Inner Game of Tennis many many years ago, which was the first in the series. It advocates an intuitive, almost unconscious approach to teaching and learning, and argues that traditional analytical instruction techniques create many more problems than they solve. Victor Wooten's The Music Lesson, which I read awhile back, is along similar lines, as it The Perfect Wrong Note, which I mentioned before. Interestingly, both these books are by bass players. I think at least some of my flaws in playing are due to my relentlessly analytical approach. When working on etudes, I've been focusing on legato, and trying to learn how to play scalework evenly without accenting every note, as I strain to play each note clean. (Here's the Matsukawa masterclass that talks legato.) Music teaching is full of tactics to get people to think and not think in the right ways. Play this arpeggio as one gesture, says M, as opposed to my natural tendency to see it as a dozen distinct slurs, each of which I can screw up in its own way. We'll see if reading the book can help me.

As a side note, I had a lesson yesterday. I got sent on to the next etude after only one lesson on this one, Milde Scale Study #13 (E-flat scales). First time that's happened, which is cool, although I have to say, I played it better during the lesson than I ever did at home. I'm still all over the place on solo pieces. We worked on Ode to a Toad, which has some painfully big leaps. M's going to look for a recital I can crash around Christmastime, so I'll have a performance to work towards, which should help focus me a bit.

Vacation, ear training, bassoon techno, and improv

We were gone for about ten days, arriving home yesterday. It was a great trip, long enough to get my head out of the space of my day to day, which is what vacations are really about. I didn't bring my horn, didn't want to worry about it on the trip, but we did bring some instruments (keyboard, a drum) and occasionally goofed around with music. I also took the opportunity to start trying to learn some harmony, something my formal music education seems to have left out entirely. Long ago I tried reading Walter Piston's Harmony text, but I kinda skimmed over the exercises and getting the ear training into my head, so naturally I didn't get too far. I'm hoping this time will be different. Another book I have suggests that harmony ought to be learned slowly, giving as much time as required to internalize and make functionally useful any new concept. So that's how I'll approach it: slowly, and integrated with my goals for using the harmony. This means I have to do ear training.

There are a few ear training apps on my ipod I've spent some time with, trying to learn interval recognition. I have gotten better: it does improve with practice. But it doesn't seem like it's gotten better at the rate that I would have expected, given the time and effort I've put in. Some of these apps I've been playing with for more than a year now. And this is all chapter 1 material, the kind of thing a music student would be expected to internalize, I'm guessing, within weeks. I still make mistakes, all over the place. I recently identified one factor that may be contributing. My wife was playing random arpeggios for me to identify as major or minor, the kind of thing which would appear on a Grade 1 exam. I was terrible. I felt like I was guessing, and indeed, she told me that I was right only about 50%. However, she did note that whenever the root was a black note, I'd called it minor, and a white note, I'd called it major. It looks like I probably have some tendency, however undeveloped, towards perfect pitch. Our son has perfect pitch, so if there's a genetic component, maybe I have some of it. Some semblance of perfect pitch is pretty common -- members of the general public, if asked to sing or hum a tune from the radio, are usually quite close to the key -- but for me maybe it's interfering with trying to get the intervals identified. And it's not so developed that I can just name the pitches, and figure out the interval by subtraction, the way my son can. A little frustrating, and I wonder if the effort will bring a reward.


Now that I'm home again, I can play. It's always odd, playing after even a couple of days off. I have no major projects right now, mostly just a few vague plans to do duets. I did find one pleasant surprise on my stand: the sheet music for Techno Music for Bassoon and Electronica, a piece by Alex Kotch which he kindly sent me. I blogged about discovering the piece earlier, but I'd forgotten about getting the music. I spent a few minutes with the part, playing long tones on its Bb minor arpeggios. Later, I goofed around with my son, him on piano and me on bassoon, mostly in a Bb minor pentatonic groove. That was a lot of fun. And that's the point, really: knowing enough, and being good enough, to play with people I care about.