Back to reeds

This is my favorite reed tool. It's the ultrasonic cleaner I got awhile back, designed for jewelry, but used by many players. Since I became convinced that the primary aging mechanism for reeds is becoming encrusted with foreign matter (mostly skin cells from the lips), I've been pretty religious about cleaning my reeds with this after every use. Hot water is better, with a bit of dish soap to help cavitation get started. Last fall sometime I found that one of my reeds played much better than the others. Mindful of the advice to practice only on good reeds, rather than treasuring it and continuing to spend hours making new reeds, I decided that I'd progress faster by spending my time practicing while playing only on my best reed. I started this in I think October, and played that reed basically exclusively until mid-February, so perhaps 16 weeks. At ten hours of playing a week, it was good for some hundreds of hours of playing. Not bad, I should post a picture of that hardy little reed. (It came from a piece of Neuranter cane, so I ordered some more of this today.) This reed did start to die, though, and adjustments seemed to start fraying the tip, so I moved on. At my lesson last night M tried to smooth out some of my work on the newer one. The E kinda dropped, and F was unstable. something I'd noticed in my tape of the Mozart rehearsal too, though I didn't notice at the time. Cropping it back didn't help much, and we eventually decided it was just too soft cane. Next week we'll only be working reeds, so I'd better try and finish a few to bring in and fix up. I have a few sitting on tips, waiting for finishing, and I also have a few pieces that have been soaking for weeks, waiting for me to find time to form tubes. Too many projects, not enough energy.

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.

First public performance

I'll be playing at my wife's music club tomorrow, with piano, mostly as a test of nerves and memory in advance of rehearsing with orchestra. Preparing for that, I've been recording a cold runthrough every day, just to check on how the whole thing is coming, and to see where I screw up. These recordings have lots of goofs, of course, but also a fair number of train wrecks, where I lose the thread, and have to switch gears and come back in somehow. Some have been clean though, at least as far as keeping going (not goof-free, obviously). At my last lesson I ran it, from memory, standing. It felt kind of like a performance, a performance for my teacher, and I was pretty happy it was train wreck free. At my lesson this evening, in consideration of the music club performance tomorrow, M didn't want to work on it, but we did do a performance practice. Actually, he dragged his wife in, and we went to the living room, so I had a new venue, and an audience of three (including the cat) to listen to me play the Mozart. How'd it go? Well, they clapped enthusiastically at the end (except for the cat). I had a fairly train-wreck worthy screwup, confusing the ends of the two trilly bits midway through the second one. I listened to my recording when I got home, and the confusion was briefer and better recovered than I felt at the time, but still I feel dissatisfied. I'm consoling myself with a beer and Ruthie Foster on my iPod before heading down for a little more quality time with the metronome.

The pursuit of perfection

Had a lesson last Thursday. I had high hopes this week, for finally killing off the Milde etude (#7, D scales), which I've been stuck on for a number of weeks. Early in the week I spent a lot of careful slow time trying to smooth out and clean up the tricky bits of the etude. However due to circumstances I missed my evening practice the day before my lesson, and the morning practice on the day of, and didn't even find time to warm up at home before I showed up, not having played in more than 24 hours. Not good. After muffing one of the randomly selected scales (I got C# minor) I received a lecture with yet another way to practice scales. The etude I took slow, aiming for smoothness above everything. To me it didn't feel like much of an improvement over the previous week, but maybe it was enough better, or maybe it had stopped improving, and M was tired of hearing it. In any case we didn't spend much time on it, and I got sent on to the next one. The Mozart, too, must be approaching at least a local plateau. After spending some time harassing me about the trills (apparently, they'll sound more similar if they each have the same number of turns) I received a pile of new music to sort through and pick from. It's by no means perfect, but again, perhaps the rate of improvement is so slow, that M is getting tired of repeating himself about what to do to fix what.

Trying to understand some different choices in the Mozart, I spent some time critically listening to different recordings. In addition to the ones I have, I also found that I could stream the entire Naxos catalog through my university library. Pretty nice for doing research. After awhile I started to hear things that sounded like flaws rather than varying artistic choices: a muffed note in the final flourish before the cadenza in one recording, an early entrance on the opening solo in another, that kind of thing. Kind of gratifying in a way: if I hear these kinds of flaws in well-produced recordings by famous people, maybe I'm not so bad myself. I then went back to listen to my own recording I'd been so pleased with a month ago: and it was terrible. So wrong, in so many ways, that I'd hardly know where to start listing the problems. So I'm not sure that developing truly critical listening is necessarily helpful. I don't want to be so self-negative that I give up. Certainly, one of the goals of classical music is to give a really good performance, to be beautiful, to try and play everything perfectly. This idea of the pursuit of perfection constituted the central story in the current high art horror flick Black Swan, so it's not just classical music.

Maybe the thing I need to remember is that it's an essentially infinite pursuit. Studies on skill development claim that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything, and talent has little to do with it. At my current rate of ~10 hours/week, if I keep it up, I can expect to be there in 20 years. Nor does it stop there. Pablo Casals, when asked why, in his 90's, did he continue to practice three hours a day, responded "I am finally beginning to notice some improvement." Paul Hanson has a similar remark: "I will never master the instrument and that is fine with me... We never stop learning-the point isn't to finish. The point is always to be going forward with relaxation and a sense of wonderment at all the possibilities."

Mozart

Had a lesson last night. Here's the first few licks of the Mozart concerto. I was pretty happy with it at the time, so it's probably a reasonable indicator of where I am at the moment, when I'm playing at my best.

Mozart opening 2010-12-17 by TFox17

Inspired by Betsy's post on playing high F, I dug out a recording I'd made about year ago when, suddenly, for about one day, my reed and the stars were aligned and I could play a high F. At the time (Nov 2009) I realized how out of tune the high notes were, with the high F being about a full semitone flat. What I didn't realize then, but makes me cringe now, is how terrible the intonation is on the rest of the scale. It's awful. Maybe I have improved in the past year.

3 octave F scale by TFox17

Update:

I had to record a basic F scale the way it is now, just for comparison. Recorded on the iPod, with a touch of reverb (12% Large Chamber) added in Ableton. That's a little less painful to listen to, I think.
bassoon 2 octave F scale 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:

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.

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.

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.)

Blue

Had a lesson yesterday. It sucked. I mean, I guess I wasn't expecting much, coming just a few days after having a week off, and I also missed practicing Wed evening entirely (though I had gotten a few minutes in the morning), but still, it sucked. Lack of confidence didn't help, so I experienced the "I played this better when I was practicing" sensation, but that's connected to practice, too. There's a confidence that comes from preparation, you know more or less how it will go. Knowing that you're badly prepared, on the other hand, can wreck your ability to even fake your way through something even to the level that you're at. Better to be well prepared, or to at least feel like you're as prepared as you can be, given your constraints. All psychology I guess, beyond the obvious (more practicing).

That, and the recording I tried to make cut out after the first few minutes.

So, what'd we do. Spent time on tone, playing just C3, the C in the staff. He took my reed, G11 I think?, and opened it up, to brighten the sound, then shaved lots off sides and tip to reduce the strength. An improvement, but then it felt sufficiently different when playing to be yet another distraction. Part of the process, though: gotta be able to play a forte, gotta be bright enough to be heard, and have to do whatever it takes to make that possible.

Scales. I currently play my set of scales as 16ths, quarter note a little under 60 bpm. I'd calculated how fast I'd need to move this up to play at say 120 in a year, improving on a log scale, and it starts about 1 bpm per week. So I'd moved up to 60, since the schedule says I need to be at 61 by the end of September. Whether 120 is a reasonable goal is totally debatable: the ABRSM starts at quarter-note=50 at Grade 1, and goes to 132 at Grade 8, but doesn't seem to specify whether the scale is 16ths, 8ths, or what. I'm guessing 8ths. Range is up to D5, slurred, legato tongued and staccato, major, melodic and harmonic minor, plus thirds (F, G only), chromatic and whole tone, and triad, dominant seventh, and diminished seventh arpeggios. I could do all that slowly now, I think. Barrick Stees does specify speeds, and starts at 60, ends at 120, over the whole range of the instrument up to about a high E (E5). That's college-level, for performance majors who presumably have more time to practice than I do, and four years to get through it anyway. Still, 120 is maybe a reasonable ultimate goal, even if the time frame is unreasonable. That said, M listened to my scales (done worse in lesson than at home), and suggested: 1) dropping the speed by a factor of two or so; eights or quarters and 2) focusing on how far my fingers move. So explicitly practicing the range of finger motion. He hasn't complained about that in awhile, but he definitely complained at my first lesson, when again I think I was nervous. I seem to recall my old teacher advocating that fingers would naturally come closer to the instrument as speeds increased, but maybe the direction of causality is reversed. So now, when I practice, I just need to think about 1) new fingerings 2) totally unfamiliar embouchure 3) very different air support 4) exactly how far I'm moving my fingers, while of course 5) relaxing completely at all times. Easy, huh.

We spent some time on the etude (Milde scale study 4, which I tried to take slowly, but played terribly anyway) and Mozart, but I've mostly forgotten what was said. And I have no recording.

I did practice this morning, since I probably won't get to tonight. Spent it all playing a C major scale. *sigh*

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.

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.

Another week, another lesson

Milde Scale 1 went well this time. Really well in fact, I think better than I've ever played it in practice. It got so I was nervous about ruining the streak of smooth notes, and messed up from losing focus. I'd done lots of practicing, missing only one day, and I'd played twice yesterday and also twice today, before my lesson. It doesn't seem like things improve, but I guess they do. I was going to ask about the finger movement thing, but it didn't happen, so

Still complaints about tone in upper register, despite my work in that direction. Especially A4 and up. Lips firm against teeth but as loose as possible against the reed mute the reed less apparently, if that doesn't sound too contradictory. All support from the air, very fast air. No biting or anything like that of course. G4 is a good note to start on, since it's easy to get a good tone there, and then work up. Thin and dead is what I'm trying to avoid.

Elgar: very long lines, look for the dissonant downbeats->resolve figures (appogiatura). It's all very exposed, so every aspect of every note counts. I think this is the first piece I've played which has been hard due to phrasing, rather than just notes.

Scales: just keep the ones I'm working on, C F G D, their relative melodic minors, and arpeggios, maybe slowly work up speed. I played them at 60 in the lesson, which felt comfortable, though I've also been working them slower in practice, eg 53.

Bocals: I played on a new-to-me bocal, a CD1 I got off of eBay. It feels different than my other one, thinner and more metallic somehow. Probably no audible difference to an external listener, but it feels quite different anyway. For reed, I played on G5. I formed a bunch of tubes before I went on vacation, and really need to start finishing some of those reeds.

A lesson

I'm playing a short piece with J next week, and I want it to go as well as possible. So I took a lesson with Matt, to see if he could provide useful advice. I was pretty nervous, because, he hasn't really heard me play before, not much, and not close up, and I care what he thinks. After I'd put the horn together and he'd left me alone to warm up, I played it through, and was happy that I'd managed to get through it without falling apart. Actually, I felt it was pretty much perfect, so I was happy, but then wasn't certain what we were going to spend the time on. Matt said something nice, then started work on my reed.

The reed: I played on G7, which is my best one at the moment. Lots of comments. Wires: rather than essentially glue down the wires with nail polish, he suggested just continuing to tighten wires as the cane shrinks. Wires 1 and 2 could still be a bit loose, and tighten up when the cane gets soaked. Profile: he noticed a slight step change in the profile just back of the tip. I'm not sure if that's a consequence of not working in when shaving the tip, or even left behind from the profiler. He took his knife to the heart, just a few scrapes. Even just that change made a positive improvement. Next, general strength. I'd complained about tiring. Also a thin tenor register means too strong, and I'd noticed thinness (ie less resonance) for eg tenor D in the Louchez recordings. And the whole thing was thick for his taste. He took it down uniformly across the reed, edge to edge, shoulder to tip. We tested by playing C-D-E-F with no lip on the reed, only air support, listening for dropping pitch. The E a little unstable, so he took a sliver off the tip to address this and also repair my skewed tip chopping. Somewhere along the way he took a bit out of one corner to improve symmetry. With that, it was a little easier to support the pitch in the tenor, improved, but not dramatically different in character from how I'd left it. Except for surface texture: it feels much rougher, I think his knife is sharper, and cuts thicker shavings.

Next, he had me play it again, stopping frequently. Lots of stuff. All picky stuff, but the notes are easy, and well, I'd hit them even the first time through. And there was tons of things to fix. Long notes - need to grow. Quarter notes before a breath - have to taper a bit, end the note, before the breath. Repeated quarters - have to grow, esp the low ones, should be accented, kind of like the thuds of a pop tune bassline. The phrases don't really stop, but I was tending to back off on the long notes. Matt wasn't accepting that. He also pointed out a lot of features of the line: notes that have to get emphasized because they break a pattern and need to stand out, parts where two lines happen simultaneously and need to be differentiated, fixed up a few articulations and dynamic locations ("you should ask the composer what he meant here"). Pitch wasn't too bad, he asked for attention only to a high C, where I tended to be sharp, trying to get it to speak, and once a B2, which has always been a flat note for me. We added a few breath marks, some crescendos.

The big thing was just sitting next to and playing with a pro. Really quickly I was hearing his demonstrations and copying the intensity. I was surprised how loud he plays, I sure felt like he was much louder than me, but maybe it's just where I'm sitting, and being behind vs next to the horn. The whole thing makes me think about the usefulness of lessons, though. I went away thinking that it was more useful than I'd expected. Doesn't mean that I want to be back every week, but worth thinking about my "I can do it all by myself" attitude.