The last performance of the Mozart has come and gone. We were playing in a school gymnasium in a small town a couple hours away. We had a good turnout, it was a benefit organized by a few local teachers, with dessert served at intermission, and an auction afterward. We were set up fairly close to the audience, so there was maybe two feet between my bassoon and the people in the front row. Right in front of me was a burly biker type, he scowled and crossed his arms during my entire performance. It was the attack of the bassoon soloist, I'm not sure I would have been happy either, with a bassoon in my personal space. Nevertheless, I was satisfied with how things went.
Here's the reed I used. In the end, I used the same reed for all three shows. It was starting to get a little old, but I felt like the pitch was a little more stable with this reed than the other one I was considering, even if that one was a little brighter.
And here's the recording. I left my iPod out propped against a video camera case from someone who was recording. Unfortunately, they came by and tidied up, resulting in my recording having been taken from *inside* the foam camera case. Not the best mic location, but you can still hear what happened.
I'm not yet sure which performance was best. I'll have to listen carefully at some point, and see if I can't put together a canonical, souvenir version. Something I can show to my parents, or listen to later.
Overall, it was a great experience to have had. I learned a lot while doing it, and had a lot of fun.
Different hall, different night, different flubs. Overall better than last week, I think. I felt like I was able hear and stay in time with the orchestra a bit better, maybe I was rushing a little less. And I feel like my intonation was improved. I'm happy with it. One more to go, in about two weeks.
My wife took a video of the Mozart performance, and I watched it the next morning. All the mistakes I remembered were there, plus a few other ones too. But that's not what struck me. What surprised me was the sound, especially my intonation. It was terrible! A sustained tenor F4 at the end of the cadenza, a note I'd milked for impact, was incredibly painfully flat. Not the impact I was looking for. But it wasn't just one note or two: every bar, starting with the opening statement, had a few notes which were only vague approximations of the right pitch, or which did such wonky things over the duration of the note that you'd be hard pressed to describe them as simply sharp or flat. I didn't remember being that bad while I was playing, I thought I'd sounded fine. And I've been listening to lots of recordings of myself recently, so it's not the novelty of hearing myself. Was I good while practicing but bad at the show, or have I somehow been deluding myself that I was close to okay? Kind of a shock, really. Searching for something positive to think, all I could find was, "Well, at least there's something basic I can improve on! No worries that I've peaked yet!" I chatted with my wife about it, and she helpfully pointed out that I sing out of tune too, so maybe it's connected with that.
Later I watched it again, while trying to prepare the file for uploading. Maybe I was ready for it, but this time the intonation didn't bother me. I could still hear that it wasn't right, but somehow it didn't seem as severe. Weird. This stuff seems like it should be absolute, but in terms of how it gets perceived, nothing is absolute.
Here's a plot (using Melodyne) of that last bad F. Yeah, 27 cents is pretty flat. Worse is that the big preparatory open F before it is sharp, so you've got an octave leap which is a full quarter tone out. Maybe pain is the only rational response, and all else is delusion.
Here's the whole thing, in case you'd like to hear it for yourself. A year of work.
The show happened - last night I played a movement of the Mozart bassoon concerto with orchestra. Here's a pic, taken just as I went on. It went well, about as well as could be expected, given who and where I am. One odd squawk, one concentration slip just before a tricky bit, those are the flaws I remember, but overall I was pretty pleased. Everyone clapped at the end and said nice things to me afterward. My daughter was in the front row, about a foot away from me since the stage was a little cramped, and she was giving me feedback and a thumbs up after every passage. Once I have a recording I'll put it up, in case either of my readers wants to listen. It was a lot of work, and while the end result was not perfect, I learned a great deal along the way. We'll do the whole show twice more over the next few weeks, after which I can put this piece away for awhile. I think everyone around me will be grateful when that happens.
I've taken to saying that there's a fairly narrow range for how a show can go. There's a limit to how badly it can go, determined by your preparation, and also a limit as to the best possible you can do, given who you are and where you're at. Psychologically, you may feel sad, or happy, depending on where in that range you end up, but in terms of the impact on the audience, on the listener, the difference between best and worst is not that large. To be honest, I have no idea if this statement is true, but if it helps me process the pressure of performance, I might as well believe it.
I almost took it back at the dress rehearsal last night. Mozart went first, so I pulled on the shoulder strap and went. Somehow I ended in a slightly uncomfortable posture, with too much weight not just on my left hand, but forward onto my fingers which were trying to play the notes. They ended up slipping and not sealing, nor feeling right. I ended up muffing entire *bars* of sixteenth notes, not exactly an auspicious beginning. And it's hard to phrase and sing beautifully when you're presiding over a train wreck in progress. So yeah, while there is a range for how badly it can go, that range might not be "narrow".
Still, I listened to the tape later. It sounded rough, like the bunch of amateurs we are, but not as bad as it sounded in my head. And while things improved as I got myself sorted out, but there's no time for that at the show. It occurs to me that when I practice at home in my room, I get set up standing, warm up with scales, then work hard passages up slowly, so I have lots of opportunity to get balance issues and everything else ironed out. At the show, I'll have to get up, put on the shoulder strap, walk to the front, and do it. I'd better start practicing doing that.
Here's what I put on the door of my office this afternoon. You can tell it's a serious concert, since we're charging admission, even if all of the proceeds are going to some worthy cause.
Had a rehearsal tonight. The sub for our conductor got a surprise gig, so we had a sub for the sub, a student conductor who carefully videotaped his performance. He did great, except maybe on time management, and we didn't do the Mozart. We have our last rehearsal next week, then the show the week after. It'll be fine.
Here's the practice chart I made for Mozart. Each snippet of a few bars gets a name ("regal opening", "F arpeggios", "trilly bit"), and every date gets a column. Performances are circled. After I work on a snippet, I mark it off, usually writing the metronome mark I achieved. Mostly I'm putting the metronome on 8ths, so my full tempo is 210+. The idea is not that I expect myself to deeply practice every bar on every day - I find it pretty easy to blow 20 minutes or more on two beats, and I don't have enough time or energy to spend the hours required. Rather, the chart lets me see at a glance though what bits I've been neglecting. If a passage hasn't been worked from slow to fast in a few days, it could probably use some attention. Also important, filling it out gives me a feeling of accomplishment, a record of small victories, however transient, over the notes.
For the trilly bits in Mozart, starting at the pickup to 51 and again at 120, I long ago decided I wanted to do 32nd notes, something like this:
Three turns, starting from the bottom. The advantage of straight 32nd notes over something like a 7-tuplet is that it's easier to practice slowly with a subdivided beat. When I crank up the metronome, I don't always manage to get all three turns in, or maybe there will be two clean ones plus a little bounce near the end, but this is the plan anyway.
There are lots of ways to play these, of course. My teacher I think told me he played 5 turns, which seems like a lot to me. And of course, when he demonstrated, they went too fast for me to count. With recordings, we can slow things down. Here's that section from Klaus Thunemann's recording, which has pretty fast trills:
It's too fast for me to count, unless I slow it down: Kt slowed by TFox17
From that, it's pretty easy to write out what he is doing:
I count four turns, starting from the top, for straight 32nd notes all the way through. So not, on paper, any faster than my plan, although faster in practice, since he both takes a faster tempo, and is able to execute the whole thing beautifully.
Now, how fast can a trill go? It turns out that there are limits in principle, not just practice. First of all, there are limits as to how fast fingers can move. Kochevitsky's book on piano technique goes through some of the studies. Apparently the 2nd and 3rd fingers can make 5-6 movements per second, 4-5 with the other fingers. Training doesn't help peak speed: great pianists and members of the general public were about the same, with some untrained participants able to make 7 per second, which some pianists were only able to do 5. For a trill on piano, you can alternate two fingers, so 6 movements per second can give you 12 notes per second. On a wind instrument, you can only move one finger, but each full movement cycle, up and down, gives you two notes. So it's more or less the same, 12 notes per second. It turns out that there's a limit to what the ear will perceive of as distinct notes. Passages played faster than this will blur together. This makes sense: after all, every note is just a cyclical progression of pressures, and A0, reachable by a contra with an extension, has a frequency of about 22 Hz. The limit of hearing notes depends on several things: the pitch of the notes (low notes get muddier faster), the complexity of the passage (scales, trills and tremolos are easier to perceive than more complex passages), and the listener. This limit is typically around 12 notes per second, sextuplets at 120 BPM, which interestingly corresponds to about the limit of what's possible to produce. For a trill, the limit quoted is more like 15 notes per second, which is around what Klaus Thunemann is performing his trill. We can test this ourselves, though, by shifting the tempo on the recording, and seeing what happens.
Here's the tempo shifted to about 150 bpm, which gives us about 20 notes per second:
And again, to about 180, which gives us 24 notes per second: Kt 182 by TFox17
For me, at 150 it still sounds like a trill, though I certainly can't count the notes. At 180, it's degenerated into a sort of fluttery effect on a sustained tone. At 240, the 16ths become indistinct.
From this I think we can conclude that Klaus Thunemann's trills are, not just fast, but essentially at or near the limit of being the fastest possible, either to perform or to hear.
There was some discussion awhile back about whether, and which, rock bands played to a click track, ie used a metronome to keep their drummer precisely in time. Post-recording quantization is also used, and, like pitch correction, has percolated down to consumer software such as Garage Band. I thought it would be interesting to use the same software to see how steady my beat is. Here's the version I used, which allows you to upload your own track for analysis. (Or, if you just want to look at tracks found online, this is slightly more advanced.)
This is a plot of the tempo during the rehearsal last night. Our maestro picked a rather bright pace, compared to previous rehearsals, perhaps because we had only a couple minutes of rehearsal time left. To be honest, it felt a little too fast to be in control for me, although on an absolute scale it's a reasonable speed. There's some wandering up and down, but it ends up about where it started. After the rehearsal I was guessing the speed at 116, but in fact it averages more like 106, which is around where I'm aiming. When you're working with the software, you can have it play sections, and watch the marker move on the plot, so you can see and hear how the tempo change affects the music.
For comparison, here's a plot of Dag Jensen's recording. It's much faster overall, around 120 average, and steadier, with certain large deviations for effect.
Finally, here's the recording itself. I'm not happy with it, but being pseudonymous is what lets me post stuff like this. And while I did screw various things up, the final show is probably going to sound a lot like this, so I can consider it a preview.
I've been having some trouble this week with the pad on the G key (right hand ring finger) sticking. A couple times I opened up the case, and found the key stuck entirely closed, and during playing, sometimes it would stick a bit and open slowly. After consulting with my tech who did the repad a few weeks back, who unfortunately lives far away, I've been trying to clean the pad with a dry Q-tip and various kinds of paper (cigarette paper, Kimwipes from the lab), closing the pad firmly against the paper and pulling the paper out. Whatever has gotten into the pad and tone hole surface that's causing them to stick, I'm hoping that this can remove it, and let it close. Probably the pad has gotten wet, so I've also changed how I clean the instrument out. Now I swab the boot first, although this requires juggling the wing joint while I'm working with the boot. And being careful to be sure that the G key is not being pushed closed in the case, so it can dry. Blocking open the other keys which can attract condensation is also a good idea.
It occurs to me that lots of short practices is worse for condensation than continuous practice, just because the horn has time to cool off and hence condense moisture again. That might be part of my problem too.
Also I'm probably using too much force on the key, but that's not easy to fix. I can get it to stick if I press hard, just about every time.
Here's Mozart from this morning. Different mistakes, every time.
I'll be performing the Mozart four weeks from tonight. Here's a runthrough from this morning. I find that making recordings has really helped; I tend to hear things on the recording that don't even occur to me to listen for when I'm practicing. It's usually easy stuff, or things that I think are supposed to be easy: is that trill four beats long, or do I go for about six before rushing into a cutoff? Scale runs that I've ignored because "scales are easy". Are the first four notes in tune, in time and in tone? At least then I become aware of other things I need to practice too.
I'm posting it here not because it's great, but it's a reasonable view of where I am now. And besides, posting audio creates a little more performance pressure when making the recording, and practicing performing under pressure always seems like a good idea. With the SoundCloud recording, I think it's possible for anyone to add comments to the track. (I think you have to go to the direct link for the clip, and make an account.) I'd certain welcome it if anyone did, positive or negative. Someday I'd like to put something on YouTube, and hopefully attract a YouTube-style "you suck" commenter. It's something to work towards.
I was pretty relaxed this week. Maybe too relaxed: if we don't count rehearsals time, lesson time, and reed testing time as practicing, then I missed four full days of practice in a row. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised it didn't go well. When it came time to play Mozart in rehearsal, I found myself getting distracted, and losing flow. Anytime I'm thinking to myself, "Oh no! I'm thinking, and not in a flow state! How do I get focus back?" instead of "Bump bahh, bee-de bump bahh..." you can be certain that it's not going well. I got totally lost in the middle of a solo once, mixing up the first and second statements I think, and had to almost stop playing until I could figure out where the orchestra was. Another time I tried following the conductor's beat, even just for a moment, which created another train wreck. Maybe a bit of nerves is a good thing, if it can help keep me in the moment. It might also help encourage me to keep some steam up on practicing Mozart: just to keep it at its current (and rather mediocre) level, I've got to continue to put time in. Preparation, again.
Last night was the second time playing it with the orchestra, and my first time playing it in front of our conductor B. I'd just given blood in the afternoon, so I was a little concerned that I might not be at 100%. When the time came, I grabbed my things to go stand up at the front. B went to chase me a stand, and while stopping him, I realized that not only was I planning to play from memory, but I hadn't even brought my part with me. Absentmindedness or confidence, who knows. In any case, knowing the part went (mostly) fine. And though I sometimes felt a little spacey, this wasn't entirely a bad thing. I think it helped me to not rush the sixteenths, which probably helped them be a little cleaner. The worst part was probably the few minutes spent woodshedding the strings without me. I stood the horn up and leaned on it, trying to look cool, but mostly I was just concerned I might keel over and ding the horn.
I still don't have a cadenza. There's time, but still, I'd better get on that.
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.
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 troppoper lafagottistamediocre, 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.
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.
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.
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:
I performed the Mozart allegro at my wife's music club last night. Any giant train wrecks? No, not really. Did I remember all the notes? Most of them. Did I rush the tricky bits? I think not at all. Did I have fun, did people like it? Yes on both, I think. The pianist, an amateur like me, did a great job with only a few days of preparation on a rather unfriendly piano reduction. So, all things considered, should be pretty good, right?
Well, actually, there are a ton of things which make me cringe, now when I listen to the recording. It got worse after I put it in iTunes and listened to it next to the professional recordings I have. Still, I think there's a virtue in reality. This is where I am. And if my blog is a diary, I might as well be honest with my diary and myself: this is what I sound like.
