My homework for Monday

Here's what I'm working on in the next couple of days. I've already mentioned we're playing Verdi. Also on the program is Leonore No. 3, which has some fast stuff. But the 2nd part is mostly not too exposed, and besides I'd gotten the music just before rehearsal, so I had an excuse, even if only inside my head. Monday's rehearsal will cover the Stokowski version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue. The piece I know, and have played in a band version, but the Stokowski version looks like it has lots of really tough stuff. I put a picture of one section here, based on the video I found on YouTube, the tempo is about quarter notes = 112 or so. And sextuplets. Yikes. There's also a ton of slurry stuff, things much easier to play on the organ than the bassoon. And, since I've now had the music for days, I no longer have any excuses for not being prepared.

Other things on the program: a few opera type things that I don't know but don't look hard, and ... oh yeah, Marriage of Figaro. I played it in high school, but I fear the tempo here will be ferocious. Plus, I'm going to miss the one rehearsal on Figaro, so I'll get one runthrough at the dress, then the show. So: lots of slow practice, every trick fingering I can find (I don't know many, since I'm not used to needing them, but M showed me a few this morning), and a general attitude that it's okay to hide or even drop out if it'll improve the overall sound of the orchestra.

The good news is that I'm not worried about playing Mozart at the music club next week.

Subbing with a hardcore orchestra

The other bassoonist in my community orchestra is a first year performance major, and plays 2nd (mostly) in the university's symphony. She got sick, and I got asked to sub in until she recovers. My first rehearsal was last night, and wow, what an experience. It's been a long time since I've played in a group that consisted solely of people that were better than me. I've forgotten how far the gulf is between serious high level players (mostly students, but likely many future professionals, I'd guess) and dilettantes like me. The music is hard, the tempos are fast, and everyone is perfectly in tune... except me. Apparently the level of sloppiness that I usually get away with sticks out like a sore thumb here. I'm sightreading, trying to more or less keep up and not get too lost, but the expectation is that every phrase and dynamic be right, not to mention the notes and the pitches. Very much a learning experience.

The first piece up was Verdi, the Force of Destiny. This is the one tune for which I'm subbing on 1st. I'm a little nervous, since I want to make a reasonable impression. The principal player is an extraordinary young bassoonist, national youth orchestra and many awards, and I think I'm most worried about my impression on him. Why I'd care about what someone half my age thinks I don't know, but I do. The conductor says "Let's separate the men from the boys" and begins a few bars before N, where the violins do a light fast tripletey thing, against which low strings and solo bassoon (me!) do a counterpoint. So my first notes here are supposed to be a solo. Separate the men from the boys indeed, although the conductor probably wasn't referring to me. I don't know the music, I don't know if it's in 2 or 4, I don't know the conductor's beat, I don't know where to come in, I can't hear the cellos, and I care too much about the first impression. I'm so nervous I'm shaking, which doesn't help. In addition to missing most of the notes, and probably playing in the wrong spot, my tone was weak and tentative, which somehow seems worse. So not an auspicious start, by any means. First impression has been made. Still, by the end of the evening I felt as though I'd done a few things right, here and there. And apparently I wasn't so terrible that they don't want to see me again - there'll be room for me at the show, in an uncovered 3rd part on one piece even if their real bassoonist recovers in time. So, all in all, very positive.

Still, that experience of playing under pressure, in terror. If I could can that terror, put it in a box so that I could take it out and play under those conditions whenever I wanted, it'd be very useful I think. Not all the time of course, but some of the time, for practice. Next up for me will be this evening, when I rehearse with a pianist who's kindly agreed to help me play Mozart next week. I've been practicing for this by recording run-throughs, one a day, no stops or fixes, just the best I can. Even this makes me pretty nervous, and most have had a complete train wreck somewhere. I think I'm in trouble.

How to remove the stress from a stressful event

Like anything else, the solution is to practice. Here, the worry is performance pressure, and how that affects the result, so I should practice while I'm under that stress. So for example, I'm freaked out about performing Mozart with an orchestra. Actually, I'm more freaked out about rehearsing it, particularly worried about bombing the first rehearsal. A rather useful piece of advice I got given, from a professional soloist I contacted by email, was to not let that first rehearsal with orchestra be my first public performance, but rather to arrange something else first. Okay, so now I'm going to do it in front of my wife's piano club. This actually makes me pretty nervous, which is a good sign. And now the pianist who's agreed to play the reduction wants a rehearsal. This Friday. I'm now freaked about that. All very good. By the time I'm actually standing in front of an orchestra, I'll have had many opportunities to try and play this piece while freaked out, so hopefully it won't be a problem.

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."

The Mozetich Concerto

There aren't many contemporary concertos. John William's Five Sacred Trees is well known, and I love Judith Leclair's recording of it that I got off iTunes. You can get a taste of it from recitals on YouTube, eg this one. I recently read about Marjan Mozetich's 2003 concerto. Mozetich is a Canadian composer, pretty successful and well known as contemporary classical composers go (2010 Juno winner, for example), whose work is described as both romantic and post-minimalist. So I was kind of curious what the concerto sounded like. There are some samples on Mozetich's website, and bits of other pieces on YouTube, but it's not so easy to find the whole thing. Until I discovered the Canadian Music Centre, which will not only stream you Canadian music, including some live performance of the Mozetich concerto, but will loan you a score if you want to study or play it. They don't even charge postage! There are things I like about Canada.

World orchestra for peace

Georg Solti and a hand picked group doing William Tell. Amazing. (Stolen from the Perfect Pitch oboe blog, whose author appears behind the english horn player.)

The formants in a bassoon spectrum

It's a little easier to see harmonics on a spectrum plot than on a sonogram. That loses how things change with time, though, as you go through different notes. So I made a movie, using a screencap on the spectrum analyzer in Live, from a chromatic scale. Ugly, but I think good enough to get the point across. (Full screen HD makes it easier to see details.) Frequencies are along the bottom, and a spike shows the intensity in each frequency bin. The bins form a comb, with a spacing set by the number of samples in each spectrum. You can see the lowest peak at the frequency of the note being played, the first harmonic an octave up (a factor of two in frequency), the second harmonic at a 12th (a factor of three in frequency), etc. Each harmonic moves up together as the note changes to the next one on the scale, but they keep their relationship to each other. To me the most interesting thing, though, is how the amplitudes of the harmonics all fit inside a single overall envelope, which is basically constant. Live keeps track of the peak hit by any momentary spectrum as a dim line, and this line shows the curve of the envelope inside of which the spectra of all the notes lie. The envelope has a broad peak around 500-600 Hz, ie around C4. So you have this funny thing where for low notes, the fundamental is weak, there will be many harmonics, and the strongest harmonic might be the third or fourth, while for high notes, you'll have only a couple relevant harmonics, with the fundamental being strongest. So the character of the sound changes dramatically in different parts of the scale, but it all makes sense, because every note is ringing inside of the same envelope. This envelope is called a formant, which refers to a broad acoustical resonance. Formants are particularly important in identifying vowels, but also help define the timbre of instruments.

Fletcher and Rossing talk about bassoon formants, quoting 440-500 Hz for the lower strong one, and a weaker one at 1220-1280 Hz. That's not so far off what I see. Saying there's a shape doesn't tell you why the shape is there, however. Fletcher and Rossing also talk about a cutoff frequency, which seems to be some kind of low pass filter coming from the tone holes, and quote 300-600 Hz for the bassoon's cutoff frequency. Another source I have, a chapter in the Springer Handbook of Acoustics, quotes Benade as measuring a cutoff of 400-500 Hz for bassoons, and stating "specifying the cut-off frequency for a woodwind instrument is tantamount to describing almost the whole of its musical personality". So it's important, however exactly it works. Fletcher identifies the lower formant with "the transition at the tone-hole frequency cutoff", and the higher one with the reed somehow. Or maybe it's the cone angle, eg the French horn has a similar bore angle, and a similar sound to the bassoon, at least during sustained notes. Regardless of how exactly the formants are formed, it's clear that they have much to do with describing the nature of tone.



Added: Joe Wolfe's delightful acoustics site has more on formants.