Tuning system wackery

Here's someone who believes that A=440 is a bad idea, not because they like baroque instruments, or because Verdi knew singer's ranges best, but because "432hz vibrates/oscillates on the principals of natural harmonic wave propagation and unifies with the properties of light, time, space, matter, gravity and electromagnetism." Um. Okay. But even that makes sense, as compared to this maker of a microtonal keyboard, who somehow mixes Pythagoras, chakra/pitch identification, Georg Cantor, Egyptian pyramids and 666 together in search of a tuning system.

This is what I get for working on reeds

Split all the way to the wire, before it had ever been played. I don't even know when it happened, I flipped it over and there it was. Maybe (evidently?) I was using too much tool pressure, I was trying to take material off fast.

More cowbell

I hadn't played in a band for 25 years before last week, when I got called to sit in two bands in two days. One was  subbing for a rehearsal with a fairly high-end group. The group's site calls it "semi-pro", which I think means that they don't get paid, although they are good enough to be. Indeed, of the several acquaintances I knew there, all but one made their living in some music-connected way. They were good, the tempos were fast, and there were a lot of time changes and a lot of flats. A lot. It's been awhile since I needed to sightread Gb.

The other band was an adult amateur ensemble, sharing a concert with a junior high honor band. Each band got a few pieces, then there was a couple of joint pieces. The rehearsal went fine, but at the sound check at the venue, an hour before show time, things started to go wonky. The venue was a largish modern church, lots of seating, sound, video, and lighting. The back of the stage area had several large video screens, displaying continuous loops of abstract animations, with a dozen or so big screen TV's around in case you couldn't see one of the giant screens. The band I was in got positioned up on the stage. We were well lit by bright spotlights onto the stage, which were angled down from above. I'm sure the audience would've been able to see us well. Unfortunately, the conductor's podium was placed in the shadows near the audience, and we couldn't see him at all. Various permutations of lights were tried, to no avail. I gather that the techs were not used to trying to deal with masses of musicians, who not only need to be seen, but who also need to see, and need to see music as well as a conductor. The techs struggled through, trying a wide variety of variations while getting feedback from the scores of musicians, strobing through the colors on the disco lights ("I'm sorry, I can't see my music with the purple, go back to the pink"), trying different angles ("Stop  there! I can see from the reflection off the tuba!") and lights. Eventually they managed to bring up a spot at the rear, and point it straight at the conductor, but then he was blinded, and couldn't see us. And the minutes for the sound check ticked by.

For the joint massed band pieces, the conductor got it figured out. He got an 8th grader percussionist to come to the edge with a cowbell ("No, you don't need your music!"), to a spot where he could make out the baton. "Now bang it on the beat. Yes, the whole time. No, louder. More cowbell. Everyone else, listen to the cowbell!" For the adult band, we relocated to the floor in front of the stage at the last minute, where we could be under the house lights. The show went on, only a few minutes late. And it was fun, I got to blow hard and listen to a lot of brass and drums. Still, I don't think I'll be joining a band routinely.

Forte

I've already written about my struggles to play softer, but recently I've been trying to see if I can play louder too. Such basic things. The standard exercise, given to beginning students to convince them that they can, in fact, play louder, is to put the lips over the entire reed, so the blade isn't hindered or even touched by the lips at all, and blow. The sound is ugly and out of control, but loud. The principle of playing loud well is similar: the less embouchure pressure on the reed, the more vibration and more volume. There've been a couple of things that made me think that louder is something I need work on. One was sitting next to the bassoon student in the university orchestra, and trying to say something useful to her as she worked through an exposed technical bit in a Haydn symphony. ("Helpful" advice is always risky, I know, but you'll have to take my word that we know each other well enough that it was appropriate.) The only thing I said was play louder. Project to the back of the hall. Make the conductor tell you to shush. Let the fingers ride on a stream of air. I was also thinking, although I didn't say it, that even if the notes aren't perfect, if the sound is good, and loud, and played with conviction, the audience will accept it, despite the errors. In a sense, error in tone is worse than a wrong note, since inadequate tone affects the entire passage, whereas a wrong note passes quickly. When my son is practicing clarinet, I'm constantly on him about tone too. Blow through the horn, I say, sounding like the conductors of my high school marching band. I thought that was lame advice at the time, only appropriate for playing in the middle of a football field, but I'm a little more mature now. So, having advised my son and my sectionmate that louder sounds better, I slowly developed a sneaking suspicion that perhaps I too could use a little more "projection", which is to say, volume.

A related experience came at a lesson a couple weeks ago. We were looking at my part in the same Haydn symphony, and my teacher played through it. And he kept on playing after the exposed fast bits, blowing through fortissimo tutti whole notes. And man, I was taken aback by how loud he could play. And yes, the tone does shift at high volume, spreads a bit, but that's not necessarily a negative. Think of the characteristic brassy sound of a trumpet playing loud, filled with high harmonics generated by a supersonic shock in the bore. This isn't a flaw, but another tone color to be cultivated. On bassoon, there's also a lot of junk noise you can hear from a foot away, particularly some hiss from losing air around the reed. This could be considered a flaw, but I don't think it'd be an audible problem in a full orchestra. It's more important to get volume into the bassoon tone color of the chord.

The other inspirational comment came from my wife. We were quibbling a bit over something or other, and she admitted me that, despite having gone to my concerts for years, she could hardly ever hear me, even during solos. Ouch! And it stings more due to likely being true. I think one of my problems is hearing the balance authentically. I think I tend to get comfortable, and play to what sounds good to me. And I like hearing a bassoon-rich orchestral sound, but since I'm a few inches away from the bassoon, and many yards from the strings, what sounds bassoon-rich to me is totally inaudible to the audience.

So, how to play louder? Part of it is reed. The reed has to vibrate well, and has to be open enough at the tip to accept a large flow of air. Embouchure is important. A hard embouchure, that will not dampen the vibration, and as little pressure as possible. (Note the distinction between the firmness of the lips and the pressure exerted by them. You can press either soft or hard using a marshmallow or a screwdriver, and these four cases (high pressure/soft implement, low pressure/soft implement, high pressure/hard implement, low pressure/hard implement) will all have different effects on the vibration of the thing you're damping. I should really try this with a cymbal or something.) And lots of high velocity air. Control the pitch with the air stream, since the lips aren't doing it. Easy enough to say, I guess. Doing it is another matter.

Fagonello, another small bassoon

Haven't heard of this one before. The Fagonello seems to be the latest of a number of attempts to build a bassoon which works for kids (mini-bassoon, fagottino, tenoroon, etc.). This one is nontransposing, and is basically the same as a full-sized bassoon, it just simplifies and moves some keywork, and cuts off the bottom couple of notes. The result sounds pretty good to my ear, at least compared to the other ones I've heard on YouTube.

Trimming a clarinet

I'm fascinated by the construction of instruments. I tend to think of instruments as expensive and permanent, with acoustics fixed in form and unchangable. They're not of course. Someone made them. And to the maker, adjusting an instrument is no scarier than making it out of wood in the first place. Here's Morrie Backun tweaking a clarinet for Ricardo Morales, jamming a reamer into a $8k piece of wood as casually as any reedmaker, making reeds.

Relaxation

One of my problems is tension. It's a very common problem, exacerbated by the critical atmosphere in classical music training and performance, not to mention my own hyper-analytical attitude. The tape loop in my head is commenting: hard part is coming up, try and get it right this time, nerves on high alert, try try try... ooh, just screwed it up again. It's pretty clear that the response to the problem is part of the problem itself. There are a variety of approaches to trying to deal with this. I've mentioned some before, and Barrick Stees comments on the unsuccessful Cleveland audition are relevant too: in a high pressure situation, pretend that you're giving a lesson. My son's piano teacher suggested playing while talking, as a path to effortless playing. (It has to be something you can talk about easily, though. The teacher asked him what he had for breakfast, and he totally couldn't remember. Eventually he replied "A carrot", which seemed like an unusual breakfast to the teacher -- I don't think the passage he was playing came out very effortlessly. My wife suggested changing the topic to the properties of bismuth, something my son has been interested in, and that worked much better. Not sure how you'd do the playing while talking on bassoon, though.)

Recently I've started reading jazz pianist Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery, which seems to be concerned with this effect. Early on he describes his experience with a vaguely mystical teacher, this is already after he's been through Berkelee and is a working pro, who only lets him practice one note at a time. One note, one finger. Aiming for total relaxation of that finger and motion. And not as some kind of quick warm-up, before setting into hours of intense, high-tension "real work" in the practice room. Rather, no more than five minutes of this, per day, and no other playing. After some weeks of this, spending most of his time hanging out at the beach in Brazil or whatever, he went to a party, and got asked to play. After many apologies about being out of practice due to his crazy teacher, he did. And everything sounded wonderful. Much of the problem is in our heads, in particular, in the parts of our brains responsible for analytical critique. The part that decides, is it Right, or is it Wrong, the Manichean fallacy. Nonjudgmental should be the goal. "If you can meet with Triumph, and Disaster, and treat those two Imposters just the same." (Kipling) Or alternatively, in words stolen from forum, you're not as good as you think you are. You're not as bad as you think you are, either. At my lesson, we did a few things along the lines of relaxation. One was to exhale in time before inhaling, both to get a fuller breath, and also because deep breathing is a relaxation exercise. Another was to listen to the tone from the room, trying to ignore the direct sound of the instrument coming through the mouth and jawbone. This morning I spent my practice trying to figure out how to practice that mental state, how to play effortlessly and relaxed. I ended up playing scales at MM=48, which I'd just picked to be slow, but is probably a good tempo to establish a slow breathing and a slow heartbeat. Pulse is physical, and relaxation is physical.