Performance Diary

This past Saturday saw the "soft launch" of two groups I'm hoping to establish. The occasion  was a walking tour of Gordonsville put on by the Dolley Madison Garden Club.

From 11:00 a.m. until noon the "Kenwood Players Brass Choir" played with Tom May on the pipe organ in Christ Episcopal Church. We had a trumpet, a flugelhorn, a French horn, a euphonium and two E flat tubas. We did a number of hymns, usually with the trumpet on soprano, flugelhorn on alto, horn and euphonium on tenor and tubas on the bass the first time through. Then second time through the trumpet went up to a descant, the flugelhorn went to soprano and the horn to alto. Third time through was organ only, then fourth time was brass and organ together again. On tunes without a descant, the second time the flugelhorn and the tubas together played the melody with the organ as accompaniment. 

The one long piece we did was the R. V. Williams setting of "Old One Hundreth" he did for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth back in the fifties. There are brass flourishes at the beginning, then a number of variations on the tune, a trumpet descant, then ending with more brass flourishes.

We'd been expecting people to come and go throughout the performance, but in the event a number of people came early for good seats and stayed the entire time, with a few people coming and going in the back of the church. We were very well received, with strong applause after each tune - and Ben Armistead, the choir director, who announced each tune, led the singing if people wanted to join in, and many did.

I find the sound of brass and pipe organ to be viscerally moving, and a lot of the audience seemed have that experience. A number of people in the front pews had expressions of reverie on their faces the entire time. I think part of that comes from the fact that hearing a live brass ensemble is a fairly rare event, especially out here in this rural area. 

My favorite comment came from a lady that came up afterwards with an expression of fatigued wonderment, who said she'd been ill with bad allergies all week and unable to even speak, but that she was able to sing with the brass and organ. Another comment that gets across the feeling was the trumpet player saying that with all that sound and support he felt his range and endurance was expanded for the duration of the performance.

I've put together brass groups before, but this instrumentation gave by far the best results and I hope to keep the group going, with secular as well as church performances. 

Then from 2:00 until 4:00 what I'm calling the "Kenwood Players Chamber Group" played on Main Street, which had been closed to traffic. For the Handel Water Music/Music for the Royal Fireworks we were recorder (soprano/sopranino), flute, alto flute, clarinet, cello, and percussion. For the pop and movie tunes from the 60's I switched from alto flute to guitar or banjo.

This group also went over very well. What most pleased me was seeing people being drawn in to the Handel. I'm convinced that music is very infectious and appealing - but that most people aren't at all familiar with it, or live chamber music of any sort. With the banjo/guitar music we had people dancing. 

I'm hoping to keep this group going as well, and maybe add a second clarinet. The limiting factor is that our cello is Dr. Andy, who has to come down from Harpers Ferry to play with us, which pretty much means weekends only.

I have the hope that when people are exposed to live music like this, that's not normally heard around here, they'll like it and want more of it. Maybe the novelty of loud DJ music will wane and people will enjoy returning to live music in more of the classical/acoustic tradition.

UPDATE - for photos and a little more info, go here.

Horn Diary

I've been playing the horn for coming on to seven years now and it still pulls me in like no other instrument I've ever played. There are things I can do on other instruments (piano, guitar, banjo, alto flute/flute, and cello) that I can't do on the horn, but none of them as consistently have me exploring how to make music.

Part of it is probably the fact that when I started the horn in my mid 50's, I already knew a lot about the generality of music making, which allows me to bring all that to bear in learning the horn.

Increasingly, though, I think it's the very tactile nature of playing the horn that has taken me so much deeper into the experience of music making. My hands, arms, and torso all vibrate in resonance with the tones I primarily feel in my embouchure. I love the feel of the resonance of the guitar/banjo, cello and flutes, but with the horn there's just more of it.

There's also more of a one to one relationship between breathing and phrasing than on the flute that I think has to do with all of the air going into the horn as opposed to being split by the embouchure plate and only some going into the flute. 

For me the tone of the horn is simply larger and more malleable than that of other instruments, and somehow I feel more inside the tone experiencing it than being outside the tone and manipulating it.

Fingering

I was delighted to see this post by Prof. Ericson over on Horn Matters. Over the years I've noticed time and time again on both the flute and horn that poor attacks can be the result of not getting all the fingers that need to go down (or up) in place at the same instant. I'd always assumed it was because I played piano all my childhood and often associate soft and legato with slower and less forced finger movements. On wind instruments, though, the movements need to be decisive and quick, even in slow and delicate passages.

One of Prof. Ericson's suggestions is:

. . .I have found it helpful to alternately watch my fingers directly, watch them in a mirror, and then close my eyes and feel the motion.

My solution has always been that last step - closing my eyes and focussing on connecting the proprioception of my fingers with what I'm hearing.

Performance Diary

Over the past couple of weeks I've been involved in various performances: horn in concert band; a flute obbligato with the community chorus; flute and alto flute with the Presbyterian Ensemble Christmas morning; guitar, horn and alto flute with the great nieces at the nursing home; and horn with the brass group and a pipe organ at an Episcopal Sunday service yesterday morning.

Something about playing flute or horn with voices really moves me and seems to put me in a much better position to experience flow. I didn't get there this time, but was tantalizingly close. I think it must have to do with my experiencing the intonation and the balance blend with voices as being far more delicate than, say, the concert band. I think that's also why I so enjoy playing alto flute with flute and cello, and playing horn in the brass group - getting that wonderful ensemble feeling seems much more in reach, and that wonderful ensemble feeling is a big (necessary?) part of flow.

Right at the beginning of this series of performances I got the very sad news that someone I've been close to for forty years had passed away. She was a wonderful musician, which always seems to make it worse. So while playing all this wonderful Christmas music, there was this constant undertow of sadness. People didn't seem to really notice a change in my playing, but I sure did. If I were a higher level player, maybe I could have played joyous music more successfully while feeling sad.

The other way not being a high level player came into play was having technique issues to clear away before being able to interpret the music on the various instruments. Were I to give up all instruments but one, I could spend way more time on technique so as to not be caught short when wanting to perform. I really enjoy making music on various instruments, but there's a price to pay in having to drill on the various technique deficiencies that pop up in phrases here and there when prepping for performances.

In several of these performances we used carols I'd transposed down into flat keys some years ago, having added a keyboard book in the new keys for piano/organ, and people really enjoyed our playing and sound, and we really enjoyed playing in the comfort zones of our ranges. It's sort of like the old hymns mentioned in the previous post. Simply putting music in easy to play keys, just like playing music people want to hear, is a very high reward endeavor and I'm sort of baffled more people don't do it.

Flute Diary

This summer I spent a lot of time on the alto flute after something like seven years of hardly touching it and it was great to play it again. I recruited Hayley from the Orange community band to join me and Dr. Andy to work up music I'd arranged back in the 90's for flute, alto flute, and cello, along with some things I'd written for keyboard with those instruments.

Jumping around from instrument over the years has its drawbacks, but there are wonderful advantages as well. All the work with the horn and the regular flute meant I was able to get much better tone and volume on the alto flute than I did in the past. There's also sometimes a complete absence of the hissing, tire leaking air sound that used to be a regular feature.

I think the work with BE, Jeff Smiley's embouchure method for trumpet and horn, helped me better understand the way all the breathing and muscles work together to produce the embouchure, and that the better you "get" that, the easier it is to have a comfortably open throat and jaw, which in turn allows for creating centered, full tone. 

With both flute and horn my tendency was to obsess over what the lips were doing. I've never particularly liked buzz words, but that 60's hip term gestalt really fits the bill for explaining the true nature of embouchure. Embouchure is how everything else you're doing manifests in the lips. I realize this is one of those commonplaces of teaching wind instruments, but it's also one of those things where you have to experience what the words are talking about. Just because the words make sense to you doesn't mean you have a full understanding of their import. 

The other thing that has struck me (all over again) is what a perfect trio the flute, alto flute and cello make. There's the wonderful balance of treble, midrange and bass sounds, and the flutes have that difference tone ghost of an extra instrument from time to time, and all three are agile instruments.

Old Dogs & New Tricks

The problem with old dogs learning new tricks may not be due to brain decrepitude. This brief article outlines a study where adults formed new grey matter over the course of just a few days in response to complex conditioning.

The researchers subjected 19 adult volunteers to a study where colored cards (2 shades of green and 2 blue) were shown to them; each with nonsensical names. The participants were then asked to accept the new words as actual descriptors for the new colors and to memorize them so that they could reply with the correct color name at a later date and to match them when asked. After the conditioning was carried out (over three days with five sessions; total time less than two hours) the subjects all underwent MRI scans, where it was revealed that new grey matter had formed in the left hemisphere of their brains. . . 

. . . It appears the key lies in the name differentiation, and how the subjects perceived the colors based on the names they were given; something much deeper than say, asking subjects to simply memorize a list of names. It was a change in perception. This is backed up by the fact that the areas of the brain that grew new matter were parts of the brain known to process color and vision, but more importantly, perception.

My biggest age related issue is my fingers not being as flexible and quickly responsive as I'd like on the flute. Part of that might be that even though I've played the flute and alto flute off and on for years, I've spent a lot more time on the keyboard and guitar and banjo, all of which use the fingers in different ways and I'm having to work at not using them in those ways with the flute, as much as trying to learn the new ways.

V.S. Computer Playback

Here is a completely untweaked computer playback of A Louisiana Sashay, a.k.a. Vermont Song, as it now stands. There's some kind of glitch at one point where it briefly sounds as though there are two flutes, and the final chord for the harp isn't arpeggiated as it is in the score. Real people will probably play it a bit slower, with pauses and/or ritards here and there.

This playback, though, is good enough to get an idea of the piece, and it seems to work. I finished the writing of it Sunday morning and have listened to it a number of times since, and nothing calls attention to itself as needing fixing. I'm very pleased with a number of things that happen in the piece and look forward to seeing how it will come off in actual performance.

I've sent PDF scores and parts to my friends up in Vermont for whom it was written, asking if there are any awkward or unplayable bits, especially in the case of the harp. If it passes that test, I think it's nearly done.

The only problem in writing the piece (other than trying to keep straight what the harp can and can't do) was finding the time to spend with it and then having the patience to keep working at it to get something that sounded "right", measure by measure. That Thomas Edison quote about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is very apt in my case. There were any number of places where nothing seemed to work and it took an hour or more to find something that did work for just a measure or two. Somewhere along the line I thought of using a stopwatch to see just how many hours it took me to get less than five minutes worth of music, but decided not to, being afraid that seeing an actual number might make me slower in taking up the writing of the next piece. 

Horn Diary

In this post Jonathan West talks about different kinds of horn tone. Back the weekend before Christmas I played horn in the community concert band's Christmas program on Saturday night and then in a cantata Sunday morning. It was a wonderful experience of the difference between the first tone Jonathan talks about (wind quintet and small ensembles), and the last (concert band).

In the community band I'm the only horn, with five trumpets, two trombones and three baritones. I generally play at least shade higher than the given dynamic when against the other brass, just to get some balance. Over the years I've discovered that a brassy tone can help being heard, and have been encouraged to play that way. The problem is I didn't take up horn to be able to make that sort of sound. I understand its place in the band arranger's palette, but feel trumpets can do brassy much better. 

The sound that appeals to me is more what Jonathan talks about first, that of the horn in a small ensemble. Since September I've been listening to a recording an ensemble Jonathan is in playing a wind quintet I wrote sometime back. Without consciously realizing it at first, hearing that tone of Jonathan's changed the sound I'm getting from the horn, and the cantata was a perfect piece of music to explore that tone.

Dave Wilken often says we make a mistake when we assign the reason for musical growth to a particular cause, because when we practice we're doing lots of things, not just the one thing we might be focused on at the time. I agree with that, but also feel that listening to my friend Susan's flute tone this summer and hearing Jonathan's horn tone on that recording both had a catalytic effect, as those aural experiences made me more aware of what I wanted on each of those instruments and, on a proprioceptive level, how to get there.

During this past semester I started playing "off the leg" and am enthused with the results.

When I started horn I used a Farkas very deep cup mouthpiece because I liked the tone. When I had my embouchure crisis and began working with Jeff Smiley's BE method I also switched to a Farkas medium cup mouthpiece. I didn't like the tone as well, but it was lots easier to play.

During the brief hiatus from band I've been switching to a Farkas medium deep cup. I instantly felt better able to lip pitches into tune, which I think is due to there being more lip inside the wider diameter, so there's more to work with. My hope is this mouthpiece will be something of a compromise between ease of playing and the tone I prefer.

I've been spending nearly all my playing time on the F horn, and have been enjoying not having to play 1st horn parts. In the past when band was in session, just trying to keep up with simply being able to play all the parts took most of my energy. These days my endurance and range are much better, and having become familiar with concert band writing, my hope is I can learn those parts much more quickly and then still have time and lip each day for chamber style music.

Flute Diary

This past Sunday I played flute in three pieces at the Presbyterian Church in Orange. Two were at the beginning of the service with the ensemble and one was an obbligato part with the choir and organ (the music of which I got just two weeks previously).

I did fairly well, and got some nice compliments from some musical folks. About half the time I played as well as I can right now (with a tone quality I'm very excited about), and the rest of the time the slight cracks and the unintended vibrato here and there didn't seem to be disruptive enough to break the spell. 

For the piece with the choir I was up in the gallery with them, and the acoustics of the church are even more reverberant up there. It almost feels like playing a duet with another flute due to the sound reinforcement. The downside, which I discovered going up there and practicing by myself once, is that if you don't end a phrase beautifully and cleanly, that wounded sound will hang out there on its own for a while.

In practicing for this performance I again came up against something I've mentioned before. Having spent my childhood and adolescence plugging away at the piano, my brain is wired to think moving just one finger is all that's needed to move a step up or down. Notes like A flats and F sharps on the flute really hang me up if they're part of a run of sixteenth notes. Trying to concentrate enough to get them (because they're nowhere near automatic for me) can make me tense up, and that makes them even harder, whereas keeping my shoulders relaxed and letting that relaxed alertness spread all the way down to the fingertips makes everything easier.

It all reminds me of that Marvin Minsky(?) book Society of Mind and of the idea gaining currency with the neuroscientists that our brain works as a distributed network. One part of my mind knows I should keep the shoulders relaxed, but something I'm doing elsewhere in the network is having the side effect of making me tense them up if my attention to that issue lapses in the least.

Another factor in all this was my playing the horn off and on for three hours the previous day at a rehearsal for a cantata there at the same church for next Sunday. It may be that if I can build up my flute embouchure enough I can play it concurrently with the horn. Right now, though, playing the horn 24 to 48 hours before a flute performance leaves me feeling I have less motor control over the fine adjustments of the aperture needed to get good tone on each of the pitches played.

Back Issues

For the past several weeks I've been spending more time on a daily basis practicing music, working to extend my technique enough to perform some new pieces on horn and flute, than I have since conservatory days (late 70's). Back then I was a piano major, not having touched a keyboard for something like ten years before wanting to get credentialed as a music therapist. I lived with an amazingly tense and sore back, right between the shoulder blades.

Since then I've gotten and done a lot of bodywork. Pretty much everyone has back and shoulder issues, usually from a mostly unconscious hunching of the shoulders. For me, when I'm working to deepen my technique, whether its keyboard, guitar, banjo, flute or horn, there's a tendency to let the intensity of my mental effort create needless physical tension, especially in the shoulders and their muscle attachments to the torso. It's sort of a negative example of embodied cognition. The relaxed and alert physical state best for making music seems a little antithetical to our mental image of someone working hard and thinking hard.

Somehow my feeling of really working hard and concentrating and being completely focused on the task at hand suggests the body posture of hunching over the instrument and using exaggerated control gestures and scowling (!). I'll catch myself, relax, let my shoulders slip back to a more neutral position and let go of the facial contortions. Then the next time I see 16th notes in a key signature of more than a couple of sharps or flats, or have a new chord or chord progression to fret, I slip back into the needless extra tension. Over time I slip back less, and to usually a lighter degree of tension, but it always happens. My suspicion is that those two and a half years of intense piano work, with very little sense of what I was doing to my body, helped me create this situation.

Jeffrey Agrell and James Boldin over on the Regular Reads: Horn list both have talked about the need to be aware of basic body issues when learning to make music and I think they're really on to something. As a therapist I've always paid a lot of attention to how a client physically interacts with an instrument. I just wish I'd figured out my own issues before wiring my brain and body in some dysfunctional ways back in the day. 

Update - Pasting in below most of a comment left by Jonathan West, as it is so responsive to my post:

I'm with James & Jeffrey on being aware of your physical state when playing. It may be that you need to put regular relaxation exercises explicitly into your practice routine.

When you play horn in band, you aren't playing continuously, so it is reasonable for your practice at home to mimic to some extent the kinds of activities involved when you play in a group. And that consists of bursts of playing interspersed with rests. If you get into the habit of doing some kind of relaxation exercise during home practice, you may find that it comes increasingly naturally to you to do such execises during rests in band rehearsal as well, and you may find that this has a surprising effect on your endurance.

As for what exercises to do, I suspect that you're in a better position than I am to know the sorts of exercises that would be good for you.

Relaxation exercises to loosen your shoulders are great, but I think that it would be an even better idea to find some kind of relaxation technique that stops your shoulders getting bunched in the first place.

Try standing, and play an octave scale of long tones, each one with a long crescendo and diminuendo. You get rid of all technical issues, and you just concentrate on feeling relaxed and getting that smooth intense non-brassy tone you want, all the way from p to f and back again. Think of and feel your shoulders as you crescendo and concentrate on remaining relaxed.

If you find yourself getting tense during practice, stop what you are doing, do a relaxation exercise to un-knit your shoulder muscles, and then do a couple of long tones to remind yourself how you should be feeling when playing. Then go back to what you were doing before.

Flute Diary

Yesterday I played flute with the Presbyterian Ensemble at the opening of the Sunday service. Besides flute there are - clarinet, bass clarinet, alto sax, trumpet, trombone and two Eb tubas. I played well enough, and got a very nice compliment from the organist, but felt I hadn't stayed away from the horn long enough to let my lips have that fine control the flute needs, especially on the higher notes. I wasn't able to get 100% of the full tone I can sometimes achieve when my lips aren't horn fatigued.

Besides the band concert on Thursday, on Friday I spent a lot of time on the horn running through the five parts of an arrangement of four Christmas carols I'm working on and the rehearsing it with the Friday group. Then Saturday played no horn, but lots of flute with Dr. Andy on the cello. I'm pretty sure that for me, no other combination of instruments is more appealing. Others might be as good, but cello and flute have a complementariness and completeness of sound that can't be bettered.

Flute Diary

On my Vermont trip I got to hear Susan play the flute. Simply hearing her tone made me a better player. 

Back when she was here in Virginia I played either alto flute or keyboard with her on flute and Dr. Andy on cello, and I never got my soprano flute out of its case. Here in the past year or so I have played that exclusively and not the alto. Putting in all those hours made me a better player, but they also set me up to better appreciate Susan's tone in the sense of having a better proprioceptive insight into what she's doing. 

All the neuroscience talks about how making music tickles a lot of parts of the brain at the same time and in coordination with each other. What I'm talking about here is the interface between the part of the brain that appreciates hearing good tone and the part that tells the muscles what to do to get it. 

Susan's tone, especially in the low and mid registers can have a tactile, Dionysian power to it. A lot of flute players are more Apollonian in tone, and Susan can do that if need be, but that feeling she can generate that the flute's tone is getting traction on the listeners' emotions is what amazes me.

All that's not as well expressed as I'd like, but the point is, immediately upon hearing her for the first time in years, doors opened in my mind and muscles that are leading me to do all kinds of proprioceptive things I can't begin to explain, but which improve my playing.

Dave Wilken has a great post that got me thinking more about all this here. 

V.S. Key Signature

The next step is choosing a key signature (pitch set) to work with. Since the harp likes flats, since I'm contemplating an alto flute part (which adds a flat in transposition), and since strings might be involved (I think of them as having a slight preference for sharps), that narrows it down to one or two flats, three at the most (on the alto, four is my practical limit).

One flat would yield F major, which from the F above middle C to the one above that nicely covers the ambit of flute pitches in that mid range I want to really dig into having Susan's tone freshly in mind. The two octaves of D minor above middle C would probably incorporate the full gamut of pitches to use to avoid overpowering the harp.

Adding the other flat would yield G minor, which is a nice one step up from F major, and having just played around a little with it on the keyboard*, those two keys are where I'm going to start, as I think moving from one to the other can make for a pleasing and fresh sounding shift.

There are, of course, possible modal uses of those key signatures as well, and "modal" is a comment I sometimes hear about my music, so I must be doing something along those lines some of the time.

* Should say I simply can't imagine composing music without access to a keyboard. I took piano lessons as a child but never "got" what classical music was about until I heard Susan and a flute friend playing the Bach Two Part Inventions at a garden party out in the Virginia countryside early on during our time at Shenandoah. What did happen during all those years of lessons, though, was that the physical arrangement of the keyboard became the way I thought and still think about music and music theory. I do not have "theory mind", but with a keyboard and plenty of time, I can fake it.

V.S. Players and Instruments

The first thing I settle on in writing a new piece is who's going to play it on what instruments. In this case it's my flute playing friend Susan and her harp playing friend Carol. On my recent trip to Vermont, they played Mosaic for me. I wrote it in 1994 for Susan on flute and me on piano and they had worked it up as a flute and harp piece. It really works that way, but I kept thinking a piece written expressly for the two of them would better exploit that wonderful pairing of instruments.

I've known Susan since the '70's when we were at Shenandoah Conservatory together. I've never known anyone to more fully inhabit the music she makes and I've never heard better tone on the flute. She's a pro level player, so the only concerns about the instrument are those inherent in it. Her low number Hanes has a B foot, but I never write that note as other flutes might not have it. The E above high C on flutes is the hardest note and worth avoiding if possible. Being a product of the music education system Susan. tongues. every. single. note. un.less. o.ther.wise. no.ted. It was for Susan I first wrote music for small ensembles (Dr. Andy on cello and me on alto flute or piano) and she loves the new and unusual, so besides writing things for her I think suit her personality, there are no limits on what I can try.

I've just met Carol on this recent trip. She plays the harp very well, and like Susan, has a wonderful Louisiana laugh. She's also pro level, so instrument considerations are of a general type. I've never written for harp before and only know what I read up on and what Carol showed me in a brief clinic after she and Susan played Mosaic. The main things seem to be the harp prefers flat keys, too many accidentals or key changes mean a lot of messing with pedals, and she said an octave and a third was a good limit on chord fingerings. She also made the point that when a harp plays high notes, it's good to have low notes with them so they won't sound tinny. 

One thing I want to go for is having Susan in her low and mid ranges more than the high. Playing softly in the high range of the flute can be done, but it's tough. There was a blend of tones when Susan was in her mid range where the harp and flute sounds really melded. The high flute range can be used, but it will tend to overpower the harp. The other thing for me to keep in mind is that the harp strings are plucked by fingers, not struck by levered hammers as on a piano, so that loud percussive side to the piano is not something the harp can do.

Once things get going, I may add a third part for alto flute or violin or viola. When I was in Vermont and making music with Susan I mostly played an electric keyboard I'd taken, but we did try one duet I'd done years back for flute and alto flute. I didn't play that well, being very rusty on the alto, but the combo of those two flutes creating difference tones on close harmonies is an amazing sound, and one the harp would frame nicely. The alto's range is exactly that of a violin (starting down at the G below middle C) and the upper three strings of a viola and Susan has family members who play them, so the alto part could be covered by one of them when I'm not in Vermont. If written, that part would be easy enough for me to play and there would absolutely not be any E's above high C (concert B as the alto is in the key of G) and low D (concert A) would be as low as I'd want to go.

photo - yard violets, which some consider flowers and not weeds.

Flute Diary

Did pretty well with the Presbyterian Ensemble yesterday. Somewhere between "a gentleman's C" and a B+. Got lots of phrases just right with full tone. Got the high F's and Eb's. Garbled enough notes here and there to keep things out of the "A" range, though.

Came to realize the fingering insecurity stemmed from the fact that on the alto flute, which I played a lot in the 90's between our Vermont readership on regular flute and Dr. Andy on cello, the mid-range Eb has better tone and intonation with the left index finger down, rather than up as on the soprano flute. Once I realized that bit of brain wiring was what was setting off cascades of fingering errors and bad intonation and poor tone, drilling all the little sections where that cropped up really helped.

The other thing was realizing I needed to stop playing horn for a couple of days to let my lips have the ability to finesse the aperture to fine tune the tone and intonation. 

One of the great things about the flute is that you can play as long as you want, as opposed to the horn where your practice time is limited by how long you can buzz your lips well enough for good tone. With the flute, the more you play the more flexible and enabling your embouchure becomes.

This was the most intense wood shedding I've done in a while, and it was very helpful drilling down into technique issues and figuring them out. One thing that revealed problems was to use the metronome on a variety of speeds right around the one indicated. Slightly expanding or contracting the length of the beat helped me learn the essential rhythms of the phrases. I may well have it wrong mathematically, but adjusting the rhythms to slightly varied beat lengths felt more logarithmical than arithmetic. Once I got the feel for the flow and patterns of the rhythm, could pull off the phrases at the various tempi.

One thing that really helped was that the Presbyterian Church is a wonderfully large open space with mostly exposed brick walls. Playing the flute into that space is a joy because the sound comes back at you so easily and clearly, it's almost like having another flute doubling the part. In a great acoustical space like that it's easier to refine your tone, because better tone gets a better acoustic response.

photo - early spring crocus 

Sequential Fingering

Through high school I played the piano, then as an undergraduate took up guitar and banjo. On both the keyboard and the fret board, half steps are arranged sequentially from low to high and moving one finger moves you one half step up or down. 

On the flute, there are times, like Ab and Eb, where you have to move two or more fingers at the same time to move a half step and the movements seem weird to me because they don't conform to how I wired my brain before I started playing the flute. 

Every so often this issue crops up on the horn, but since there are two different ways to make every note, and since there are few sequential movements analogous to the keyboard, I usually haven't been lulled into that frame of mind, though it does happen.

What gets me about the flute is that a lot of the fingerings are sequential, with raising or lowering one finger moving you a half step, and that lulls me into a frame of mind that gets me into trouble.

I also set myself up for this by never venturing much beyond one sharp or flat once I took up the flute thirty years ago. I distinctly remember our Vermont readership patiently telling me a few times that if I practiced scales, it would all be easier. Now that I'm trying to play things with 4 flats part of me wishes I'd at least nailed down using the Ab key. Old dog; new tricks.

Closed Eye Practicing

Down in the comments of this post, Jeffrey Agrell mentions the benefits of practicing with one's eyes closed. I've often done this working on guitar and my voice (and to pull down all the verses of long Dylan songs), but had never really tried it with the flute or horn. One reason for that being not having lots of stuff memorized for either instrument.

Just now, though, I was working on a flute part for the Presbyterian Ensemble. It has several high E naturals above high C, and those high E's are about the hardest note to play well on a flute. When you use the regular fingering the pitch is very sharp, so I've been trying the trill fingering, which is to finger an A below high C and play the harmonic a fifth above. While easier to play in tune, it's harder to get the note to speak, and I've been struggling with it in this particular piece for several weeks.

The short passages where the high E's appear are easy to memorize and play with my eyes closed. Doing so made it much easier to coordinate the fingering of the keys and the adjustments of the embouchure. With the eyes closed it's much easier to be more fully aware of all the proprioceptive feedback. 

With just this single practice technique added to the mix, that high E is popping out clearly and in tune (mostly).

Playing Outside

Yesterday the Players performed outside for the annual hospice butterfly release fund raiser, this year down at the Locust Grove campus of Germanna. The weather was sparkling clear and the temp right at 70 degrees, with a nice breeze that was an occasional bluster and clothes pins were needed to hold the music. Every so often there's low wind noise on the recording even though I'd put a foam cover over the mics.

Among the things learned was why Handel scored things so high in the ranges of the instruments in his outdoor music. The bourrée and minuet we did in the original keys went fairly well. Summer Is Icumin In and Dindirìn, dindirìn which I'd put in keys easy for the band instruments didn't go as well, mainly to my not being able to play the flute cleanly with good projecting tone. Indoors they sound fine, but outdoors the lower pitches just didn't carry. I also didn't figure out until halfway through the flute pieces that turning just a bit to one side kept the wind from interfering with my air stream.

I played horn on two minuets and two hymns and that went OK. We did four spirituals with me on banjo and they went very well. Playing with the Dixies, and the two recent sessions with Dave have all helped me refine the strumming. I was doing my regular moving with the music (only sit when playing the horn) and had a number of children dancing and a few adults swaying with the rhythms. Sang without amplification which reduced tonal nuance, but makes things a lot easier on the roadie side of things.

Warming Up

Bruce over at Horndog blog was good enough to answer some questions I had about warming up on horn, down in the comments to this post of his.

All the instructional materials I've found talk about the warm up and how important it is, but none actually explain what is happening physiologically. They give all kinds of things to do, but don't talk about why or how those particular exercises work. I've essentially been starting over with the horn, and rethinking all the aspects of playing, and that led me to realizing how little I understand what warming up is actually is all about. And not being a natural player, the more I understand what I'm trying to do, the better chance I have of doing it.

I'd always thought starting with low and sustained notes was the way to go, but here lately starting in the middle and working out, with lots of tongued notes in the mix with all the slurs seems to be working a lot better. I've also noticed that practicing the flute first for 40 minutes or so takes care of about 80% of the horn warm up. 

Something else I've noticed is that having a balanced mix of sound from p to ff helps me keep things focused. Also, taking a few 20 to 30 second breaks early on seems to be helpful.

As to explaining what the warm up does, for now I'd say it involves increased blood flow, better proprioception and muscular control of the lips and embouchure, along with better proprioception and limbering up of all the physical elements involved playing the horn - diaphragm, throat and tongue, fingers on keys and hand in bell, etc. Playing music involves a lot of feedback loops, on both the conscious and
unconscious levels, and in and among the physical, mental, emotional and, sometimes, the spiritual levels. The warm up is getting all of that up and running in an orderly way.

Flute performance

This past Sunday I played a flute solo with the Presbyterian ensemble at the 11:00 a.m. service. I got through it with no major blunders, but half way through it I was asking myself why I thought I could do something like that. I had practiced the piece everyday for weeks, it didn't go above high B, and there were no sixteenths. But performing is different than practicing, especially as we hadn't rehearsed with the grand piano up in the church proper, so everything sounded different, which was disconcerting. 

The main thing, though, was trying to create enough sound with the flute to fill the acoustic space of the church. That took a lot more work than practicing had, so by the time the piece was over my lip was shot and just beginning that quivering that fatigue brings on when I was holding out the final tied whole notes.

The other thing was that while playing it dawned on me that my style was not what Al probably wanted. Charitably, you could say I was playing with a lot of heart and expression, whereas a bit more polish and command would probably have been more to Al's taste.