Two Quotes

In this post by Pliable, in which he's really outdone himself, there are two great quotes on what music can do:

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. - Gita Sarabhai

The power of music ... is one of the greatest practical and theoretical importance ... What we see, fundamentally, is the power of music to organise - and to do this efficaceously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or scematic forms of organisations fail. - Oliver Sachs

Musical Assumptions

Here's a comment I made over on Musical Assumptions. And here's a link to the specific post:

Hi. Seems like this is a situation where your blog title comes into play. There's the music, and then there's each individual brain sensing and processing that music. I'd guess it's not just simple prejudice, but a more complex brew that might include that, but also everything else heard beforehand conditioning the response, as well as various differing ways individuals have of responding to music.

For a lay person not completely knowledgeable about the era and without all kinds of mental furniture to enable comparisons, notions of imitation and ranking of importance would probably not be as big an issue.

You begin the post talking about what "bothers" you is the assumption being made. What gets me is that so many academics and musicians seem to have a need to pin pieces down like butterflies in a case, where all is ordered and arranged - and dead.

Part of what you hear is what the brain is looking for, so if you're busy classifying and judging everything you might miss what the music is really about. Analysis is important, but not the only reason to listen to music.

I'm a music therapist, and often tell people it simply does not matter what someone else thinks of music you like. If it benefits you physically, mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually, that's the bottom line.

(Just found you back when "Sounds & Fury" linked that Gould video you had, and very glad I did.)

Double Horn

Working with the BE method, I've been rethinking approaches to the horn. One change was restringing the trigger so the horn is in Bb unless the trigger is depressed, which will switch it over to the other horn, the F. Since pretty much all of the music for the community band is in, for me, the high register, I use the shorter Bb horn to make getting those high notes easier. Restringing the trigger means my thumb is not not involved most of the time, removing one area of tension from the mix.

Previously I'd warmed up on the F horn and then switched over to the Bb as needed for higher notes. Now I warm up on, and do most all my playing, on the Bb horn. So when I started preparing the alto part of a Handel bourrée for the Gordon House performance, discovered I'd developed an embouchure that works well for the Bb horn, but on the F horn it's loose and the tone isn't focussed. 

I've seen where horn players with the luxury of other players in a section will specialize in either high or low ranges, and now it's more clear to me why that is. A corollary to this is understanding another reason I was having trouble with high notes before using BE and the lights came on.

Cousin Steve, a natural trombone player, said one time, "Warm up high if you're going to play high, or low if you're going to play low." So that makes more sense to me now. But the main thing is that I'd never really fully appreciated that there are two distinct instruments involved in the double horn, with an embouchure for each. I think if I'd really understood everything involved in learning the horn I wouldn't have been quite so cavalier about picking it up.

Pliable Post

Here's a comment I made over on a post On an Overgrown Path where Pliable talks about music using a Buddhist perspective:

This post has induced a number of memories and associations for me. Your using Buddhist thought to talk about music reminded me of my first encounter with Tibetan Buddhism, when I was struck by the frequent use of the phrase "spiritual practice". Up until then I'd largely associated the word "practice" with just musicians, athletic teams, doctors and lawyers. Ever since then the notions of practicing music and spiritual practice have been intertwined in my mind. With each you're using daily encounters with an essentially nonverbal experience, trying to better understand it and to use what it offers to better your life experience.

The point you make about music's being able to exist in the mind even when you're not actually listening to a live performance ties in with a lot of the new brain research. A lot of the same places in the brain light up in imaging studies both when you're hearing live music and when you're not, but just mentally listening to or performing a piece.

Since we all have brains that are wired differently because of both genetics and our individual past experiences, we all respond differently to various pieces of music, as well as to various performances of a single piece. So besides there being no permanence to a piece of music, there's no permanence in the minds making the comparisons, either from person to person, or the same person at different times in different moods.

That Steve Hagen quote is wonderful, and led me to the notion that maybe the deep reason music can have such great effect on us is that the flux and flow of one can connect with the flux and flow of the other, that there's a sharing of the ways of working between streams of music and our streams of consciousness.

More Sandow

Pasting in below a comment I made on Greg Sandow's blog on this post of his:

One way of putting the problem is that classical music is sometimes perceived as a top/down situation where the student/audience has only the supporting role of reverencing the canon, along with the performance practices of the moment. I'm a music therapist and for me it's the client that's the primary concern, so whatever type of music and performance style that works sets the direction.

If I read Greg correctly, he's trying to refresh the relationship between the audience and the music by reducing the top/down dynamic and introducing a more general equilibrium. I think music educators can do something similarly with their students ("at least loosen up a bit") by helping students broaden their relationship with music beyond the technical advancement that's usually the main focus.

Include a little improvisation in lessons. Find a key that suits the student's voice on a song or two and teach them the I, IV & V chords in that key. Get four hands going. In my experience there are lots of classically trained musicians for whom improvisation is terra incognita, and given the skill levels involved, that seems a shame.

Back in the old days before guitar tuners, one trick I'd show people tuning was to take the string way sharp or flat then work back to being in tune. Playing pieces in ways that are "wrong" can help you find what's "right". And if you're client centered, the "right" way for one person to play a piece will not be the "right" way for someone else.

Encourage a little composition. It's a great way to play with theory, and increases appreciation of well composed pieces.

Anything to augment all the solo playing. Find an instrumentalist who needs an accompanist for a couple of pieces. Maybe the local teachers organization could connect people for two (or more) piano pieces. Ensemble playing is a different way of learning how to play music that can round out a student's feel for music.

As a music therapist, one thing that never ceases to fascinate me is the myriad combinations of talents and abilities individuals bring to music making. The better we can understand just how it is a particular student is processing music and performing it, the better we can help him or her become a better musician, and to be less likely to burn out and give up music on down the road. And from Greg's perspective, I think they'll be more the kind of audience players and composers enjoy creating music for.

Muscled Music

 In yesterday's community band rehearsal, maestro had us read through some pieces and kept stopping us to remind us of the unforced, flowing, balanced sound we've sometimes achieved. He said even though we were just reading, there was no need to "muscle" through the music. He put his finger on something deeply significant about music making with that comment. 

 I knew immediately what he was talking about, but still had a hard time playing with musicality while struggling to get the right notes. As much as anything I'm guessing that so much brain function is being shifted to simple mechanics that there's nobody home in the part of the brain listening for higher order dimensions of the music. 

 Just about everything in music making requires balance, both in the sounds made and in the behaviors producing them.

Performance Acoustics

 Yesterday was the first community band rehearsal since the performances last weekend. Maestro just said we'd done well, specifically mentioned the final chord of the West Side Story piece, and then moved on to new material. The mistakes made in the second performance weren't mentioned. I understand not dwelling on the mistakes, but my curiosity as to how music making works, and doesn't work, would have liked a few comments on why the breakdowns. 

 The thing that always gets me playing in the high school is the distance from the audience and the unfriendly acoustics combined with the seating arrangement always being different from rehearsals, due to the different dimensions of the areas. This time that was worse than usual because the dress rehearsal was down at Lake of the Woods, so our performance at the high school was the first time we'd played there in a long time, and for me the pieces sounded totally different. Trying to play with the right amount of volume for good overall balance was strictly guesswork.

Slip Rhythms

As a hospice volunteer, since last fall I've been visiting a client in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease. I go by his home every Wednesday and do 30 minutes of music with him. Like every hospice client I've worked with, he's taught me a lot about music and taken me in directions I'd never gone in before.

But today was extra special. Ideas that have been sort of on the periphery of my consciousness popped onto center stage. My client's wife says he's always had a great sense of rhythm, and he sometimes plays the maraca I gave him in perfect time, but I've never quite figured out how the best way to "get traction" with him. Sometimes my guitar playing and singing will engage him, and sometimes it won't. 

I'd always thought that maybe tempo was the key, but today realized that the rhythm itself is far more important. After a lackluster start to the session I did "Eliza Jane", really working that I-IV chord change between the first and second beat of some four beat measures. Because of the afternoon with Dave last week, I've really been able to get a "groove" on that rhythm. Every so often when it's really going well I get flashes of being caught up in Mardi Gras parades (Crewe of Zulu, maybe?) back when I lived in New Orleans. There's something sinuous and trance inducing about that slip time groove. (And I learned "Eliza Jane" going to Preservation Hall back then.)

When I hit on trying "Eliza Jane" today, my client just flipped channels and was totally engaged for a while. Went on to do "She Belongs To Me", "All Along the Watchtower", and "One More Cup of Coffee for the Road" - all Dylan favorites of mine I've done for years and have some slip rhythm type strumming, and he connected with them as well.

Of course, every day is different in situations like that, but I intuitively feel I've hit on something that could have great value.

Lip Callus

The blog is still getting hits from people searching "lip callus", and here lately, specifically from playing trombone and tuba. I play horn and had one last fall, and if you search for "callus" in the field up on the top left, you'll get all the mentions. 

Just this past weekend had a long dress rehearsal one night and the two performances on the subsequent nights, and the callus shows no signs of reappearing, so I think I've figured out what was happening. Don't know how tuba and trombone embouchures work, but for me on the horn the issue was using too much of the outer visible lip in my buzzing and not enough of the soft inner lip. Using the tools involved in the Balanced Embouchure method (BE) also made it clear I wasn't using the larger muscles around the lips in the most efficient and natural way to produce my embouchure, so the buzzing parts of the lips probably didn't have the best support. Still don't know if the good tone I sometimes had will return, but my playing is more reliable, and there's no callus.

Valerie Wells, the horn rep for BE mentioned in an e-mail that she'd had a horn teacher with a callus in the middle of her upper lip that didn't seem to bother her. Also, Gabby, who plays baritone in the Friday group, had one briefly that went away, from what I understand, with the application of an ointment and making sure the mouthpiece was perfectly clean all the time.

Professional Percussion

This past Monday Dave, who plays percussion in the community band and also in maestro's jazz quartet, came by and we ran through some songs with me on guitar/banjo and singing and with him playing my high hat, cymbal and blocks, along with a small snare and some other things he brought. He's far and away the best percussionist I've ever played with. A couple of years ago he filled in with the Dixies on the New Year's Eve performance and it was the best I've ever played with that group because of being able to bounce off his playing with my strumming.

We did some old Dylan faves of mine, along with things I'm developing for the learning materials. Playing with him was a real treat, but listening back while making a practice CD for Andy and maybe the Kenwood Players has been a revelation.

First, I've been amazed at the variety of sub rhythms he creates, along with a wealth of variety in timbres and articulations. His high skill level means he's got a huge range of possible licks to bring to bear, so his playing, while rock steady, is full of variety and surprise.

The other thing took longer for me to recognize has to do with my singing. I've always realized I play with strumming behind the beat, but had thought my singing was right on the beat. Listening back to the recording it dawned on me that I'm actually anticipating the beat with my singing, either somehow due to years of leading people or because in learning songs I tend to line up the accented syllables with or slightly before the beat. Either way it creates an off-putting edge that I'd always thought had to do with the timbre of my voice, when it's really a rhythm issue as much or more than anything else. 

Last night after coming to this realization, tried singing after the beat and it was really difficult, but when it worked it brought a whole new feel to songs I've been singing for over 30 years. 

One of the great things about making music is that there's never an end to how deeply into it you can go, and the learning and experiencing new dimensions recharges the whole endeavor. 

OPC Performance

This past Sunday the Kenwood Players provided some music for the Orange Presbyterian Church service and I think things went well. Dick was absent as he'd had to funeral back in South Dakota, but Maggie stayed. I set the little Sony up in the choir loft to record, but the audio is not as good as it could be. The distance from us down in front of the church meant that all the reverb of the acoustic of the church comes across as a sort of "boominess" and lack of focus to the sound. To work well, the recorder needs to be much closer to the sound. There's also some airy hiss to the sound, which might be from the distance, or could be because I hadn't set the recording level high enough.

A number of folks came up afterwards to compliment us on the music, and Steve heard much the same from his mother and her friends. We had a little sing along with the choir before the service on "Closer Walk". The prelude was "Under His Wings" followed by "The Old Rugged Cross". The anthem was "Were You There?".  The offertory was "Blest be The Tie That Binds". The postlude was "Down By The Riverside". A lot of the positive comments contained something about loving hearing the old hymns.

From a materials perspective, the blend of straight four part hymns vs. spirituals arranged for guitar and improvisation seems about right. Once some Christmas carols are added, that set of church music might be the first completed part of the materials.

We've got the Gordon House performance on 4/17, with just one rehearsal between now and then. This Friday is dress rehearsal for the community band concerts, and 4/10 is Good Friday. The next performance looks to be on Mother's Day at the Hospice of the Rapidan's annual butterfly release fund raiser, which is moving from the gardens at Montpelier to Germanna Community College, where there's a place to go if it rains.

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.

Lip Callus update

Had a milestone moment here in the past couple of days in that in Sunday's band rehearsal I played most of the high notes called for and was able to do so with the new embouchure formed by working with BE. Previously the days after a band rehearsal I could feel how that bit of lip, where the callus had been, wanted to harden up due to my slipping back into the old embouchure for the high notes. This time that didn't happen and it feels as though the callus is well and truly gone as long as I use the new embouchure. 

Where I'll end up with the new embouchure I don't know, as I'm still exploring how it all works using the BE tools, but being done with the callus is a terrific feeling. It's been a long five months dealing with it.

Know the Words

A couple of rehearsals ago, maestro mentioned he had once taught jazz, and that he'd always said, "know the words", of the melody you're playing. Given his emphasis on the details of the music, such as dynamics and articulation, that makes a lot of sense. It also, though, works on a more general level of having an idea of what the song is trying to say and then using that info to help decide what overall approach might work best for you and your instrument.

Just another of those obvious things that's so easy to forget.

Hymns & Spirituals

Here's a copy of a note I sent to Don, our liaison for music at the Presbyterian Church 3/22. 

Don -

Thought I'd give you sort of a menu of what the Kenwood Players can provide for the Presbyterian Church on the 22nd. There's one set where I play guitar and can lead singing, while the players have a generic accompaniment they can use as an improv base, to intersperse the singing with instrumental solos. Here's that set:

Down By The Riverside
Follow The Drinkin' Gourd
Higher Ground
Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho
Just A Closer Walk With Thee
Sweet By And By
Were You There?

There's also a set where I've taken four part hymns from the hymnal and put them lower and in flat keys to make them easy for band instruments to play as instrumentals. Here's that set:

Blest Be The Tie That Binds
Blessed Assurance
In The Garden
Love Lifted Me
The Church In The Wildwood
The Old Rugged Cross
Trust And Obey
Under His Wings

These hymns, along with Higher Ground and Sweet By And By in the previous set were all published before 1922 and are in the public domain. The spirituals are traditional tunes I've arranged for the group.

If there's nothing going on in the church in the hour before the service, I'd like to get there at 10:00 a.m. to have a nice relaxed set-up (if Judy's recovered by then, that will include some small percussion). Then, if any choir members would like to warm up with us in that wonderful acoustic space, we could do some sing alongs, say from 10:30 to 10:45. Then the choir could head to the loft and we could play some instrumentals to set the mood for the service.

Also, if it's OK, would like for the players just to remain seated in the same place before and during the service. That would simplify things for me logistically and feel less disruptive to any Lenten mood we might create with the music.

With my background as music therapist, my primary aim is to help you and Rev. Denise create the service you'd like, so please let me know however we can do that.

All the best,
Lyle

Kenwood Players performances

The Kenwood Players are set to return to the Gordon House 4/17, the third Friday in April. I'm upgrading the music makers materials so we can play the pieces that work best, using what we've learned to make the materials more useful. 

The Players will also be performing at the Presbyterian Church, probably 3/22, covering for Al and Barb while they're on vacation. Need to see what is and isn't appropriate for Lent, but thinking about doing both four part instrumental hymns taken from the public domain, along with some open ended arrangements of spirituals I've done for various instruments, guitar and sing along. 

Along with opening and closing pieces and either an offertory or anthem, thinking about just playing for 15 minutes before the beginning of the service, both to warm up and to simply enjoy the wonderful acoustics of the Presbyterian Church. 

Talking about Music

One of the main reasons for my following the blogs over on the "Regular Reads" list is that there are often posts which talk about music and music making in, at least for me, fresh language. Just thinking about music differently can help to play it differently, and the more ways of playing you have at your disposal the better.

This post over on Kyle Gann's blog had me processing it for days. I even wrote in to the comments, eliciting even more language that sent me running for the Oxford Dictionary. 

BE Round-Up

Now that I've been working with the Balanced Embouchure method for a while, I think I can say it's the answer to my lip callus problem. Basically, I think my previous poor technique was asking that bit of skin to do too much of the work, while other parts of the embouchure weren't doing enough. Everything was fine until I really started to push for stamina and the high notes I'm expected to play in band. The extra stress precipitated the callus. For now, the callus is gone as long as I don't fall back into the old embouchure. If I use the old embouchure for high notes the skin will show signs of wanting to callus up again.

While endurance and the general feel of the embouchure are improved, at this stage while I'm rebuilding my embouchure, the range and tone are not what I'd like them to be. Only time will tell, but I feel confident the range will come. Not sure where the tone will end up. My guess is that the better understanding of embouchure will allow for a wider palette of tone colors.

Working with BE has given me an experiential feel for a number of things I'd heard or read about playing the horn, but either hadn't really understood or fully appreciated. Here are a few of those:

*Angle of the horn - I'd noticed on photos that most horn players hold it so that the lead pipe has a slightly downward angle from the lips, whereas I held it more straight out. With the BE, that downward angle just happens on its own.

*Cousin Steve, a "natural" trombone player always talks about "the air", and maestro says things like, "Let the air do the work." With the BE, I can now feel what they are talking about, whereas before it just didn't register.

*My tone is much "brassier". Andy says he can hear more overtones, and the sounding board (an old spinet with action removed and all strings tuned to the Bb scale) resonates more quickly and with more volume to the new tone. And I also now understand that when maestro was asking for more volume, what I really needed was a fuller tone, which my previous embouchure couldn't give me. (I hope I can regain my previous tone to use from time to time, as it was perfect for chamber music).

*Before BE I didn't understand what warming up was about, and all it did was to fatigue my lips. Now warming up makes sense, and I can play for much longer times. I was previously baffled by the amount of time horn players seemed to be practicing and had pretty much decided my 60 year old lips were the problem.

*Lip slurs were always a trial for me, but now I "get" what they're all about on a proprioceptive level and they're much easier. Lip trills no longer seem out of the question.

*One other result of BE has been greater ease in producing third octave tones on the flute. I think the better muscle awareness is what's making the difference.

Opera Chic

I think I found Opera Chic through some list of classical sites I ran across sometime back. I've been clicking ever since, and this post is a great example of why. The blend of refined musical sensitivity, deeply felt knowledge of the subject and such a wonderfully created persona make the blog one of the best out there. I don't particularly like opera, but I love to read Opera Chic talking about opera and the world of classical music.

Orange Community Band

One of the people who has done a lot of the work organizing and administering the Orange Community Band, the indefatigable Tom M., has begun a web site for the group. There's a link to the Dixie group on the page as well. Tom plays alto sax in the band and tenor sax with the Dixies. There are photos of maestro and of Al and Barb, who blew into town and created the the chorus and band out of thin air. Al also leads the little Presbyterian ensemble where I get to play flute and horn. The Friday group, that performs as The Kenwood Players, is drawn from the concert band.

I grew up in Orange in the 50's and 60's, went away to school and work, and returned in the 90's. There have been a lot of changes in the county. Having all these musical opportunities is one of the best as far as I'm concerned.

Overdoing it

In yesterday's rehearsal, maestro returned to a theme he's talked about several times. He makes the point that in Broadway shows, where there are no close-up cameras to telegraph emotions and effects, everything is exaggerated to make sure those emotions and effects are communicated to the audience. He usually makes this point when talking about dynamics and/or articulations.

It reminds me of a local man who arranges flowers and gives workshops on the subject. Just about anyone who has attended a workshop can repeat his signature quote, "It's not done until it's overdone."

I think when we're making music (and perhaps for people listening to pieces they know well) small scale effects work fine, because our brains are primed to respond to the effects. Playing music for ourselves and performing for others are two different enterprises.

Frames of Mind

One of the handiest concepts for my understanding the process of music therapy was best put forward by Martin Gardiner in Frames of Mind, which came out back in the 80's when I was just starting my private practice in San Antonio. The basic notion is that there are different kinds of intelligence. As I remember, he talks about eight varieties. Four that I remember him talking about are mathematical, verbal, spatial and musical.

For me the specifics weren't nearly as important as having a way to understand how we all come to music with different frames of mind and skill sets. I also think it's handy to realize that just as there are various types of intelligence in general, there are also various types of musical intelligence. Some people have a great sense of rhythm, others can play in tune easily, others memorize easily, others feel chord changes easily, and others have what I call "theory mind" and can tell you a chord they hear is a second inversion with a flatted fifth and an added thirteenth.

Jeff Smiley, in the BE method, talks about the "numbers game", saying that some students are going to naturally "get" trumpet playing, no matter the instructions given by the teacher. The mistake teachers can make is thinking that what they've told those students will work for all the rest. What he does is lay out for the rest of us all those things about embouchure that "natural" players feel automatically. What he does for trumpet playing is pretty much what I'm hoping to do for music making in general.

Whole Body Music

Working with BE (Balanced Embouchure) on the horn has greatly increased my understanding of how the embouchure is formed and how it works. The information and exercises provided give a great overview of what it is you're trying to do with your lips on the mouthpiece. I finally understand what Farkas was talking about with the example of the string bag on the coffee can and what Tuckwell meant about pedal tones being a great way to improve embouchure.

The way I had been using my lips was sort of like strumming the guitar using only the wrist and not the whole arm along with it. The same thing is at play when I stand when playing the horn or flute or sing and can move and breathe with my whole body, not just from waist up when sitting.

Part of the problem is that in being so focussed on the finer points of music and music making, I was not appreciating the full physical nature of creating music. Using your full body in as natural a way as possible leads to better technique and better music.

Ratios

Being a mathphobe, ratios have always been off-putting, but they're integral to music and music making, so they've got to be talked about somehow in the materials. The 2:3 ratio is both the hemiola in rhythm, the two against three, while in harmonic frequencies it's the Perfect Fifth, the same thing, just a lot faster. If one string is vibrating 200 times a second and another at 300, then we hear a fifth.

Harmonic Tuning

This afternoon it was Dick (trumpet), Gabby (baritone), Bill (Eb tuba), Judy on percussion and singing, and me on horn and flute. Trying to develop a free form tuning etude to help people hear intervals other than unisions and octaves, while gaining an appreciation of the harmonic series and how it establishes the range from pure consonance to very dissonant.

First had Bill play his middle Bb and Gabby the F a fifth above, shifting down to the Eb and back. Once that was established I played the Bb below middle C and Dick played the third and fifth and flat seventh. What really worked was Bill and Gabby playing those Perfect Fifths and Perfect Fourths, because they could really hear the coherence when they were right. My guess is they never really realized fourths and fifths are more consonant than thirds.

So the place to start with the etude is with the fifths and fourths, because I think they're easier to hear and recognize as being in tune than unisons and octaves. There's almost a sense of feeling the standing waves in the air, that octaves don't generate, at least to me. Another way of putting it is that the fourths and fifths suggest triangulation when focussed, whereas octaves are more like lining up points in a straight line.

Balanced Embouchure

Because of my lip callus and struggling to play high notes on the horn, I've been on the lookout for embouchure information. One of the horn blogs over on the regular reads list sent me to Julia's Horn page, and she was talking about and linked to Jeff Smiley's site. He's a trumpet teacher in Dallas with a method called "The Balanced Embouchure". 

I was impressed by the sample information on the site and got in touch to get the address of his horn representative, Valerie Wells, and through her bought the book with the extra horn materials. Looks to be the best $50 I've spent on music materials in a long time.

Working with the materials in the book I have a much better idea of what's going on with my embouchure than ever before. I think I've figured out how I managed to get the callus and why the high notes were so hard. After taking off playing for a month have been back at it for over a week with no callus and the hope I'll play even better than before, though I do now understand why horn players talk about embouchure changes being such a big deal.

Once I get further along I'll post more about "The Balanced Embouchure", but not the details of the method. What impresses me the most about the book Jeff's approach to teaching music. The man has taught for a long time, been paying attention to what works and what doesn't, and most importantly, treats his students and the learning process with great respect. He gives you the tools and the general parameters, but realizes that every individual has to find his or her own way. 

A lot of music educators seem so focussed on the music, they seem to forget the students are individuals. It's an extreme exaggeration, but I've often thought some educators would be just as happy with a bunch of trained seals, as long as they performed the music well. 

Jeff has created an outstanding set of materials because he's been paying real attention to all his students all those years, and that has led him to a number of realizations about the learning

process that I've never seen so wonderfully and completely presented. Besides helping me play the horn better, I think working with these materials will help me better go about doing a better job on the materials I'm trying to create.

Digital Recorder

I just got a Sony PCM D50 digital recorder and it looks to be a great tool. It has two condenser mics onboard and 4 MB memory. All it really does is record very well and allow you to edit out and delete the bits you don't want. I'd thought it would be useful to make trial recordings of the CD to go with the learning materials, but it may be good enough to make the real thing. 

Using the onboard mics means the mix is a result of where players are in relation to one another and the recorder. Any EQ adjustments and reverb additions will have to be made on the WAV files on the Tascam multitrack or Garage band before burning the CD.

What's great is that it's very easy to operate and has plenty of memory, so I can just set it to go and then just worry about making music without being a recording engineer at the same time

Where the music is

I've been starting back on the horn after taking a break to let my lower lip heal from the callus that developed due to poor technique, a worn mouthpiece, and using pressure to get high notes. Paying more attention to how the sound is created than to the music as such led to the realization that on some level I sometimes act as though the music is in the instrument and in the score.

While working on embouchure and trying not to force notes, there came the idea that the music is inside me, not inside the horn, and that awareness really helped create a more natural embouchure and sound. It's a simple notion, but could be useful motif in talking about a range of musical issues, e.g. rhythm, gesture and articulation. 

Horn instructions always include the "hear the note before playing it". That works just as well for rhythm, gesture and articulation, no matter the instrument. 

Directions for 2009

Over Christmas I was involved in five performances: the community band (horn), the Presbyterian small ensemble (horn & flute), the Kenwood Players at Gordon House (horn & flute), the Dixieland band (banjo & vocal), and the Kenwood Players at Oak Chapel (alto flute, guitar and vocal). The strongest response (from me and the audiences) was to the sing alongs (Dixie and Oak Chapel), with the Gordon House performance a strong second.

For this past Friday I prepared a five part improv platform for Down By The Riverside to build on the success of the sing alongs. It worked well by spreading the instruments (Eb tuba, baritone, trumpet, clarinet) over the frequency spectrum with all being heard well in the mix, and everyone having plenty of choices of what to play. We also worked on #'s 1, 3, 13 & 14 in the Sampler Suite, with Dick improvising a descant on repeats, and that went well, though he asked for guitar style chord notation to make the improvs easier.

(Dick & Maggie went to a concert this week where classically trained players riffed on classical themes and had a great time, so that reinforced the idea of improvising repeats in the Sampler Suite.)

So I spent all day yesterday assigning well tempered chords to Renaissance dances, refining the five part improv template, and checking to see what hymns are in the public domain so that sing alongs can be built around them. With the Sampler Suite and the hymns the idea will be to present the material as it exists in the public domain, and then a second version in the improv platform (which will have the extra advantage of making it easy to break out melody lines and guitar chords in whatever key might be needed). 

Along with the hymns and spirituals for sing alongs, traditional and W.C. Handy blues are things I'm looking to include in Music for Music Makers 2.0. 

Henry Purcell

I just got a book of Purcell's keyboard music and am having a great time working through it. His music is closer to Renaissance dances than that of Handel by at least a generation, and it shows. There's a clarity of movement that's more suggestive of the physical dances than you find in Handel. After Handel the dances are pretty much abandoned.

This music also seems a touch more modal than well tempered, which makes it all the more appealing to me. And the lack of complexity means its a treasure trove of materials to break out into three and four voice pieces for small ensembles.

The book is the Schirmer Oesterle edition, and as I worked though some of the pieces, they sounded very familiar. Turns out I'd gotten the Dover edition years ago, looked through it a bit, filed it away and forgot I had it. The thing is, the Oesterle edition has ornaments I'm fairly sure are inauthentic, but they sound great, and I prefer them to the authentic ones listed at the beginning of the Dover edition. Made me wonder if the piano (or in my case, electric keyboard) wants different ornaments than those that work well on the harpsichord or virginal.

Proof of Concept

The Kenwood Players did five old time hymns over at Oak Chapel on Sunday, mostly as simple instrumentals, and it went well. Both members of the congregation and of the players had good things to say about the experience. For me it demonstrated that just having some real orchestral instruments playing very simply arranged music in a small setting can elicit a good response from people.

The idea for part books of hymns for various instruments is a good one, though there's probably not going to be a generic version that will work in all cases, unless the harmonies are reduced to mostly I, IV and V chords with very simple accompanying riffs behind the melody. 

Another issue is that so far as I can see, no matter how old the hymn, collectors always use the exact same version in the same key in all the different hymn books. On the plus side, that means people are going to remember and associate that key with the hymn. Levitin says when folks are asked to sing well known songs, they very often match the pitches of the original.

The down side of the fixed key is that it's bound to not work well for some people's vocal range. Seems the answer might be to have a sort of appendix with small print versions of the song in several different keys.

The Exaltation of Channeling Music

Last night I got to lead three sing alongs, one in the first set and two in the second set of the Touch of Dixie performance for Music on Main Street. Every time I've had the opportunity to do this I've had the suspicion the amazing feeling I get is a one off thing that will wear off, but so far that's not happening. Leading a sing along with the banjo is old hat for me, but leading a sing along with the help of a Dixieland band is new and takes things up several levels.

Part of it is I don't have to work so hard just to create the music to be sung along with. And somehow, leading the band with the banjo has the effect of making leading the audience in singing much easier. Maybe it's the band modeling for the audience how the music should sound.

On a practical note, the simpler Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho, which didn't require a song sheet, went much better that Just A Closer Walk, which does require a song sheet. I've been working up a simple arrangement of Down By The Riverside, which has a simple refrain and call and response verses, and I think it could work well for the Dixes.

Cold Time

The Dixie group is playing tomorrow evening as part of the Music on Main Street in Orange, and we rehearsed this afternoon. I'm getting over this nasty viral cold that's been going around, and while playing this afternoon I flashed on another reason having a cold might help one's playing. 

Earlier I mentioned it might make one more physically sensitive and less likely to over-think. Another part of it is my time sense is subtly altered. We played things with faster tempi, but I felt I had all the time in world to vary banjo strums, both to make some more arpeggio like and to make more subtle syncopations.

I have the feeling if I could cultivate this expanded sense of time, my playing would be remarkably better. It may just be that feeling so miserable, I'm not as hyper about being "right" in my playing.

Guitar Action Trick

My black Alvarez guitar, which was my work guitar in San Antonio, had been in its case for over ten years until I got it out recently. When I restrung it, the A string buzzed a little bit on the first fret, but no others. I've always avoided sanding down frets, because there's no going back. So what I did was snip a short section of the unwound end of the A string and put it in the groove in the nut, under the A string, raising it just enough that it doesn't buzz on the first fret anymore. If there's a difference in the sound, I can't hear it.

Harp

The precipitating factor for the recent posts on music as massage was the presence of a harp at the Christmas concert of the community band and choir. Ms. Maestro is Anne Michaud, an accomplished harpist who also played with the Pittsburgh Symphony. She was the accompaniment for one of the choral numbers, and I got to sit directly behind her on the next tier up, with my music stand sitting down on her tier, so I couldn't have really been any closer.

As she played, I both heard the sound and felt the vibrations in my torso. I can't remember a more pleasing musical sensation.

Another thing that struck me was that Ms. Michaud has the compact build and physical manner of a gymnast. She brings a lot of physical energy to bear on the instrument, and has great enthusiasm in doing so. One of the ideas informing the learning materials is that music is, a least in part, simply physical gesture made audible. Ms. Michaud playing the harp wonderfully demonstrates the interplay of physical gesture and musical forms.

Flute, Alto Flute & Horn

To give the Friday group more treble voices, I started playing the (soprano) flute, which I had never really worked with before, other than as a solo instrument to take a break from piano back in conservatory days. I've had real trouble with intonation halfway up the second octave and on up. Running through things with Andy on cello fooled me into thinking I was OK, but I now realize he must have been compensating for my sharpness high up.

So I got out the alto flute, which I played for a number of years, and discovered there were intonation problems there as well. I adjusted the cork in the head joint on both and that helped a lot. But the real culprit has been the horn. With both flutes and the horn, moving the lower jaw has a lot to do with playing in tune. The problem is that the jaw movements needed for each instrument on each note are different, sometimes subtly and sometimes more obviously. 

Once all that became apparent, things have improved. Playing multiple instruments is a real joy, because each has it's very own way of making music. But there's a price to pay if you don't completely "change channels" when going from one to the other.

Close Up Music

The more I think about the response the Kenwood Players got at the Gordon House, the more I think it has to do with the audience being so physically close to the instruments. If you click on "medicine" in the tag index, there are a couple of posts linking to news stories from Britain talking about how people in hospital who hear live music regularly leave the hospital sooner and require fewer meds than those who don't have the music.

Part of the effect probably has to do with the performer being able to tweak the music to suit the individual patient, increasing the connection between player and listener. After the Gordon House session, my intuition suggests hearing live music up close also exposes you to deeper and more subtle timbres than you'd get sitting out in a concert hall. So on a physical level it's sort of like a massage. And on an feeling/emotional level, that increased connection between player and listener is probably an intensifier of the experience.

We're set to do some hymns over at Oak Chapel 1/4/09, and I'll try to pay attention to this. The problem is that leading sing alongs, I've got everything memorized and can focus on the clients. Playing the alto flute with the players requires full concentration on the music and the music making, so it's harder to observe the response.

Modulations

I've never been a big fan of modulations. Rather than seeming to grow from the music itself, they more often feel like cheap tricks by the composer to maintain the listener's attention. This is especially true (to my ear) of the repertoire for concert band. I'd rather the music stay in the same key and use rhythmic and melodic variation, along with same key harmonic variation. I usually like music to create and nurture a mood, or an alpha wave type trance, and modulation tends to alter the mood.

Working with the trumpet on the Christmas carols made me aware of a good reason for modulation. The trumpet has a very limited useable range, restricting the available keys for various tunes, depending on where the notes fall on the scale. If you were to arrange a piece for various instruments, when you come to a trumpet solo you might want to modulate to a key suitable for that melody in that key.

The Kenwood Players I

On Friday we had the inaugural performance of the Kenwood Players over at the Gordon House, an assisted living facility. Bill and Crawford on Eb tubas, Maggie and Dick on clarinet and trumpet, Steve on trombone, and me alternating horn and flute. We played Christmas carols in four voice arrangements based on the old Episcopal Hymnal.

The room was small and there were, at most, twenty residents in the audience. One of the things I kept noticing was how the audience seemed deeply affected by the music. It was nothing like leading a sing along, and, of course, Christmas music is especially appealing. But I was reminded of the studies that live music benefits health. With all the timbres we created in that small room, so close to the audience, you could make a case it was as much subtle body work as it was music.

I hadn't worked with a population like that for years, and never with such a fine group of musicians helping me. It made me realize how I've always presented music therapy performances differently than straight up musical performances. I naturally did as much as I could to break down the barrier between performers and audience, and at the end of the session, a nice little social mingle naturally bubbled up.

Dream Trio

Flute, alto flute and 'cello make a wonderful trio. Some years back I covered the alto flute while Susan and Andy played wonderfully on flute and 'cello. Susan moved away, so we no longer get together, so it's only in retrospect I realize just what a great match-up we had going. 

Working with the band instruments has meant learning that where instruments are in their ranges has a lot to do with how the mix comes out. The thing about the flute, alto flute and 'cello is that they each have at least a full two octave and a half range. More importantly, there's not the large variance in timbre and projection over the course of their ranges. That meant that as long as we listened to one another, a nice blend could be achieved. With the band instruments, some combinations of instruments and voices just don't work.

Cold Sensitivity

Back in conservatory I was a piano major and Mr. Henry Black was my teacher. One day, and one day only(!), he marveled at my playing, asking all kinds of questions, trying to find out why my playing was so much better than usual. I had a very bad cold.

Yesterday doing body work, while having a cold, I had the same sort of feeling of greater sensitivity. It may be that having a cold affects the brain's processing of things. Playing an instrument and doing body work are sort of similar activities, and the cold may attenuate the "thinking" component of the thinking, feeling, intuiting, sensing Jungian mix. 

Trombone in D minor

The Dixieland group I play in will be doing two sets in the Baptist church for the Music on Main Street event New Year's Eve. They've been letting me do a sing along version of Just A Closer Walk With Thee and now we're going to try to add a sing along version of Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho. The very simple arrangement I worked up just gives the melodic and harmonic outlines as a basis for improvisation, and is based on the version I did for the Ten Traditional Songs section of the music learning materials. 

In the learning materials Joshua is in C minor, but for this I brought it up a step to D minor because it suits my voice better, and I lead the singing without a microphone. Steve, who plays professional level trombone in the group, mentioned that the melody "lays" well on the trombone in that key, just as it does in the other D minor number we sometimes do, The St. James Infirmary. I took him to mean that D minor is, in general, a good key for the trombone.

Mind Practice

This post over on Horn Notes quotes from a book called The Mind Gym by Gary Mack. It ties in neatly with some of the things Daniel Levitin covers in his first book, This Is Your Brain On Music.

One interesting study involved college basketball players. For three months, one group shot free throws for one hour each day. Another group spent an hour each day thinking about shooting free throws. The third group shot baskets thirty minutes a day and spent thirty minutes visualizing the ball going through the hoop from the foul line. Which group, at the end of the study, do you think improved its free-throw shooting the most? The third group did. The imagery had as much impact on accuracy as shooting baskets.

Blogger and horn teacher Ericson follows this by talking about visualizing the situation of the performance as well as how to play the music. 

Whenever I perform I want to be there way ahead of time to get used to the space, hoping to minimize any surprises during the performance. Differing acoustics call for differing approaches to performing the music.

Voicings

Andy came down yesterday and we ran through the Sampler Suite with flute on the top voice and cello on the bottom voice. Other combinations may work as well, but I don't think any are going to be better. Made me realize some combinations of instruments can use the Suite as is, but others will call for serious tweaking to get a good balance. It's also possible some combinations will need so much tweaking, using different music entirely might be an easier answer.

Consorts

When the Friday group started, we were an Eb tuba, baritone, trombone and horn, sort of a low brass consort. Then we added trumpet, clarinet and flute, making us a broken consort in Renaissance terms, and the Renaissance consort has been the closest thing to a model of what the Friday group might be. Adding the treble voices changed things as well.

With the first group, achieving a good blend was fairly easy. The one issue that cropped up most was the melody voice not standing out enough from the harmony voices. With the broken consort things get much more complicated. Where each instrument is in its range, especially the trumpet, has a lot to do with its presence in the mix. The trumpet playing lower voices only works if it's playing in its lowest range. The flute playing a lower part in the bottom fifth of it's range won't be heard unless there's only the clarinet above.

Speech|Music|Dance

In setting the stage for understanding how music works, the current draft of the learning materials uses the idea that there's a continuum from speech through music to dance. The Horndog Blogger mentioned immediately below has various quotes that show up on his posts. The one that's currently on the compression post is:

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music."
-- Ezra Pound

Such a shame the man had to end up a fascist for Il Duce and then on to St. Elizabeth's. His early stuff has amazing flashes of insight.

Audio Compression

Here's a great little post over on Horndog Blog covering what's going on with compression, which is used so frequently in audio we hear these days. There's an embedded video with aural and visual examples. 

When Stewart Weaver did a demo mastering job on my "Slow Music" CD, he did the opposite of compression to the keyboard sound, making the softs softer and the louds louder. I knew he'd done something that really changed the sound of the CD for the better, but until he told me he'd used some decompression, or expansion, I couldn't tell how he'd done it. 

Muscle Memory

Synchronicity strikes. I've been formulating a post in my mind about muscle memory, the trigger being the repeated realization that sometimes I misfinger notes on the horn because somewhere in my body/mind I think I'm playing the flute. And on the flute, the non-sequential notes like Eb and F# are my most difficult after years of playing the piano where everything is simply one after the other on up or down the scale.

In the NYT today there's an obituary of a man at the center of a lot of memory research, and here's a snip:

Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. This system depends on the function of medial temporal areas, particularly an organ called the hippocampus, now the object of intense study.

Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pick up a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it.

Standing Horn

Still practicing horn standing up and still sort of amazed at how much better I sound. For one thing, the intonation is much better, and I think it's because when sitting I have to remind myself to keep the jaw low and throat open, but when standing that's naturally the way things are. 

The other thing I keep noticing is that articulations are more "horn like". Over it's very long history, if you were sitting playing the horn, you were probably on a horse, otherwise you were standing. Somehow sitting in a chair cuts off the involvement of the lower half of your body when playing, and somehow that limits the physical expression you can bring to your instrument and the sound you're making.

Stand Up Practice

I'm working up some Christmas carols on the flute, and know from past experience that I simply play the flute better when standing up as opposed to sitting. Besides breathing better, there's something about standing that gets the whole body behind the sound and expression.

Last night I tried playing the horn standing up and was amazed how much better it sounded. Along with everything else, I had the feeling that my embouchure was forming better, creating a better and stronger tone. Quick short notes were particularly better as well. For the horn, though, the downside is that it's a much more cumbersome and heavier instrument to deal with standing up.