Voice Diary

One project I've had on the back burner for a couple of years is making a recording for friends of the the Dylan songs I've been singing for over 30 years. There have been several sessions with Dave the former Army Band drummer and Dr. Andy on bass, separately and together, to get a feel for how to do them with a small ensemble as opposed to just me and the guitar.

Here lately I've been doing some test recordings to figure out how to best use the audio equipment to get the best sound on the voice and guitar. Running the sound through the speakers and/or headphones has been a revelation. It's like holding a magnifying glass to both tone and articulation. In a purely acoustic environment the sound of your voice is a blend of bone conduction and what the room sends back, which has the effect of buffering and delaying it for the tiniest bit of time.

Using a nice condenser mic no more that a foot away from the mouth and having that feeding headphones gives the voice a temporal immediacy and a clinical clarity. Small details I never noticed loom large. (Dr. Andy says it's the same for him using headphones with both the cello and the bass.)

One thing that's become particularly apparent is my not articulating clearly throughout a song. Just because I know the words as well as I do from memory doesn't mean someone listening will.

Something else is that the tone of my voice doesn't always sound like I'd imagined it does on some of the songs, and isn't conveying the sense and mood of the song as I intend.

All of which is to say recording yourself is a wonderful aid to learning to make music, and that using headphones while making the music amps up the experience.

One small audio procedure that seems to work well setting volume levels at that sweet spot that's at a high level comfortably short of feedback shriek is paying attention to the EQ settings. With my Mackie mixer there are knobs for high, mid and low EQ and I've been turning up the volume enough to hear a little room noise through the speakers, then dialing back any EQ that creates any sort of hum or white noise, and then turning up the gain. It's dawned on me that feedback shrieks are as much a creature of poor EQ settings as they are of too much volume.

Audio Note

Our group, the Kenwood Players, had an outdoor performance of Dixieland jazz last weekend at the Gordonsville Street Festival, and I took the full set of audio equipment. Over the past several years, learning how to set it up and get a good sound has been something of a challenge, but I'm making progress.

Last year at this event I pointed to two large keyboard amps (fed by the mixer) straight out from the porch we play on, and there was this weird edge to the sound on the recording, especially the trombone. I decided it was the result of something like an infinite regression like old time barber shop mirrors, with the sound bouncing back and forth across the street. This year I placed the amps so they were at a 45 degree angle to the porch, one pointing up the street and one down, and the sound was much better.

As usual, each tuba had a dynamic mic clipped into its bell, there was a condenser placed near the clarinet and one for me to sing into, a dynamic for Dick to announce songs. A new wrinkle has been clipping a small condenser to the banjo, because its sound is so directional. Having it go through the sound system means I can face any direction I want and everyone can hear it.

The other part of the system was a set of small powered speakers used as monitors, and that worked well. My sense is that besides helping us hear each other better, monitors help round out the sound. I'm used to thinking feedback is always a bad thing because of the howls it can create, but a little feedback, i.e. the sound from the monitors blending into the overall sound, can be a good thing.

But I always forget something. This time I had a knowledgeable music friend there evaluate the balance of the various instruments out front, but I didn't ask the players themselves if they could hear everyone else well, and it turned out the trombone player was too far from the monitors for them to help.

When we first began the wind came up, blowing one music stand over, and creating a low rumble in the mics, even though they all had foam covers. I dialed back the bass EQ on them all and the rumble went away.

The balance on the recording is about as good as we're going to get in a live situation, with the exception of the tenor sax not being strong enough because I forgot to put the vocal mic over next to him when I wasn't singing. I forget that even though the balance of the mix can sound good to me in the middle of everything, the recorder is in a different place in front of us and what it's picking up is a different mix altogether.

One thing I did in preparation for the event was to mark the inputs on the mixer with what was going to go where (there are four inputs with phantom power and trim controls and four 1/4 inch inputs). That meant I could set the EQ for each input ahead of time to best suit each mic, so that at the event only minor fine tuning was needed. All the pans were set right down the middle.

Warming Up

Until I took up the horn I never gave much thought to warming up. On the piano, guitar, flute and cello I just play a few easy things, more to get my mind focused on the task at hand than to limber muscles. With voice there is always doing things in the middle range before trying to hit high notes, but again, just doing a few easy pieces fits the bill. If the goal is to be a high level player, then things get more complicated, but just playing for enjoyment doesn't need to entail extensive warming up, as long as you pay attention during the beginning of each session.

The horn, though, is a different beast altogether, and not warming up properly can have huge downsides in simply not being able to play well or for very long. This post by James Boldin is a good one on some of the issues of horn warm-up. 

Reading and thinking about James's post lead me to remember that the "warm up" for Buddhist spiritual practice, whether attending a dharma talk or a solo meditation, is reviewing and "setting" the motivation. In most of what's been written about musical warm ups, the focus is on the physical aspects. Taking a little time at the beginning of each practice session to think about what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're trying to accomplish it, can be valuable as well.

Physical technique is very important, but there's a lot else involved in making music, and calling some of that to mind at the beginning of each practice session can bring more balance of all the elements to the endeavor.

Composing Music

One of the projects I set for myself this summer was to write a piece for horn and cello. Didn't happen. I came up with what both Dr. Andy and I thought was a great kernel / introduction in one of those odd time signatures I like so much, but nothing doing. Either those dozen or so bars really don't want to go anywhere, or I wasn't able to figure out how it can happen. So I put it aside and spent a lot of time arranging music for the brass group. But there was this feeling of failure, of a journey not completed, not to mention wondering if the muse had fled.

Then one of my students asked for a piece for her and her sister, flute and trumpet, and I came up with a little duet for them. And when arranging things for the weekly meeting of the brass group I've been doing these little harmonic studies to hear how the various instruments blend from various points in their registers. The point being that setting small goals makes coming up with something much easier.

Another thing that's been going on in the composition realm has been going back to pieces written in the 90's for various combinations of flute, alto flute, keyboard and cello - and trying to get the computer to play them again. There have been any number of upgrades to Finale since then, and it's taken a number of tries to get playback to work, but it finally does.

At any rate, I've had a few listens to those old pieces and it's been great fun, certainly in the psychological sense of being reminded of my state of being back then, along with being reminded that whatever it is I want to do as a composer comes out as a kind of style or sound, something first noted by our Vermont readership / flute player for whom the music was written. Kyle Gann revels in every piece being a totally new departure, and they certainly sound that way. For me, that there's a commonality to my sound over the years is sort of reassuring.

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.

Horn Diary

This summer has been the best I've ever had on the horn. During the hiatus of the community band I successfully got back the Farkas  Very Deep Cup mouthpiece I started with years ago, but moved away from when I had the embouchure crisis and the callus a while back, when I switched to a Medium Cup and then the Deep Cup for a while. I love the tone of the VDC mouthpiece and that its thin rim allows for so much embouchure movement inside the rim. While it might be marginally better for me to stick with a smaller mouthpiece for band music, and to match the first horn player's tone, I'm going with what I like more in the music I'm doing away from band.

One set of pieces I've been working on are the 12 Duos Mozart wrote for horn. I got the music years ago, but the gauntlet of preparing band music drew me away from it, and it's been wonderful music to come back to. Like some of the Handel pieces, they combine simplicity with musicality, with every note perfectly placed. One thing I've really enjoyed has been the detailed articulation, which seems to be the original intent of Mozart. They're making for great exercises as well as pleasing pieces for both me and the brass group. I'm putting them in keys that allow the trumpet and horn play 1st and 2nd voice up and then horn/trombone and Eb tuba down an octave.

Now that I seem to have some basic horn technique to work with I keep noticing an issue of brain rewiring. Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line. And I keep being caught off guard by how an interval, of say a fourth, feels different up and down the range of the horn, whereas on the piano it feels the same everywhere.

Something else I've had since I got the horn and got back to this summer are books of the hunting horn calls. I can finally play all the high F's and occasional G's called for. The blend of signaling and music is both fun and interesting. One thing I'm trying to arrange for the brass group is the old hunting song "Do you ken John Peel at the break of day" with some of the hunting calls between the verses.

As for community band, having a 1st horn player has made it a much more pleasant experience in that I'm not in the position of having to play music that's really too hard for me. Not playing the higher note in harmonies is a challenge after years of doing so, as is trying to be in tune with the 1st horn more than the band as a whole. But all of that seems to be coming along, and simply hearing how a good player plays band music is a continuing revelation. It's sort of like a dialect I've never gotten the hang of because I'd never heard it spoken.

Mindfulness and Good Luck

Here's a brief article on a simple study suggesting that people who consider themselves lucky display more mindfulness than those considering themselves unlucky. It gives a wonderful illustration of how mindfulness can ease problem solving.

Here's the final paragraph:

People who we often consider lucky are more relaxed and open to what's going on around them. They're not focused on a single task, blocking out everything else so much that they miss something important and unexpected. What this experiment demonstrates is that luck may not so much be luck, but whether or not our mindset leaves us open to opportunities we would otherwise miss because we're so absolutely sure of what we want.

That last sentence also gets at why giving some thought to your motivation can be helpful.

Thoughts from Yo-Yo Ma

This brief article based on an interview with Yo-Yo Ma has some great quotes in it. 

Here he's talking about the Kalahari bushmen:

“They do these trance dances that are for spiritual and religious purposes, it’s for medicine, it’s their art form, it’s everything. That matches all I’ve learnt about what music should be or could do.”

In modern life we tend to think of music as something separate unto itself, as opposed to its being a deep experience of our humanity. I'll never forget going to a performance by various African groups and the program talking about how the performers had a hard time just making music to fit an hour or two time slot - they were used to going on for hours and hours.

The following paragraph from the article starts off talking about the work of Demasio and ends up getting close to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the importance of motivation in any endeavor.

I mention Damasio’s insistence, in Descartes’ Error (1994), that the self cannot be meaningfully imagined without being embedded in a body. This must be resonant for a musician? He concurs and suggests that the role of tactility in our mental wellbeing is under-appreciated: “That’s our largest organ.” Ma sees this separation of intellect and mechanism, of the self and the body, as pernicious. “We’ve based our educational system on it. At the music conservatory there’s a focus on the plumbing, not [on the] psychology. It’s about the engineering of sound, how to play accurately. But then, going to university, the music professor would say ‘you can play very well, but why do you want to do it?’ Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.”

Memory, Music & Alzheimer's

Following links in a story about brain research and Alzheimer's, I found this preview of an article behind a pay wall:

Music is known to aid memory, especially recalling autobiographical information. 

For example, people with Alzheimer's disease are better at remembering events from their own past when music is playing in the background. It was less clear whether tunes could also help them learn.

Brandon Ally at Boston University and his team were inspired by the report of a man with Alzheimer's who could recall current events if his daughter sang the news to him to the tune of familiar pop songs. They decided to try it out for themselves.

Since the title of the article is Dementia: Sing me the news, and I'll remember it, the researchers apparently met with some success. This fits with how the neuroscience is telling us music uses various parts of the brain, as opposed to a single one that can get damaged by disease, and that for Alzheimer's patients that can mean using music to enhance memories by pulling together undamaged parts of the brain. I just had never seen anything previous to this about music being used to help lay down new memories for such people, but it makes sense.

Psychoacoustics

Here's an article in the NYT discussing the latest in simulating the acoustics of a great concert hall in your living room, as well as making hearing aids that do more than simply amplify sound. The word "psychoacoustics" is used to cover not just what the ear hears, but also how the brain interprets that information.

Anyone who has ever tried to mix and master audio for a CD will immediately appreciate this quote:

. . . One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said. . . 

. . .“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

Like music therapy and music pedagogy, this is another field where the new neuroscience looks to bring a much deeper understanding to what works and what doesn't. 

Performance Diary

This past Thursday my great nieces and Crawford and Judy and I played down at the Orange nursing home to a mostly wheel chair bound audience. We did the same program we did at Oak Chapel, adding Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, Sweet Hour of Prayer and Down By the Riverside.

I have never received more effusive, heartfelt and sincere thanks from an audience after a performance - ever. While I was packing up and schlepping equipment back to the car they kept rolling up to have a private moment to say just how much the performance had meant to them.

A small part of it has to do with my being down there once a week for years, so there's a nodding acquaintance with most of the residents. What just melted me was that two residents who've suffered strokes and have speech problems, and who normally don't really try to say too much because it's so difficult and frustrating, rolled up and really worked to say thank you.

The main reason for this was that the girls totally peg the cuteness meter. Once the audience realized we were really going to pull this off and successfully play the old hymns that mean so much to them, they slipped into a relaxed state of pleasure. The room just got sweeter and sweeter the more the girls played and sang, and when I got the audience to sing along with us (and most of them knew ALL the verses without hymnals).

Having done music in institutions a lot over the years, I couldn't help notice we pulled a lot of staff into the doorway of the room. The staff at places like that have heard it all, and they're very busy people, but when something special is happening, they notice. When I was leaving, several came out from back offices to say just how much they appreciated our playing.

My main contribution to the event was figuring out what the girls are capable of doing at this point and arranging music to suit. Skylar on trumpet is just starting her second year in band, and just got braces, so her range is Bb below middle C to the Bb an octave above, so mostly everything was either in Bb or Eb to accommodate that, and when it wasn't, she played the drum.

We just worked our way through the books I'd done up for them and did as many iterations of the hymns as we could get away with, with me calling out who took the next time through each time. That gives everything an improvisatory feel as opposed to plodding through a preset program, and it keeps the audience on their toes, so to speak.

Towards the end we had Crawford sing "Good Night, Irene", as the hurricane had just recently passed, and that went down very well as well. 

Judy P is the proud owner of a new ukulele with an onboard pickup I can plug straight into an amp. The amplitude of a uke strum is about half that of a guitar, so she can go much faster and throw in delightfully quick syncopations. Makes me realize one reason I so love Judy's drumming is that her background as a strummer so informs it, so it's great to play guitar and banjo with.

Back in this post I talk about what one blogger calls "transmission". And in this post there's talk of transcendence. What keeps coming back to me is that it's the sort of thing that can happen in all sorts of places outside concert halls, but in the era of recorded music and with fewer people playing in small catch as catch can ensembles (which was the norm for human society until the past couple of generations), people seem to have lost touch with that. If I can create some materials that will help facilitate more of this kind of small scale playing, I'll count that as a success.

Nadia Boulanger and the Unconscious

This woman's name pops up all the time as having been a composition teacher for numerous modern composers, but until this brief article, I had never seen anything about how she taught.

Bearer is also a composer who studied with the French composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. “She was very, very focused on the musician’s mind,” Bearer says. “To study with Boulanger meant that you learned to use those unconscious parts of your mind that respond to music, that dream of music, and you learn to bring them to the conscious state where you could take a pencil and write them down.”

Going through the training with Boulanger, Bearer says, “I can say through personal experience that music does not live in the same part of my brain as my science."

I came across this just after leaving a comment on this post on Julia's Horn Page. She's talking about Jeff Smiley's work (which I most recently posted on here) and says:

As your lips learn to do new things, the things that work better are gradually and unconsciously incorporated into your current embouchure.

Maybe it's my background in the psych field, but I find the astonishing vituperation Jeff's work can bring forth from music educators about as fascinating as the work itself. It's my intuition that it's this opening up to and working with the non-conscious aspects of the mind that's so upsetting. If you're dedicated to reducing the activity of music making to a set of rules and concepts, it seems to me you're setting yourself up to paying more attention to the conscious mind than all the rest of it.

Performance Diary

Yesterday we performed at the large Presbyterian Church in the town of Orange and last week we performed at the small Macedonia Christian Church down in what my father used to refer to as  "the lower part of the county" (it's more coastal plain than piedmont). I don't think we've ever sounded better than the audio at the link for Macedonia from two years ago as it was one of those times when everything sort of magically gelled. These two recent performances were very good, though, and I want to note what went well.

At Macedonia the minister, one of our tuba players, made our music the central feature of the service. We led the singing of the hymns as well as performed some tunes on our own. Crawford specializes in short sermons and services, and in a service of less than 60 minutes, we played for 35 minutes.

Crawford says it's the best he's ever heard that congregation sing, and that was my feeling as well. I've pitched most of the hymns a step or three lower than the hymnals, so they were more in the range of regular people. I led the singing with my voice and the guitar and the players did a marvelous job of supporting the singing, with a different instrument taking the lead for the singing of each verse. On hymns of three verses we added two instrumental iterations between the sung verses and built the mood.

I'd done up a keyboard album of the transposed hymns for the organist and having her play mostly the bass and harmony lines was a real treat, filling out the sound. From past experience I knew that when I faced the congregation, she and the other players can't hear the guitar, so I took an amp and put it back next to them with just enough volume for them to hear it but that I couldn't detect. That worked very well. 

We've slowly been working up an improvisatory Dixieland version of The Church in the Wildwood, which is sort of a theme song for that particular church, and that went down very well.

At the Presbyterian Church yesterday we just did music before and after the service with a couple of mostly instrumental hymns during the service. Crawford was still preaching down at Macedonia, so we were down to one tuba, and Bill B our sax player didn't make it due to a freak car/power line pole accident near his house preventing him for getting out.

Before everyone else got there I set up our equipment and sang that long song of Dylan's, Boots of Spanish Leather, from up in the choir loft where we were going to perform. It takes me high and low in my range and is a great workout, both for my voice and for testing acoustics. I figured out the best ways to aim my voice into the wonderful acoustic space, and how much to project it to get just the right amount of reverb.

Once everyone else got there we played right up until the service as people gathered below. At one point we got a nice round of applause (after Just a Closer Walk with Thee) and during the "joys and sorrows" portion of the service one of the members said how wonderful it was to walk into the church with everyone smiling and the music coming down from upstairs.

One thing I've never had happen before is that while I was singing the one verse of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior I did between instrumental iterations, my ears popped twice in that pressure adjusting way they can. The hurricane had passed during the night, so I don't think it was a big pressure change in the environment. I think it was just that I was opening my jaw in that "yawning" way voice teachers talk about and it allowed things to equalize, which in the normal course of things wouldn't have needed to.

Quotes to Save

A neuroscientist:

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

We listen to the "music" of the brain all the time in the lab. My favorite station is Jazz 88. I cannot help but listen to music the way I analyze large-scale brain activity, searching for the syntactical rules that allow separation of messages and long-term features to be predicted from short time scale interactions. The esthetic features of music emerge from its complexity — a halfway state between trivial predictability and random noise (i.e., pink noise) – just like the complex features of brain dynamics.

Glenn Campbell has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and one of his band members says:

"The style he's been playing does not sit in his memory, it sits in his muscles and his emotions which he will always remember. [It] is quite astonishing to see how deep music sits - it's not just your brain, it's emotions in your flesh and spirit,"

Alex Ross uses the word "gesture" talking about the music of Liszt:

Freire, who has long given life to the old cliché "poet of the piano," has a way of connecting Liszt's gestures so that they form a naturally flowing narrative; you never feel hectored.

Approximation

One of the ideas I'm working on for the 2.0 series is coming up with a workable definition of what music making is. Defining music itself is a rabbit hole I don't particularly want to fall into, but being able to say what I think music making is about has to be part of the ground plan for any approach to helping people do it.

That definition has to include the idea of approximation. Part of the deep attraction of music making is that you can always get closer and closer to being better able to express yourself musically. If that's not part of your practice of music, burnout becomes probable. 

From the fool's gold mouthpiece the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying

What's so recharging about music making is that the more you do it, the more it helps you understand what it is you're trying to express. That other great American poet, T. S. Eliot, in his usual grim way, gets at this issue here:

. . . one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate . . .

It's like blogging. The more I try to say what I think I mean, the better I understand the thoughts beneath the language trying to find a way out. And the same goes for music making, with each approximation getting closer and closer to pure expression, but rarely, if ever, getting there.

Horn Diary

Community band has been on hiatus since July 4th and I've been having a wonderful time on horn looking at music more to my liking. In particular, I've been working on some arrangements of Corelli, Praetorious, Tomkins and Gibbons pieces, along with some new Bach and Handel, for an ensemble of trumpet, horn, trombone, and two Eb tubas. (To my ear, the two trumpets in the standard brass quintet is at least one too many.)

Since a first horn player showed up in band, I've been working more on the mid range than the high, and using the F horn more than the Bb. The Renaissance and early Baroque music suits me down to the ground and practicing is a joy. It makes perfect sense to me and the path to making it sound good on the horn is clear cut. I have a clear sense of the various ways I might want it to sound. (One of the top three or four comments I get on stuff I write is that is has a Renaissance flavor.)

Me and BE

 "BE" is the short hand label for Jeff Smiley's "The Balanced Embouchure" approach to helping people with trumpet and horn embouchure, of which I'm a big fan and have posted on a number of times over the past couple of years. 

James Boldin has just done a post on it and here is part of the comment I put down below it. It's the best brief summary of my response to BE I've come up with so far.

Appreciate the open minded approach to Jeff Smiley’s work. I’ve been watching the debate on this for years, ever since getting his book and using his approach to get through an embouchure crisis that had me thinking about giving up the horn.

My sense of it all is that it can be very helpful for people looking to take a new direction due to the standard approaches not helping whatever issues they might be wanting to work through and who are willing to rebuild from the ground up.

For those for whom the standard approaches are working, though, a major overhaul and starting all over is something of a threatening prospect.

What I most appreciate about Jeff’s approach is that it helped me get a much broader and deeper understanding and feeling for what the embouchure can do and needs to do, and that helped me figure out what I needed to do to get everything working. He gives you the tools, but the responsibility is yours, and that’s a nice fit for how I like to work with people.

The other thing about Jeff’s approach I really like is that it goes well with all the neuroscience coming out saying how making music uses so many different areas of the brain, not all of which are always under our conscious control. His exercises helped me get a better sense of that when it comes to playing the horn.

My guess is that a lot of music educators don’t “get” what he’s up to because it’s so very difficult to look at something differently after a lifetime of building up something has worked for them. Besides, most people in the field are probably “naturals” to one degree or another and can’t really conceive what it’s like for the rest of us who aren’t. I’ll never be a natural horn player, but Jeff’s book helped me understand what that must be like and what I have to do to approximate it.

James says he's going to get the book and try it out. I look forward to his response and maybe talking with him about it. I'm also reminded I printed out Dave Wilken's somewhat riled up take down, with the idea of comparing it to the book the next time I reread it. The thing is that I've been having such a great time on the horn, particularly since my flow experience with the Fauré Requiem, I haven't felt a need for a refresher.

Baroque Oboe

My oboe friend from conservatory days, Craig Matovitch, just uploaded this little gem.

Down in the comments on his post on Facebook about it he says, 

One thing these barogue pieces do is get me very honest with lots of things, tongues, tuning, aspects of expression. Its good therapy.

Performance Pix

Here are some photos the activity director at Gordon House took of our performance there last Friday, which I posted on here.

In this one, from left to right, is my second cousin Steve, Dick & Maggie S, Crawford H, Bill C and Bill B. The Sony recorder is on the camera tripod in front of Bill C.

Here's a shot of me on banjo and Dave F on trap set on the right side of the flattened semi-circle. Dave is following the music closely because for a couple of numbers it was the first time he'd ever played them with us. Pro level reading skills really do come in handy.

Here's a nice close up of Crawford and the Bills:

That's all the current Kenwood Players except for Judy P who plays percussion for us in church and other settings where a full trap set would be too much. 

Cousin Steve (trombone), Dick (trumpet) and Dave (trap set) are pro level players and play in a number of different groups. Steve joined the Fredericksburg Big Band several decades ago and now runs it. They've raised millions of dollars for charity over the years. Dick is a retired army colonel and he and Maggie have lived all over, seemingly starting Dixieland groups wherever they've been. Dave was a drummer in the Army Band.

On a genetic note, Steve and I are second cousins because our grandfathers were brothers. He has several dozen Sanford cousins and I think at least half are very musical. I have just over two dozen Sanford cousins and am the only one doing music, other than one or two who took piano lessons as a child and dropped it.

Another thing to mention, which relates to tone quality is that from time to time in rehearsals and performances, Dick and/or Steve will play with such gorgeous tone it's all I can do not to stop playing and just listen. Hearing such great brass tone up close and personal has been a boon to my horn playing.

Performance Diary

This past Friday the Kenwood Players performed for an hour over at Gordon House. It was 20 minutes Dixieland (me on banjo), 20 minutes Hank Williams and hymns (me on guitar) and then 20 minutes of Dixieland. Everything went very well.

We were in a flattened semi-circle and left to right it was trombone, trumpet, clarinet, the two Eb tubas, sax (soprano and tenor) trap set and me. Very nice mix on the recorder, except on my vocals. Had it set-up right in front of the tubas with one mic facing the trombone and one the trap set. If I were to crank it higher and stand right in front of it on vocals I think the results would be about the best it can get. The closer it is to the sound, the better it is.

One small note on gesture. A handful of the Dixieland arrangements call for the banjo to go tacet in the last measure or so, and we did one of those pieces. Without thinking I did a sort of flourish on my last strum trying to get it perfectly in the rhythm of the trap set, and seeing that flourish and sensing the end of the piece coming up, a number of people applauded prematurely. I'd mentioned before that I conduct music therapy sessions in part with gesture, just hadn't made the obvious connection to influencing an audience as well.

Something else to note was how well we and the audience connected. Gordon House is an assisted living retirement home, so the residents are the right demographic for old time music. What happened that was so nice is that they picked up on how we josh amongst ourselves between numbers and started making jokes along with us. After we finished a lot of them felt comfortable coming up and speaking to players and there was quite a little confab there for a while.

We're also getting better at being more efficient performers. We performed for 60 minutes and the music only CD runs right at 45 minutes, so for all the talk, we went right from one number to the next and got a lot in. Any more might have stressed embouchures, especially on the Dixieland which is pretty demanding.

Should also mention that Dave F, former Army Band drummer, was able to join us. Having a professional level drummer makes all the difference, especially on the Dixieland. For me it's a treat not to be the sole time keeper on banjo, so I can get a little creative accompanying the other players.

My Core Constituency

Here are some photos of the rehearsal/warm up for the performance I wrote about in a previous post. These first two show the twelve year olds who started band last September, Skylar on trumpet and Amber on flute, along with the Reverend Crawford Harmon on E flat tuba, who's been playing his instrument a bit longer. 

Here's one with me on flute. . . 

. . . and on horn, with the six year old Carly in the first pew waiting her turn.

And here's the four year old Calli.

Providing the music for these people to play in this kind of situation is exactly what I'm trying to do when I talk about creating learning materials. What the girls are leaning in band and what's in the hymnals wouldn't work for this, but it's very easy to create arrangements that suit the players and the situation.

Working with the girls once a week this past year has been a wonderful opportunity to figure out what does and doesn't work with beginners, and working with Crawford and the other members of the Friday group, helping them get better use of the skills developed over a lifetime, is just as rewarding.

Many thanks to Crawford's wife Liz who took these pictures, and for using only available light, so there were no irritating flashes. I wasn't even aware she was taking the pictures.

Baroque Gesture

In this Pliable post about a now deleted CD, he writes:

As Benjamin Schweitzer explains in the CD booklet, "...there is something in the gestures and tonality of [Baroque music], which is closer to modern times than one would assume in the first place".

Given my interest in the gestural component of music I was delighted to see someone actually using the word, particularly in association with Baroque music, as pieces requiring just three or four voices from Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks, A Musical Offering and Anna Magdalena's Notebook have been mainstays of my music making for decades. 

Most of my favorite classical music is that written before 1750. It's still connected to people actually dancing, which is where a lot of the gestural component originates. It's also from a time before equal temperament took over and before the various rules and regulations of music writing that brought an end to the simpler, but to my ear very rich, modal harmonies and less uniform metrical structures.

Here's another quote from the same source which I like, because as a music therapist I'm much more interested in how individuals can express themselves than in conforming to the standard practice styles laid down by academics.

'Sound experiments are part of daily life for a baroque orchestra. Because more so than their "modern" cousins, historical instruments offer numerous possibilities for sounds that are equally valid.'

Your Tone Is You

It's my feeling that tone is the most primal of the elements of music making, just as one's tone of voice is the most primal element of speech. 

During my 20's I worked as an attendant and group therapist on locked psychiatric units. My primary responsibility was to insure the physical safety of the patients, which meant closely monitoring the emotional state of patients who might become violent with themselves or others. Over time I learned to pay close attention to tone of voice as an indicator of mood, more so than the verbal content of speech. Listening closely to tone of voice was also very important in understanding what was going on under the surface in group therapy sessions.

The flip side of all that attention paid to the voice tone of others was trying to always insure my own tone of voice was not accelerating a volatile situation, but rather helping to keep things relatively calm.

Those experiences led me to be more conscious of something I think we all do on a mostly unconscious level, i.e. make judgments about the personality and state of mind of others based in part on their tone of voice, and that we use our own tone of voice as an underpinning to expressing ourselves through speech.

It's my idea that when the neuroscience gets sophisticated enough, we'll see that the tone quality of your music springs from, and affects the listener in, deeper and more primal parts of the brain than the rhythm, melody and harmony. When you make music, your tone sets the stage for whatever else you do. 

(As a side bar to this discussion, there's the question of the tone of piano players. It would seem that, more than wind and string instruments, the tone of a piano resides more in the piano than the player. That's largely true, but the hammer action means that strings can be hit with different amounts of force and at different rates of acceleration (see correction below), exciting the strings in subtlely different ways. Along with that, high level players can control the dynamics and the temporal sequence of every single note to such a high degree that individual styles can be developed and appreciated.)

UPDATE - Jonathan West corrects me in the comments:

By the way, you're wrong about the piano. By the time the hammer hits the string, it is no longer attached to the key and so it is in free movement and has no acceleration due to the key. Being in free movement, the the sound made by the hammer's action on the string varies from one note to the next solely on the speed with which the hammer hits.

What pianists and others think of as tone on a piano is derived from timing and use of pedals, and also from different degrees of force (and hence loudness) applied to different notes of the same chord. To a great extent, the idea of varied tone on the piano is a cognitive illusion fostered by the player - one which the player himself may be unaware of and honestly believe in.

All of what Jonathan says is very well put, especially that last sentence. During my time as a keyboard major in the late 70's I convinced myself that there was something more than simply the speed of the hammer affecting the tone of the note, and had come up with my faulty explanation involving acceleration. There is the acceleration created by gravity as it works to pull the hammer back to its resting position, but that's a constant rate involving the number 32. So maybe what I'm feeling is how that interplay between gravity and the force of the keystroke allows for super fine tuning of the hammer speed. 

Jonathan is also absolutely right to mention pedaling, which I'd not included and which has immense effect on a player's tone. Oftentimes a hammer is hitting a string still vibrating anywhere from a little to a lot from a previous hammer stroke, and pedaling controls the amount of that vibration. 

Performance Diary

This past Sunday I helped my great nieces perform in their little country church (celebrating its 120th year). One 12 yr old started trumpet last September and the other started flute. The 6 yr old and the 4 yr old sang. The Reverend Crawford H from my regular group joined us with his E flat tuba to supply bass line (and because I so enjoyed playing with a group with a 75 yr difference between the oldest and youngest player).

All went well, particularly on our instrumental version of The Church in the Wildwood. The first run through was me playing alto line on flute with the flute playing soprano and Crawford on bass. The second time through I switched to horn on alto line of the chorus while the trumpet played the lead. The third time through was trumpet and flute on lead, horn on alto and tuba on bass. 

Perhaps the best thing was that things having gone well, the girls are eager to perform again, so we'll probably take the show on the road to the nursing home before school starts up again.

Two weeks ago I made a CD with them of a complete run through of our performance for them to practice with. They used that CD and were completely comfortable with the sequence of singing and instrumental solos, and the little ones used it to get the words of the songs down. 

The practice CD was so successful it makes me think something like that would be really helpful in the materials for learning I'm developing. Unlike a music minus one CD, I talked through who was doing what while playing and singing so that there were plenty of cues to follow. The idea would be to create CDs to jam with more than to play one particular part. That also allows for more than one to play along at the same time.

Revising Compositions

I've always been hesitant to revise pieces once they've been completed. Part of it has to do with the realization that when writing the piece I was as fully conscious of all the bits of it and what the decisions were to create and join them together as I'll ever be. It's hard to go back and rethink one bit without rethinking it all.

In today's post, Terry Teachout is talking about artistic perfection and has this quote with another take on the issue of revision:

The wisest artists are the ones who finish a new work, walk away and move on to the next project. Whenever a colleague pointed out a "mistake" in one of Dmitri Shostakovich's compositions, he invariably responded, "Oh, I'll fix that in my next piece."

Moving Making Music

In this post Greg Sandow is talking about the culture of music making in high level orchestras and he tells this anecdote:

After a Berlin Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, I ran into a musician from the New York Philharmonic whom I happened to know. Berlin, I think, is all but universally acknowledged to be the world's beset -- and most inspiring -- orchestra, an institution run by its musicians, who show great commitment and great autonomy while they play, not least in the way they move, putting their entire bodies into every note.

"Did you see that?" the Philharmonic musician asked me, almost levitating (as, I think, we all were, from how wonderfully the musicians played). "Did you see how they move? If I moved like that, I'd be reprimanded."

I play much better standing up, whether guitar and singing or flute or horn. Besides being able to breathe better and more naturally, standing up allows me to move as I play. Working with music therapy groups over the years, and now fronting the Kenwood Players, I don't conduct, but lead through gesture, along with verbal instructions half sung with the music. 

When I see players sitting stock still when making music it makes me think the music is too abstract and too far removed from the motions and gestures that make us human. Cerebral music, like say a Bach four part organ fugue, usually doesn't engage me (The Art of the Fugue being a major exception).

On the other hand, I think we've all seen people making music with far more physical gestures than needed, as if those gestures can make up for the lack of technique needed for the music being performed. Like everything else in music, a balance needs to be found.

Early Work History

During my junior and senior year at Duke I worked as an attendant on the locked psychiatric ward in Duke Hospital. Second semester senior year (1971) I worked there 32 hours a week and then full time that following summer. Duke Hospital was (and remains) the top level referral hospital for a large geographic area, so the docs and nurses were top flight and the patients tended to be difficult cases.

From '71 to '73 I worked as a group therapist at DePaul Hospital (now defunct) which was the old line Catholic mental hospital sitting right on the edge of Audubon park in the Garden District. The unit I worked on there was a locked long term one for adolescents and young adults who received no psycho-tropic medications. It was all talk therapy with their docs, combined with a group therapy session every morning and evening shift. (It was at DePaul I encountered my first "music therapist", albeit without formal credentials.)

From '74 to '76 I worked as an attendant on the locked admit unit of Santa Rosa Hospital (now defunct) at the Medical Center complex in San Antonio.

All that time my music making was mostly recreational folk guitar and singing, with a couple of gigs singing in bars and restaurants.  

The point of all this is to explain how where I'm coming from is usually very different than where most music therapists and educators are coming from. In my experience all music therapists and music educators went straight from high school to an undergraduate music degree, their options then being performance, education or therapy. Their background and skill set is heavily weighted towards musical issues and they have to work to acquire the skill set to teach or to be a therapist.

My strong suit is the experience of being a therapist and I've had to struggle to gain the musical skills needed to be an effective music therapist. Because of that I tend to see the elements of music and music making more in the overall realm of what's going on with the person involved, than the purely musical and pedagogical aspects.

Performance Diary

Back on Saturday 7/2 the Orange Community Band played in a band festival in the pavilion down at the end of the pedestrian mall (formerly Main Street) in Charlottesville, VA. The pavilion is the major outdoor big time venue in Charlottesville and it was a real treat to play in such a well designed, top of the line venue. Ample room on stage and very nice acoustics. The band played well and the audience very receptive.

Then on Sunday 7/3 there was the Picnic in the Park here in Orange out behind the airport. My group opened up with a Dixieland jazz set of about 40 minutes, then the community band played for about 45, then there was a short ceremony (which included my singing the national anthem with the banjo, a tenor sax and an Eb tuba), then a mother and daughters singing group, then my group started with some Americana until the storm came.

For the Dixieland I used a clip-on dynamic mic on the banjo because the sound is so directional. Putting it through the sound system meant everyone could hear it no matter where I was facing.

Also used mics on the tuba, harmonica and the clarinet, all run through the Mackie mixer and out to the two large Peavey keyboard amps, with the control room feed going to a small keyboard amp for our monitor. Then ran a line from the out of the most distant amp to a powered mixer and two speakers set up even further away. We had nice sound coverage throughout the area without it being too loud up front.

The community band apparently played very well. The director and the music educators in the group all talked about how "musically" we played. Here's an excerpt from the director's note to us afterwards:

. . . but once the music 'gets in your blood' it more-or-less begins to take on a life of its own. At that point the conductor becomes far less important as the engine drives itself from within the ensemble. We have to remember, though, that this occurs only when the notes and rhythms are learned and we are no longer bound to the printed page. That's when real music begins...and that's exactly what happened on Sunday night, in particular.

My problem was, as it has been in the past at these events, trying to change mental gears from banjo to horn. With the banjo I just play without thinking, but with the horn it is only with full concentration that I can manage to not embarrass myself. So for the first several numbers my memory is more what I was up to more than how the group sounded.

The Kenwood Players last set started, and then the storm came. Torrential rain and lots of close lightning. We were all safe under the large shelter, but I had to kill the sound system because of blowing rain. Until it was announced that the fireworks were canceled, it was me on banjo, a trumpet, sax, clarinet and tuba in acoustic mode. 

My singing was semi-hollerin', but people liked it and we kept everyone occupied during the storm. (Nearer My God to Thee was mentioned several times ;-) Orange being the small town it is, have had several people come up to say they really appreciated our persevering in the face of the storm.

One thing about my singing voice I keep meaning to mention is that I live on a dairy farm and most days spend most of an hour getting cows up out of the field and into the barn. Yelling is involved, but over the years I've worked on being loud and projecting without straining my voice. We're in the piedmont, so there are hills and vales offering great acoustics for testing uses of the voice.

Beauty in the Brain

Here's one of several articles that have come out on an fMRI study from University College of London. It's very preliminary and may get revised in significant ways, but it makes a great deal of intuitive sense to me that our awareness of beauty can occur in different categories of experience. 

They watched where the blood went in the brain when people experienced beauty in both music and visual art. One particular part of the brain responded to both, the medial oribitofrontal cortex (mOFC).

Several studies have linked the mOFC to beauty, but this is a sizeable part of the brain with many roles. It’s also involved in our emotions, our feelings of reward and pleasure, and our ability to make decisions. Nonetheless, Ishizu and Zeki found that one specific area, which they call “field A1” consistently lit up when people experienced beauty.

The images and music were accompanied by changes in other parts of the brain as well, but only the mOFC reacted to beauty in both forms. And the more beautiful the volunteers found their experiences, the more active their mOFCs were. That is not to say that the buzz of neurons in this area produces feelings of beauty; merely that the two go hand-in-hand.

This all made me think of the Golden Mean and proportions and relationships and balance. Beauty seems to reside in the ways various parts of things fit together and relate to one another. In the most beautiful, the various parts can disappear into the whole.

Lineage

In some recent posts with the 2.0 tag I've been trying to establish a conceptual framework for the deep process of the practice of music making, making connections to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. 

In this morning's post Pliable makes the connection of lineage in both the practice of music and the practice of Buddhism. Over and above my never having seen that particular commonality, there's much to think about is the post. On a hectic Independence Day just want to bookmark the post to come back to, probably multiple times.

Among the questions to consider is how Pliable's use of the word "mystical" in the following quote will play with skeptics. 

. . . the establishment of a mystical link from the performer forward to his audience and back to the composer . . .

Transcendence

This post is mostly just to bookmark this post of Pliable's for the little back and forth we had down in the comments. It's helped me at least ask better questions about something that's very difficult to come to grips with, but is a core issue of what music therapy is or can be.

The issue is whether or not one person's transcendent experience listening to music can be compared to another's, particularly if the genres of music are very different. A. C. Douglas, one of my "Regular Reads", maintains that the transcendent experience offered by "high culture" is much superior to that offered by pop culture.

To really answer the question you have to both get inside other people's consciousness and make value judgments about their experiences. 

Another thing that comes to mind when talking about a U2 performance versus that of a symphony orchestra is that part of what Bono is up to is a kind of modern shamanism. Which leads to the question of whether someone like Leonard Bernstein was just another kind of shaman. It's easy to make the case that a kind of ritual is involved in both rock and symphonic performances. 

And then there's what Stanislav Grof found in his research into psychedelics and transcendent experiences back when that was legal, that the mindset of someone approaching the experience combined with the setting in which it occurs has a lot to do with the outcome. 

Back in the 70's when I was getting getting my Registered Music Therapist credential, music therapy was called an "adjunctive therapy". As far as transcendent experiences go, my feeling is that music can be involved in them, but is probably not the single cause when they occur when listening to or making music.