Performance Diary

Last Friday the Kenwood Players performed at the old building of the Orange nursing home, where the residents are mostly wheelchair bound, and this afternoon we played at the new building which has more ambulatory residents. As we had our full compliment of players both times - trumpet, clarinet, trombone, tenor sax, two Eb tubas, drums and banjo - we were able to play Dixieland arrangements. Live music can play on the emotions of audiences, but Dixieland is more specific - it makes people happy. 

Both audiences moved and tapped and swayed and smiled and were very appreciative with both applause and coming up afterwards and thanking us. I once again had the thought that having been a banjo player in a Dixieland group may well have been the better decision than going into music therapy if simply making people happy was the motivation.

The most striking vignette for me had to do with a wheelchair bound gentleman I've been seeing in the lobby for years on my hospice volunteering visits on Wednesdays. I've always nodded and said hello, and his single response every time has been "Alright, honey!", and that's all I've ever overheard him say to anyone. He appears partially paralyzed on one side, so I've assumed he's a stroke victim. To close things down, we do an "Amazing Grace" sing along before ending with the "The Saints". He sang every word clearly, and in tune, and with great tone and feeling. Amazing grace, indeed.

On the audio front, the rooms are similarly sized, but couldn't be more different acoustically. In the old building there are lots more drapes and thicker carpets. In the new building there's a lower ceiling, bare walls and a little stage right back against a bare wall. I clip a dynamic mic into the bell of each tuba so they can be easily heard without having to work so hard, put a condenser next to the clarinet for the same reason, and have a dynamic mic for Dick the trumpeter to announce the numbers, and another for me to use for vocals. All these mics go to two amps. With all the settings the same, today in the new room we were much too loud until I turned everything down by about half.

Part of the problem is that whenever I ask the group to play up for a sound check, they never get to the volume we get when we really get a groove going. We've talked about it, but somehow we're always louder once we get going, so I've learned to dial back the recording level a bit to adjust for that. It might be that the players somehow think "sound check" is the same thing as "tuning note". 

In my experience, most musicians don't really know much about audio. It's rare to find one who knows the difference between a condenser and a dynamic mic. I'm getting better at being a "sound man", but it's been trial and error all the way. At the least, it's been a long time since I set off a feedback shriek. 

The one thing that I'm learning that's been helpful is to set things up so that the amps work as monitors for the players as well as reinforcing the sound for the audience. The better players can hear themselves and each other, the better they play.

Reed Embouchure

We have a sax player in the Friday group, who has wonderful tone and intonation on the tenor sax. He also plays the alto sax in the Presbyterian Ensemble. It's the soprano sax, though, that he's really keen on, having only recently given it a lot of time. His sound reminds me strongly of my sound on the horn. The higher I go, the more tentative and unsure it gets, but with the soprano sax I think you have even less room for error with both tone and intonation. It may well be the least forgiving instrument in the band. To my ear, only the piccolo can come close in sounding as flat out wrong.

He's mentioned a couple of times how he realizes he needs to "loosen up" his embouchure as he goes higher. Makes me think of BE. Just wrote him this in an e-mail and hope to pursue it with him:

I've been using a book/method for horn called "The Balanced Embouchure", which was written by a trumpet player and there's a horn player who has adapted the exercises for horn. Turned me around.

Here's the basic idea as it affected my playing. We tend to think the embouchure is just the muscles right at where the mouth meets the instrument. I had ended up super stressing those muscles to the point of collapse one day in rehearsal (turns out this is not unknown among the horn players I'm in touch with via the net).

The method is for brass embouchure, but I'm thinking the deep principle might help other embouchures as well.

Here's the deal - whatever you can vary in your embouchure - do it in extremes. Get used to the feeling of doing it really wrong in one direction, and then go do it just as wrong in the other direction. Doing this shows you how much deeper into your musculature your embouchure goes. If you get all of it going just right somewhere between the two extremes, not just the bit closest to and touching the instrument, your control will be much firmer, and your ability to fine tune tone and intonation much enhanced.

There is, of course, way more to the Balanced Embouchure than this, but this idea of exploring extremes to better understand and feel the middle is one of the underlying notions of BE that I want to try using in realms of music making beyond trumpet and horn embouchure.

Modular Music

One of the many things I've learned working with the Friday Group/Kenwood Players is that any positive effects of short pieces (say 2 or 3 minutes) in performance are erased by the shuffling around before and after. So I'm trying to string together tunes that have similar tempi by putting them in the same, or closely related keys, and just conjoining them as Handel did some of his short pieces, just going from one to the other with no transition. 

The individual tunes are clearly marked with double bar lines at beginning and ending, with the title given over the first measure, so beginners can work on individual pieces before stringing them together.

What looks to be a fun aspect of all of this is that once the basic work of transposition and juxtaposition is done, then the players can jump from piece to piece in whatever order suits, not necessarily the way it's laid out on the page. As far as I'm concerned, anything that helps players see the written music a just a simple aid to playing, as opposed to a holy writ, will help them become better players in the long run. 

The other thing I'm aiming for in these little arrangements is that they will sound fine played as is, but they can also be used as stepping stones to improvisation. Lavishly detailed scores can be fun to dig into, but they can also feel way over-determined if they head into directions that don't appeal to the player(s). 

Seeing the player(s) as more important than the music means the scores are going to have a different purpose and are going to have a different look and feel.

photo - garden greens.

Soundboard

Here's a photo of what I call the soundboard. It's the spinet piano I had as a child with all the action removed. All the strings are tuned to pitches in the B flat scale with the intervals being more just than equally tempered. There are more strings tuned to single pitches than there are on a regular piano and the white cloth threaded through the bass strings is there to help me keep straight which strings are tuned together.

The original idea was to strike the strings with felt mallets to get a nice humming going and to record that sound as a wash to go behind tracks on the Mantra Mountain CD we did for Lama Tashi. 

Currently it's mostly there to help me play in tune on the horn and flute. When you play the note in tune and with good tone, it sings back the note and others in the harmonic series as well, especially when some nice condenser mics are placed close to it and run through the sound system. When the Friday group meets it's a handy way for us to tune together.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Eb Tuba

The blog is now hooked into the net enough for it to show up in Google searches, and the word that's getting hit is "tuba", whether regular or Eb. 

There are two Eb tubas in the Friday group. They come in a wide variety of styles, were much more popular back in the 40's and 50's, and have a range from the Bb below the bass clef to the Bb sitting at the top of the bass clef. Their range is meant to extend a few more notes in both directions, but they are rarely called for.

The confusing thing about Eb tubas is that their name suggests a transposing instrument, but they are not. They play the same music as the regular, larger Bb tuba, but have learned the differing fingerings needed to get those same notes. Back when I first wanted to arrange some music for them I could not find that information on the net, nor could I find a fingering chart.

Eb tubas are a great fit for a small ensemble, giving a great bass without being too big a sound. They can also be fairly agile, but can't play running lines like a cello or bassoon.

One of the aims of the learning materials is to give everyone a chance at the melody line. Working with Bill last Friday I realized he generally never played legato, even on Christmas carols where he would use legato when singing. Just mentioning that to him flipped the switch and his playing was immediately more melodic. He said the effort he had to make was much more mental than physical.

The other thing I noticed was that if he played the melody line with full tone, I could play the alto line on the flute and it sounded better that when Andy and I tried that with cello. My first guess is that the tuba has stronger upper partials on the octaves than the cello.

Mosaic

Mosaic is a flute and piano piece I wrote in 1994 for Susan and myself. We've always enjoyed it, and it gets the best response from listeners of anything I've written. Andy and I have also tried it as a 'cello and keyboard piece, and with a few modifications, it works well. (Though nothing else is going to come close to Susan sailing through it bringing out all the melodic inflections written with her in mind.)

Yesterday I tried it with clarinet and trumpet both doubling the solo as well as taking turns playing it. It can work for clarinet, but not for trumpet. The trumpet needs a lot more rests for breathing and lip recovery. And even with a lot of modification, I'm not sure it will work because of the innate brilliance and power of the trumpet's tone. While the piece is very rhythmic and has a sort of happy bounce to it, there's a kind of wistfulness to it that's unsuited for the trumpet. 

If Maggie enjoys the piece enough to work it up, we could work on doing whatever we can to make it more suited to the clarinet, and then at that point, maybe add some trumpet descants or harmonies. And since Mosaic is a modular piece, maybe new 14 bar units written especially for the trumpet could be added to the pattern. The idea of possible future reworking of the mosaic's pattern has been there from the beginning. Will be interesting to see if it can be done. 

I think the appeal of the piece has a lot to do with its rhythmic foundation. It's not difficult, but not used very much. Throughout the piece, which has six beats per measure, a measure of 1,2,3,1,2,3 is followed by a measure of 1,2,1,2,1,2. Two groups of three followed by three groups of two. It's an easily felt pulse that has the impetus for melodic variety built right in.

Eb tuba and clarinet

Every Friday afternoon I'm having some friends by to proof out the part books of the learning materials. Posts with the "Friday" label will be things I've learned in those sessions. Current possible attendees are two Eb tubas, a baritone, a trombone, a clarinet, a percussionist and maybe a trumpet. For the Renaissance and Handel/Bach pieces from the Sampler I'm playing the horn or flute. For the Ten Traditional Songs I'm playing banjo or guitar and singing (sometimes with a mic) between instrumental solos.

This past Friday's biggest revelation had to do with how well the Eb tuba and the clarinet sounded doubling the highest voice with the other instruments covering the lower voices. It was like one food bringing out the flavor of another. When doubled with another brass instrument, the tuba tends to disappear into the bottom of the sound of the other, and it's hard to tell where the sound of one instrument starts and the other stops. The clarinet had the opposite effect of bringing out the top of the tuba's sound, as well as making its overall sound more distinct in the mix. In the Arbeau Pavane, with it's sustained notes, the blend was very nice.