How We Receive Music

     As we’ve gotten the Music Room up and running this year, what has struck me most has been the audience reactions. Because it’s a very comfortable space with sparkling acoustics, the audience experience is about as good as it gets aurally and socially. At intermission and after the music, people are physically and verbally animated; there are lots of wide eyes, hand gesturings and animated conversations. I always ask as many people as I can what it is they like, and the answers are all over the board. 

     Back in the 60’s I came across Karl Jung’s idea that there are four ways of experiencing the world around us - via thinking, via sensation, via feeling, and via intuition. A recent FaceBook conversation with Kyle Gann catalyzed my realizing those four modes are a great way to talk about how different people receive music, and that since we all have different combinations of these four modes of experiencing music, it goes a long way towards explaining why so may different kinds of music can have such ardent fans.

THINKING - “Theory mind” is the term I use for people who can distinguish instantly between major, minor, diminished and augmented chords and whether they have added pitches like 2nds, 4ths, 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and so on. Theory mind can also hear and name the chord functions in real time, such as the I chord leading to the IV chord, to the vi chord. When modulations occur, they can say what the new key is and how the chords in the previous key were manipulated to prepare the ear for that modulation. 

On many occasions I’ve had band directors and fellow brass players tell me that when you have the third of the chord it should be played slightly flatter than it would be in equal temperament, and I marvel that they can automatically know where in the chord the pitch they’re playing fits. 

Part of Kyle Gann’s FB comment that triggered this post illustrates theory mind:

The other day a cultured woman with a little musical knowledge asked me what I thought made Schumann's music so wonderful. I went into my spiel about his diagonal harmonies, how he'll hit a dissonant note and not resolve it until the chord meant to harmonize the resolution has already passed, and also about how unusual the spacings of his piano sonorities are.

SENSATION - I think one of the reasons the live performances at the Music Room so affect people is that they’re simply hearing the various timbres of the instruments much more fully than what recordings can ever capture, especially if those recordings are compressed down to mp3 levels. Even audience members sitting in the back are quite close to the performers, and the very good acoustics make the aural sensations immediate and fully textured. This means the fast/slow; high/low; and soft/loud parameters of the music are easily perceived. 

When playing the horn, I have to trust that my sensation is helping me play in tune, even though my weakness in “theory mind” means I don’t know where in the chord the pitch I’m playing fits.

FEELING - One way music “touches” us is that it often encodes physical gestures that trigger our emotions. Most straightforwardly, when we see a violinist caressing notes out of their instrument or a timpanist pounding out a martial rhythm, we feel the emotions we associate with those gestures. The neural pathway for this phenomenon employs mirror neurons. When we see someone making a physical gesture, our brain fires the neurons we’d use to make that same gesture (more here). I also think, with zero proof, that just hearing some gestures in music can trigger mirror neurons, even if we can't see the performer making the physical gesture. Less straightforwardly, while phrasings and articulations in music may not have direct physical cognates, they can evoke less specific feelings and moods.

Also, a piece of music can call up emotions we’ve come to associate with that particular piece because of when and where we’ve heard it before. 

INTUITION - Intuition is non-verbal and non-rational by nature, so it’s hard to talk about. I’ve been told professionally I’m more intuitive than most, and while it’s a great help to me as a group therapist, the problem is that I can’t know right away if my intuition about something is correct. With that caveat in mind, I’ll suggest that one way intuition may come into play is those of us without “theory mind” can still intuit the general structure of a piece. I think our intuitive side can also inform us as to how the performers are approaching the music and their connection to the audience.  

Our intuitive sides are probably also part of whatever it is that happens during “flow” experiences  when our normal ego fades, time flows differently, and we feel part of a larger whole (more here).

Rapidan Orchestra Rehearsal Photos

We had a husband and wife team of photographers come to the last rehearsal before our fall concerts to take some informal pictures, without using flashes, as that would probably have been too distracting.

Here's our new conductor Benjamin, who is just terrific. His knowledge of the music is so phenomenal he can sing anyone's part instantly, and his verbal and gestural suggestions convey the gestalt he's after, as well as the details.

Charles W., our concertmaster, like many of our members, plays in a number of other groups, one of which specializes in Russian music.

Michael, besides his musical activities, restores WWII aviation radio equipment for the Smithsonian.

Brian is recently retired from the U.S.Navy.

Carol and her husband Roger (cello) have been with us from the beginning.

Jenny recently retired from teaching and is enjoying spending more time with violin.

Kelly on viola is a Montessori teacher over in Charlottesville and her husband John plays trumpet with us.

Here's Roger (husband of Carol/violin) on cello.

Joe B. grew up over in Barboursville and recently returned when he retired and just joined us this semester.

The other Joe B. on string bass wasn't with us at this rehearsal as he had a performance with another group, so I dug out this pic from several years ago of him with a Dixieland Jazz group - he played great that day, even when given the wrong chart for a piece and just played by ear.

Karen is one of those many M.D.s that somehow finds time to make music - and has college age sons majoring in music.

Don on flute is a retired accountant, professional photographer and holds a music degree in flute performance.

Lynne, when not playing flute, is a veterinarian working on emerging infectious diseases for the CDC.

Charles T. is the volunteer director of the Orange Community Band (and the longest serving one) and an assistant conductor and first oboe in the Charlottesville Municipal Band. His playing of the oboe in orchestra rehearsals and concerts has taught me more about "musicality" in classical music than any other single thing - especially his full, rich tone and his ever alive phrasing. (His wife Theresa wasn't present when these photos were taken - she plays piano/keyboard for us, and percussion in the Orange and C'ville bands.)

Heather, a homeschool mom and former band director, was a founder of the orchestra and does more work than anyone else keeping us going - and has gorgeous tone on the clarinet.

Don plays clarinet in a number of groups, as well as recorders in my Fun Band. His duet with Heather in the Bizet was a highlight of these concerts.

John retired to this area after a star studded pro career in both the classical and jazz genres.

Pete has been a mainstay of the Orange Community Band, and I'll always be grateful to him for being such a gentleman 12 years ago when I sat next to him and was a rank beginner on the horn - he handled the sounds I was making with great aplomb.

Grace is from Charlottesville, a college student, and will be off to New Zealand soon for a year abroad.

Here's me.

Nick is the music director over in Greene County High School and plays trombone, trumpet and horn for us.

Charles H. is a local dairy farmer who finds time to play with us, as well as being in the Orange Community Band and the Charlottesville Municipal Band - his touch in the timpani rolls is wonderful.

And here's Karla, who helped found the Orange Music Society over 25 years ago, organizing house concerts of classical music, and was good enough to join our board when we were getting started. She organizes the ads in the local papers and sends out by mail something like a 100 flyers for our concerts to people she knows, as well as putting them up all around Orange and Madison.

And here's a group shot from the choir loft.

Performance Diary

Courtesy of Jeff Poole at the Orange Review, here are some pics of the Rapidan Orchestra's performance at the Orange Presbyterian Church 11/20/15.

A New Venture

This flyer is for the inaugural performances of a small community orchestra recently formed here in Orange, Madison, and Greene counties (though which the Rapidan river runs) to give locals a chance to play and perform pieces from the standard repertoire for their friends and neighbors. 

For me this is a twofer. I'm getting to play this kind of music on horn for the first time in my life and find it exhilarating. And as a music therapist, bringing this music to small community venues so as to make it accessible to people who may never have experienced it live is a great opportunity. 

Horn Diary

 *  I retired from the community band in December after the Christmas concert after what I think was 7 and a half years participation. It was a great run. I'll miss playing for the veterans on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, and it was the crucible in which I learned the horn well enough to play the Brahms Requiem, which was one of the most amazing and rewarding experiences of my musical life. 

Between realizing I'll never fully appreciate the concert band repertoire (maybe because I never knew it until my fifties and it always seemed a dialect I could never really speak) and the occasional drill sergeant approach by the music educator directors - when I realized I was over extended, moving on from the band seemed the best thing to do.

 * Over Christmas I played in a cantata, which at one point had the entire congregation singing along with the choir and instruments, and once again found playing the horn with voices an extraordinarily moving experience.

 * On my old horn, the F side didn't sound as good as the B flat side - and most of the stuff I was playing in band was very high (I think concert band arrangers think of the horn as an alto trumpet) - so I never used the F side. My new horn has a wonderful sounding F side, and it was a revelation to me that Brahms used a much lower pitch range in the Requiem than I was used to in band. So I've been working on the F side - and due to this horn having a good sound there, have come to realize what people mean when they say the F side is really the more authentic sound of the horn. However, relearning fingerings is an old dog, new tricks thing for me.

Performance Diary

Four of us - trumpet, clarinet, tuba and me on banjo/guitar and a few vocals did a Mardi Gras performance in a local French restaurant - and then last Saturday we did some hymns as a five piece brass choir (trumpet, flugelhorn, horn, trombone, Eb tuba) for the prelude and postlude to a funeral in the Presbyterian church, and then followed up with Dixieland jazz with the full group at the reception in the fellowship hall following the service.

Following the Mardi Gras performance someone who had been there - who probably attends more live music than just about anyone I know - sent a note containing the following: "Whenever you play beyond the music is a sense of communitas." It's the most gratifying comment I've ever gotten about my public music making. 

I've posted from time to time about the Buddhist notion that it's one's motivation that makes any action/karma positive, neutral, or negative. I've also said from time to time I'm convinced one reason people enjoy our playing is that it's obvious how much fun we're having and that the fun is contagious. That an audience member divined the music therapy behind the performance feels like a terrific accomplishment.

One thing that I think conveyed that feeling was my memorizing a number of tunes and then walking out amongst the tables with the banjo and singing. A highlight of that was a little girl - say four or five - who started clapping along, and then some adults did as well. 

Another thing that helped was that I always play the banjo/guitar while standing up and sort of dance with the rhythms. Back in the days of running music therapy groups with emotionally disturbed children, that's essentially how I conducted. All the extra physical gestures seem to heighten the effect of the music.

Having a smaller combo for the Mardi Gras performance helped us play better as well. We were all more exposed than we are with the full group and had to work to get a good sound.

Another factor was working with the hostess to play tunes she liked. A lot of bands have a set list and when you ask them to play - that's what you get. What we do is talk to the host to get an idea of what they want and then tailor our performance for that specific event. It's sort of like working up a music therapy treatment plan, and when done well contributes greatly to the overall success of the performance.

For the brass choir at the funeral (of a man who has been a lawyer in town all my life and with whose children I grew up) I just took the hymns they requested and put them in four parts with minimal tweaking. To my ear, simple four part harmony played by brass is one of the most glorious things in all music making.

The Dixieland jazz at the reception just made people happy. I don't know of any other genre that has that effect for so many people.

Horn Diary

This is the cover of the program for the two performances of the Brahms Requiem put on by two local vocal groups with instrumentalists from the community band (with one exception). Both performances went well with standing ovations at the conclusion.

My horn playing was as good as I could have hoped for. I got all of those amazing long held pianissimo descant type harmonies which had been the hardest things for me to learn. In the second performance I got the high G in the first movement way better than I ever had when practicing. Also hit better than ever that repeated high E in the first movement that's a bit of a solo.

I was the only horn (along with two oboes of professional quality, two flutes, two clarinets, a trumpet, bassoon, tuba and timpani - along with the piano and organ) and had cut and pasted bits from all the horn parts together so as to cover all the exposed horn playing. That meant I played pretty much the entire hour and was traversing through parts written in F, E, Eb, D, C, and low Bb.

The toughest thing ended up being the long held low notes like the middle C at the beginning. With no strings it was completely exposed and my autonomic nervous system kicked in due to anxiety and there was a slight quaver in the tone (which I'd never experienced practicing). No amount of conscious control could completely eliminate it, though it was slight enough that apparently few people noticed.

Got some very nice comments from fellow musicians and the community band director - but the best was from a lady in the audience I'd never met before who came up and said she'd watched me the entire time and had marveled at the horn playing. I explained that Brahms's father had been a horn player, that the horn writing was extraordinary, and that if I merely sketched it out it has profound effects.

She could see me easily because all the instruments were in front and because I'd taken a piano bench which had me sitting a bit higher than other players (because I wanted every possible molecule of lung capacity and I'm tall and sitting on a folding chair gives me an acute rather than right angle between thighs and torso). 

I would have much preferred being hidden back behind the chorus and standing, and putting body english on every single note. As it was I tried to not sway too much with the rhythms and to keep my facial expressions somewhat in line - but I will never be able to sit rigidly like an emotionless robot and play the horn well, just as I can't not dance a little bit when playing the guitar/banjo and singing in front of a crowd. 

Engaging the horn parts in this piece has changed my musical life. A door has opened into a world of musical expression I'd never quite realized was there. It also confirmed for me that it's playing the horn with voices that puts me in a musical world I can't get enough of. And for any horn player - working through all these parts is an absolute clinic on what the horn can do.

It's also made me realize that part of what makes the horn such an amazing instrument to play is just how emotionally vulnerable I have to allow myself to be to get that exquisite expression to manifest. I was basically in an altered state during the performances and for at least a quarter hour afterwards. Carrying on conversations with people right after the performances was an ordeal - I simply was not in a verbal state of mind and everything I said sounded trivial and trite and felt like it was pulling me back to the everyday world when I wanted to maintain that blissful state.

Horn Diary

Here lately I've been able to fully sound out the fundamental pitch on both sides of the horn pretty much every time I try. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment, and it's a very good exercise for the embouchure. Working on the extreme low part of the register is a key part of Jeff Smiley's Balanced Embouchure method, and a number of other books I've looked at talk about the value of working with the low range as well. 

When sounding out those fundamentals it almost feels like a vibrating massage back into the muscles behind the part of the embouchure that actually touches the mouthpiece. I'm convinced that the embouchure crisis (and the lip callus that came along with it) I had a while back was due to my over using the muscles in the part of the embouchure touching the mouthpiece and under using the muscles in the part of the embouchure (of which I'm much less proprioceptively aware) back behind those front line muscles. I regret letting the band directors of the community band getting me to play first horn (because I was the only one) well before I was actually capable of doing so.

I'm still working with the Brahms Requiem and finding it a wonderful piece of music. Part of it is I think I'm very attracted to playing with voices instead of purely instrumental music. For me, tone is the foundation of music, and blending the horn tone with that of the human voice creates a sound I can't get enough of. Putting on the headphones and playing along with the CD alters my state of mind every single time.

The other thing about the Brahms is the horn writing. I knew his dad was a player of the pre-valve horn. What I hadn't realized was how every single horn phrase in the piece sounds so archetypically horn like. There are all those intervals of the hunting horn put to symphonic use, along with those amazing half steps he uses for emphasis. 

Working on the Brahms has also had the effect of crystalizing my thoughts on concert band music, which has always had the feel to me more of etudes than pure music. That the Brahms is way easier to play (just a few high F's and G's and none of those weirdly complex rhythms that are such a staple of band music) and that it's infinitely more beautiful bolsters that notion. 

Horn Diary

Back in August I got a new horn and it's been an amazing ride ever since. The move was from a Yamaha 567 to a 667, and it's still hard for me to believe how much easier it is to play. It's physically lighter, so playing off the leg as I do is less tiring, but the main thing is that the "slots" for each pitch are so much easier to hit. It's as if they are more uniform throughout the full range of the horn and that there's a much more either/or feel to getting the right pitch. 

It's also the case that I find it much easier to hit what note I want at the beginning of a piece, or after a long rest. That used to be a scary proposition for some pitches, but somehow those better defined slots make that easier as well.

With the new horn, my high G immediately went from sometimes there to just as good as the notes right below it, and the high Ab and A are starting to be possible. The written D a ninth above middle C has also become much easier to play. Previously it was always something like a register shift that I didn't always get, and now it's just another note.

Overall the instrument just feels more refined, especially the rotor levers. I now sometimes notice I'm playing with exactly the right amount of finger effort and that the valves changes are much more synchronous with embouchure changes as I move from note to note.

The overall tone is more refined as well, though I wonder if I'll ever be able to get that raw sense of anguish I got during the Fauré Requiem on the old horn. 

I didn't post on the new horn right away because I wondered if there'd be a honeymoon period right at first, and there was. After about 10 days or two weeks there was a week or two of getting that slight buzzing sound that almost sounds like something is loose, but that somewhere Farkas says is a bit of saliva right in the aperture of the embouchure. After a while I somehow adjusted and the horn plays as it did right at first.

Since my background is largely in stringed instruments - guitar, cello and banjo - I'd never really experienced how a better instrument is so much easier to play. With the strings the same technique will sound better on a better instrument, but there's nowhere near as much of a sense of the instrument being so much easier to play. 

On a different topic - I've finally begun to transpose horn music. The same local music man who organized the Fauré Requiem a couple of years ago is going to do the Brahms Requiem this spring and has asked me to play, so I downloaded the horn parts. I don't think I'll ever be able to transpose at sight, but working with this music over a couple of weeks I've been able to play it as written and not needing to put it in Finale and transposing it, as I always thought I would have to. Because I've played piano since childhood, both bass and treble clef read as second nature - and with all the arranging I've been doing, viola clef and tenor clef make sense to me. With that background, seeing music written in one key and playing it in another is really just sort of another clef substitution.

One last thing is a comment on the strength of muscle memory. The trigger on the new horn was set up as they all are, needing the trigger pulled to get the Bb horn. Back when I had my embouchure crisis and began working with Jeff Smiley's Balanced Embouchure method, I also restrung the trigger so that doing nothing gives me the Bb side and depressing the trigger gives me the F. My thought was that I was tensing up way too much in places I didn't need to when playing the Bb side, so that relaxing the thumb when going that direction helped me counter the over stressing. (I get a lot of strange looks from regular horn players). Anyway, the point is that until I restrung the new horn, I really couldn't play it as the trigger feeling backwards threw me for a loop. Intellectually I knew it really shouldn't make a difference, but it did. I went to a store to try out the new horn, but basically decided to get it on faith as I couldn't really play it as it was.

Archeo-acoustics Round-up

This article in Discovery Magazine covers a lot of what archeologists have been discovering about the acoustical properties of ancient sites, and then talks about one I hadn't heard of before in central Peru.

The most detailed evidence of ancient acoustical design comes from the Stanford team studying Chavín de Huántar, which was constructed between 1300 and 500 B.C. Peruvian archaeologists first suspected the complex had an auditory function in the 1970s, when they found that water rushing through one of its canals mimicked the sound of roaring applause. Then, in 2001, Stanford anthropologist John Rick discovered conch-shell trumpets, called pututus, in one of the galleries. The team set out to determine what role the horns played in ancient rituals and how the temple may have heightened their effects. Archaeoacoustics researcher Miriam Kolar and her collaborators played computer-generated sounds to identify which frequencies the temple most readily transmits. Over years of experiments, they found that certain ducts enhanced the frequencies of the pututus while filtering out others, and that corridors amplified the trumpets’ sound. “It suggests the architectural forms had a special relationship to how sound is transmitted,” Kolar says. The researchers also had volunteers stand in one part of the temple while pututu recordings played in another. In some configurations, the sound seemed to come from all directions.

Voice Diary

Here in the past 6 or 8 months my sense is that my singing has gotten a lot better. When I've sung around other people there have been a few spontaneous positive comments that suggest that what to me seems a tremendous shift is at least big enough others can hear some difference. Here are a few things I think are contributing to the improvement:

• I did not begin to sing until in my 20's when I began playing guitar, and my guitar playing was always stronger. What's dawned on me lately is that my guitar playing was leading my singing, rather than the other way around. Most conspicuously, I was laying into the down beat strum on the guitar to such an extent the syllable sung on those beats was getting covered up. Lately I've been just very lightly strumming on the downbeats and letting my voice learn how to lead. There's definitely some brain rewiring going on, because not paying attention means the old habit creeps back in.
• Listening back to recordings has made me cringingly aware of how my affectations were suffocating the poetry and music. I was so caught up in trying to convey how wonderfully artistic my stylings were, there was a lot more ego than artistry on display. Now I'm trying to just sing the song - letting all the consonants and vowels come alive and the phrases more naturally spring from the words, chords and rhythms.
• I've been giving songs I've sung for 40 years a rest and working up more new ones so as to stay out of the old ruts. Exploring new pieces makes it much easier to try new ways of singing.
• Back when Dietrich Fischer-Diekau passed away I clicked on a video of him singing and noticed that he sometimes tilted his head down and that made me realize I'd always assumed looking straight forward or tilting one's head up a bit was the best way to sing. Tilting it down a bit changes the way the sound feels in my head. There's the sense it's resonating more fully up there - and it also changes the musculature around the throat. Both those effects give me the sense of having more tools to work with to create a good sound.
• Brass players sometimes use the cliché, "let the air do the work", and that's sort of the feeling I have now when the singing is going well, that I'm not forcing or making it happen, but simply letting it happen. Rather concentrating on projecting sound, I'm more focused on singing expressively, syllable by syllable, phrase by phrase.
• Playing the horn has given me a much deeper nonverbal appreciation of phrasing and its connection to breathing. Just to play a phrase on the horn, you have to keep the energy level up throughout. For me it's harder to simply "phone in" notes on the horn as I sometimes feel I do with the flutes, and that in turn made me aware of how from time to time I've been just sketching in phrases with my voice, rather than giving full support to every syllable and pitch.
• For years and years my singing was either in day rooms in psych wards and nursing homes or leading music therapy groups in closed classrooms for emotionally disturbed children (and never with a mic). In both cases volume and projection were of paramount importance. Now I'm more often singing with pro level players and sometimes with a mic and it's a totally different environment and allows for a more nuanced approach.

Performance Diary

Last Saturday the Kenwood Players had a little Dixieland performance on the downtown mall in Charlottesville, Va and this snapshot was taken right before we started, with the trombone player just out of the shot to the left. Our regular trombone players were both unable to join us, so Dick, the trumpeter in the white cap, asked a friend in a big band he plays in to fill in. 

This was all part of a big band festival put on by the Orange and Charlottesville bands, with a dozen community bands from around the state scheduled to play from 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. Unfortunately that weather system, el derecho, came through the night before and Virginia got whacked, some people still without power even today. One group's bus was damaged by a tree overnight and the army band was dispatched to clean-up duties.

We had a nice little crowd for the Dixieland, with nearly a dozen pre-school age children sitting on the bricks in front of us fascinated by it all. 

That was at 10:30 a.m. and it was only in the low 90's. When the Orange Community Band played at 5:30 in the pavilion at the end of the mall it was close to 100, so that audience was sparse. (Also, half the traffic lights weren't working and over half the city was without power.) We played well, but I kept noticing I'd never felt my horn so warm to the touch, and the heat and humidity did something to the sound - it seemed more tactile and vaguely felt and sounded like we were under water.

Horn Diary

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

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

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

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

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

Horn Therapy

As a hospice volunteer I've been working with an elderly male in end stage Alzheimer's. He's both non-verbal and non-ambulatory and his wife, with the help of a caregiver, is caring for him at his home. Until recently I've been using very rhythmic guitar playing and singing to catch his attention and get feet tapping and an occasional smile or wink. 

Last month, however, that no longer worked and he didn't rouse up and open his eyes when I played for him. It seemed to me (more intuitively than emprically) that it was some combination of him not being able to hear as well and/or able to process music. So for the last two sessions I've taken the French horn and played hymns, thinking that it's both louder and less complicated musically than guitar and singing - and it has worked.

Both times while warming up he has opened his eyes and looked around to see what's going on, and then looked directly at me while I was playing and given me some full face smiles, which is the best response we can get at this point. 

Virtuous Circles and Brain Plasticity

According to Wikipedia, the concept of virtuous circles comes from the field of economics:

A virtuous circle and a vicious circle (also referred to as virtuous cycle and vicious cycle) are economic terms. They refer to a complex of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop.[1] A virtuous circle has favorable results, while a vicious circle has detrimental results. A virtuous circle can transform into a vicious circle if eventual negative feedback is ignored.

One way to talk about how music making can improve over time is to look at how an increase in brain function in one area can help lead to an increase in brain function in another area. In my experience, an example of this is how increases in the depth of proprioception in making a note is tied into hearing deeper subtleties in the note. 

In learning the horn, for example, it seems to me that as I increase my ability to create more subtle shades of tone, the more I can hear what those tonal shades are. The proprioceptive part of my brain and the listening part of the brain are making connections and working together. The more I can hear what it is I want, the more I can feel what it's like to create that sound, and visa versa.

I think a big part of helping someone on their path of music making is to help them be mindful of as many of these connections as possible. It's impossible to be fully conscious of all them at the same time, but having an idea that they're there can be very helpful. The challenge of teaching music is having a good awareness of how each individual student is progressing in all the areas of music making and nurturing the various areas in tandem. 

Fingering

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

One of Prof. Ericson's suggestions is:

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

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

Parameters and Musicianship

The March 2012 Musician's Friend catalog carries an interview with Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and other groups. The interview doesn't seem to be online, so I'm going to type in a couple of things he says.

I've had the same rig since prior to Rage Against the Machine, with my band Lock Up. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. One of the things that has helped me creatively and helped my imagination is to have some things just carved in stone. . . There's a sense of comfort in not worrying about gear anymore, I'm going to worry about trying to get sounds and music out of the gear I already have.

This is very similar to something I said in a post about composing, i.e. set some parameters and then see what you can do within them. If everything you're doing is boundless, it's sort of like that thing that can happen to hikers lost in a wilderness when they can't see the sun due to cloud cover or tree canopy - they often just wonder in circles.

There's also the "if only I had a better instrument" syndrome. It's true that better instruments are more responsive, but it's also true that a fine musician can make an average instrument sound great. 

Later in the interview he says:

. . . Up until that point, I had wanted to sound like my favorite guitar players - that's what "good" guitar playing sounded like to me. Then came this revelation that good guitar playing is when you sound like yourself, and I really began to discover who I was as an artist, as a guitarist and a musician.

To me this is the true path of the music maker. You start because you hear things you like and try to do the same, but over time, working towards discovering what it means to "sound like you" is what keeps the practice of music making meaningful, rewarding and ever refreshing. 

It can take a while. I've been singing some Dylan songs for 40 years, and just in the past couple of years have begun to sing them in a voice that sounds more like mine. I think two of the things that helped me were: 1) recording myself much more and repeatedly noticing I didn't sound like I thought I did or how I wanted to, and 2) playing the horn has taught me a world of things I hadn't fully realized about breathing and phrasing and the importance of never letting the musical line just be there filling space as opposed to moving forward with purpose.

Horn Diary

The following comment just came in on a Horn Diary post back in 2009:

Before I get too far into anything, I should probably say up front: yes, I realize that this was posted in 2009... I guess I'm posting on hope. I have been having 'meltdowns' with embarrassing frequency the past few months. It is almost entirely my fault. I'm a freshman in highschool, but I have been playing the french horn since fifth grade. Four or five years, overall. The problem is that I practiced very rarely during the last school year, not at all over the summer, and in a very inconsistent fashion during this school year... In short, I had more endurance two years ago on a single F horn than I have now on a double horn. If I practice consistently for a week, I'm fine, but I have no buffer -- three days of not practicing and I'm back at square one. Again, my own laziness -- which no one can correct but myself. So, people have been giving advice -- very good advice which I will keep in mind in the future -- for band rehearsals. Which leads me to this: I have a solo very rapidly approaching. I realize that there's very little I can do in time for this particular performance that's going to save me from my own laxity, and I look forward to the eminent embarrassment... [Okay, not really.] But I'm curious. Does any one have tips for preserving your chops during a solo performance? (People here are also mentioning that they find the mental attitude of people in bands sometimes... disappointing. Thought I'd add my own observations about this high school band which I'm suddenly thrust into. All of a sudden I've gone from being one of two [the second was a late arrival, even] french horn players to the second least experienced one of six. This is also the first time I've experienced chair tests/auditions. Is the level of competition and the slight feeling of animosity [or aloofness] from the higher chairs common?)
By Anonymous 

I'm bringing this comment up to a new post to make a few points and to see if any regular readers have anything to add. 

The commenter realizes that regular practice is the real answer to the problems cited, so as a music therapist I'm very curious as to why the practicing slacked off here lately. I'm so old I can't even remember what it's like to be a freshman in high school, but maybe the lack of practice just has to do with lack of time. The thing is, though, in my experience, the horn, unlike the guitar, demands regular practice or the lips just stop working well. So the question becomes, is playing the horn something you care enough about to make the time commitment?

(In my personal experience, that last question becomes, do I care enough about playing horn that I'm willing to learn all this concert band music that doesn't really appeal to me as much as the small brass ensemble things I'm arranging myself.)

It's my sense that part of what goes on in music educators' classrooms is a winnowing out of people that aren't as committed as others. So at the bottom of all this, you have to decide if playing the horn in this context is something you really want to do and are willing to make the commitment.

As to tips for saving chops during a solo performance, other than full preparation through daily practice, I don't really have any. I will say, though, that how you practice is crucially important and that I found Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure method a lifesaver. I was on the verge of giving up the horn (and was encouraged to do that by a music educator who thought taking it up in my 50's was somewhere between ill advised and insane), but working with the exercises in that book brought better endurance and range within a few weeks of regular practice.

As to the chair issues - as a music therapist I find the competition based methods of educators not helpful for what I want to do, but understand why it works for them. It's the people they want to winnow out I most want to work with. I will say that the horn players I've had the chance to work with have been wonderfully helpful, but that they've been imbued with that extreme competitiveness from an early age and it's sort of always there. As a therapist I can't help wondering if the new psycho/social situation you've been "thrust into" is the precipitating factor for a lot of this. Playing the horn is unlike any other instrument I've ever worked with, and one's mental state, e.g. confident or unconfident, is a huge factor.

My best wishes to the commenter, and please come back to continue the conversation if you'd like. To close I'd say that all the new research points to making music regularly as being very beneficial, and that for me personally, the horn has taken me to musical places I didn't know existed, so is worth the commitment. But the bottom line is to figure out what it is that's really important to you and spend your time pursuing that. 

Performance Diary

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

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

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

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

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

Terry, Gunther and Walt

Just want to bookmark this post by Terry Teachout on Gunther Schuller and Fantasia. Schuller's biography looks to be a fascinating read. Here's one thing Terry says:

Mr. Schuller, who turns 86 next month, is a much-admired classical composer and conductor and a distinguished jazz scholar. Before that, he was the principal horn player of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He is the only musician in the world who can claim to have played with Maria Callas, Miles Davis, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Igor Stravinsky and Arturo Toscanini. In "Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty," just out from the University of Rochester Press, he talks about all this and much, much, much more.