Sleeping and Learning

This article in the LA Times covers some research done at Brown suggesting that learning can continue even as we sleep.

Data from brain activity measurements of the subjects whose performance had improved overnight suggested the epicenter of memory consolidation was in a small zone of the motor cortex known as the supplementary motor area -- not in the primary motor area, as earlier studies had suggested.

There's another discussion of learning continuing during sleep in a study out of SMU in this post over on the musician's brain.

The students in the first group, who had learned just the one melody, showed over 11% improvement in speed and accuracy the next morning. So while they were asleep dreaming about something else, the motor skills to play the melody they had just learned continued to improve. Pretty amazing! Surprisingly, the students in the second group, who had learned both melodies A and B, showed no improvement in either one. Learning two melodies seemed to cancel out the overnight gain for both. But for Allen, the most surprising, and perhaps most important result of the study concerned the third group. They had learned both melodies but then reviewed the first melody (A) at the end of the practice session, and they showed the same improvement in melody A after sleep as the first group – over 11%. The students in the fourth group, who learned A at night, B in the morning and then reviewed A, were similar to the second group in showing no improvement of anything.

I commented on this post, talking about how when I was working on the Brahms Requiem, during the day I focused on gnarly technical things that were giving me trouble, but at night I played through the things I'd mastered along with a CD. The idea that learning was continuing as I slept seems right to me, because there was the feeling that I'd never learned a piece of music as well, and that there was a sort of dream-like feeling to the depth of that knowing of the music.

A lot of things made the Brahms one of the most amazing musical experiences I've ever had. I've never felt so drawn to a piece of music or wanted to practice it so much. No way to prove it, but I'm convinced the sleep learning had something to do with my ability to play that music from the inside of the music in a way that involved my unconscious as well as my conscious mind.

Practice and Brain Plasticity

This article talks about the neuroscience of spirituality and I was struck by the similarity to what the neuroscientists are saying about making music, in that multiple areas of the brain are simultaneously involved. 

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.”

The article goes on to talk about how people who've had trauma to that part of the brain dealing with the "self" tend to have, 

"an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power."Neuropsychology researchers consistently have shown that impairment on the right side of the brain decreases one’s focus on the self,” Johnstone said. “Since our research shows that people with this impairment are more spiritual, this suggests spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self. This is consistent with many religious texts that suggest people should concentrate on the well-being of others rather than on themselves.”

Johnstone says the right side of the brain is associated with self-orientation, whereas the left side is associated with how individuals relate to others. Although Johnstone studied people with brain injury, previous studies of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns with normal brain function have shown that people can learn to minimize the functioning of the right side of their brains to increase their spiritual connections during meditation and prayer.

Johnstone makes the comparison to other kinds of disciplines; "It is like playing the piano, the more you train your brain, the more the brain becomes predisposed to piano playing."

The fact that deactivation of some areas of the brain is apparently just as important as activating others for some mental states reminded me of this post talking about what's going on in the brain during improvisation. 

Another point to make, that ties in with the previous post, is that as you practice, all kinds of new connections (and activations and deactivations) are being made in your brain, most of which you're probably not fully conscious of. The more mindful you are of creating positive mental states, and the less you build associations between music making and negative emotions, the more enjoyable your music making will be. It's not just a question of increasing brain plasticity, but the quality and nature of that newly created brain function.

It's also worth noting that that lack of "self" seems to be a part of "flow" and that's probably why many, but not all people, tend to associate the flow experience with spirituality.

Practice Tip

Before you begin a self-training session RELAX, this ain't Wall Street. You can't lose riding a mountain bike. If you are working on a technique and you fail two or three times in a row, STOP!! Do something else and try again later. This is called "Training To Failure" (positive progressive training; pushing the envelope). If you push a training session beyond three successive failures you are "Training To Fail" (negative regressive training; more pain than fun). As you become more adept at self-teaching and pushing yourself appropriately you'll be able to discern where good (beneficial) training ends and bad (regressive) traning begins. [Hint: lack of fun marks the spot.]

This excerpt from a book on learning how to mountain bike makes a lot of sense about how to practice anything, music included. For one thing, it makes clear that when you're learning to "self-teach", you need to stay aware your overall mental/emotional state as well as the details of technique. How you go about learning makes a huge difference in outcomes. Without mindfulness, practice for practice's sake can be harmful.

That first sentence is also a great way of looking at motivation. If you're trying to make a living or get a scholarship with your music making, how you approach practicing will be different from someone doing it just for fun and personal enrichment. 

I found this over on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site. He was one of the people behind the Whole Earth Catalogs and this site is an internet version of that wonderful idea.

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.

Art. Emotion & Technique

Here's Terry Teachout's almanac entry for today:

"It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman; art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

I think that some art can only be fully apprehended and appreciated by the community of craftsmen. Musicians and composers with "theory mind" can delight in harmonic and rhythmic complexities (which may or may not be manifestations of emotions) unintelligible to regular people. I do agree with the overall point of the quote, though, and think it's a good way of thinking about teaching music - that the emotion is the point of it all, and that technique is how you get there.

Horn Diary

I've had two very pleasant experiences with the horn within 24 hours of each other earlier this week.

The first was an evening practice session running through all the bits and pieces in my 2nd horn parts for community band. My tuner, which beeps when a correct pitch is played, had been left on and time after time it beeped right after the last note of a phrase was played. After nearly two dozen times I went and turned it off as a distraction, but the feeling of being so well into an intonation groove lasted the whole session.

Then the next afternoon we had a full rehearsal of the brass quintet we've been trying to pull together (two Eb tubas, trombone, horn, trumpet). I've put together an album of Mozart, Corelli, Facoli, Tomkins, Gibbons, Bach and Billings. Over and over again we hit the chords just right and that amazing sound of an in tune brass ensemble filled the room. In my fairly wide experience of music making on various instruments, there's simply nothing like it. The trio of flute, alto flute and cello can be just as good, but in an entirely different way.

The feeling I had was part of what I experienced as a "flow" discussed in this post. I hated it when the pieces came to an end, wanting that feeling and gorgeous sound to go on and on.

Also, I now know I can play the horn in tune with other brass and with voices, and my suspicion is that in band my difficulties are due in part to there not being a clear "slot" for me to fit into. My first band director five or six years ago one time said something like, "You have to be in good tone to be in good tune", and I think that's right. If the tone is not centered in all the instruments playing, the sound mix is contaminated with all sorts of out of tune harmonics. It's also my suspicion that trained educators can hear through that static and divine where the pitch should be, but I really have a difficult time doing so.

Recording Yourself

Listening to recordings of yourself making music is probably the single most effective thing you can do to improve your playing. 

The key aspect of mindfulness is experiencing things as they are - not as we want them to be, as we're afraid they might be, as we feel/hope others might be experiencing them, or any of a myriad other distortions our untrained minds can inject into the experience. When we are actually in the process of playing music, there's so much going on in our minds, especially for amateurs, that's it's quite difficult to hear the music as it is.

Listening to a recording is a totally different experience. All the mental/emotional gymnastics have faded and we're left with just the sound of the music as we made it. There's no middle man/teacher trying to explain what it is we're doing, we can hear it ourselves. There's no need to reduce the experience to verbal language, as we can simply hear and react to the music non-verbally as an audience might.

I record all the performances of my group and give CDs to all the players. I and the amateurs of the group have all benefited wonderfully from this. I don't need to tell them what I hear they need to do to improve as they hear it themselves, and the same goes for me. 

As a single example, listening to recordings tipped me off to my sometimes more speaking than singing bits and pieces of lyrics instead of singing every syllable of the song. This probably goes back 40 years to my first trying to learn songs by speaking the words in rhythm while strumming the guitar as a preliminary to actually singing the song. Until I started doing all the recording here a few years ago, I was completely unaware of this and would have been dubious of anyone telling me it was the case. Hearing it in the recordings, though, cut right to the root of the problem and has given me much better traction improving as a singer.

Just as cultivating mindfulness of our behaviors in retrospect can lead to more clearly perceiving them in real time, listening to recordings of our playing can help us more accurately hear ourselves in real time and make improvements on the fly, just as high level players do. I used to be astounded by the real time listening skills of band directors, thinking I could never do that as for me it would be a sensory overload. While I'm nowhere near that level, I can now hear better in real time how my group is playing and make adjustments accordingly.

Mindfulness in Music Making

This article from Wired talks about how your mental attitude affects your behavior. 

. . .“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,”. . .

. . . To lose confidence in free will seemingly introduced a lag between conscious choice and action. . . 

My sense is that studies such as these are so very preliminary that drawing hard conclusions on the specifics can lead you astray, especially on topics as controversial as free will. But I do think that they empirically reinforce the common sense idea that your attitude and general mental state as you go about something like making music is going to affect the outcome.

The neuroscience is telling us that it's the simultaneous coordination of many areas of the brain in music making that makes it such a unique behavior. Maintaining continuous awareness of all that can be tough sledding, and I think the concept of mindfulness as put forward by Tibetan Buddhism can be one very useful way of talking about how to go about it. 

A big part of mindfulness is simply observing your thoughts, emotions and behaviors without feeling you're having to make immediate conscious decisions and judgments about everything all the time. In making music this involves being as good a listener as you can be to what you're doing, as well as to those around you if you're in an ensemble. Taking the time to have a better sense of the music as a whole can help you understand what adjustments you want to make on the smaller scale.

One thing about practicing mindfulness is that like anything you practice you can get better over time. One thing which sets high level players apart is their being able to hear and respond to the music they're making both as a whole and in its many parts in real time. For those of us not at that level, understanding that how we're thinking and feeling about making music has a lot to do with how successful we are. It's another way of framing the musicality vs. technique duality.

One thing that can happen as you work with being more mindful is that you become aware that there's more going on in your behavior than you're usually aware of, and that some of it is merely reactive and routinized. A classic example in music making is rushing when playing passages perceived as difficult. Usually it's anxiety kicking in and highjacking the tempo. Coming to realize it's an anxiety issue as much as a technique one is half the battle.

Another point to make about mindfulness in the Tibetan sense is that it has to do with feelings and emotions as well the more rational connotation it has in the West. A Tibetan saying someone has a good mind is like a Westerner saying someone has a good heart. So in music making this means being open to the feeling/emotion content in real time, as well as the technical issues. 

My Friday group has both professional level and amateur level players, and all the amateurs have approached me at various times to say they've had more fun and gotten deeper into making music in this group than any other they've ever been in. I think a lot of that has to do with arranging the music to suit their abilities, which allows them to be more mindful the musicality side of things. That means they can lay down a solid framework for the pros to use to take improvisational flight.

Old Dogs & New Tricks

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

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

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

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

Playing Softly

With both horn and flute I've lately been working on playing more softly than I ever have before. Very helpfully, James Boldin recently posted on that very subject as regards the horn. 

Something that's impressed me is how playing at the softest level possible requires such a different embouchure on both flute and horn, and how that change has deepened my proprioceptive sense of the embouchure. Somehow the delicacy needed reveals the underlying structure of the embouchure in a different light.

Proprioception

Proprioception is a vital component of music making, but rarely expressly mentioned. Here are some snips from the current Wikipedia entry:

Proprioception . . . from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. . . a . . .  distinct sensory modality that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with the required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other. . . 

. . . Kinesthesia is another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception, though use of the term "kinesthesia" can place a greater emphasis on motion. Some differentiate the kinesthetic sense from proprioception by excluding the sense of equilibrium or balance from kinesthesia. An inner ear infection, for example, might degrade the sense of balance. This would degrade the proprioceptive sense, but not the kinesthetic sense. The affected individual would be able to walk, but only by using the sense of sight to maintain balance; the person would be unable to walk with eyes closed. . . .

 . . .The proprioceptive sense is believed to be composed of information from sensory neurons located in the inner ear (motion and orientation) and in the stretch receptors located in the muscles and the joint-supporting ligaments (stance). There are specific nerve receptors for this form of perception termed "proprioreceptors," just as there are specific receptors for pressure, light, temperature, sound, and other sensory experiences. . . .

. . . Proprioception is what allows someone to learn to walk in complete darkness without losing balance. During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

One thing about music making is that there is really no end to how much we can develop and deepen our ability to do so. Part of that is our becoming more and more proprioceptively aware of how we play our instrument. One reason for this post is for it to be here as foundation for a flute diary post on how an advancement in technique was based on increased proprioceptive awareness in my fingers.

Advances in technique can lead to advances in our more fully inhabiting the music, and our growing interpretive sense can lead to advances in technique. Nurturing that interplay can keep music making fresh and rewarding for a lifetime.

I also have the intuitive sense that there's an overlap between our proprioceptive sense of balance and the ways we can feel "balance" in music making and in music we listen to, particularly in rhythm, but in all the other elements of music as well. How well and in what ways music is "balanced" is sort of a primal gesture to which all the others contribute.

Memory Aids

Here are two articles having to do with memory. The first concerns a study on older people.

A new study shows that one year of moderate physical exercise can increase the size of the brain's hippocampus in older adults, leading to an improvement in spatial memory. . . .The right hippocampus expanded in the older folks who exercised and shrank in the older folks who did not exercise. If you sit idly your capacity to form memories will decay.

For me, this study's results strengthens my feeling that there are a number of things people can do in their everyday lives that will benefit their music making (for which better memory is an asset). As a music therapist, I feel the reverse is also true, that going about music making in a non-stressed way can be of overall benefit to people in various ways. 

In an earlier post I made the point that a basic finding of the new neuroscience research is that within the brain all sorts of functions mediate all sorts of other functions. It's more an ecosystem than a machine. This study suggests that on a much more general level our non-musical behaviors can mediate our musical behaviors.

The second article is about a study indicating taking a test, i.e. working with retrieving information from memory, is better than other study methods.

Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.

This study reminded me of a back and forth I had with Jeffrey Agrell some time ago about the benefits of practicing with the eyes closed. This study suggests that part of the benefit of doing that is that when not looking at the music on the page, you're amping up your retrieval process in the brain, which would be helping you remember how to play that particular passage.

Horn Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competition

I just left a comment on this post by Jeffrey Agrell where he talks about so many students wanting to participate in competitions by playing pieces beyond their current capability. It's a great post with lots of food for thought. One thing it helped me realize is just how important a tool competition is in the educational system as a motivator and a winnower. In music therapy, competition just isn't in the picture. 

Here's the comment:

Hi, Jeffrey – Just a terrific post I’ve read several times now and keep seeing new things. The “patience for the process” phrase seems perfect for music education, and you’ve set me wondering how I’d rephrase it for music therapy.

“The difference between practice mind and performance mind” is something I hope you will expand on sometime.

Your general idea list reads like part of a music therapist’s care plan.

To me, this obsession with competitions is just the music education system’s ethos turned up an extra notch. I’m an outsider looking in, but competition seems a basic tool used by educators to get musical results, and part of the ongoing winnowing process.

The always striving for greater technique seems to trump letting students play things they’ve fully mastered technically so that they might mine them and themselves for a deeper understanding of musicality.

Like everything in music, a balance of some kind is needed, and you’ve done a great job of outlining the thinking needed to find it.

Where to Practice

This NYT story looks at what research is saying about study habits in general, not music specifically.

. . . For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. . . 

 . . .The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding. . . .

This tallies well with my experience. I think with music it's especially important because the acoustics of the various places will be different, and besides that helping you encode the info, it will make it easier to adapt your sound to a particular performance space when the need arises.

I also think everyone (except maybe piano players) should play outside from time to time. It's just different from playing indoors, as good tone is an absolute requirement for good sound without that reverb effect any room will have. Plus, playing in a natural surrounding can be great fun. Some years back my yearly routine involved two short stays in the Ozarks and I loved taking my cello out into the woods and sawing away, mostly simple improvs responding to nature.

Music does get a mention in the story here:

 . . .Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

This story also has some of the contemporary push back against the notions Martin Gardner put forth years ago in his Frames of Mind, which I find very helpful. I think the pendulum will find its way to somewhere in the middle once all the data comes in and we've made some sense of it.

More on Improv

In an example of what Jung called synchronicity, after publishing the previous post I came across this video. On the Apollonian to Dionysian spectrum, Michael Hedges was over on the Dionysian side with a little shamanism thrown in. Before he died way too early in a car crash, he was making music like nobody else. It had to do with his wonderful connection with audiences, his using custom made guitars, tunings that made the guitar sound like some kind of other instrument, and a real familiarity of what was going on in the "classical" music world, having formally studied composition.

But what really set him apart for me was the improvisational feel his work has. He sounds like he could improvise for hours and not be boring, and that's the point of this post. My sense of his playing of this Bach piece is that it's informed by his improvisational skill. I think most people would put Bach more over on the Apollonian side of things, that his works are beautifully crafted works of art, nearly mathematical in structure. Hedges makes this piece sound like he's making it up as he goes along, expressing his feelings of the moment, using technique and a feel for the sound of his instrument that has to have come from his time put in improvising. 

On a music therapy note, his playing a calming piece at the end of a long concert is a wonderful example of using music to help people transition from one feeling/mental state to another.

Improvisation

I keep coming up against the very strong feelings of high level players on the value of sight reading, and I understand what they're saying, especially as it applies to high level players being able to fill in at the last moment. It's also a terrific skill at lower levels of play as well, as it allows you to browse through material to see what you want to work on.

With the exception of Jeffrey Agrell, though, they rarely talk about improvising. I think what my problem is with sight reading is that it's not balanced with making up some stuff on your own. They are two completely different ways of making music and working on both will make you a better music maker as different parts of the brain get exercised. Going with just one seems to me to have to distort your sense of what music making can be.

As I think about it, I've read through a number of practice routines mentioning scales and etudes and sight reading and current literature, but have never seen mention of spending as little as five minutes a day improvising. No wonder so many high level classical players freeze up at the thought of improvising or composing. 

Part of what's going on here is my focus on the music maker and wanting to enrich that experience, whereas educators are more biased towards the needs of the music itself. Why you're doing what you're doing affects how you do it.

Listening to Singers

Over the past few months I've had several conversations with different people talking about general ways to improve instrumental technique and expression. I've mentioned seeing in a number of books written by the highest level players the advice to listen to singers, as what you're trying to do with your instrument (I guess with the exception of percussion) is to bring to it the unmatched expressive power of the human voice.

Just wanted to make a brief post on this because that info was new to some people, but since I've seen it so many times over the years, thought everyone was aware of it.

Horn Diary

The hiatus of the community band ends with the first rehearsal of the new semester tomorrow. From 7/6 until now have been playing only what I want, and that meant spending most of my time on the F horn in the octaves below and above middle C. In band music notes in that lower octave are rarely called for (for first horn) and I'd never gotten them as well as I felt I could. I did a lot of etude like improvisation, always going for the best tone and intonation I could muster, and never stressing the sound, going for full and big tone as opposed to loud. What music I played was a hunting horn tune transposed around the easy keys and the lines of arrangements I've done that fell into that range.

The results have been wonderful. All those notes come easily and well now, though the low octave C and the D above it are not as good as the rest. I really do like the F horn, and I think part of it has to do with simply feeling its reverberations in my upper body and head better than the Bb. From what I've been reading on the horn blogs, they simply are not making decent F horns any more. If they were I'd look into getting one because I'd love a lighter instrument that would be less burdensome to hold and would speak more easily as there would be less metal to set vibrating, and I'm not really interested in going above high F or G.

I helped sort the band music into folders and brought home the first and second horn folders and have looked through them. For the first time, with the exception of a piece that has a section in five sharps going up to high G sharp, all the first horn music looks playable to me. The issue is going to be endurance. I'm still the only horn, though we may get ringers for concerts. Right now I feel I have the endurance needed, but having to shift back up to higher notes in piece after piece in rehearsal is going to be wearing.

The next time Dr. Andy comes for some music I want to spend some time with him on cello and me on horn and play around with how those two instruments could work in a duet. I may have a large enough range on the horn now that something along those lines could be worth pursuing.