Mind Training ~ Musical Training

A lot of non-Buddhist spiritual practitioners, perhaps Thomas Merton most famously, have felt that the tools of mind training can be used effectively in their own endeavors. Based on the very general framework laid out in the previous post, I think they can be helpful in the practice of music making as well.

One of the basic tools of mind training is simply practicing being more aware of your thoughts and actions in real time. As we go through life, a lot of our ways of thinking about things and behaving is habitual and reflexive. By learning to watch our thoughts and behavior we can get a better sense of what's working and what isn't, which is the first step towards making improvements.

What's really interesting about this, and what correlates so well with music making, is that we're bringing into the conscious realm things that usually reside at a deeper level that we're normally much less aware of. It's like shining a flashlight of attention around a dark factory and seeing the individual components and finding the ones that need work. Then, once we've fixed something up, moving on to another, while that one slips back out of the immediate consciousness.

What the neuroscience is telling us is that in this procedure we're slowly but surely rewiring our brains in various places. If we go about this in the right way, we'll end up with more of our music making flowing in a natural and nearly automatic way.

Another mind training tool that goes hand in hand with this is being clear about your motivation. The lamas often make the point that doing things to simply satisfy the "self-cherishing ego" can lead to suffering. Working towards being more of a benefit to others can lead to more happiness and contentment.

I think the analog to this in music making might be that if your motivation is simply to build technique as an end in itself, you're setting yourself up to be a creature of your "self-cherishing ego". That is, a lot of, "Hey, look at me and how great a player I am", can creep into your mind. If this is the case, one result is going to be being pretty upset when you make mistakes, and that kind of disequilibrium can cascade into some unhappy states of mind.

More importantly, though, if your motivation somehow includes being of benefit to your audience, that's going to color all of the instances of your brain rewiring work. Besides thinking about how to more efficiently make music, you're also going to be thinking about how your music is going to affect an audience. To my mind, that broader awareness of what you're up to has a lot to do with what frequent commenter Jonathan West calls "musicality".

photo - day lily 

Mind Training

Jeffey Agrell left a comment down in the persona post that bookmark these two posts of his, and my response says that every time I reread them all sorts of new ways of looking at things pop up in my mind. This post is a try at framing one of the very deep issues of music making they raise.

As evidenced by the work put in to create the CD over on the right, I think Tibetan Buddhists are on to something. For one thing, in teachings where lamas present their ideas, they much prefer the term "mind training" to "religion". Bound up in that notion is the idea that one's progress depends on one's practice, which involves analyzing what you're doing and then trying to make a better job of it, as is the case in music making.

A lot of the new brain research talks about how spending ten thousand hours doing something effectively rewires your brain. In music practice, a lot of that rewiring involves getting the physical body to become more responsive to your musical intentions. What Jeffrey's posts make clear is that effective music making in front of an audience requires more. He also makes clear that this other (non-technique specific) part of music making, without which the exercise can lose most or all of its value, is not much talked about by music educators.

The primal point of Buddhism is motivation. Why you're doing something is more important than what you do. Every teaching I've ever attended has begun with a discussion of the importance of your motivation.

One of the great insights of Buddhism is that neither wisdom nor compassion alone does the trick. If either outruns the other, obstacles will arise.

In music making, technique is analogous to wisdom. And for now I'm going to say that the motivation to positively connect with and to be of benefit to an audience is the analog to compassion.

The lamas often say wisdom and compassion are like the wings of a bird, as both are needed to take flight. The point of mind training is to pay attention to and to cultivate each. 

photo - calla lily

Music Neuroscience Overview

In this article talking about upcoming talks and workshops at this year's Aldeburg Festival, Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct,  gives the best overview of the present state of music neuroscience I've come across. Here are a couple of paragraphs.

It’s still not known if AP (absolute pitch) is inherited (that is, genetic) or acquired. But it probably has more to do with language than music, being much more common among people whose first language is tonal, such as Chinese. In one study, half of the new students at a top music school in Beijing were found to have AP, compared to just one in ten for a comparable American school. And musicians with AP have an enlarged region of the brain associated with speech processing.

Neuroimaging has shown that practising an instrument purely in one’s head really works: the motor cortex signals associated with each finger get stronger without the pianist actually moving them, and eventually the finger movements trigger audible tones inside the head. Vladimir Horowitz is said to have practised this way to avoid “contaminating” his finger movements with the different action of pianos other than his own Steinway, while bon-vivant virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein did it just to avoid having to sit for long hours at a piano.

Persona

The word persona comes from the Greek for mask, specifically the ones actors wore in dramas. Somewhere along the line I remember seeing that besides hiding the face, they somehow altered the voice of the actor as well.

 ~~~ Update - Just checked Wikipedia and found:

 

This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning "to sound through").

The latin word derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance.~~~

In psychology, and I think Jung in particular, persona is the term to describe the face we present to others and how they perceive us. It seems as well a handy term to describe how musicians present themselves to their audience.

Jeffrey Agrell has two great posts up talking about the non-musical aspects of performance here and here that I've read several times and been meaning to post links to. 

Then today came across another of those botox inhibiting emotional intelligence stories here.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

Connecting with an audience while making music means a lot more than simply getting the notes right, and Jeffrey's posts are a great survey of what's involved, and your persona as perceived by the audience is as important as the music itself. Part of what's going on has to do with mirror neurons.

One thing I've noticed recently in working with these ideas and trying to keep a more relaxed and personable face while performing (and practicing) is that my facial expression affects the tone and emotional content of my singing voice way more than I'd realized. It's obvious, really, but a lot about music making is obvious only when you give it some attention.

Trombones and Voice

This past Monday, the community band played in town for the Memorial Day event where the names were read out of all those from Orange county who gave their lives on foreign battlefields. We played a couple of Sousa marches, the national anthem, a medley of "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America" and then another Sousa march. 

Afterwards I had the Kenwood Players, the band director and his wife and the two trombones from C'ville who come down to play with us all out here for lunch and music making. We had a great time and the music making session was terrific, as both trombone players are very good.

I had a musical epiphany singing unamplified with the two tubas, soprano sax, trumpet and the two trombones and my guitar. I was half facing the trombones, and when I had the intonation right at full voice I could feel the sound waves from the trombones and my voice blending in such a way it was almost as if the trombone sound connected with my diaphragm. There was almost the sense of body surfing on/in the sound waves. It's the most tactile I've ever felt music.

This all reminded me that the trombone was used nearly exclusively to double voices during its early history, and after this experience it's very clear why that was.

Music for Doris

Through my regular visits to the nursing home as a hospice volunteer doing music, I've gotten to know Doris W, seen in the photo above. Each year she raises thousands of dollars for the U.Va Children's Hospital by organizing various events, one of which is a garage/bedding plants sale in the parking lot every Spring. For a year or two I went on my own with a guitar and sang for an hour, but last year and this year, the Kenwood Players performed.

In this photo you can just see the mics in the tubas and the cord from my guitar, each running to one of the three inputs in the amp. I sang without a mic.

Here's a nice shot of the two tubas, Crawford and Bill C, where you can better see the microphones.

Here's Bill B on soprano sax.

Judy on percussion.

Dick and Maggie.

My guess is I'm singing "Don't Think Twice" here. Or maybe "King of the Road".

Our Vermont readership may recognize my godmother, Miss Mildred, in this photo. She came to my senior piano recital at Woodberry Forest in 1967.

We all really enjoyed this event, and the amping of the tubas and guitar worked very well. Have since gotten a mic for Maggie's clarinet that seems to work well. We have a small indoor event on 6/17 and then the larger event on July 5th, where some of us will also be performing in the Dixieland group, "A Touch of Dixie", and we'll all be performing in the concert band.

Practice Time

Since talking about practicing the flute with the metronome at slightly different speeds so as to help feel the rhythm of the phrase itself, had the realization that what I was trying to get at has to do with that recent link to the article saying that we keep time in different ways in different parts of the brain. Just as music, our sense of time is not localized in a single area or two, as are most of our activities.

This is also what I was trying to get at saying Kyle Gann's The Planets refreshes our ears to rhythm shapes outside of repetitive triple and duple meters.

For me it's a given that music and physical gesture are deeply connected, and unless we're doing something like dancing, we don't count off to create a rigid time line when we nod, wink, use our hands when talking or any of the other thousands of physical gestures we make every day.

In ensemble playing we have to keep time in the metronome part of our brain so that we are, in fact, an ensemble. But for the music to trigger emotional responses in the audience, our sense of time needs to register in the other parts of the brain that perceive time as well.

photo - over in Echo Valley last year. John's wall; Kate's flowers.

Flute Diary

Did pretty well with the Presbyterian Ensemble yesterday. Somewhere between "a gentleman's C" and a B+. Got lots of phrases just right with full tone. Got the high F's and Eb's. Garbled enough notes here and there to keep things out of the "A" range, though.

Came to realize the fingering insecurity stemmed from the fact that on the alto flute, which I played a lot in the 90's between our Vermont readership on regular flute and Dr. Andy on cello, the mid-range Eb has better tone and intonation with the left index finger down, rather than up as on the soprano flute. Once I realized that bit of brain wiring was what was setting off cascades of fingering errors and bad intonation and poor tone, drilling all the little sections where that cropped up really helped.

The other thing was realizing I needed to stop playing horn for a couple of days to let my lips have the ability to finesse the aperture to fine tune the tone and intonation. 

One of the great things about the flute is that you can play as long as you want, as opposed to the horn where your practice time is limited by how long you can buzz your lips well enough for good tone. With the flute, the more you play the more flexible and enabling your embouchure becomes.

This was the most intense wood shedding I've done in a while, and it was very helpful drilling down into technique issues and figuring them out. One thing that revealed problems was to use the metronome on a variety of speeds right around the one indicated. Slightly expanding or contracting the length of the beat helped me learn the essential rhythms of the phrases. I may well have it wrong mathematically, but adjusting the rhythms to slightly varied beat lengths felt more logarithmical than arithmetic. Once I got the feel for the flow and patterns of the rhythm, could pull off the phrases at the various tempi.

One thing that really helped was that the Presbyterian Church is a wonderfully large open space with mostly exposed brick walls. Playing the flute into that space is a joy because the sound comes back at you so easily and clearly, it's almost like having another flute doubling the part. In a great acoustical space like that it's easier to refine your tone, because better tone gets a better acoustic response.

photo - early spring crocus 

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.

Sequential Fingering

Through high school I played the piano, then as an undergraduate took up guitar and banjo. On both the keyboard and the fret board, half steps are arranged sequentially from low to high and moving one finger moves you one half step up or down. 

On the flute, there are times, like Ab and Eb, where you have to move two or more fingers at the same time to move a half step and the movements seem weird to me because they don't conform to how I wired my brain before I started playing the flute. 

Every so often this issue crops up on the horn, but since there are two different ways to make every note, and since there are few sequential movements analogous to the keyboard, I usually haven't been lulled into that frame of mind, though it does happen.

What gets me about the flute is that a lot of the fingerings are sequential, with raising or lowering one finger moving you a half step, and that lulls me into a frame of mind that gets me into trouble.

I also set myself up for this by never venturing much beyond one sharp or flat once I took up the flute thirty years ago. I distinctly remember our Vermont readership patiently telling me a few times that if I practiced scales, it would all be easier. Now that I'm trying to play things with 4 flats part of me wishes I'd at least nailed down using the Ab key. Old dog; new tricks.

Sighing

Here's an article on sighing that discusses how it's a way for the respiratory system to "reset" itself. Research into why "take a deep breath" can be so effective. In band, I try to always take a big relaxing breath during tacet measures and it really helps.

via Bruce Hembd at Horn Matters

Performers/Audience

One of the things I really need to work on is how to relate to an audience as a performing musician. Whenever I work with a group as a music therapist, I usually stand in the middle of the group, or at least wander around among the members some. In trying to get people to make music you have to take some pretty heavy whacks at a mindset that gained the upper hand over the course of the 20th century as recorded music drastically altered how music making is viewed in technically advanced societies. There's the assumption that some people can make music and others can't, an idea that just doesn't compute in most "primitive" cultures where everyone just naturally participates in communal music making. 

When the Friday group goes out and performs as the Kenwood Players, the social dynamic is very different than my doing a music therapy session, and I need to stop being surprised by that and to figure out how to adjust and do what I want to do in the new environment. In any kind of performance situation there's a default set of expectations on the part of the "audience". I can work with those expectations, but I can't remove them in the short term.

The audience at the hospice event is unusual in two ways. Physically, it's sort of theater in the round. We're providing music for what is essentially an event in a park. Emotionally, just about everyone there is grieving for a loved one recently passed on. During the talks and the butterfly release that followed our playing, there were tears both from the lectern and in the audience. Knowing that tends to make me a bit tentative in relating to folks there while playing.

The main problem, though, is that being the organizer, music arranger, roadie and default leader of the band, I let myself get caught up in all the details of the performance and the ensemble dynamics and end up not giving the audience the attention it deserves, which is really pretty amazing, since they're why we're there. 

Using the guitar amp which lets me move around while the other players can all hear it is very helpful. As the arrangements settle into playability, there'll be less need to direct. The main thing, though, is to remember to make eye contact with audience members and do whatever I can non-verbally and musically while playing to connect with them. Between numbers I need to make sure they can hear me thank them for applause and to give them at least as much attention as I do to the players in prepping for the next song, just not at the same time.

Being extremely fortunate in having fine players in the group, I don't need to give them the attention I'm used to giving members of music therapy sessions, and instead give more of that attention to the audience.

Ensemble Mix/Audio

One of the guiding principles for the part books I'm building is that they take into account that not everyone can be there all the time, either at rehearsals or performances. The idea is to create parts that suit the various instruments, but are generic enough that players can successfully jump around from playing lead to being accompaniment.

This past Sunday was the first time we've had just two treble instruments, trumpet and soprano sax, along with the two Eb tubas and percussion - and neither of our alto or tenor voices, the clarinet and trombone. 

I played horn on two numbers, which are four voice suites I've been working on. One strings together a Renaissance dance, a troubadour part song, and Lillibulero (Purcell/Beggar's Opera). The other strings together that famous Jeremiah Clarke Trumpet tune with one by Purcell. With the horn on the tenor line they worked well (when I played the right notes).

On everything else I played the new acoustic steel string guitar with the on board mic run through a small keyboard amp. It had much the same effect of the C'ville horns coming to play with the Orange concert band. It gave a middle to the sound that the tubas could plug into from below and the sax and trumpet from above. 

At our next little performance I'm thinking of putting mics in the bell of the tubas, so that like me on the guitar, they can work not so hard and yet get a better sound. At the last C'ville Municipal Band concert I was struck by how their three Bb tubas laid down this wonderful bass throughout all the numbers. They sort of created a primal river of sound that everyone else could float and swim along in.

I have an aversion to using amplification in our performances, because over the years, walking into events where there's amplification I've come to view amps as lethal weapons and to think that professional musicians using them are deaf (or that they're way more self involved than is healthy). Judicious use, though, can create a better ensemble mix than not using amplification (or sound reinforcement, which is a probably a better term).

The way I set the level for the guitar was to turn it up just enough so that what was coming out of the amp was about as loud as the guitar itself. I hardly noticed the amp was there, but for the other players it kept my sound steady whether I was facing them or facing out to the audience. This lets me move around as I always did doing music therapy sessions back in San Antonio. I can sing strongly enough to not need a mic in small scale performances like this one, and I much prefer it, as having the mic control where I am feels very constraining.

The deep lesson of what's been learned here has to do with balance. On all sorts of musical issues there's the forest/trees dynamic. Because of my focus on creating part books, that's what I was hearing. The way the guitar brought everything together made me realize I hadn't been hearing the forest. The part books are going to work best if there's a guitar, or rhythm keyboard, or an omnichord or autoharp to give that middle to the sound. You can get by without, but having one of them will make things much easier.

Another thing I was more reminded of than learned, was that rhythm guitar is my strong suit when it comes to music making. The new guitar is a joy to play, and the amplification makes it a whole new experience for me, and I had listened to a Michael Hedges CD here recently which led me to try some new textures. But mainly, I don't have to think about how I'm going to strum. There's a direct connection between the feeling I want and the strum just happening. Except for a few keyboard pieces I've been playing for decades, along with some Dylan songs I've been singing for 40 years, everything else I do musically requires a lot more "left brain" or conscious mental involvement. With rhythm guitar it's all intuition, feeling and sensation with very little thinking. 

Butterfly Music 2010

Here are some photos of us playing at the Butterfly Release fund raiser for The Hospice of the Rapidan down at Germanna yesterday afternoon. There was stiff wind, so that's why the French horn case is being used to anchor the tripod with the Sony recorder. That's Dick on trumpet and Judy on percussion.

Here I am in full music therapy encouragement mode, urging on Bill B on soprano sax and Bill C on Eb tuba, with Crawford just barely in the frame

Here's Crawford on the other Eb tuba and me trying to keep my music stand from blowing over.

Here I'm facing where most people were seated over where, after we played, a harpist played while the names of people who've passed on were read out and then the butterflies released.

Except for Crawford, we can all be seen in this shot.

Wanted to put these shots over on Facebook, but it crashed every time I tried. Update - Finally got it to work. Here's the link.

My feeling is we did very well. There were some rough spots, but they were mostly due to my giving incomplete road map instructions or getting off the beam on guitar once and horn a couple of times. We've got another little outdoor performance in two weeks, then a small indoor one in June, then a bigger outdoor performance on the 5th of July. Learning a lot, and want to post on some of that here in the next week or so.

The Planets

I was nearly 30 before I heard the phrase, "There's no accounting for taste". Truer words were never spoken. It's also the case that over the course of my life, I've been attracted to things well out of the mainstream. Just because this music works for me, there's no reason it should for you. But if you feel the need for something fresh in your musical diet, give it a shot.

In a number of posts I've talked how excited I am about Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure approach to helping folks come at the issue of embouchure in a wonderfully accessible way. In some deep sense, I think Kyle Gann is doing something similar in helping us to rethink the possibilities of tonal music in a new and very natural way. Both Smiley and Gann seem to be saying, "Forget the experts; come at music and music making as you are." Just as Smiley talks about how one's best embouchure can't be arrived at by following rules handed down by the masters, Gann's music creates wondrous new forms by leaving behind the monotony of regular bar-lines and harmonies meant for the parlor. 

Relâche is an odd assortment of instruments, sort of a chamber concert band without brass but with a occasional viola. Gann seems to exult in oddness of timbres, even to flaunting his ability to turn it to his uses. 

All of the novel sound sculptures in The Planets mean that you can't simply assign them to familiar pattern correspondences. Several times while listening I've had the phrase " A poem should not mean but be", float up. There are a lot of times in The Planets where the sound shapes don't easily map to known quantities. But nothing is so far removed from "normal" that it's incomprehensible.

One caveat I should throw in is that I've been following Kyle Gann's blog, PostClassic for years. When you read someone's writing that closely, an image of them forms in your mind, especially if you were an English major in a previous lifetime. While there are a number of passages in The Planets where I'm not sure of their "meaning", I have the feeling of Kyle coming to life in sound.

Tunings

This book review by Jan Swafford is a nice overview of the temperament question. Thanks to A. C. Douglas for pointing it out.

Here's the main problem:

As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat.

Music, Movement & Autism

This short article is on some very preliminary work combining music and movement to help autistic children who are non-verbal to learn to speak.

The theory behind the therapy is that the combination of sound and movement can activate a network of brain regions that overlap with brain areas thought to be abnormal in children with autism. Researchers think the intensive, repetitive training on sound paired with motion will help strengthen those abnormal areas.

Clocks and Clouds

Here's a short article in the latest Wired which offers some cautionary advice about the nature of the type of neuroscience research I'm often linking to. This is the concluding paragraph:

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Time Awareness

One component of music making is that it is an aural manifestation of our sense of the passage of time. This article is about how the brain processes time.

. . . .“This is because your brain is constantly calibrating duration,” Eagleman explains. “If every time you flip on the lights there is a 200-millisecond delay, your brain recognizes the pattern and edits out the delay. Flip the switch, and the lights seem to turn on instantaneously. But if you moved to a funky house where the lights really did come on instantaneously, it would appear that they came on before you flipped the switch. Your brain is temporarily stuck on the old pattern.”. . .

. . . . This suggested that the brain maintains at least two separate versions of time, a master clock that feeds you a perception of the now, and another that is constantly at work tidying up that perception. . . .

. . . .unlike speech, which is processed in Broca’s area, or vision, which the occipital lobe handles—our sense of time is not centralized. . . .

. . . But Eagleman is finding that time might be relative even if the two observers are standing next to each other. He has a long way to go to prove that time is not the objective constant we think it to be, and that each person instead experiences time’s passage on an individual basis, but, he says, “it does make one wonder what else we’re going to learn along the way.”

This is the first time I've seen a researcher talking about something besides music that is processed in various parts of the brain simultaneously. The other thing is that I think most music makers have had the experience of time seeming to pass at different speeds, especially in moments of flow.

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.

Embodied Remodeling

I've been going through a remodel and subsequent rearranging of lots of the physical components of my everyday life. As I've been using various rooms in new ways, and having regular routines disrupted, new ways of conceptualizing aspects of the music materials project keep floating up. 

The notion of embodied cognition holds that for even our most abstract cognitive processes, there are physical cognates buried within. My suspicion is that the physical rearrangement of my daily life is triggering cognitive rearrangements of various projects at hand.

Pete Seeger Banjo

I've mentioned from time to time playing a banjo and here's a photo of the one I use. It's an old Gibson I got second hand back in 1967 when a freshman at Duke. It's called a "Pete Seeger" model (or "folk banjo" or "long neck banjo") because he's the one that popularized this particular model.

Where the capo is on the third fret is where regular banjos stop. The extra three frets allow for longer strings and a deeper sound when the capo isn't used, which is great for baritones. It's also the case that to make the instrument strong enough for that extra string length, it weighs a ton, but that extra weight adds heft to the sound as well. 

Currently the fifth string has been removed because I'm playing it as if it were a tenor banjo with the Dixieland group and the Kenwood Players. Having that drone just doesn't work with all the jazz chords and the chamber wind ensemble.

One of the glorious things about a banjo is that the bridge is held in place by simple string tension, so it can be placed exactly right so that the first harmonic matches the 12th fret. That, and the fact the bridge is sitting on a drum head that's set in motion when the strings vibrate, is why the banjo "rings".

Of all the instruments I play, the banjo pulls people in the most. There's just something about it people love to hear and to come up and talk about.

New Guitar

I hadn't looked at new guitars for something like 25 years, but here lately have been wanting a steel string acoustic with a microphone inside with the jack for it where the shoulder strap attaches to the back of the instrument.

Turns out there's a new design that wasn't available all those years ago. While built for steel strings (rather than nylon), the strings are further apart than standard steel string guitars, though not quite as far apart as they are on most nylon string classical guitars. The fretboard is also much flatter than a standard steel string, though not perfectly flat like nylon string guitars. In both stores I went to, these newly designed guitars were said to be for "progressive" players.

It's a joy to play and has a robust, bright sound, even without using the onboard mic, but when it's plugged into the sound system, the sound is just about perfect for accompanying the Kenwood Players without having to work so hard for volume.

Because of the spacing of the strings, strumming is a little different and different effects can be had. It really is a hybrid of the classical nylon and the American steel string, and plays in its own way.

Daniel Lanois

Daniel Lanois helped Bob Dylan create Oh, Mercy. They recorded it in a house in the Garden District of New Orleans and captured some of the vibe of The Crescent City. Whenever I listen to the album, it always reminds me of an Allman Brothers concert back in the early 70's I went to down in some warehouse near the river just off the amazingly named Tchopitoulas Street. The music was powerful and energetic, but there were these amazing moments of relaxation, lazy blues licks floating in the humid night. 

The main thing about Oh, Mercy for me, though, is that it's a touchstone for how you produce a CD. There's an amazing sound palette Lanois brings to bear in the arrangements that pull performances out of Dylan that are among my favorites. 

Lanois also writes and performs his own music. This video is of a song he wrote called "The Maker", as performed by Emmylou Harris and Spyboy. He's expanding and playing with the song form just like he does with CD production.

Conducting in a Trance

In this post Joe Horowitz is talking about Leopold Stowkowski. 

A Philadelphia story told by Abram Chasins captures the Stokowski conundrum.
Before a performance, he would secrete himself in his dressing room and do deep-breathing exercises. "If someone said 'Good evening' or merely brushed past him when he was on his way to the stage, he would wheel around and return to his room to restore his former degree of concentration." This could delay a concert by as long as 15 minutes. The gesture was as practical as it was theatrical: Stokowski conducted in a trance.

In Praise of Kyle Gann

Outside of a few favorite Bob Dylan albums and the two or three close listenings to recordings of the performances I give to each of the performances of the  Kenwood Players, I very rarely listen to CD's. My recently purchased Kyle Gann's The Planets is a major exception. In the past several weeks I've listened to it over and over again.

Kyle Gann is some kind of savant masquerading as a musicologist, composer, critic and blogger. I've been following his blog PostClassic for years. He has an astonishing gift for talking about music in such a way as to expand one's notions of what music is and can be. 

He's a big believer in not talking about specific music unless you can hear it, so always has a downloadable example of whatever he's talking about. I'm on rural dial-up, but always take the time to download his examples. 

He's recently come out with a CD release of something he's been working on for years, The Planets for the Relâche ensemble. Turns out he can write music as well as writing about it.

One reason I don't listen to CD's is that after several listenings, most loose their freshness. A frequent finding of the brain researchers is that we want music to go in unexpected directions at least some of the time, and after several listenings to any particular CD, we remember what is does and where it goes, so it becomes less interesting over time. 

The Planets has an accessible surface, but has deep complexity right below the surface, so that upon repeated listenings, there is (so far) always more to be heard, which is very refreshing.

Here is a link to the CD, with links to brief samples. There's lots to say about it, but so far, for me, it's that "new music" I kept seeking but not finding back in the 60's, 70's and 80's. There are all kinds of ways for music to be new and fresh without a lot of the épater le bourgeoisie behaviour that contaminated so much of the music back then. 

Timbre

Timbre and tone are closely related, but not usually thought of as the same thing. When using the word "tone", we're usually referring to a specific instrument and/or player. "Timbre" (which is italicized because it's taken from the French) usually refers to the characteristic sound of a family of instruments, and then further to individual members of a particular family. 

There are the strings, which can be bowed orchestral instruments or guitar, banjos, and mandolins and such which are plucked or strummed. There are the brass instruments, some of which have conical tubing and others with cylindrical tubing. There are the single reeds - the clarinets and the saxophones - and the double reeds - the oboe and bassoon. The percussion family has a wide range of individual members with unique sounds.

One way we identify an instrument's timbre is by what audio people call the envelope of the sound (how the sound starts, sustains and then ends). Strings, brass, reeds and percussion have characteristic ways of creating their sounds that our brains process quickly and easily.

Another way we identify an instrument's timbre is by the nature of the vibration creating the sound. In this animation I linked down in the post on tone, you can add or subtract individual parts of the vibration and thereby change the overall vibration.

We use this way of changing the components of a vibration to alter its sound all the time when we speak. If you sing a long held note on a particular pitch and go through all the vowel sounds while doing so, it's your making subtle changes to the various components of the overall vibration creating the sound that makes "a's" sound like "a's" and "u's" sound like "u's". 

The specifics of what's going on with the components of the overall vibration are explained by something called the harmonic series, which gets pretty mathematical pretty quickly. At some point in the materials, the harmonic series needs to be explained for those interested. My hope is, though, to help people understand the broad outlines of all this well enough to inform their music making, without inducing math phobia.

Music Makers & Brain Function

In just about all of the articles about music and the brain, one of the points being made is that music engages and coordinates activities in multiple areas of the brain. If there is a human activity that uses as many, or more, areas of the brain, it hasn't been mentioned in any of the articles.

One of the underlying principles of music therapy is working to find the best way for each individual to go about learning how to make music and then how to improve their music making. Individuals are going to have variations of strengths and weaknesses (and individual characteristics) in the various areas of the brain involved.

 

The more we learn about these different areas and their involvement in making music, I think it will help us better tailor learning strategies for individuals. The better, and more complete, the evaluation of the client, the more effective the therapist can be. We need to improve our working understanding of what the different parts of the brain are up to and how that plays out in individuals.

Horn Diary

In the past week four horns from the Charlottesville Municipal Band sat in with our community band for two rehearsals and two concerts. I continued to play 2nd horn and sat with 1 and 2 on my left and 3 and 4 on my right. It was even more fun than the last time this happened. 

For one thing, having an idea of what to expect left me in a better position for more critical listening. Before when this happened, experiencing for the first time what being in a horn section sounds like had such a powerful effect, details got lost. I also had more opportunities for conversation and all four of the players were gracious and very informative in their responses, and were very good about letting me look closely at their instruments and mouthpieces.

My main takeaway was just how good they are. I was extremely knowledgeable about the music, having struggled for two months trying to play my part close to adequately. On their first read through they didn't make any real errors, but some of the bits I'd had trouble with weren't as smooth as the rest. What amazed me was how quickly they improved. We went through the program four times, and every time their playing was significantly improved and more musical. For them, the technique is there, it's just a question of mentally inhabiting what the score and the conductor want. Made me realize just how rudimentary my technique is.

What I enjoyed most was hearing them interpret all the expression and articulation markings in the music. Having grown up playing piano I don't fully appreciate what those marks can mean, especially on the horn. I kept having the thought that they were sculpting shapes in the sound of the music. So much of music making is the mental space you have of what's possible, and anything you can do to increase that is beneficial. I may not be able to be as expressive as they are, but hearing what they did shows me the way.

Something else that I kept noticing was a quality to the tone that I'd missed previously. I could hear 1 and 2 a lot better, and 1 had a new instrument and that might be part of it. Words are going to fail me here, but what I heard from time to time was that point midway between brassy and mellow, an amazing urgency within glorious tone. I had an involuntary emotional response to the "call" of the horn. I can't ever remember having such a visceral response to a musical tone quality. 

They all had mouthpieces with nicely rounded rims - none approaching the thinness of the Farkas VDC. One player loaned me a Schilke 31, which is close to a 32, which I think I'm going to get one of. Big cup, large diameter opening, and comfortable rim. 

It still amazes me how unsettled the horn is as a physical instrument. They all had different wraps and ways of draining condensation.

I've seen occasional mentions of a sort of stereotype for horn players - very nice people with a bit of eccentricity thrown in. These four players certainly have the being nice people aspect down - they drove something like a total of 200 miles without remuneration to play with a group far less accomplished than their band. They could not have been more helpful to me with my questions. As to the eccentricity, if that is the case, for me that's not a bug but a feature, being a somewhat biased observer on that issue.

Horn Diary

The intonation issues I wrote about in the last entry had several causes.

One was the position of the right hand. I had decided it was too far out of the horn and ended up having it too far in. To my ear it seems that having the hand too far in affects intonation of the different valve positions differently.

That problem was exacerbated by not using my embouchure well for that final tweak on intonation. A year ago, when I began incorporating Balanced Embouchure principles in my horn practice, I also switched to a different mouthpiece with a thicker, more pillowy, rim. ( A Farkas/Holton MC instead of a VDC.) I was less happy with the tone, as it was brassier, but that's what the band directors seem to want, and it made playing easier.

What it also did was to increase the amount of lips being pressed against the mouthpiece and unable to have an effect on the intonation.

At the same time, I also pushed all the tuning slides all the way in, thinking to reset them over time, but didn't, because just pulling out the primary slides of each horn worked.

So now I'm back to the VDC mouthpiece, all tuning slides pulled out various lengths, and my right hand seems to be in closer to the right place.

For the first time, here in the past six months I can hit the high F with no problem. Before that I could occasionally, but never with both good tone and intonation. The F# and G above that are passable most of the time and the Ab and A are like the F used to be. 

I seem to be in the minority on preferring the less brassy tone of the VDC mouthpiece, but have decided to go with it most of the time as I so much prefer it.

Also have switched back to the normal sitting position for playing the horn. The other one was a bit easier on the back muscles and made it easier to play with the volume needed to make the one horn sound more like a section. Our new director is really working on the band playing with less volume overall, which I'm realizing is one way to improve the tone quality of the group.

Recently my cello and fret-less bass friend Andy was here for an afternoon of music and we recorded some things on the Sony. I was just as close to it as he was, but with the bell pointed away, and even though he was unamplified, the cello is louder in the mix that the horn. With the flute the balance was much better.

Beginner's Mind

Over on the Facebook group for "The Midlife Horn Player", one of the members recently talked about dialing back his practice time from over an hour a day, every day, for five years - to just once a week, and he says his tone has improved nicely. 

This reminded me of a phenomenon I've repeatedly experienced playing various instruments. Because I can't keep up with them all at all times, sometimes there'll be months of inactivity on one before picking it up again. It's often the case that that first playing after a break makes me wonder how I ever gave it up, as the music flows easily and with good tone, sort of a "first, fine careless rapture". Then subsequently all the technique issues creep on back.

Shoshin is a concept in Zen Buddhism that means "beginner's mind". In Wikipedia there's this quote from a master:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

Wikipedia also says this concept ties into authenticity:

The term can be used for any thing or person who is perfectly genuine.

Routine can be immensely helpful in your practice of music making, but falling into mindless ruts is the dark side of that.

More on Tone

Back down on this post on tone, Jonathan West made some excellent comments and then went on to post three times at his blog on tone here, here, and here. 

It's very validating that such a high level player agrees with the notion of the centrality of tone to your music making. A number of other things Jonathan says are grist for future posts. For now, though, a few points.

In lots of ways, making music is an extension and an elaboration of your voice. Just as the tone of your voice conveys the emotional content of your speech, tone is a primal element of your music making. 

One aspect of Jeff Smiley's BE method of helping people find their best embouchure is having them exaggerate various muscle movements so as to better be able to find that nicely working balanced spot between the extremes. Trying to create the infinite variety of your voice tones on your instrument, with lots of exaggeration thrown in, can help you expand the envelope of tonal possibilities and give you an idea of which sorts of tone you'd like to develop to better make the music you want to make.

A great frustration of mine in community band over the years has been that pretty much all the pieces we've worked on tend to sound at least as much like etudes as they do enjoyable music. They offer all sorts of opportunities to work on rhythm, intonation, dynamics and articulation, but tone quality gets left off the list. 

photo - first warm toned sunset we've had in a while. Taken with the new camera.