Voice Diary

I record most of the performances of the Kenwood Players and then make a CD for each player. That means listening closely all the way through twice, always noticing things that weren't as evident to me in the real time of the performance. The recording of the last week's performance is the first time I didn't physically cringe at least once listening to my voice. One of the most amazing things to me about the Kenwood Players is that I've ended up being a vocalist they feel is good enough to perform with in public.

I never sang as a child through high school, and when taking up the guitar in college it was transferring my piano finger skills to finger picking that occupied me the most. Any singing was just humming the melody enough to hear where the chord changes were. 

A couple of years after college I spent some months backpacking, traveling with guitar, through southern South America with a friend fluent in Spanish, sticking to the back roads. Chile was where we started out, and the first time I ever sang in public was around a small bonfire outside a small village on the coast. I remember doing Dylan's "Hard Rain". Jim asked one of the villagers what he thought and the reply was "se pasa" (it passes). 

What has always made my singing cringe worthy to me (and family and friends who have known me mostly as a non-singer) has been the weirdly inauthentic moments when the emoting overpowers the technique and the psychodrama implodes the music.

In this latest recording there are lots of errors of intonation and rhythm, but none made me cringe. I hope that's because I'm finally able, after nearly 40 years of trying, to have the singing be inflected by the emotions rather than visa versa. But then again, it could just be my ear has become numb to my neuroses.

Then there's the whole issue of two very close friends I got to know after I began to sing, both of whom much prefer what they call my "old voice" of before my working on it so much here the past ten years or so. 

photo - bull frog with the old hay barn in the background

Empowering Players

Just this afternoon got word from Jonathan that the St Clements Wind Ensemble has, after two (more than just reading through) rehearsals, decided to go forward with performing Timepiece at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh in August.  I. Am. Over. The. Moon.

Part of it has to do with why I write music. I think the error of the 20th century modernists was assuming radical change was needed to refresh the repertoire. There's all kinds of stuff yet to be written in what I'm going to start calling "common touch" harmonies and rhythms that the modernists flew right past in their quest to be ever so much cooler than the plebes. I use rhythms that are more complex than simple 3 or 4 to the measure, but which still have a recognizable bounce and shape. My harmonies are all tonal, but "modal" gets used as a descriptor, and I do love Gesualdo. 

Also, I'm not sure I completely buy into the whole cartharsis thing. There are times it can work wonderfully, but there are other times that's not what I'm looking for. I do not need music to feel the negative emotions like anxiety, depression and anger. I most of the time want music to reinforce positive emotions in fresh ways. My sense of audiences who've heard my music is that I'm at least partly successful.

But this I why I'm so happy. Below, Jonathan comments:

When rehearsing a new piece, particularly a newly-composed piece where you haven't had any opportunity to listen to recordings, the music emerges only gradually. Initially, you are just concentrating on counting and getting the right notes in the right places. Only after that do you have time to give attention to balance, phrasing and eventually structure and overall interpretation.

And the interesting thing about this process in chamber music is that it is a collaborative process. All the participants have something to contribute to the interpretation, we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

That my music can be used for this level of music making - and that it engages the players enough to want to continue working to see what they can make of it - is a whole new level of validation, both in terms of my notions of where music can go and of my notion that small ensembles are part of the answer to lot of Greg Sandow's questions. All the small ensembles (regular and irregular) keeping the culture of homemade music making alive need fresh material, and the latest twitch out of the twelve tone enclave ensconced in the academy isn't very helpful.

And maybe it's because we just went through the Fourth, but this really struck a chord with me:

. . . we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

This made me realize I'm more of the democratic/republican way of thinking than the authoritarian/totalitarian when it comes to music making. I've always had trouble with authority figures for whom I could deduce no really good reason for their having authority other than the quirks of samsara. To my mind, it would be a sign of a more vibrant music making culture if what Jonathan is talking about here were simply assumed, and it was the surrender of liberty involved playing for an autocrat that needed explaining.

photo - yard violets, which our Vermont readership (who asked me to write a wind quintet in the first place) insists are flowers and not weeds.

Picnic in the Park 2010

Here's a shot of the Kenwood Players at the Picnic in the Park this past Monday. The temperature was nearly 100 degrees and the heat index was higher. We played an early set from 5:30 until 6:15, then the A Touch of Dixie group (me on banjo and a vocal) played from 6:45 until 7:15, then the community band played the national anthem at 7:30, the community chorus sang, and then the band played from 8:15 until 9:00. The Kenwood Players then did a short set between 9:00 and the fireworks at 9:30.

We all played well, and the crowd was nicely appreciative of all the bands and the chorus. I want to do a few separate posts on various things, this one being to give context. This event was the culmination of a lot of work by a lot of people, and for me it was a testing ground for lots of things I've been trying to accomplish, and overall there's a solid sense of success. Here's a snip from an email Charles Torian, the conductor of the community band, sent out.

Please allow me to thank you for the fine season we have enjoyed together. Monday's performance 'took the cake' in terms of your playing especially well in severely adverse conditions. It's been a long time since I've had to work in those temperatures, but you met the challenge with grace, an uncomplaining demeanor, and a real excellence in your pitch, which could have been a major disaster if you hadn't maintained the control you exhibited. I was proud to be able to accept, on your behalf, the applause of the audience as it increased during your program.

Maestro Charles sat right behind the Kenwood Players during our first set, the first time he'd heard us. He was very complimentary of the little arrangement I'd done for the group that strings together "Yankee Doodle", "Shortenin' Bread", and "Oh! Susanna." He also really liked the way the tubas were amplified, and suggested that in the future we might try that for the community band. 

Besides being our first director who has committed to the long term leadership of the band, Charles is a fine arranger. He's working on translating some brass band music from the Civil War era into something the band can play. Also, Orange is the home of President Zachary Taylor as well as James Madison, and a Taylor family member has asked the community band to play over at Montpelier in November at an event celebrating President Taylor. Charles, with his knowledge of historical music troves down in Richmond, has found some piano music written in honor of Zachary Taylor and is working out some arrangements for the band to play. All the historical stuff is great, but having music created just for our little group is terrific.

Timepiece ~ A Wind Quintet

(proposed program note for Timepiece)

I've been a Registered Music Therapist since 1980 and first got into composing by writing piano pieces for adult beginners more suitable for their larger hands and mature sensibilities than the children's pieces usually on offer. Then over the years I also began to write music for myself and friends to play, mostly involving flute, alto flute, cello and piano.

In 1994 a flute playing friend asked me to write a piece for the wind quintet she'd just joined and I jumped at the chance because that ensemble combines the intimate expressiveness of a small chamber group with such a powerful palette of tonal colors. The title derives from two of the three movements having unusual time signatures, which allows for creating fresh and innovative music while remaining fully in the tonal realm.

A late draft of Timepiece got a small public reading and was never heard again as some members of that quintet moved away and it never reformed. Last year on Jonathan West's horn blog I read of his interest in finding new music and got in touch. On getting a receptive response I sent him the parts to try out, leaving the final editing for live performance in his capable hands. Were it not for the St. Clements Wind Ensemble, this music would still just be some ones and zeros on my computer. I am immensely grateful to them for bringing it to life.

Lyle Sanford
Orange, Virginia

This very exciting. When Jonathan got in touch recently to say the SCWE had rehearsed the piece and decided to perform it, I felt then it was already a success, their liking it enough to keep working on it.

Were there no demands on my time and I could do whatever I wished, I'd spend a lot of time composing. There's nothing quite like creating new music. Always the first time I hear it performed it's a little like dreaming while awake, with my conscious mind getting hints of my unconscious mind encoded in the music. 

More on The Planets

Back a while ago I sent Pliable at On An Overgrown Path a CD of Kyle Gann's The Planets, being very curious as to what he'd think of it. He just got back from traveling and put up this post and Kyle has responded with this one. My previous posts on Kyle are here.

A lot to say about all this, but two things are at the fore. I'm very much on the fringe of both Kyle Gann's and Pliable's worlds, and their knowledge of music is way beyond mine. It's wonderfully validating that Pliable seems in agreement with me as to the importance of The Planets. Just to make another connection, I think what's so important about this music is that it so well meets the needs Greg Sandow blogs about.

The other thing is that the internet still amazes me. Here I am out in rural Virginia, just out the back door from James Madison's Montpelier, on dial-up, helping connect two of the biggest and best music bloggers out there. The geezer in me is floored.

Lama Tashi/Solstice Performance

My friend Lama Tashi performed at the Handshake Concert in Delhi on the solstice. This was the third annual event put on by the delightfully named Rattle and Hum Society, which works to broaden awareness in India of the far Northeast of the country. He's the one on the right in the photo above.

Here's a quote from one of the reviews of the concert (gompa is Tibetan for monastery):

They closed with a worship duet, alternating Angami and English verses, and setting the stage for Grammy nominee Lama Tashi and his ‘singing monks’ to take us to the edge of heaven, syncing chants with languorous drum rolls, soft cymbal clinks and reverbs from Tibetan longhorns. 

An overwhelming peace descended over the audience, as if we were deep within a gompa, in a meditative trance. From the rage of rock to the stillness of spiritual music, quite a transition.

Walls and Sound

Back a while ago I posted on how much better the community band sounded when set up right in front of a wall in the town park as opposed to being out in the middle of it. We could hear ourselves better and the audience could as well.

Last week the Kenwood Players performed what Erik Satie might have called "furniture music" for a Health Fair put on by U.Va. hospital and a number of local non-profits.

Free mammograms and sports physicals for school children, along with lots of information booths and free screenings, were on offer for non and under-insured folks.

The locale was the gym in the new field house at the high school in town. The way we set up, Dick on trumpet had his back directly to a wall and Bill B on soprano sax had his back to the corner of the huge room furthest from us. In the recording, Dick is perfectly clear and Bill B sounds as if he's in the next county, and they were equidistant from the mics. 

At the time we were playing this disparity wasn't obvious because of the booming acoustics of the gym and because I was usually standing closer to Bill B than to Dick. There was also a thick pad on the wall right behind Dick and I assumed it would soak up a lot of his sound, but anything reflects better than nothing. Also, the recorder was out in front of us a bit, and other than setting a level, I didn't really pay attention to the sound and the balance.

The basic lesson in all of this is not to make assumptions, but to walk around and pay attention to how the acoustics are working.

Lightfoot and Handel and Dylan

Just came across this in an article on Gordon Lightfoot.

"The music just seemed to roll out of me," Lightfoot said. "I'd sing at festivals, weddings, everything when I was young. Luckily, I had a teacher that showed me how to sing with emotion. He taught me to do so by having me sing songs from Handel's Messiah. He had me singing a lot of really serious religious music at one point just to see what I could do with it. I think that's what you're hearing there in a lot of my music."

His songs "Early Morning Rain" and "Four Strong Winds" were among the first I learned on the guitar and he performed at Duke when I was there, so I've always been familiar with his music, and somehow this really makes sense.

The other thing about his voice is that someone once asked Bob Dylan why he sang the way he did and his response was he was just trying to use what he had the best he could, but that if he could have someone's else's voice it would be Gordon Lightfoot's. 

update - later realized "Four Strong Winds" an Ian Tyson (Ian & Sylvia) composition. Joni Mitchell was another Canadian I listened to a lot back in the 60' and 70's. I remember an English professor talking about how much better recorded the folk music was than the classical records he listened to. Probably geezer nostalgia, but there seemed a much more human presence of the musicians, with the large album cover, analog vinyl sound, and the timbre of the voices and instruments than stuff you hear today, especially in the mp3 format. 

Recorded Music

I keep coming back to the idea that the ability to listen to recorded music is the biggest change to the culture of music making, ever, with all sorts of recognized and unrecognized consequences. 

In this post, Kyle Gann talks about how much he likes recorded music, particularly his own. As usual over there, the comments are great.

In this post, Terry Teachout wonders whether second tier orchestras are needed in the age of the iPod.

In this post, ACD takes issue with Terry in his usual bracing style.

Mirror neurons, and the notion that live music is healthier than recorded, go unmentioned. Part of me thinks most music specialists, whatever the species, tend to go for the abstract elements of music and lose sense of the common touch elements of music making.

Music and Alzheimer's

Two new articles just popped up on music and Alzheimer's. This one covers familiar ground on music helping retrieve memories from earlier periods of patients' lives.

It has long been known that even after patients no longer recognize names and faces, they can sing along to a favorite tune. “Auditory processing seems to be the last skill to go,” said Tomaino, who has worked in the field for 32 years.

This article talks about using music as a mnemonic tool for remembering things like what pills to take when.

“One thing we do know about the way the brain processes music is that it’s more of a global process,” he says. “While the parts of the brain where we make memories — the medial temporal lobes like the hippocampus — are the first parts to be ravaged as Alzheimer’s develops, music pulls from the cortical and subcortical areas, which aren’t as damaged by the disease.” As a result, neuroscientists believe that music may allow patients to code information using much more of the brain. Or it may be that music stimulates people and helps them pay more attention, he says, adding that even with healthy older adults, lack of focus plays a role in memory impairment. Whatever the mechanism, the therapeutic value of music is accepted by the medical establishment, and some forms of music therapy are covered by health insurance.

Blog Roll Update

No more dial tone at Dial M for Musicology. Phil dropped out a while ago and Jonathan has recently signed off. It was a great run while it lasted. They both struck me as being fully up to date with modern academia, but sort of throwbacks to when academics did more real (to me, at least) research adding to the sum of our knowledge, as opposed to simply spinning jargon for the benefit of fellow jargon spinners. 

Adding James Bolden's Horn World because in just the few posts he's started with there are two very helpful nuts and bolts type posts. One on rotor stringing and one on performance acoustics. As a music therapist, one thing I always try to do is make sure all the issues not directly related to the actual playing of the instrument are addressed, so the the player can focus entirely on the playing. Anything making your instrument more responsive is the way to go. Equally, paying attention to the acoustics of your performance space will give you the biggest payback on all the work you've done to prepare for the performance.

Recently I've done a number of posts on some of the deeper aspects of making music, but if you don't take care of the details first, all the rest will be much harder to achieve.

Gann on Composition (and blogging)

Kyle Gann has just put up this terrific post on composition. He draws parallels with blogging and says:

The impetus is transformed by the process. In a sense I had something to say and I will have said it, but more accurately, I will have found out by the end of this essay what I think. Which is the value, for me personally, of writing a blog - and would continue to be even were no one reading it.

This little snip resonates with my previous post.

The notes seem to be smarter than me. Thank goodness the purpose of the piece is not to demonstrate to the world how smart its composer is (which strikes me as being the case with some pieces I hear).

Here's the concluding paragraph:

The composer has something to learn from his or her own music just as everyone else does. And while we talk loosely about the composer "writing down the music he hears," I think we do more justice to the complexity and reciprocal value of artistic experience by admitting that the composer is just as subject to his or her materials as anyone else. All praise to the composition - but the composer should be humble.

UPDATE: The first comment under the linked post, by "mclaren" is a good summary of how the left and right brain work when listening to music.

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.