New Maestro

After two years as band director, Bob Hamrick has moved on and our new director is Charles Torian. He's an oboe player from the Tidewater area of Virginia (with the musical drawl to prove it) now living in the Charlottesville area and has lots of experience directing and arranging music for bands. I'm going to continue to use the "maestro" tag for playing tips from the podium. Those preceding this post are from Bob Hamrick and this one and the ones that follow are from Charles Torian. These are not direct quotes, but my memory of what was said.

One thing he said yesterday was that on the final note of a piece, imagine projecting it to the back of the hall. When he had us do that there was a much better feel of finality to the final chord. He also said that mind games like this can be helpful, but that you can get too deep into them as well.

Something else he said was that if your triplets aren't even, try slightly emphasizing the second note, that paying it that attention will tend to slow it and even it out.

At a rehearsal a week or so ago we came to a passage where a lot of people stopped on the third beat and others had a pick-up on the fourth. He asked those stopping on the third beat to not tongue the note we stopped on to make for a more gentle release. That made a remarkable difference. Before, the music seemed to stop then start again, but when we did that it flowed right on through that measure.

Remaking the Self

Phil Ford just put up a terrific post over on Dial M, and I'm pasting in here a comment I made on it.

>>Wonderful post. Reminded me of, and sent me back to, your "Where is the self that performs?" post. I'd quibble that ignorance can be, but doesn't necessarily have to be, a willed state. Your point of it being a way to define the self is terrific. Hope you come back to the dualism of objectivity/subjectivity, and the challenge "to know ourselves and not just the things we study". Maybe one way of talking about the "in the flow" state is that the music is remaking you while you're making it.<<

More Jung

For our Vermont readership especially, want to paste in a comment I made on Jonathan West's latest post on musicality:

Jonathan - Per usual, lots and lots to think about in these posts of yours on musicality. For right now, though, want to pull out this bit:

>>When playing in a large group doing well, all kinds of instantaneous feedback and adjustment is going on between and among the players, who are responding to each other and not merely to the conductor. And this happens far too fast and unconsciously for anybody to be able to describe in any kind of detail exactly what is going on, even after the event.<<

My personal working assumption about this is that it really is a kind of what they used to call ESP, extra sensory perception. Some time ago I did a post linking research showing that when musicians are playing together, it can induce brain wave entrainment amongst them. That, along with all the sensory cues pouring in, seems to be able to create an altered state where things can happen that go beyond our normal individual capacities. That's when egos can fade and the music is more channeled than made. Sort of a brief manifestation of what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Goldberg Variations

The Aria from the Goldberg Variations by J. S. Bach (in the Kirkpatrick edition which writes out all the ornaments) has been a musical touchstone for me since discovering it as a keyboard major in conservatory back in the 70's, and CDs of the entire set are among the very few I come back to over and over.

In this post over on Sounds & Fury  A. C. Douglas compares the two recordings Glenn Gould made of them, one early and one late in his career. The writing about the music is as good as it gets. Agree or disagree, you know what he's saying and why he prefers one to the other.

This ties in to the previous posts on musicality in that both recordings by Gould are bursting with his amazing musicality, but the flavor of one suits some and the other suits others. 

Poem

Working through the ideas in the previous post led me to remember the final lines of this poem which have stuck with me since high school. Sure wish there was a poem that does for music what this one does for poetry.

               Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be

-- Archibald MacLeish

What's the music about?

Jonathan West's post on musicality keeps drawing me back because it's so unusual for a high level musician to go into the subject in such depth. Every rereading triggers all sorts of musings about the nature of music making. 

One thing that fascinates me is that he makes a number of wonderful points about how to play with more expression, and how to avoid breaking the spell the music is casting, without going into the nature of the expression or the spell. As he grew up in a musical family making music since early childhood, the reason for making the music seems deep below the verbal, conscious level. What a Mozart rondo is meant to express is simply part of his mental furniture. His post tells how to make pieces of music express their content, but not how to ascertain the nature of that content.

High level players are expected to play any piece put before them well and musically and with whatever spin a conductor wants to put on it. I guess the assumption is that when played coherently and correctly, any piece will convey the content the composer intended.

One of the things our previous band director would do from time to time was to give us a mental image of when, where, and why a piece of music might be played. That was an immense help to me in understanding why he (or the arranger) wanted particular articulations, phrasings, or whatever. For me, without a sense what that particular piece of music was about, all the details were simply that, details. With that explanatory image, the details would fall into meaningful place.

Knowing what a piece of music is about and what you want to convey to an audience by playing it is a key to success. If you're a "natural", then your right brain will probably supply that to you below the verbal level. If you're not a natural, giving thought to this issue will probably help your music making. For me, outside playing the banjo, reflecting a moment on the nature of the music I'm trying to play really helps.

photo - from John & Kate's

Performance Styles

Over on Horn Insights on this post I made the following comment:

>>Thanks for this info. Just seeing them in the photo playing from memory, standing up and out from behind their music stands, suggests a vitality to the music making that surpasses immaculate recitation. The photo also suggests a couple of them are moving with their music making, something I wish more classical performers would do from time to time. Curbing the physicality of music making can give the music a formal sheen, but can also reduce its immediacy and accessibility.<<

Jeffrey Agrell then did a follow-up post elaborating on that comment. This general idea of broadening our notions of music making is one of the things folks like Greg Sandow is working with, to the consternation of folks like A. C. Douglas. It's an interesting topic to follow and I can see both sides of the debate.

To me it comes back to the fact that we're all wired differently when it comes to what music we like and how we want it presented. Some people have what I call "theory mind" and can consciously hear and appreciate all kinds of subtleties, harmonic and otherwise, that affect me only subliminally. I can see how for them anything other than a strict formal presentation of the music will be full of unwelcome distractions. They seem to be able to go straight from the cerebral to the emotional, not needing that visceral, almost physical, connection with the performance that I so enjoy.

The other thing to mention is that one of the great delights of blogging is the exchanges with other bloggers I follow, none of whom are music therapists. We have some mutual interests, but have different ways of talking about them, and that deepens and broadens my appreciation of various aspects of music making in ways I'd never expected. 

Hans Pizka

Thanks to Jonathan West for citing in this post on musicality the following quote from Hans Pizka :

>>If you listen to certain chords, and it starts running down your back icecold, and your flesh begins to creep, that's where musicality starts. If you listen to music, and you feel like flying in outer space, that's where musicality starts. If you listen to music, and you become angry or sad, that's where musicality starts. And if you are able, to bring others into the moods said above by your playing, well, then you are a musical musician.<<

The first step as a music therapist is to engage the client's interest in what you're trying to do. I've often used the phrase "getting traction" with a client, and this quote wonderfully explains how that can happen. For music to have any effect, therapeutic or otherwise, it has to effect some physical and/or emotional response in the listener. 

Good technique can give you more, and more subtle, tools to express your musicality, but perfect technique without musicality will get you nowhere with most clients and audiences. If there are exceptions to this, it might be folks falling somewhere in the spectrum of autism, or that type of pedagogue for whom technique can seemingly become an end in itself.

photo - at John & Kate's

Farkas & the F Horn

John Ericson put up this post on horn legend Philip Farkas talking about the F horn. Speaking from the peanut gallery, I'd say they're both correct. 1)There's something central to the sound of the horn in the F horn that players need to remain acquainted with. 2) The double horn is probably the best place to start. Prof. Ericson includes the info that these days few single F horns will have the quality of the F side of a double horn.

Mantra Medicine

Here's a Reuters story on a doctor making CDs mixing mantras with meditative music to be used in conjunction with regular allopathic treatments. No new research, just anecdotal results. Reads more like a press release than a news story. Great title.

Horn Diary

Community Band has started up again, and I'm back on the Bb horn. Don't know how long it's going to last, but things are going very well and want to list some of the factors I think are helping.

Jeff Smiley's Balanced Embouchure book has been invaluable, mainly for giving me a mental construct for what's going on with the whole embouchure mechanism. Unless you're a pure natural player, the better the notion you have about how your instrument works, and more importantly, how on the physical level you make your instrument work, the better chance you have of finding your path to more fulfilling music making. Having something like that Catholic monk in China (Ricci?) called his "memory palace" for your music making is better than flailing away hoping something good is going to happen.

I've been carrying around a mouthpiece to buzz in free moments. Before I'd done some of it right before practicing, but it's different knowing that's all that's going to happen, that it's not just a preliminary. The best thing about it for me is that it allows for just the right amount of pressure for the seal, and without the distraction of actually trying to hit notes, that pressure can be calibrated very finely.

The work on the F horn this summer was a game changer for me. I'd actually gotten to where it was a toss up between frustration and enjoyment. Being able to get deeply into good tone has brought back my love of the instrument. There were times the good tone and intonation just flowed naturally without constant adjustment and I felt more like I was inside the tone than making it.

I'm using a Farkas medium cup mouthpiece, and the wide, rounded rim feels pillowed against my lips. That feels good in itself, but it also allows for me to better feel and adjust the various embouchure muscles. For my lips, this mouthpiece of the ones I've tried, provides for the most, and the most evenly distributed, surface contact.

I'm using a playing position that has trade offs, but really suits me. Back some time ago John Ericson (I think) put up a video of a horn player's audition tape of a Mozart piece and he had what's called a pip stick to hold the instrument. The instant I saw that guy's fingers effortlessly flipping the keys because his left hand wasn't having to hold any of the weight of the horn, I realized where a lot of my problems were coming from. 

Pip sticks are expensive and apparently only available in the UK. Plus, the idea of stressing the horn where it rests on the stick would make me nervous (I can imagine it loosening braces). So I just raised the guitar footrest to it's highest level to raise my right leg and rest the horn there on a folded hand towel used for drying water in the bell. Not having all the muscle involvement holding the horn in position more than makes up for having to pay attention to not letting that leg position trigger bad posture and breathing.(If you're thinking of trying this non-standard position, please see what Jonathan West has said in the comments.)
 

And speaking of trigger, back earlier this spring I redid the trigger so doing nothing means I'm on the Bb side. There's enough tightening up going on for the higher horn without having to squeeze the thumb as well.

Photo - at John and Kate's in Echo Valley

Mimicry

Jonathan West has come back to the topic of musicality with this post on mimicry. I'm copying and pasting in here the comment I made on it.

>>Very nice points. Thanks again. Hope you keep coming back to this subject of musicality. These posts have been very helpful for me because while I've thought about much of what you're saying, using "musicality" as a general descriptor had never occurred to me, and it's very handy and helpful.

About the mimicry - I briefly worked with some very young children this summer so they could sing with my group in church. Most were too young to read, so I taught the song by call and response. Visited their Sunday School class a couple of times and made a CD for them that had a track of me rhythmically chanting the lyrics with hand claps. On the recording of the performance was really amazed at how well they picked up on the subtle rhythms and vocal inflections I'd used. The intonation was all over the map, but the rhythm was solid and the words clearly understandable and very expressive.

The other thing about the "mimicry" concept is that it's part of what a music therapist does when trying to engage a client in the process of making music. One way to do that is to try to mimic the client's emotional state with the music so as to make a connection, and to then move the music's emotional content and the client's behavior a therapeutic direction.<<

Möbius Bach

This video just turned up over on the ever surprising Boing Boing. Even before it gets to the möbius strip treatment of the manuscript, it's a wonderful illustration of retrograde motion. 

Musicality

Jonathan West has put up a post on musicality. It's a subject not much written about, largely, I suspect, because most music educators and their students are to some degree "natural" players. Everyone else has usually been triaged out of the system somewhere along the way.

In Tibetan Buddhist teachings, one will hear from time to time that a bird must have two wings to fly, which leads to talking about wisdom and compassion, both of which are necessary on the path to enlightenment.

To get your music making to take flight, both technique and musicality are necessary. One of the great joys of music therapy is helping people realize that practicing and playing with musicality can make the development of technique a lot more fun. 

If your motivation in making music is personal enjoyment and self-expression, exploring the many aspects of musicality in the comfort zone of entry level technique can be more beneficial than worrying about the rapid development of technique. Worrying about technique can cause burnout; while developing musicality is refreshing, and over time can motivate you to improve your technique to better express your growing musicality.

I'm going to return to Jonathan's post and comment on specific things he's said. Just wanted to make this overall point first.

Terry's Almanac

Terry Teachout's About Last Night is the most resource rich arts blog I've found. One feature is his almanac, a regular posting of quotations. They're interesting on their own, and they often seem to be sly comments on things he's talking about in other posts.

 

He's also a model of clear writing. Says he tries to write like he talks.

Here are two recent almanac posts that set me ruminating and I want to save them for future reference:

"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision."
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

Photo - fall crocus

Landowska

Here's a link to a great anecdote about Wanda Landowska and Pablo Casals over on Sounds & Fury.

During my high school years my parents were good enough to give me a subscription to the Columbia Record Club and I learned about classical music pretty much on my own, with the help of the wonderful album covers of yore so that were so full of information. Discovering the harpsichord, and then discovering Landowska, was a very big deal.

Photo - feverfew, an herb meant to be good for migrane headaches.

Body Music

Here are two links I want to save. Jeffrey Agrell in this one talks about the physical aspect of being in good playing shape. And in this one, Elaine Fine talks about a sign interpreter interpreting music of the avant garde.

Both posts get at how there's such a physical side to music and to music making. It's easy to slip into a default mind/body dualism where we think the music is in our heads and the body's just a mechanism. 

Trying to feel the music making as coming from our hearts instead of our heads is one way to get at resolving the dualism. Also, the more we realize just how much our physical nature affects our music making, and then use that awareness to inform our music, my sense is that it will help us to make better music and to deepen our connection with the audience.

Photo - teeny tiny butterfly on lavender.

Great Quote

Here's an article on a memoir by Tim Page the music critic, who was diagnosed in his 40's as having Asperger's syndrome. When he was 21 and heard Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, he stayed up all night writing out his impressions. About the experience he says:

>>Today I find myself wondering if I would have responded so profoundly to this starkly reiterative, rigidly patterned music had I not had Asperger's syndrome. As the Quakers might say, this music spoke to my condition; it was what my insides sounded like.<<

Auspicious Symbol

Here's the front cover of the Mantra Mountain CD. The conch is one of the eight auspicious symbols, representing the sound of the dharma. Right turning conchs are meant to be more auspicious than left turning ones. 

I think you could make the case that the conch is a precursor of the horn, which would make it an auspicious instrument. That far carrying sound has been a part of human society for a very long time.

"Well, the lamb ram sheep horn began to blow, the trumpets began to sound,

Joshua commanded the children to shout, and the walls a come a tumbalin' down."

The Mantra of Compassion

Here's the back cover of the Mantra Mountain CD. Just wanting to see if the music is legible.

Recording to Learn

Because of it's ease of use, I've been using the little Sony PCM to record all the performances of the Kenwood Players. Then I run the audio into the Tascam 2488, tweak if needed, master and then make CDs for everyone. I've learned a tremendous amount by listening back, and several members of the group have spontaneously said how much listening back to performances has helped them.

The thing that's so interesting is that they've all mentioned things they need to improve that I hadn't really noticed. And when I talk about what I hear in my playing and singing and don't like, they seem a little surprised.

I think that if you are fairly familiar with how your instrument works and have a pretty good notion of the kind of music you want to make, recording yourself and listening back, while not the same as having a good teacher, is at least as helpful overall. It's that old saw about how we're all our own worst critic. The thing of it is, when I hear something deep in the substance of the music I want to improve, that work seems to improve other aspects of the music as well. 

Another way of putting it is that when you hear a recording of your music making and notice something that needs improvement, you know exactly what the problem is in a gestalt kind of way, with both the left and right brain in on the awareness. No teacher talking to you about your playing can get something like that across so completely.

(The header photo just to please the eye and our Vermont readership. It's about the last bloom on a volunteer sunflower just out the back door. Just wish I could catch the moments when I've seen the goldfinches perched on one eating seeds)

TeeVee Music

I gave up TV some years back as a mental health move and to free up time. If this catches on, though, I might go out and buy one. Via that invaluable internet resource and productivity enhancer, Mr. Dave Barry.

Loud Music

This article doesn't link back to the original research, but the notion makes sense. Apparently there's a primitive part of the inner ear, the sacculus, that can respond to the rhythm of music louder than 90 decibels by triggering the release of endorphins. This would explain why volume can be such an intensifier of the effects of rhythm, but not so much the other elements of music. 

>>Neil Todd, an expert in the scientific study of music, explains that the sacculus seems to be part of a primitive hearing mechanism that has slowly been lost as humans have evolved. He said it has a connection to the part of the brain responsible for drives such as hunger, sex and hedonistic responses.<<

What A Friend : score

Here's a late draft of the score we're playing from in the post below. In the final print out for the individual instruments, the soprano and bass go on the left page each on its own staff, and the alto and tenor on the right. That makes it easier for folks not used to reading piano music. The guitar chords are above the bass staff instead of the treble so that those playing the bass line can more easily see and associate them with their appropriate notes. And in the two page layout it's much easier to tweak the placement of the chord names so they don't touch note stems.

Putting this up just to see how it looks on the blog, and it seems too small to be useable if printed out as is, and if you zoom in it gets distorted looking. But it does serve the purpose of indicating just how much of the performance below is improvised.

What A Friend

Here's a slide show of photos taken at Macedonia Christian Church this past Sunday with the Kenwood Players performing "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" as the soundtrack. I used iMovie (for the first time), to create and compress the file. Then after several failures at uploading directly to Blogger, went to YouTube, created an account, uploaded the video, have now come back to Blogger to embed it. Writing this while waiting for YouTube to "process" the uploaded video. If this all works, it will be a great way to make available what we're up to.

The preacher in that one photo is Crawford, one of the two Eb tuba players in the group, and his sermon was on the power of music to move us. That's me with the guitar, and Judy is barely visible brushing the drum. After my opening vocal, that's a Bill B. solo on alto sax, then Steve with one on trombone, then Dick on trumpet, then closing with another vocal with the congregation, which you can't hear very well because of where the recorder was placed. Maggie is playing harmony on clarinet. Bill C., the other tuba player wasn't with us for this performance.

My opinion of tracks on these performance CD's I've been doing often changes over time, but so far, this track feels like it's crossed the threshold of something to use on the CD portion of the learning materials.

As for Macedonia itself, the acoustics are amazingly good and welcoming, and I've come to have some strong personal connections with members of the congregation. A story I've heard about those beautiful pews is that there's some graffiti on one left by a soldier during the Civil War. The church is not that far from the Wilderness battlefield on one side and the Meadow Farm estate of the Taylor family on the other. The Taylors were the ones who encouraged James Madison's people to come to the area, which is how he came to grow up here.

update - I adjusted color on the photos, forgetting I'm a little red/green color blind. Seems I gave Crawford a red face. Sorry, Crawford!!!

Sony PCM

I've run all the music audio captured by the PCM during the two church services onto the Tascam 2488, panned it all, and tried to normalize the volume across the 32 tracks. At Oak Chapel the PCM seemed to accentuate the treble, and when Kyle Gann mentioned in this post he was using one, I took the opportunity to ask him in the comments what he thought about that issue. His response made me think the issue was more in my head than the PCM, and judging by how it did at Macedonia, I think he's right.

Acoustics and audio seem deeply mysterious to me, surely in part because I'm a beginner with both. Paying attention to them and becoming more familiar with them is helping in a left brain sort of way, but appreciation and application seems to require a lot of right brain and/or solid intuitions as well. Getting a good recording and mastering the audio for a CD is a complex art that has tremendous effect on the music the audience/listener hears.

Stewart Weaver is the audio engineer who mastered Mantra Mountain for us, and early in that project I hired him to come by my home studio to give me a clue about how to make and mix a CD. One of the things he said was to listen to a mix on a number of different machines because they'll all color it differently, and that is astonishingly correct and obvious once you realize it.

Something else he said was to put on the mix in one room and go to another to listen to it. Right now that's what I'm doing with the freshly made CD for the players of the recent church performances. I'd thought the alto sax too high in the mix at Oak Chapel when playing the tenor line against the trombone playing the soprano line in the four part hymns, largely because it was up an octave to suit the range, putting it above the trombone. Steve the trombone player said he hadn't noticed that at the time when I asked him about it, and now, listening to it in the other room the mix sounds just fine. 

On the straight acoustics part of things, the sound from Macedonia is much warmer and well blended, mostly, I think, because it's a smaller space and there's a gallery up over the back pews that serves to nicely enhance the blend of timbres.

The thing that's critical about the PCM when using the on board mics is placement. Mentally conceptualizing how the sound is going to work in a space should be only the first step. I need to remember to have the players warm up while I move around, listening closely to how where I am in the space affects the mix and then use that info to place the PCM.

Tibet

Over on On An Overgrown Path Pliable has another excellent post on a Tibetan subject, this time about a young tulku, a recognized reincarnation. I made a comment on the post, and it got me thinking about the tortuous times Tibetans and Tibetan culture are facing, which is something I avoid doing a lot of, as it is such an overwhelmingly depressing situation.

I speak only a few words of Tibetan, and have no idea the meaning of the lyrics of this song, but I'm pretty sure the background video is of a tulku walking on the land and among the people with whom he's meant to have been associated over a number of lifetimes. Within another generation this video may seem like those early photographs of American Indians.

Speaking of which, one bit of info I can add to the great wikiweb is a bit of bolstering of the notion that there's maybe some genetic connection between Tibetans and American Indians. There certainly seems to be a strong cultural connection.

Lama Tashi once told me of a very high lama, while in America, being taken on a tour of American Indian artifacts in a museum somewhere in the upper midwest. When leaving he turned to his interpreter and asked something along the lines of, "Why on earth are they showing me all the Bön stuff?!?!"

The Bön were the aboriginal inhabitants of Tibet who were, mostly but not all, converted to Buddhism. So this high Tibetan lama was confusing American Indian artifacts with the Tibetan Bön culture.

I was reminded of that by this video, which to me, seems suggestive of the American Indian culture, with that long outdoor procession and the incense/smudge smoke. 

update - a friend sends this link to a New York Times piece on Arunachal Pradesh, Lama Tashi's home region and where he's now heading up a new college at the request of Tsona Rinpoche, who is the 13th reincarnation of the high lama associated with the area. 

Macedonia

We played down at Macedonia today and it went well. Working on the audio for the CD. I'm extremely fortunate to have such fine players in the group. 

Having Crawford be the minister and play the tuba, along with the country family atmosphere, made everything very smooth and informal, and somehow more spiritual for me than highly organized ritual. 

The covered dish luncheon in the fellowship hall that followed was awfully good as well. Real Virginia cured ham and something I'd not encountered previously - chocolate chip pecan pie. 

More to come on where we are as the Kenwood Players. This post mostly to keep trying to figure out how best to do photos.

Rural Music

I live on a farm, and this video has been making the rounds of the community. Music for the rest of us ;-)

Medieval Improv

In this post over on On An Overgrown Path, Pliable discusses a CD of music recreating improvisational music from medieval Spain. He quotes the sleeve notes as follows:

>>Joglaresa perform most of the songs here with only one pitched instrument (vielle or oud) and add only voices or percussion. With this instrumentation, we not only get as close as possible to the descriptions of professional slave-girl performers, but also achieve the improvisational spontaneity so crucial to music of this period. Music performed with large ensembles of pitched instruments requires an 'arrangement' that Joglaresa feels contradicts all that we know about the improvisational spirit of medieval and traditional music.<<

This info goes well with the recent posts on improvisation. The timing of it also reminds me to go forward with a post on synchronicity. Seems like the blogosphere is a fertile ground for things "being in the air" at various places at the same time.

update - Jeffrey Agrell has commented on Pliable's post, talking more about improvisation.

Brain Playing Horn

Here's a YouTube video of Dennis Brain that Terry Teachout put up yesterday in his regular Wednesday series. It starts with a nice little demonstration of the natural horn. I enjoyed seeing the curved fingers, as with my long fingers I have to do that. Also interesting even he can't make that low note sound like much more than a "blat".

Classical Improvisation

Currently on his blog, Alex Ross has links to his summer writings. One long piece in the New Yorker is on work being done to bring back the improvised candenzas once common. Here's a paragraph that really caught my attention:

>>For a recent paper in NeuroImage, Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari studied what happens cognitively when someone improvises; they observed increased activity in two zones of the brain, one connected to decision-making and the other to language. Even if a soloist extemporizes for only a minute, the remainder of the performance may gain something intangible. Levin, the Harvard-based musician who for decades has been the chief guru of classical improvisation, believes that performances need to cultivate risk and surprise. Otherwise, he says, music becomes “gymnastics with the affectation of emotional content”—a phrase that sums up uncomfortably large tracts of modern music-making.<<

The point about the improv affecting the rest of the piece is something like I'm trying to get at with the turbulence & equilibrium idea. A bit later there's this sentence that reminded me of Jeffrey Agrell's "immaculate recitation" formulation:

>>The musicologist Karol Berger has described the cadenza as an inherently theatrical moment where the performer steps out of a written role and speaks in his or her own voice.<<

Popular Horndog Post

Bruce Hembd's post today lists his top ten posts of 2009. I made a long comment on one of them that still reads OK. I'm linking it in this post with the tags "educator" and "Buddhism" so it can be easily accessed. 

Distinguishing Tones

Scroll down this grab bag article to the second headline for a report on brain research done with people who have trouble distinguishing tones. Basically it's all brain wiring, and the basic fact of all the new brain research is that we can rewire things through behavior. Here are a few snips:

. . .  "The better you can tell the difference between two tones, the larger that particular brain pathway was," Loui said. The findings do not mean there is no hope for tone deaf people, however. "I think there's a lot of music training in general that could help enlarge these pathways," Loui said. . . .

. . . In fact, a treatment for tone deafness might also help people with speech disorders such as dyslexia, she said. There has been evidence that people with dyslexia have same auditory processing problems as people with tone deafness, she said. Her lab showed last year that children with musical training performed better on dyslexia tests. . . .

. . . .In theory, in Deutsch's view (talking about perfect pitch), it should be as easy to call a pitch "F" as it is to say that an object is red or blue. "If you assume that there's something missing in our environment in terms of early exposure to the right types of sounds, and that it is bundled in with speech, then the whole thing makes sense," she said.

Turbulence

A few nights ago the weather here was affected by a hurricane far out in the Atlantic. There were eerie calms mixed with cells of turbulence that seemed to come and go like armies in the night. That line supposedly said by Henry II about Thomas à Becket came to mind, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

There are lots of ways to talk about the details of music making, but fewer about its general nature. The notion of "gesture" can be helpful, but only goes so far. I keep coming back to "equilibrium", but that sounds so clam and flat. Until I can find a single word that includes the meanings of both "equilibrium" and "turbulence", talking about different pieces of music having different mixes of the two might work.

The Oxford Companion to Music has a graphic of Mozart playing with billiard balls, as he is said to have done while thinking about music. When you set a ball in motion you're introducing turbulence into a system than then seeks equilibrium. That language helps me more than the usual tension/release chestnut, which seems so one dimensional.

Oak Chapel

Yesterday we played at Oak Chapel, a country church over in the Montford neighborhood, an area that has mostly escaped the physical changes coming to the county due to our being less than two hours from Washington D.C. (and 30 minutes from Charlottesville). Montford has been a stable little community for generations, tucked there between Montpelier and the Rapidan river (which was often the boundary line between the Confederates and the Federals).

The weather was on our side. Some time back I noted the sudden hot weather a day we played at the Gordon House sort of dragged down both the players and the audience. Last Friday there were weird ructions in the night due to hurricane Bill's passage off in the Atlantic, and Saturday there were tropical downpours from time to time. Sunday morning was bright and clear and there was that feeling of the community coming out safely after a storm.

The Players were Bill C. on Eb Tuba, Steve on trombone, Bill B. on alto sax, Judy on percussion and me on F horn or guitar and singing. For fifteen minutes before the service, while folks were gathering and greeting, we played old time hymns I've arranged, simply taking them down a few steps, putting them in flat keys, and tweaking the parts so that every one has all four parts in a range that suits their instrument. We then mix and match parts, depending on what's workable with the instruments present. We played each hymn twice, tuba on bass, horn on alto, trombone and sax switching soprano and tenor. The blend and the intonation we got when the alto sax was on top was very good and sometimes we got that terrific sound when you can't tell where one timbre stops and another starts.

I sang "What A  Friend We Have in Jesus" at the beginning of the service, and led the 5-7 year old Sunday Schoolers in "Count Your Blessings" midway through the service, alternating vocals with trombone and sax solos. I arranged these two songs by writing out a bass line for the tubas, the melody line, and then adding the simplest possible two inner voices based on the I, IV and V guitar chords. This style arrangement allows the skilled improvisers to take off running and gives the novice improvisors some easy training wheels that really help fill out the sound. When it works, as it did on both these songs at Oak Chapel, there's a wonderful freshness to the sound that an elaborate arrangement can never have, no matter how faultless the recitation. 

A highlight for me was our playing the Doxology ("Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow"), while Judy conducted us and the congregation's singing. The blend of our four instruments, one to a voice, with the singing was a wonderful sound.

We closed with a few more hymns in four parts during the social moments after the service when everyone was getting up and speaking and leaving. Afterwards a number of people came up to say how they had enjoyed the music, and from the looks on their faces, they really had been touched. 

There are lots of aspects to music therapy, but helping people in their spiritual practice has to be one of the most rewarding.

Next week it's on to Macedonia, down in "the lower part of the county" in an area even older and more settled than Montford. Crawford, one of our Eb tubas will be alternating preaching and playing tuba with us. Just like Oak Chapel it's a small structure with lots of wood inside and wonderful acoustics.

Guest Post - Warm Up

(Here's a post via e-mail from Valerie Wells. She runs the horn side of things for Jeff Smiley, adapting Balanced Embouchure for horn players. We were in touch back when I posted this on warming up, and I said if she had anything to add I'd be glad to post it. )

Earlier this year, Lyle asked if I'd like to contribute to his blog on the topic of warming up. I'm religious, actually fanatical, about doing my warm up "the right way" and it seems a simple task to write about it, so why have I struggled with this idea for so many months? I believe it's because I realize we are all unique and thus have unique warm up needs. The last thing I want is to promote the idea that I alone know the best one-size-fits-all warm up for all horn players.

I associate with fine horn players who have vastly different warm up strategies. I know one 60+ year old semi professional horn player who pulls his horn out of the case cold & plays Siegfried's Horn Call then proceeds to play anything else with equal ease and facility. Sheesh! I know another who spends 5 minutes on mid range scales, does two or three minutes of selected Balanced Embouchure exercises, then gets right to work on technical drills, practicing her band & orchestra literature, etc. I know a professional horn player who plays through a 12 minute set of tough chops building exercises (BE) two or three times in a row for his warm up. And then there's me . . . my personal warm up is about 25 minutes long, but before I tell you what I do, I think it would be helpful to tell you my horn playing history.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I dropped out of university music school because I was frustrated with my dysfunctional embouchure. 33 years later, I decided to come back to horn, hired a qualified private instructor and began practicing diligently. After 7 months, I'd regained all my previous playing abilities, and unfortunately, the same disabilities, severely limited range and endurance. Since the conventional approaches to embouchure development had failed me, I decided on my own to risk trying something radically different, The Balanced Embouchure (BE). BE is a unique development system for trumpet players "master minded" by the successful trumpet teacher, Jeff Smiley. Within a few weeks of starting BE, I was playing with noticeably improved range and endurance. My playing took off like a shot. My private instructor was so impressed she bought the BE book for herself.

But . . . almost a year later, in spite of the success I was having from the Balanced Embouchure, I still had a problem. I could play with good flexibility and facility for the first 45 minutes I played each day. When I came back to my horn later in the day, I would always find my lips had stiffened making playing difficult and the tone rough & "scratchy." I was doing my best to follow the practice schedule my private instructor recommended, so I was puzzled.

It was then that I found Wendell Rider's book, "Real World Horn Playing." Wendell claims that the most important thing we play each day is the warm up. He explains that when the warm up is not appropriate for the hornist's needs, the lips will stiffen, especially for older players. That made sense, so I dumped my old warm up and began the Wendell Rider warm up. The improvements began the very first day. As long as I warmed up the Wendell Rider way, I was finally able to play with good tone and flexibility anytime of the day.

It was just over three years ago I started The Balanced Embouchure and still find Jeff Smiley's BE exercises essential for maintaining my range and endurance. It was 2+ years ago I found Wendell Rider's warm up and I've found his warm up essential for maintaining my flexibility, tone & facility throughout the day. The few times I've departed from these excellent teachers' instructions, my playing has suffered. Just yesterday, I decided I didn't want to take the time for Wendell's warm up & did something else for a warm up. And just as before 2+ years ago, I played well for the first 45 minutes, but after a rest period, I came back to my horn and found my lips had stiffened so I couldn't play anything well. So last evening is when I knew exactly what I wanted share warming up on Lyle's blog today!

The Wendell Rider warm up starts in mid range and very gently, slowly expands upward and downward with lots of built in rests and pauses. During the first 10 minutes the ratio between the time the mouthpiece is on the lips and off is about 50/50. The complete Rider warm up efficiently covers just about every element of horn playing including tone development, listening, intonation, scales, transposition, phrasing, tonguing, dynamics, etc. But Rider's warm up is lacking the crucial & universal embouchure building elements found in "The Balanced Embouchure." To cover everything I need in one sitting, I put Jeff Smiley's BE exercises smack in the middle of Wendell Rider's warm up. I've found this routine not only keeps my playing at its best, but provides for my advancement as well.

I'm very pleased with the progress I've made since coming back to horn and know that I wouldn't be enjoying my horn today if it weren't for Jeff Smiley's and Wendell Rider's excellent contributions.

I have since written my adapted version of The Balanced Embouchure (BE) exercises to share with other horn players. I sell the BE book and give away my adapted exercises free of charge to all horn players who are working the BE development system. If any of you believe you could improve your chops with a fresh approach and would like to try BE, shoot me an email.

Valerie Wells
"The Balanced Embouchure" for French Horn
Wells123456@juno.com

Lyle adds - If you're interested in the Rider book, here's a link for it via Bruce Hembd's blog store.

Music Educators

I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm up to as a music therapist is different from what music educators do. There's a lot of overlap, but crucial differences. Jeffrey Agrell over on Horn Insights, in today's post offers this formulation for what educators are up to:

>> Musical training is about immaculate recitation.<<

Brain & Hearing

We don't all hear the same thing the same way. Part of it has to be genetic. Part of it is also how our brains are programed by previous experience and social conditioning. Here's a neat example of that over on John Ericson's Horn Notes.

He's reviewing a model of horn no longer made that has a certain reputation among horn players. In this quote he's describing the results of a blind listening test.

>>The results . . .  show that when people did not know it was a Reynolds they loved the tone and when they did know it was a Reynolds they hated it.<<

F Horn

The community band and the Presbyterian ensemble are both on hiatus, so for the past month I've been exploring the F horn using the Balanced Embouchure approach, sticking with written notes mostly from the Bb below middle C to the C an octave up when it comes to repertoire. The Kenwood Players will be performing in two country churches, one this Sunday and another the next, so I've been working on the alto lines of the old time hymns taken down several steps and put in flat keys. Also working up the alto lines in the small pieces from Handel's Water Music  and Music for the Royal Fireworks that have been a part of the learning materials since the beginning.

The F horn is so much more forgiving in its core range than the Bb, at least for me. Even though you can make most of the notes on either horn, they feel slightly different on the lips. The closest thing to it is how you can make the same note on the low E or the A string on a guitar using different frets. The vibrations are the same frequency, but on the E string and F horn they feel fatter, thicker, broader. 

Somehow that extra heft of the vibration makes the note easier to work with on the F horn. It's an exaggeration, but the F horn feels like comfortable tennis shoes and the Bb horn feels like ever so slightly tight dress shoes. Working on these alto lines on the F feels great because good intonation and tone come much more easily, and my endurance is much better. And when my lips do give out, it's a slow loss of control, whereas on high notes on the Bb horn the loss of control can be sudden.

One reason I'm posting on this is because it changed my mind on an issue brought about by the unsettledness of the horn world. There's no agreement among educators on how to start students on the horn. Some say on the F, some say on the Bb, some say on a double and some say on a 3/4 size double. 

Given that concert band music wants the horn high in it's register, I'd thought the Bb horn would be the way to go, but now I'm not so sure. The comfort of playing in mid range on the F horn is allowing me to feel and work with my embouchure in a way not possible on the Bb.

The problem might not be the horn, but the music. 

Music & Hearing

This article discusses research showing musicians are better able than non-musicians to hear and understand speech in a noisy environment.

>>The findings strongly support the potential therapeutic and rehabilitation use of musical training to address auditory processing and communication disorders throughout the life span. . . 

 . . . Such populations could benefit from the reordering of the nervous system that occurs with musical training, according to the study. Because the brain changes with experience, musicians have better-tuned circuitry—the pitch, timing and spectral elements of sound are represented more strongly and with greater precision in their nervous systems. . . 

 . . . The results imply that musical training enhances the ability to hear speech in challenging listening environments by strengthening auditory memory and the representation of important acoustic features.<<

Soundboard

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

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

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

Tibetan Buddhist Music

Pliable over at On an Overgrown Path has put up a post on the residency/performance of a group of Tibetan lamas near where he lives in England. As is often the case, he includes some great photos. There's also a link to a CD of Buddhist temple music that looks very interesting.

I met Lama Tashi back in 1992 when he was with a group of Drepung Loseling lamas doing a similar residency in San Antonio and stayed at Wanda Ford's Willow Way, where I had the great good fortune to live during my time in San Antonio. I'd never been around Tibetan lamas before and was deeply affected by their deep voice chanting, their deep and spontaneous laughter, and how well and humanely they dealt with all the very unusual people they attracted. Decided then and there to find out more about whatever it was they were up to.

When Lama Tashi was here with me last week, he did a puja in the altar room and I was reminded of just how different Tibetan notions of music are. He rang a small hand bell when reciting texts, and the rhythms were much more speech like than dance like. Years ago he played a tape of hundreds of lamas at Drepung Loseling chanting evening prayers. Intonation was not something they were the least concerned with, nor starting and stopping together. Sounded like large ocean waves with all their power.

Pliable includes in his post a photo of two Tibetan long horns and it reminded me that the first time I ever tried playing a brass instrument was giving one of those a try in 1993 when I was back here in Virginia and helping Gangkar Tulku and his group when they were on the Sacred Music & Sacred Dance tour that followed the one Lama Tashi had been on. After a performance the lamas were letting anyone interested try to make sounds on one. I had beginners luck, was very taken by the sound and the experience, and the notion of my getting a French horn was born.

Cardiovascular Benefits of Music

Here's a study from the University of Maryland on a physical benefit of listening to music.

>>Music, selected by study participants because it made them feel good and brought them a sense of joy, caused tissue in the inner lining of blood vessels to dilate (or expand) in order to increase blood flow. This healthy response matches what the same researchers found in a 2005 study of laughter. On the other hand, when study volunteers listened to music they perceived as stressful, their blood vessels narrowed, producing a potentially unhealthy response that reduces blood flow. . .

. . . . “We don’t understand why somebody may be drawn to certain classical music, for example. There are no words in that, and yet the rhythm, the melody and harmony, may all play a role in the emotional and cardiovascular response.”

That physiological impact may also affect the activity of brain chemicals called endorphins. “The emotional component may be an endorphin-mediated effect,” says Dr. Miller. “The active listening to music evokes such raw positive emotions likely in part due to the release of endorphins, part of that mind-heart connection that we yearn to learn so much more about.<<