Quantzalcoatl In Caledonia

Think Slow, Play Fast (or, "Peace is every note")

2011-05-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

Originally posted here. Used, of course, with permission.

The question for the week (or lifetime) is:

What can we do to put extended, technically demanding passages in our comfort zones and make music in the process?

In other posts I've discussed the benefits of practicing slowly, to the point where one may play the entire passage or movement without any note errors. The same with practicing short segments of the passage, both forwards and backwards. And while doing all of this, other elements to practice are the practices of being aware of what your body is doing. By this I mean what your fingers are doing for every note, how your embouchure changes from register to register (or even from note to note, especially in large leaps), how your breathing mechanism moves or reacts, and what your musical mind is doing as you work through the phrase. This is a lot to think about while playing a piece of music. But let us first determine the difference between practicing and playing. Practice is often thought of as not fun; I try to view it as meditative, the process of trying to achieve some sort of musical enlightenment (the Zen of flute playing, so to say).

Because it is a lot to process, that is why the practice is to be done slowly. Slow. Very slow. Unbelievably slowly. We are learning to control our environment, from how little our fingers need to move to how much air we need to take in on one big or a few small breaths in rapid succession before the passage begins, to keeping our musical mind focussed on the music, the phrase, the goal notes in the harmonic function and their relationship to the bass line (when applicable). Think of this as setting up a base camp before making the final ascent towards the rhetoric of the music.

Once we start this process, there are even more things to consider, and different people have different ways of getting to the comfort zone base camp. After getting comfortable with where all the notes go in the passage, and we have figured out which of our fingers are behaving radically, that is, pointing at the ceiling when they don't have to, we can start developing some speed and identifying goal notes/rest stops/water stations/etc. A good thing to do is to slur the entire passage at various speeds (taking air when needed). This will tell you right away what note combinations and finger movements are uneven. It may seem illogical, to try to even out a passage when we ultimately want it to swing, but the notes inégales should happen on purpose and when you want them, not because of an uneven finger technique. This is all part of building our foundation, on which to build the musical structure. How many other ways may I describe this? Base camp, foundation, starting point, and . . .

OK, now that we've slogged through the meditative aspect of the music, we can start to engage the rhetoric. What exactly is rhetoric? In today's wacky political climate the word or term gets applied, erroneously, to all sorts of things. Historically speaking, it means two things, and two things only: the art of speaking well, and the art of speaking persuasively. For our music making, we want to speak well and persuasively. We have a story to tell, essentially. How the story is told is up to the individual story teller, presenter, musical orator, player, etc.

One could tell the same story over and over with many different interpretations. Regardless of your interpretation, you have to be clear, consistent, and convincing. This is where your magic bag of tools comes into play, your articulations, including slurs (yes, they are "allowed" in Baroque music), and the huge array of other punctuations, such as dots, strokes, slashes, and just plain, unmarked notes. Going back to the practice part, the slow practice, now that you can play all the notes without flinching or missing them, it is time to engage the various rhetorical tools from our bag of tricks ("If I only had my magic bag . . . "). You may still feel as if you are slogging but hopefully you will be slogging with a purpose and you won't be worrying about what your body needs to do; it will be doing it. I really do approach things this way, which occasionally drives my wife into her sewing room.

In the words of one of the Immortals of Music, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

Time and Crime (or, "You can call me Al")

2011-04-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

In other posts I have discussed the benefits of a prescribed practice routine. A process and not a goal. It builds a foundation on which your musical interpretations can stand. If one gets bogged down worrying about technical details, a musical-rhetorical presentation is not possible. Once you and your instrument become one with each other, you may begin a dialogue with the music and your listeners.

In another post I've given detailed instructions for practicing, the flute player's prescription, with an underlying message of "if you do this, it will come," that is, a relaxed physical technique. The other part of that message is that if you do exactly as prescribed, you will make progress.

And in yet another post, I pointed out that there has been one student who has done exactly what was prescribed and guess what? He has made excellent progress. In fact, in the past few months student Al Pha has taken it "to the next level," as people say.

I recently heard Al Pha play in a house concert. The loud cracking sound you all heard was me, breaking my arm patting myself on the back again. One small suggestion made a couple of months ago turned into a huge leap in playing technique.

The downside to Al's recent leap in physical technique is that he now finds himself in the cracks, so to say. He's a "'tweener," now too advanced to get any benefit from playing with a current local group of players, but not yet in the place to work with people who are driven to play professionally. Two comments here: 1. Al could benefit from working with the current group if he chose to work on leadership skills, and making musical analyses in real time (with some prep work in advance, of course), such as "the bass line moves in this direction at this rate, so the treble lines need to do X"); 2. Mr. Pha could get to the place where he could work professionally; Al just needs to decide whether or not he wants to do that. Number 2 comes with several steamer trunks of less-than-fun things, such as dealing with the gross insecurities of people who get threatened by anyone with a musical backbone, ensemble leaders who feel obliged to put everyone in their place, or my favorite, inferior players who feel a need to try to "lead" in their section, and point out any flaws (real or imagined) of the person sitting with them, regardless of their own ability.

It is one thing to go through this apprenticeship of dealing with the neuroses of other people when you are in your twenties and perhaps still in college, trying to figure out what you want to do. It is quite a another to deal with this when you are an established and well-respected professional in an unrelated field. Or even when you are an established professional in mid-career (my bacon continues to get burnt to a crisp when I sign on for a gig and I hear the conductor say something like, "I've always thought it would be fun to do this piece with a Baroque orchestra," and "I'm going to conduct this section in 8." Yeah. Right. I bought a scalpel on eBay and I think it will be fun to practice appendectomies on people. And, yeah, right, the ALLA BREVE mensuration symbol of course means that it must be conducted in eight. Eight what? Eight slaps upside the head because you are too lazy to do anything but indulge your ignorance? Eight times I dunk your head in the privy (and only pulling it out seven times) because of yet another uninformed decision?

There are, to be sure, some positive aspects that Al Pha can look forward to. For one, musical decisions are, in theory, not based on someone's technical limitations but on what the group feels the music has to say. And music can be made with minimal effort spent on playing together, working out cues, and playing in tune. In retrospect, the musical benefits reaped in the past twenty-five years far outweigh the Gauntlet of Psychos that had to be run in order to get to where I am. And, in the same way that mushrooms have a symbiotic relationship with trees, insecure knuckleheads have their own symbiotic relationship with good gigs and players. They will always be there but, as noted in David Arora's Mushrooms Demystified, these toxic fungi are "better kicked than picked."

Stay tuned for further Al Pha updates.

Baroque Flute Boot Camp XIII (or, "If it were easy, anyone could do it.")

2011-03-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Baroque Flute Boot Camp XIII

Yep. It's time again to start getting ready for the Thirteenth Annual Baroque Flute Boot Camp in Seattle, Washington. 24-30 July 2011.

Thirteen? Really? Seems like we just started doing this a week ago . . .

The crew for 2011:

Flutes: Kim Pineda, Janet See
Continuo: Gus Denhard, theorbo; Don Simons, harpsichord

On the website there are PDFs of the enrollment form, the housing application, and a typical schedule.

Repertoire list will be posted as the anxiety mounts, uh, I mean the workshop gets closer.

As of today, we have four confirmed participants.

Rhetoric, Analysis, and Performance (The Original R.A.P.)

2011-03-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

What would music be without rhetoric? Is rhetoric really necessary for understanding or performing music? If rhetoric is not part of my musical performance, research, or analysis, then on what is my complete musical experience based? To ask these questions in the context of music written between the years 1500-1850, and from the perspective of one who composed or performed the music, is to embrace the relationship between rhetoric and music that has been documented, for our purposes here, since the seventeenth century.

The study of historical performance practices attempts to view this relationship through the lens of the composer-performer, as a musico-ethnomusicological event. A mere cursory examination of primary sources that discuss the relationship between rhetoric and music, directly and indirectly, such as Johannes Lippius, Giulio Caccini, Joachim Burmeister, and Heinrich Christoph Koch, for example, and the translations and secondary sources that help us decipher and interpret them today, such as Patrick McCreless, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Benito Rivera, and the modern writers who translate, collate, and summarize, such as Dietrich Bartel, Mark Evan Bonds, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Justin London, Judy Tarling, and Leonard Ratner, to mention a few of many, demonstrate just how important the musical-rhetorical connection was and why it still is for the study and realization of historical performance practices. How could one not try to interpret and perform music without a rhetorical connection? Rhetoric is such a significant component of my study of historical performance practices that I cannot imagine working without it, and to condense such a large topic into such a small space requires an invocation of the musical-poetical elders from the seventeenth century.

Classical rhetoric was part of the Western educational agenda since the rise of humanism in the Renaissance, and, through a series of adaptations and conscriptions, held a significant relationship with music theory, composition, and analysis until the nineteenth century. But this connection is not enough, for music to be thoroughly rhetorical. The radical break from tradition, the Seconda Prattica, the meetings of the Florentine Camerata, and that timeless element of humanity, peer pressure, were needed to truly create the metamorphosis of music and rhetoric into a musical-rhetorical entity. This entity, from a compositional perspective, defined and divided different parts of music, text, and musical performance, providing more tools for composers and performers to work with.

After establishing a connection between words, that is, oration, and the text of vocal music, and music itself, all the building blocks were seemingly in place. A certain level of literacy, words and music, an understanding of poetry and poetical forms, and general education were required not only of those composing and performing the music but of the recipient or audience. For the modern performer of early music, however and whenever it is defined, we cannot assume, especially in North America, that our audiences will understand the meaning of the words, even if they are in English. Thus our modern presentation will need a visual aid to better understand the sonic presentation.

Our task, as a student of historical performance practices, in which rhetoric is embedded, is to assist our rhetorical presentation with translations or an oral summary, complete with background information of the composer, the poem or poet, the historical setting, and, in some cases, a description of the instruments used for the event. A "hive of bees" for Elizabeth I produced a type of honey that is not known for being particularly palatable, or for enhancing other foods, and subsequently is best discussed elsewhere by someone else. Failure to provide the information necessary for the modern audience to fully understand the performance will produce an unsatisfactory result. The music may be well performed and thoroughly enjoyed, but if the communication is vague or esoteric, the reaction of the audience will be less than optimal; the performer needs to reach the soul of the audience. Here the ars dicendi needs to be the ars exoravi; the listener needs to be persuaded.

How did we get to the point of needing to inform the audience of so many things in order to enjoy a concert? Johannes Lippius may have had the best idea, of not creating or naming any rhetorical figures found in the writings of later theorists. He only modeled his musical treatise on his earlier rhetorical treatise, and connected for the first time the five-part Classical rhetoric model as a musical tool. Subsequent writers cumulatively bogged down the student, reader, composer, or musicologist with so many musical-rhetorical figures that by the mid-eighteenth century Johann Mattheson and Johann David Heinichen took advantage of this and began to discuss musical rhetoric in terms of expression and not persuasion. With an abundance of rhetorical figures, some based on Classical terminology, others, such as Christoph Bernhard, who created music-specific terminology, how could any composer expect anyone, outside of the performers, but the most educated non-musician to comprehend the music being heard?

After the change in musical rhetoric to one of expression in the eighteenth century, it gradually changed again to the construction of melody, and to develop form based on the relationship between melody and harmony, as discussed by Heinrich Christoph Koch (1749-1816). He clearly felt that composers as well as audiences needed to be reminded of the connection between grammatical sentences, as building blocks, and rhetoric. During a time when compositions were filled with sturm und drang and emfindsamkeit, Koch revives the connection between music and rhetoric by imposing a formal structure to pieces by his contemporaries that seem filled with irregularities. But it is the irregularities that have their parallel in grammatical sentences. This information provides the modern performer with another tool for our musico-ethnomusicological event. Instead of unraveling rhetorical figures and interpreting their respective meanings, we can see the sections of the piece as parts of the musical oration.

Or we can ignore them and just play the notes. Do we need rhetoric in music? Does an audience need knowledge of rhetoric to appreciate music? Do they even know how to read music or play an instrument or sing? Does it matter? Particular Baroque festivals performed on modern instruments by players with no training in historical performance practices seem to be thriving with no musical-rhetoric in sight or sound. When historical performance is incorporated into these festivals any rhetorical interpretations are lost in the modern concert hall, a rhetorical vacuum for eighteenth-century instruments. Music is enjoyed by audiences with no knowledge of rhetoric performed by musicians with no knowledge of rhetoric or at least a feeling that no musical-rhetorical connection from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries need be engaged.

What constitutes rhetoric? Compiling a list of figures from the theorist-composers living and working at the time of the music I want to perform and then imposing these figures or concepts on specific sections of the music being used? With just a cursory glance at the translations of primary sources, or just a list or catalog of the primary sources, one sees that there are far too many different collections and compilations of musical-rhetorical figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make any general distinctions, other than creating very broad categories for specific musical events, e.g., musical figures that go up, go down, represent a literal event, or that represent the irony of a particular event.

Music without rhetoric would be just notes on a printed page, or in an aural tradition, just notes with no direction or function. For historical performance, rhetoric is a necessary and essential part of presenting and understanding music. Pierre Baillot (1771-1842) was concerned about both the performer and the public being equally informed, and ten years after the death of Baillot, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) felt it necessary to quote Baillot in Les soirées de l’orchestre, 1852. This seems, unfortunately, an indication that composers, performers, and audiences in the early- to mid-nineteenth century were not as concerned about musical rhetoric as I am today. Taking advice from Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria Book XI, my musical-rhetorical presentations include not only the five-part Classical format, but lessons on how to present myself to the public, to reign in excessive body movements, be prepared to extemporize, and that self-examination and physical exercise are elements of equal importance as the inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio. If the audience does not notice all of these musical-rhetorical elements during the performance, but subsequently feels moved, so much the better.

Musicology Wasteland (it needed to be done)

2011-01-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

Musicology Wasteland

(Sung to the tune of "Baba O'Reily")

Out here in the fields

I bought microfilm reels

I get my Bach into my living

I don't need to cite

To prove I'm right

I don't need to be examined

Don't cry

Don't raise your eye

It's only Musicology wasteland

Kerman, take my hand

Read a sammelband

Put out the draft

And don't look past my abstract

The AMS is here

The published ones are near

Let's get together

Before we get much older

Musicology wasteland

It's only Musicology wasteland

Musicology wasteland, oh yeah

Musicology wasteland

They're all wasted

January 2011

Project Runway (or, "you've hired me for how many gigs?"

2010-04-02T16:08:00.001-07:00

As usual, someone did something to inspire me to write. Actually, they annoyed me, indirectly, with their redolent-of-privilege attitude. How did this happen? One of my classmates is involved in an admirable task, the musicological equivalent of Julie and Julia. One of the posts was of particular interest to me so I made a comment. I checked the box that would send me an email when someone else commented on the thread. I got an email announcing that someone else commented on the initial blog post. In brief, the comment stated that while the person was interested in the project, could the bloggers please maintain a sense of humor and to please stay on topic, that is, only write about things which might interest this particular reader.

Really. A person with a cursory interest in music history presumes to tell two dedicated, enthusiastic musicology students, in the middle of a monumental task, what they should write about. Whoa. I had a ringing in my ears after reading this comment. The ringing came from the sound of two incredibly huge brass balls clanging right in front of my face. I was outraged. This was outrageous behavior. How could someone do this?

Oh, wait. People used to do this to me all the time. A perk, I suppose, of trying to build an ensemble with particular goals; a group with a 501(c)3 status, a concert series, educational outreach, various guest artists with impressive resumes and discographies, and an agenda.

I understand that people in the music business want to get as much work as possible, and there is a certain protocol to follow that is expected, often encouraged, and, when done respectfully, appreciated. Over the years many press packets have arrived in our mailbox, most of them from singers, and, with one exception, all of them were really fine professional players. That was the right way.

Then there is the "we've played some gigs together/we've known each other for a long time, perhaps we could do something together" approach, which is a very respectful way to do it, especially when it is prefaced or suffixed with "we'll let you know when we'll be in the area" (that is, travel expenses will be taken care of by someone else"). Another good way to do this is to make suggestions about future projects: "have you thought about doing alpha-beta-gamma-delta for a project," or "have you heard Lucas McCain play the Winchester kazoo? He's awesome."

And, finally, but by no means the last way I've been approached, there is the "you should hire me/my group to be on your series," or "you should hire me because I've got a lot of good projects in mind for your group," or "you should hire me for this project because I: know the piece; live in the same place as the project; am better than the other people you might hire," and, "you should hire Person X because I am sleeping with him/her." Yeah. Right. Give me the relevant numbers (on a big piece of paper, but on nothing more firm that 20 lb bond, so I can use it in the smallest room in my house).

I have never tried to insinuate myself into another person's project in my life. If I wanted a group or person to hire me, I sent them a recording of my playing, or I went and auditioned in person. And if I am not the music director or conductor, I have never tried to tell the person in that role what to do. [I do admire the way that one of my friends, when asked by the conductor of a particular group what he could do to help us out replied, "stop flailing;" that was a special circumstances and I would be OK with this same person saying that same thing to me.]

Before I go on I need to thank my friends who have hired me (or tried to hire me) for concerts, workshops, short-term residencies, etc., for no other reason except respect for my abilities, and that we work and play well together (plus I'm usually a nice guy). If I were still in the position of hiring people from around the country to come and play chamber music, they would be on the List. But the economy has forced me into the motto of one of my favorite brewpubs in Seattle, "think globally, drink locally." Not a bad thing but it also means that I don't get to show off my culinary skills for them.

So what causes this disrespectful behavior (the project insinuation)? Do I suck as a musician and people think that I will jump at the chance to play with superior musicians? Do I look as if I have money growing out my nose (that personal groomer was a brilliant idea . . . )? Do they really think that I was unaware of them and their respective skill sets and that they need to let me know of their existence? [N.B.: I'm pretty aware of most of the highly skilled players in the US that do what I do; in an earlier post I mention there are two minimum requirements for me: you have to be good and you have to be NICE].

Telling someone what they should do, what they ought to do, how to do it, or how to behave or spend the money of a particular organization is disrespectful. And as far as I'm concerned, it leads to the musical version of Project Runway: one day you are in, the next day you are out.

"I have to ask you to go upstairs and clean up your workspace."

PS--Since I wrote this the the presumptive comment has been edited by an unknown editor.

It's Groundhog Day! (or, Peace is Every Step)

2010-02-28T12:14:00.000-08:00

Observations from a bicycle commuter, who occasionally drives a car:

Your car is your Zen-do, not your weapon.

Are you talkin' to me? (or, how about we redefine our terms?)

2010-01-18T16:32:00.000-08:00

I don't look for inspiration. It usually finds me when I'm not looking for it. I don't have writer's block, either. I either feel like writing something or I don't. When I do, I do. When I don't, I don't. So stop whining. I hate whining. There is a $5.00 charge for whining.

Speaking of inspiration, there is nothing like observing and participating in a somewhat intense discussion in an online social networking group to demonstrate Aristoxenus's critical observations of Pythagoras and the Harmonicists.

What, exactly, do we mean by the terms virtuoso, virtuosity, and virtuosic? Dictionary.com tells me this for virtuoso:

1. a person who has special knowledge or skill in a field.

2. a person who excels in musical technique or execution.

3. a person who has a cultivated appreciation of artistic excellence, as a connoisseur or collector of objects of art, antiques, etc.

4. Obsolete: a person who has special interest or knowledge in the arts and sciences; scientist; scholar.

From Latin, virtus;

And . . .

virtuosic: of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a virtuoso.

Which takes us to virtuous:

1. conforming to moral and ethical principles; morally excellent; upright: Lead a virtuous life.

2. chaste: a virtuous young person.

I am on board with all of the definitions of virtuoso, particularly the one listed as obsolete, but within each definition another term comes up which requires its own understanding or clarification. Technique or execution, for example. And what do you mean by "cultivated?" And what about context?

In a community college music course when I was 19, the professor asked us to write down our own definition of the word technique. Fifteen people in the class produced 15 different definitions that ran the gamut from personal voice lesson angst to some blathering, self-righteous, hyper-verbose metaphysical rambling that defined technique as a fluid concept, one that mutated and evolved or devolved depending on the situation (what did I do with that assignment?). And everything else that any 15 other people can think of right now.

When people talk about virtuosity and technique in music we are often talking about different concepts for the same words. Separated by a common language does not just apply to the differences between the United States and Great Britain. [Sidebar: speaking of differences, I define the Mason-Dixon line as the cultural differences exemplified by the actor James Mason and the musician Willie Dixon.]

I played a concert recently. Unaccompanied music, four pieces, four different composers, four different perspectives in the world of 18th-century composition. I used three different flutes with three different embouchure holes and three different sets of quirky flute personalities. A good turn out in a nice-sounding room, but it was freaking cold. A couple of times I had trouble feeling the holes on the instruments because of the cold; when you use three different flutes with holes in slightly different places and one flute being about 5 cm longer than the other two, this poses a problem. If you can't feel the holes, or even that you have fingers, you may not be able to physically do all of the things you want to do without thinking. I had to consciously think about moving specific body parts. This could have distracted me from the rhetoric of the performance. It certainly compromised a few measures (elapsed time: 8 seconds out of 45 minutes), but because of this compromise, was the performance less virtuosic? Was my technique less-than stellar? What is virtuosic about an 18th-century French prelude, whose sole purpose is to transport the listener and performer to the particular personality of the key, pitch, and instrument? And how virtuous am I being when playing a rhapsodic, free-spirited piece full of Empfindsamkeit by a composer born before J. S. Bach, but sounds as if he were employed in Darmstadt, Berlin, or Dresden in the 1770s, especially when I move significantly away from the modern flute party line? If I play a wrong note and turn it into an elaborate and appropriate to the period ornamentation that only 5 people in the audience recognize as something other than what is on the printed page, have I violated the composer's intentions and downgraded my virtuosity?

I do have a special interest in several aspects of what we refer to as historical performance practices; does that qualify me as a virtuoso? Does it matter? If a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound? If a tree falls in the woods and kills a mime, does anyone care?

What I do care about is communicating clearly. I often fail at this, regardless of my effort and my perception. Does that make me less virtuous? Does it eliminate any sense of virtuosity in communication? The best I can do is to clearly define my terms from my perspective when I start a discourse or enter a discussion, and then try to maintain that clarity. But where does the responsibility for clarity and understanding end?

Or, to paraphrase two musical immortals:

There's only good music and bad music.

If it sounds good, it is good.

Less is more (or, Let your fingers do the walking . . . )

2009-10-15T00:19:00.000-07:00

I've been in a weird mood the past three months. A wee bit grouchy, feeling a lot of stress, perhaps have been a bit curt, short, or otherwise abrasive with people. Three days before our wedding anniversary (which is the same day as the Feast Day of San Lorenzo and the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico in 1680), the MCAT got some bad news. My life now revolves around three things: taking care of the MCAT until her recovery is complete, taking care of the house/yard and dog, and keeping my head above water in my musicology studies and teaching duties this quarter.

As much as we wanted it to, the world and time did not stand still while we started running the gauntlet through the treatment and recovery. I still had other things to do, such as play a concert with the gang in Seattle. The concert meant that I had to practice and prepare, write program notes AND a pre-concert talk/lecture-demo sort of thing (piece o' cake; "no problem, Mr. Binkley").

I started doing what needed to be done in order to meet my own personal standard for public performance. I was working on fumes, not fuel, emotionally and physically. Yes, I have been working out in earnest since the anniversary, yes, I enjoy practicing and getting ready for a concert, and I love playing concerts. But the MCAT is/was foremost on my mind. As mentioned above, there was a bit of a grouchiness factor to the rehearsals for the concert, and I just did not feel in a compromising, collaborative mood. I had made up my mind on how I wanted things done and I just did it that way and didn't care if there was any resistance.

Speaking of resistance, there is nothing like exchanging a bunch of cheesy movie dialogue with friends to demonstrate the rhetorical principles of Geoffrey de Vinsauf ("How are you going to land on Venus using fractions?"). It took a Taurean attitude and effort to make me realize that resistance, is, in fact, futile in certain circumstances. No matter how resistant I was to my situation, and no matter how much I tried to control my pre-concert environment, things were going to be the way they were going to be and I was not the entity to control them.

I let go. I was just going to play. Lean back, stand up straight, and not force the music or musical issues. It was going to be a standing meditation while playing the flute in a public concert. From the first conscious thought of letting go to the actual release of my illusion of control and authority over the musical situation, there was more music coming out through less effort. I consciously said to myself during the concert, "let go; just play, your body knows what to do, the rest of you is unimportant." It was one of the most relaxing experiences in my life, to stand there and make a conscious decision to do as little as possible, physically. I video taped the concert and watched it about two weeks after the event. The person playing flute looks much taller than the same person in the same concert series a year earlier. The earlier incarnation is very intense, and had to play something that comes in at around 168 for the quarter note. Pretty fast stuff, and watching that video recording you can see the effort being put forth. In the most recent concert there were several passages of intense technical work, but on the video looks (and it felt) as if the player is doing nothing.

I checked my grouchiness at the door, along with a couple of steamer trunks worth of emotional baggage for the concert, and it was pure musical joy. My body was doing as little as physically needed, and a tremendous amount of music was realized, including by the other players. Doing nothing was, apparently, infectious and stimulating to others. Who knew?

Now during my practice when I notice that something is bogging down or that I'm just pushing too hard, I put myself back in the "resistance if futile" attitude and just let the music happen.

Did I mention that the concert was incredibly fun and relaxing at the same time?

Eleven down . . . the week in review

2009-08-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

Comments from the week of the 11th annual Baroque Flute and Continuo Player Boot Camp. Photos may be found at the Baroque Performance Clinic blog.

(Names withheld to protect the innocent . . .)

--Had a GREAT WEEK !!! The BC gets better each year. See you next July.

--Thanks, Kim, for a wonderful week. I learned so much, and I hope I'll be able to return again next year. I will send you some photos, once I upload them from my camera.

I have a funny story...it worked out that Kevin and I gave Lisa a ride to her home in southern Oregon (so she wouldn't have to do an overnight on a Greyhound bus) and we stayed the night at her place (instead of a hotel). Well, on the way, we ran out of gas--the heavy traffic out of Seattle/Tacoma area had distracted Kevin enough that he forgot that we needed to get gas. So, Lisa and I were in the back of the van, playing flute duets, when all of a sudden, Kevin hollers, "Oh no! We're running out of gas!" The car conked out on a ramp, and while Kevin took a jug to get gas, Lisa and I set up a music stand along the side of the road and kept on playing! It all resolved itself amazingly within about 20 minutes, because a woman saw Kevin with the jug, picked him up, took him to the gas station a couple of miles away, and brought him back to the car. So, Lisa and I packed up the music, hopped back in the van, and we were back underway once again!

--Hi everyone - It was fun! Thanks SO much to everyone.

Thank you for a great week at the Baroque Boot camp and introduction to baroque flute! Special thanks to Kim for organizing it, and to Janet and Kim for their teaching, and Ronnee for his patience, and all of you for being welcoming to a greenhorn. It was a pleasure to meet all of you and a delight to hear the progress as the week went on. I learned much.

After reading almost everything possible on the internet, I screwed up my courage, disassembled the flute and oiled it for the first time. Fortunately it isn't very old and seems not to have suffered from the delay nor my "work" on it.

Now to practice.

Wishing all of you a nice end of summer and productive fall, and if you are ever in LA, please look us up.

--Thanks for the week. It was a nice group of people. I'm practicing every day again now, and what's better is I feel I have a strategy that means I might not have time to practice a lot, but I'm practicing better ( I hope).

Flute for Sale

2009-07-25T20:53:00.001-07:00

Hello Everyone,

Here is a fine flute for sale.

Denner copy by Folkers & Powell, 2001
392 and 415 corps de rechange in case provided by F & P
No foot register
$1800.00

If you are interested, let me know and I will put you in touch with the seller.

I can verify that this is an excellent instrument. The seller needs $$.

It turns out there IS one (or, eat your crow while it is piping hot)

2009-05-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

OK, I apologize to my baroque flute student who has, without fail, always done exactly what I asked. And I would like to order the baked crow, with a raspberry demi glasse, and I'll chase it all down with a shot of Jose Cuervo. How this slipped my mind is no surprise because many things do. But here I will correct the omission and oversight.

In this post, I whine about people whining about not making progress, and I discuss why they whine.

What has happened in the case of this particular student? He has made EXCELLENT progress, even after dealing with a serious illness a few years ago (all recovered now, and in great health). I will not be giving him his money back because he has, as I mentioned, made great progress, corrected all of the minor technical issues that I pointed out, continues to improve (he's now "enrolled" in Advanced Nit-Picking), and has used all of his training in public concerts.

The beauty of practicing diligently is that it frees you to learn other things that can only be taught by leaping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Last weekend Student Alpha performed a demanding solo that would have crushed a less diligent player with the things that went wrong if they were not corrected on the spot in the heat of the moment. There is a reason they refer to taking lessons in a college curriculum as "applied music." You get to go out and APPLY the techniques in the context of a performance (not unlike doing drills in martial arts or basketball practice).

Things started out OK in the first movement, then something came unglued but Student Alpha maintained his position and direction and the ensemble found him in a timely manner. In the second movement, things were going smoothly and then, when Student Alpha tried something ultra-musical (read: NEW to the ensemble), things got a wee bit rocky, but then settled down a bit as the end of the movement approached. When it was time to make a significant musical gesture to set up the final cadence, Student Alpha did something we had worked on a few times and that he had seen me do several times: he made a big body gesture while looking directly at the person who needed the most direction. It caused everyone in the ensemble and 95% of the audience, to pay more attention to what was going on and the group was tight as a drum right off the assembly line to the end of the piece.

The rest of the piece was good, and Student Alpha held the fort when things got wacky (he's significantly more advanced as a performer than his colleagues), and the piece was successful. There was nothing he could do about one player's particularly "creative" intonation. That will be the next item for us to work on.

Instead of breaking my arm patting myself on the back for his fine performance, I'll break it patting Student Alpha on the back.

If I eat my crow while it is piping hot, can I have something really good for dessert?

Indoctrination of the Superannuated Canine ("Largo? We don't need no stinking Largo!"

2009-04-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

Last week I played the third concert of my so-called "world tour." Eugene, OR, Seattle, WA, and Lubbock, TX. Being in Lubbock with my friends was rejuvenating, even if I had a cold that disrupted my sleep every night. I had a great time. My only regret is that the MCAT wasn't there with me. And the 21.5 hour return trip home caused by a flight cancelation from a freak snow storm (a snowstorm in West Texas in late March???). Dharmonia and Coyote Banjo took good care of me, as they always do, and it was, as usual, sad to leave.

I was in Lubbock with my new colleague, who goes by the moniker El Clavecin Colorado, to play a concert, work with the Texas Tech students, and for me, to enjoy part of my spring break. In our three city tour, ECC and I played one concert twice, and played a few pieces from those programs on the Seattle concert along with a couple of other players. In two pieces I decided to play it safe. Why I did that, I'm not sure. It made for a hair-raising experience. I dialed it down. Took away the intensity, did something I don't usually do, and it made me uncomfortable and the music was not communicated to the listeners in the way I wanted.

That was in Eugene. In Seattle ECC and I rehearsed the same program while we were preparing the other concert. It all felt very good, easy, and calm. I wondered why I took it easy on those two particular pieces.

On to Lubbock. Head cold, lots of congestion, fluid in the right ear, starting to cough. Good practice sessions and a good rehearsal in a great room for chamber music. I was not going to play it safe. At times like this you have to step back and ask yourself, "What would Lewis and Clark have done?" Play it safe? Dial it down? They would have been a snack for a grizzly bear if they had done that. Or permanent scullery maids for the bad-ass South Dakota natives.

No, the music of Quantz and Kirnberger was going to be treated with the respect it deserved. I was going to meet the composer's expectations. In the case of Kirnberger, it was merely settling on a character and proper tempo for one movement. For Quantz, it was a matter of picking up the gauntlet and smacking him upside the head with it. Grave e sostenuto is his slowest tempo described in his Essay On Playing the Flute. Presto in 3/4 meter is his fastest. After you make a few calculations based on the primary source information, you learn that the slow movement comes in at somewhere between 35-40 for the eighth-note. Pretty slow. We managed to take it a wee bit slower, for some reason. The slower tempo allowed for more ad extempore events in the flute part. The Presto comes in at around 168 for the quarter-note. In Eugene I played it safe and took about 160. During our warm up ECC mentioned that I might be rushing in a couple of places but he was OK with that. I didn't think it was possible to speed up when you are at your limit. I may have been wrong.

So we play the concert, we do not play it safe, we take the Grave e sostenuto at about 30 for the eighth-note, turn the page, and go at something near 176 for the quarter-note. It feels right. No panic, no tension. When I got home three days later I made MCAT listen to it and she said it sounded much clearer and in control than the previous concert, at which she was in attendance.

[You can hear the 3/4 Presto here.]

How did I manage to do this? How is it possible for the middle-aged player to keep acquiring skills? Was it all done back in my teenage years when I practiced diligently for a couple of years before letting it go to play basketball in high school and 1 year of college? Was it all implanted in college when I practiced more diligently but still never could get anywhere near 160 on the metronome? Is it that I've just learned how to relax and move only the muscles necessary for the task at hand? Doesn't that constitute learning a new technique? I feel that I did learn a new technique, or at least how to control something I'd been messing around with since age 30. I'm in terrible physical condition right now but for some reason am able to control my breath better than before. What is going on?

At this point, I don't really care if it was acquiring new techniques or just getting more efficient with the old ones. I learned to do something that had previously escaped me and was able to do it in public.

There are new performing challenges every day, and my current work as a fledgling musicologist has taken me to a place where playing it safe is not an option, and if you do play it safe, as I learned, you will experience pain.

When Lewis and Clark were stuck in the Columbia gorge on a rainy November with nothing to eat but pounded fish for many days in a row, what did they do? Quit and die? Dial it down? Play it safe? No. They stayed, worked it out, and met their expectations.

"This time for sure, Rocky!" (or, Quantzalcoatl comes in off the bench after 13 years)

2009-01-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

"Fish or cut bait."
"Are you a musician or not?"
"How many years has it been since you used your musicology training?"
"You could be doing real research."
"That corporate gig isn't the best use of your time and energy."
"You should finish your degree."
"You could be a better player and researcher if you didn't work in corporate America."
"That day job is killing you."
"Workshop lectures are great but you should be doing it all the time."
"That straight gig is sucking out all of your qi."

And these were the comments from people who like me.

So in September the MCAT and I moved our lives south to Oregon. In December I finished my first quarter as a graduate student. A few times I felt that I was too old to try this again. Some days I felt like Kramer in the judo class from "Seinfeld." That image was enough to keep me from getting too cocky. Of course, there is no way that could happen, given the comments above were made by my friends over the past 13 years. The beauty of friends is that they help you walk the line.

"Why did you take the MUS XYZ class? Couldn't you petition out of it?"

I probably could have petitioned out of it but I want to get as much from Professor ABC's teaching style as possible. In another class, Professor ABC said I would have to take it but probably wouldn't learn much. Well, were it possible for Prof ABC to be wrong, he would have been. I may not have learned anything brand new but I certainly learned to look at things with a different perspective. That is a good thing if you've been looking at and using something particular for, well, the past 20 years. So, technically, I didn't learn anything new but I was reminded of many things and discovered a new way to re-examine things. Don't rest on your laurels, they'll just get wilted and sweaty. And don't forget that knowing what you don't know is a good way to keep learning and exploring.

During he first quarter of my return I discovered that I actively enjoyed doing what I had been struggling to find time for in the past 15 years, realized that self-motivation is what will separate the wheat from the chaff here, and that somewhere in my past academic life I had acquired good work habits, the discipline necessary to do good research, and remembered most of what I thought was forgotten.

I am not a Type A personality. But I am, I remembered, just a wee bit competitive. That may not have been the best thing to resurrect. In the one course I took in the fall that was graded on a total number of points and percentage, I ended up with 98.95% for a final grade. It was likely the highest score in the class but I was miffed at the 1.05% shortcoming.

When we moved I intended to keep a low profile here and have my life as a performer be based in Seattle and elsewhere. MCAT couldn't understand my Low Profile position. I was able to maintain it for about a month. Then MCAT and I went to a recital and observed what passed for good playing on my instrument. I don't exactly remember what she said to me but it was along the lines of, "are you just going to sit there and let people think that is how it is supposed to sound?"

Uh . . . no. And so much for the Low Profile approach.

It has all been so liberating it occasionally feels as if I live in lunar gravity. Stressed out about assignments, readings, papers, presentations, finding time to practice? Go work a day job in hospital administration, then go home and try to find time to practice and spend time with your spouse, child, dog, kitchen, and run a non-profit performing arts organization in your spare time and be at your best when concerts come around. I'll show you stress. This other thing is just go to class, read books and articles, go to the library, walk the dog, practice, and have a lot more quality time with your spouse. Being older must have something to do with it. Yes, it was a 90% pay cut to return to graduate school but so far everything has been enjoyable. And I've been around the block. I know I'm not living in Academic Utopia ("Barney never forgot what he was dealing with"). I can still see the inherent and underlying Dark Side, waiting to bite me on the rear without warning, if I'm not careful.

But this time I'm wearing Kevlar trews . . .

Dia de los muertos

2008-11-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

All Saints and All Souls Days have passed but our little offrenda is still up. And for the adventure that the MCAT and I have taken on, we can still celebrate the departed (as you know, not all of the departed are dear . . .).

In September I said goodbye to this place, where I had worked for 11 years, in two different areas. It was a good place to work but, ultimately, not the career move I envisioned when I dropped out of this place for the third and final time.

The people I worked with and for at the UWMC were very nice and the attitude of the people I worked with was good and genuine, but the physical environment was wearing me out, physically and emotionally, and the job improvement opportunities were not, as I said, the career move I had in mind for myself. But working in database management and hospital administration did refine and add to a long list of valuable skills I've acquired since leaving graduate school.

The training received at the latter location was good for a few things, and I met some people with whom I've formed long-lasting friendships, but the program absolutely did not prepare anyone for a career as a scholar-performer/classroom teacher. Maybe things are different now, but I doubt it. Only one of my former classmates who managed to receive a Doctor of Music (NOT a DMA) degree from this place has a job as an academic.

So, as we've done every year for the past several years, we've taken the time to celebrate the lives of those departed, mourn the loss of various aspects of our lives, and acknowledged what they have done for us. I've also asknowledged how the people and events have affected me, and what I have learned from them.

And I will visit them all again next year.

Right now the MCAT and I are on an new journey. After wallowing in doubt, angst, frustration, bitterness, and a host of other feelings and states of being for 13 years, MCAT and I had a serious chat. After the chat, which was not a new chat to me, we decided that I should return to graduate school and complete the PhD I started way back when. A couple of friends (Dharmonia, Coyote Banjo, Terminal Degree, among others) have, over the years, and in varying degrees of subtlety (read between the lines), pointed out that I was wasting myself, my time, and my energy working in a field where my heart wasn't. They also added, often in the same "subtle" way, that I should fish or cut bait; that is, decide what I was going to do and then do it. It is a nice to know that people care. Really. It is very special. So, back to the chat: the result is that after a 13 year hiatus, I have returned to graduate school. I am now a PhD Musicology student at the University of Oregon. It is everything I ever imagined a scholarly graduate program to be, in terms of organization, dedication of the faculty to the students, and, with a supporting area in Historical Performance Practices, an expectation that I should retain and continue to improve, my playing skills.

[Yes, I am optimistic about this place and the program but please note that I HAVE been around the block. Several times. Some would say that I own that block. MCAT and I did not dive into this willy-nilly, nor did the department invest in someone who did not seem like a good fit.]

We miss Seattle. The size of the city, the restaurant options, our 1910 house, my regular paycheck with all of its benefits as a state employee, and, obviously, all of our friends. And our dog no doubt misses her dog buddies in the neighborhood and at doggie day care. But no matter where we are, our friends are still our friends, and we don't have time to go dashing about to fancy restaurants (there are a few here in Eugene of the Seattle level of fanciness) like we used to. Besides, after that kitchen remodel in Seattle, I developed a love of cooking and dream of having my own cooking show, The Fugal Gourmet, where music and food are combined into . . . well, don't get me started. And before too long, we hope, the house in Seattle will sell and we'll have a new one here in Oregon.

Watch this space for details.

And now, back to the books!

Les chants des oiseaux (or, more on the practice of practicing)

2008-07-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

The MCAT and I spent much of the recent holiday weekend doing something we had not done for a couple of years: birding. We were in extreme south central Oregon. Here, and here.

The entire experience was beautiful. The weather, the setting, the lack of other humans, and the birds (and the muskrat, the enormous frog, a couple of deer, and the pronghorn antelope). It was worth a few bug bites (we sprayed ourselves, our clothes, our hats, and one determined bug managed to bite me on the rear THROUGH my blue jeans, between the pocket with the handkerchief and the center seam). There were some rock star birds, two of which were new to us. The Long-billed Curlew and the White-faced Ibis. Others we had seen before but never so close were the American Avocet, the Black-necked Stilt, the Black-crowned Night Heron, the American White Pelican, and the Sandhill Crane. In all we saw about 30 different birds.

My experience as a birder tells me that there are three ways to do it. With binoculars, with a spotting scope, and by ear. The spotting scope is a great way to see things in great detail and without your bodily functions making you move (your heatbeat! What did you think I meant?). You can get some incredibly good looks at birds from much farther away than you can with even very powerful binoculars. The downside is that someone (usually the biggest person in the group, usually me) has to carry the scope. [Coyote Banjo is the only person I know who might occasionally relieve me on scope portage. But that's another story for another time. ]

Birding by ear is very challenging but also very rewarding. You either need to go out with someone who knows the bird calls in a specific area, or you buy recordings of them, listen at home, and then take your chances in the wild (or the city park; birds seem to be everywhere). I have put a few discs of bird songs on my MP3 player and used it for confirmation when on a group outing.

What most people do is use binoculars. But unless you live in a place where lots of different birds come into your backyard and are used to people, you won't see much up close.

That brings me to the style of birding that MCAT and I do. We like to stalk the birds in their environment. This takes as much, if not more, patience than learning the birds by ear. You can walk into the territory to a certain point and then the avian alarm system kicks in. At a certain point the sounds change from songs to alarms, and there is no mistaking the difference. How do you bypass this incredible alarm? Patience. We learned, through a field course at the North Cascades Institute, how to work around this warning system, and even use it to your advantage.

The key concept here is PROCESS (yes, we're getting to the process of practicing). First, don't look directly at the birds and smile, even if they are miles high in a tree in plain sight. The second you show teeth, you become a predator who wants to eat them. Smile at those little guys and they become invisible. No, experience shows that if you adapt a meditative style of walking and breathing, and have no sense of urgency about you, you can stand in the middle of a clearing in broad daylight, slow your breathing down, and just stand there for a couple of minutes, and the birds will pick up on your non-predator energy and go about their business, which is all about three things: mating, eating, and when the season is right, feeding their young. We learned the "fox walk," which, when done properly, makes tai chi seem to go at light speed. You can get pretty close to birds perched on a bush not more than 7 feet tall if you are prepared to go at a silent speed of about 10 steps in 3 minutes. The idea is to move so slowly and without making eye contact with the birds, you should be able to move continuously and almost imperceptibly towards the birds. No sudden movements. And when you get to where you want to be, you have to wait and not move for another minute or so before you can put up your field glasses.

MCAT and I love doing it this way. You get really close to the birds, you can really study them, imprint their images on your brain, and just enjoy the world.

The birds at the Summer Lake National Wildlife Refuge were wiley and skittish, especially the ducks. Nothing like getting shot at in the winter to make you wary of all humans who enter your turf. And I had lost my stalking chops. Those darn blackbird sentries! They make a ton of noise and you know they are there but their habitat is such that you have to really know where to look to see them. I had a good look at the aforementioned Ibis, and thought I could improve my view with just two long steps. But I moved too quickly after the first step and the sounds changed from nice blackbird songs to "CHIRP!" and the Ibis family took to the air, along with a few blackbirds. One upside to this was that it roused the Night Heron from its slumber (they typically are active at night, not in broad daylight), and its slow ascent gave us a good look. And, after I accidently vacated the premises, I just stayed in that spot and waited. Sure enough, the Long-billed Curlew couple came by after a short time and went about their business and I got a great look at them.

Patience, and a willingness to keep at something without creating any tension in your body is how to make this a successful venture.

Kind of sounds a lot like practicing a musical instrument. Except the practicing of an instrument does not come with a spotting scope option. You have to get out in the field and stalk those techniques.

[It was incredibly validating to see/hear Dirk Powell discuss the process of practicing in his "Learn to play the Cajun accordion" video that I have. He, too, says that no one wants to practice certain exercises but that you won't get anywhere if you don't. He even acknowledges that it is not fun, but, with less time than you think, you'll be on your way to mastering Jolie Blonde. And it turns out that the 10-button, single row accordion is by far the most difficult instrument I've ever tried to play. Quite humbling, actually.]

How are you going to be able to maintain your chops while playing, for example, BWV 1067? You have to play every note in every movement for 20 minutes. Yes, there are three bars of rest in the Ouverture, but at the proper tempo you may use those not as "rests" but as an opportunity to tank up on air to avoid flute player's hypoxia. Or the infamous BWV 1013, where in the first movement there are NO rests and only 5 notes over two pages that are not 16th-notes ? Or the unaccompanied sonata in a-minor by CPE Bach? You won't be able to execute those huge leaps in the first movement in what, for him, constitutes a melody, if you haven't put the time in (your meditative time) developing your breathing, blowing, and embouchure.

You have to go through the process of practicing, especially your long tones, then your body mechanics, and, as in the martial arts, once you have learned how to stand, breathe, etc., you'll be able to learn the really fun and interesting stuff.

This works for amateurs as well as professionals. The only difference is how much more time the professionals spend on the same few techniques.

I came up with the 20-minute workout for flute and recorder because I know that some of the required practice is less-than-exciting. But you don't need to devote hours out of your day to build your techniques. You just need to stalk them slowly, quietly, and with patience.

It is very relaxing and rewarding. And without any bugs.

The Flute Players Rx (or, a spoonful of long tones helps the medicine go down)

2008-07-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

Inspiration may come from anywhere, anything, and can strike at anytime. In the Process vs. Goal posting, I vaguely mention some of the processes that one must go through to progress without developing too many bad habits. It also mentions that some (OK, most) of these processes are less than fun. So, after discussing these processes with a couple of students, they inspired me to try to put down a prescription for playing baroque flute. Or at least a loosely connected set of guidelines.

Start with The 20-minute Workout. One of the foundations, or fundamental truths, of playing a woodwind instrument, is the practicing of long tones. That's why it is part of the workout. Of all the things that my teachers asked me to do that I didn't, the long tone practice was the one thing I did do, on clarinet, recorder, and flute. Good tone should never be sacrificed for good technique. Choose substance over style, every time. Styles change. Substance is constant.

In addition to the 20-minute workout, another significant source of information for playing baroque flute is being aware of when you create tension in any part of your body while playing. Use "soft" fingers, "hard" wind, and take things one note at a time. For beginning flute students, you need an awareness for the difference between tonguing and spitting for articulation (former = good, latter = bad).

I now look at flute practice as a combination of martial arts training (which I studied for about 10 years), and basketball practice (3 years of high school, 1 year of college). In both activities, most of my workouts were spent practicing fundamentals: stances, kicking, punching, blocking, avoiding attacks, studying forms, doing them as a group; passing, dribbling, rebounding, defensive stances and postures, group precision drills, and, occaisionally, shooting practice.
And just when you thought you would be doing drills forever, my teachers/coaches would introduce situational practice, that is, sparring or scrimmaging.

The purpose of that method, which was very successful, was to get us to stop thinking about the techniques/fundamentals and focus on the situations. But we reached that stage only from slogging it out on the kung fu and basketball equivalents of long tones, trill practice, and using the metronome.

That last clause leads me to . . .

The Metronome Will Set You Free (or, it is hard to get lost when you only have to count to one). Originally posted here. Used and adapted, of course, with the author's permission.

Several of my students record their lessons. They say it helps them immensely in their practice between lessons. I've adapted my teaching style to help them on the post-lesson tape listening. One of the tape recording students, Student XYZ, sat down not long ago and said that after listening to the previous lesson, s/he was reminded of something I said a few years earlier: "Practice with the metronome every time you practice. It will set you free."

This, apparently, was a baffling statement. How could something so rigid make your playing more free and expressive? But somewhere between a few years ago and the recent lesson XYZ had an epiphany and finally understood what it meant.

When I give students the task of using the metronome, it is with specific instructions.

For example, the first thing I ask is that students play everything very slowly. I mean REALLY slow. My metronome only goes as slow as 40. I'd like it to at least go down to 25, if not 20.
We do this because playing things slowly gives you the opportunity to really program your body to put every note in its proper place, and gives one the chance to play a piece without missing any notes. That is the cosmetic reason. There is an internal component. Having a slow beat in your ear will help you internalize a slow beat when we start counting things on the half and, ultimately, the whole note. One or two slow beats per bar.

Counting to one or two gives the player, and the listener, a completely different feel (vibe, aura, whatever you want to call it). It takes a lot of physical tension to consciously count the small notes.

Musical Math example: One half-note at 40 beats per minute (bpm) is two quarter notes at 80 bpm. One half-note at 80 bpm is two quarter notes at 160 bpm. Counting on the quarter-note can lead to some fast and frantic toe-tapping (not allowed in my studio except when playing traditional music). Counting larger values forces you to think of groups of notes, and, ultimately, groups of bars, and not get hung up, bogged down, distracted, and so on, by a bunch of small note values. They are just notes. The big beat helps you turn those small notes into music. [Remember: the notation is not the music.]

Playing on the big beat gives you more freedom and reduces your responsibility to the time keeping. First, it is much more difficult to get lost if you only have to count to one (OK, sometimes two). Second, your responsibility when counting the breve, or the whole note/whole bar, is limited to getting from beat one to beat one on time. What you do in between, even when playing with others, is your own business and responsibility.

[Side bar: My limited experience playing traditional music leads me to believe that while there may be toe tapping, foot stomping, other percussive effects with various body parts, they are not used to keep people in time or to keep from losing their place (I seriously doubt that people who have been playing a particular traditional repertoire for years need help keeping time to the music). To me it seems they are another instrumental part of the music. Toe tapping in classical music, however, is yet another insecure bad habit brought on by a neurotic perception of what passes for a good performance. It helps you set the bar pretty low. "If I just don't get lost, then it will be a good performance." Right. Of course. That's all you need to be a successful classical performer, the ability to not get lost in a concert. Were that the case, I'd have run back to my accounting studies decades ago.]

For me, the goal of counting large note values (big beats) and recalibrating your internal metronome, is to expand it to cover 4, 8, or 16 bars or one large phrase as one enormous beat. At any tempo. That is your freedom.

An excellent example of an 18th century piece where you can use this in both slow and fast tempos (WITH your metronome in practice) is the Sonata in D, Op. 1, by Johann-Joachim Quantz. The first movement, Grave e sostenuto, and the second movement, a Presto in 3/4, are the slowest and fastest tempos from the Baroque. Grave e sostenuto according to Quantz (my memory may be faulty here) comes out to around 38-40 for the eighth-note (that's pretty slow). The Presto comes in at 168 for the quarter-note (that's pretty fast). With both movements, it would be easy to get bogged down on the small note values (38 for the eighth-note? We'll be here for weeks! 168 for the quarter? How will be play those 16th-notes???) and forget about the phrases.

But, if you've practiced counting breves and whole-notes, you'll see the phrases more clearly in the ultra slow movement, and be able to look at a couple of lines of music in the fast movement as one enormous beat. If you think slow, you'll be able to play fast. Don't worry, panic, or fret about this. You won't get it immediately. It is, as are so many of the things I ask of people, another concept that needs to gestate before it may be realized.

To sum up Pineda's Prescribed Method for Learning Baroque Flute (PPMLBF):

Use the 20-minute workout as your base.
Use the metronome during your 20-minute workout on both the long tones and the music practice (or longer; longer is allowed and actively encouraged).
Practice in front of a mirror. This will help, especially with the next item:
Become aware of tension in your body and begin to try to play without creating any tension. Tension in parts of your body not actively touching the flute will create problems for those parts that are in contact.
Keep your fingers relaxed, not squeezed or stiff, and make a conscious effort to keep them close to the tone holes.
Use your tongue and not your lips to make articulations (don't spit into the flute).
Remember: less sound equals more music (that means be sure to articulate very clearly), and while you are working up to tempo, play your pieces one note at a time.

I hope this is helpful.

ps--Here's to Nick: sorry I bruised your arms and ribs so badly in the situation drills; if you had done what the teacher asked, you wouldn't have ended up on the ground, writhing in pain. And to Joey: if you, too, had done what the teacher asked, you wouldn't have gotten stomped by the two biggest guys in the kung fu studio.

The 20-Minute Workout (or, there is no excuse for not practicing)

2008-06-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

20 Minute Practice Regime for Recorder and Transverse Flute Players

(This originally appeared at the Baroque Performance Clinic. Used, of course, with the author's permission.)

1) 5 minutes: Long tones (About 10 seconds per note)

Start on a mid-range note, go up an octave, then return to the beginning note and go down to your lowest note, chromatically.

2) 3 minutes: Trills for each finger
RH little finger
LH thumb (recorders only)
LH ring finger
RH ring finger
LH middle finger
RH middle finger
LH index finger
RH index finger

3) 2 minutes: Specific trills
Flutes
bb'-c''
bb'-a'
a-g# in both octaves

Recorders:
C recorders
e''-d''
bb'-ab'
c'-bb'

F recorders
a''-g''
f''-eb''
eb''-db''

4) 5 minutes
Play through your piece(s)/movement at tempo a couple of times, identify technical (fingering) issues.

5) 5 minutes
From the technical issues identified above, address one (1) of them. If you do one per session, they will soon disappear. Practice relevant passages with metronome, SLOWLY, forwards and backwards. When you can play the passage in a relaxed manner and correct notes 3 times in succession, then move to playing it at tempo. When the current relevant passage is played at tempo and without any body tension in the process, and each note is correct 90% of the time, the issue may be considered resolved. You may now move to the next technical issue. If one issue doesn't disappear in one day, go on to the next one and come back to the first one when you've addressed all of the other issues. This will keep your practice from becoming stale and also give you something to which you may look forward.

ADDENDUM (posted 14 July 2008)
This now becomes the 25-Minute Workout.
6) 5 Minutes
Chromatic scales. Slurred. Flutes and f-recorders, begin on the note a' or d", go up and back one (1) octave chromatically. Move up 1/2 tone and do the same thing until your starting note is a perfect fourth above your first note (e.g., flutes, start on a', start last scale up on d"). Do this entire exercise SLOWLY, until you can play the whole scale evenly. Then you may increase your speed. This exercise, believe it or not, actually has a goal: to be able to play the chromatic scale both very slow and very fast.

Then, begin on the note 1/2 tone below your first note (e.g., flutes, start on g#'), go up and back chromatically as above, then continue in a sequence down until you reach your bottom note.

Recorders: you are now done with the chromatic scale practice. Take a big breath.

Flutes, grab one ear plug. Put it in your RIGHT ear. You'll see why in a moment.
Start on d''', and go up and back chromatically to your a''' (if your flute plays Bb''', then go there). Do this SLOWLY for the first few times you practice this exercise, then in ADDITION to playing it slowly, begin to increase your speed.

The Process vs. The Goal (or, don't to the crime if you can't do the time)

2008-06-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

This was originally posted over at The Baroque Performance Clinic (used with the author's permission . . . ).

In my private studio I am almost ready to offer a money-back-guarantee to all baroque flute students over the course of ten (10) lessons.

If each student does EXACTLY what I prescribe in the lessons, they will make excellent progress and lay the foundation to advance to the level that they ultimately want or imagine for themselves.

The students make progress, most of them good progress, but to date, NO ONE has done exactly as I have prescribed. That means the technical exercises, time required for each task, and examining the body mechanics involved in each process or exercise.

Learning an instrument of any type is a process. Practicing is a process. But people usually look at it from a goal-oriented perspective. "I want to play Sonata XYZ by Composer 123, six months from now."

This is not going to happen if you are just starting to play the baroque flute, or even if you have a little bit of experience. Well, I suppose it could happen, but with grisly results.

I have had a few students who just refused to do what I prescribed and, after a few years of not making much progress, were getting frustrated, mostly in the area of tone production. A couple of students switched to a different teacher, or took lessons from the two of us on alternate weeks, and my colleague told them the same things, just phrased differently (hmm, does that tell anyone anything?).

Some of my recorder students have been equally reluctant to do what is prescribed but so far all of them have come around to seeing the practice for what it is: a process. And guess what happens when they start treating it that way: improved playing, more fun, and being relaxed when playing, thus enhancing the whole musical experience.

Most of the frustration for baroque flute players comes from the embouchure and its development (but body mechanics and timing are also frequent visitors).

"Teacher X says I don't have an embouchure." [That's because you refuse to practice the embouchure development exercises.]

"I can't do these exercises because I don't have an embouchure!" [And you never will until you practice the prescribed exercises.]

"Teacher Y says I have a lot of tension in my arms." [So did I . . .]

Do the embouchure developing exercises I give you, and you'll develop an embouchure. It is that simple.

Why does this avoidance of the prescription happen? Because there are certain aspects of Pineda's Prescribed Method for Learning Baroque Flute (PPMLBF) that are less-than-fun.

Some of the work is similar to a physical workout at the gym, sort of like lifting weights. For me, embouchure development is 5% lips, 90% breathing and blowing, and 5% attitude.

Student A went to one my colleagues and asked for a lesson on embouchure development only. It made no difference in Student A's progress, because my colleague told Student A essentially the same thing that I have [I'm beginning to see a pattern here . . .].

Student B went to another colleague and asked for the same thing. The answer and the results were the same [Yep, sure looks like a pattern . . .].

If you go through the prescribed process, then you will acquire the skills necessary to play the baroque flute.

I enjoy long walks on the beach (more from the Oregon coast)

2008-06-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to the Oregon coast, the town of Yachats, the MCAT and I took a few walks on the beach. It started out as one of those "long walks on the beach" that are common in personal ads, but this one turned into a bit of a post-carnage wildlife viewing extravaganza. Plus some impressive driftwood.

Part One: the case of the missing ray wings.

Part Two: After the crab feast

Part Three: Remnants of the old growth forest. MCAT is 5'7" for your perspective.

It was probably best that no one was around when this piece of driftwood came ashore.

Part Four: A return to the romantic walk on the beach

This would be the sunset except it doesn't usually set until after 9:30 PM here in the Pacific Northwest.

Saving the world . . . tomorrow (a new superhero)

2008-05-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

First there were the X-Men, with Wolverine.

Now we have the meX-Men, with El glotón.

El glotón is trying to save the world from the devastating magnetic power of . . .

Manchego

The Oregon Coast from my phone (or, the Quantzalcoatls actually take a vacation)

2008-04-25T14:31:00.000-07:00

Before setting out on a hike, one needs fuel (for the body).
The view from this restaurant was fantastic. We cannot say the same for the food or the service.

MCAT and Paisley start down the trail.

I stop to smell the flowers . . .

Our car is parked somewhere on the other side of this "hill."

The edge of the trail.

"C'mon Dad! I KNOW there is a squirrel over there!"

Humanity In Perspective
(BIG trees here)

All about the trees on the Oregon Coast

Homage to Georgia O'Keefe . . .

"I could have caught that squirrel if you had let me."

Libera me, Domine! (Free me, O Lord!)

2008-04-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

Because we have this . . .

we need this.

Or at least more of this.

But instead we have this.
And this.

And God help us, this and this.

Urgh.

What not to do (names changed to protect the guilty)

2008-04-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

Three baroque flute players walk into a bar . . .
OK, it wasn't a bar, per se, it was a seafood bar in Seattle's Pike Place Public Market. And I suppose the only beginning more lame, in terms of gripping the reader with a sense that adventure is imminent, would be something like, "we were sitting in a bar drinking chardonnay," unless that is the beginning of people getting the stuffing beaten out of them ["We were sitting in a bar drinking chardonnay. It was a hot summer day and the wine was chilled. We didn't realize it was a biker bar whose local patrons thought classical music dorks would be fun to torment . . . "]. But I digress. There actually is something relevant to performing music and baroque flutes here.

Three baroque flute players step up to a seafood bar. A place well-known and well-loved and the food is well-enjoyed, and well, not often enough. Two of the players order the freshly made clam chowder. It looked and smelled delicious. The third player orders, in retrospect wisely, the grilled salmon sandwich.

The meal was enjoyed by all, and the gang was ready to continue the sightseeing before heading back to watch the finals of a tennis match, and then get ready for the concert. Priorities, you know.

On the way back home to watch said tennis match, Player 1 notices that the inside of his upper lip is in distress. It actually hurts. As they get closer to home (and the TV) player 1 begins to panic. "My lip is cut on the inside!!! What will that do to my playing? Am I ruined for life? Will I need plastic surgery to correct this? What am I going to do??? I've got to get in the house and, tennis be darned, play a few notes to see if it has messed up my playing!!!" So the driving gets a little more reckless. Players 2 and 3 exchange glances ("what is he doing? Why is he driving like this??"). They get to their destination, player 1 dashes madly into the house, runs to the bathroom, turns on the light, washes his hands, grabs his upper lip violently, turns it inside out, and leans towards the mirror. *GASP*! He can SEE the cut. A hideous gash (about 2mm long). He runs out of the bathroom grabs a flute, and starts playing . . .

Everything is fine. The cut has absolutely no effect.

Player 1 says to the others: "I cut my lip with the plastic spoon at the seafood bar. I was completely panicked, especially after I saw the huge, enormous gash in the mirror. But once I played a few notes, I realized that everything was fine. Sorry to disrupt the tennis match."

Player 2 says, "I cut my lip too. But I just figured that if it was damaged, there was nothing I could do about it, so I stopped worrying."

Player 3 said, "the sandwich was excellent."

The moral of the story: watch what you put in your mouth. Protect your investment, especially on the day of a concert.

(Originally posted at the Baroque Performance Clinic. Posted here with the author's permission.)

Keeping It Real (or, keep checking those primary sources!)

2008-04-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

Our 2007-08 concert series ended on April 5. It was late 15th-century music, primarily from the Mellon Chansonnier and Petrucci's Canti C, with a couple of pieces from the Dijon Chansonnier, one piece from the Brussels Biblioteque Royale MS of basse danses, and one from the ubiquitous Bodelian MS.

It seems that for all of the music I play there are specific rules. Rules of engagement, proportion, tempo, notational mutation, extemporization, and on which instrument to play and when, to name a few.

This particular set of music was written in a notational system that is different from our modern version.

When we transcribe music written in a notation peculiar to one era into our modern notational system, a few issues manifest themselves.

Where do I begin and how much time do we have? In a pre-concert lecture I presented my "theory of rhythm" in which I state that all notational systems should be able to convey as much information as possible without bogging the performer down with too much information. I also pointed out that the notation itself is not the music, merely a series of mnemonic devices to remind the performer to do specific things. To make such a dense, complicated (dare I say convoluted and pompous?) subject more audience-friendly, I used an 18th century musical example. That way I was able to play a skeletal version of a piece and then followed with the full-blown version, complete with more (sometimes less) notes than are "allowed" in a bar by the convention of notation, but that none of them were notated as a hybrid. To conclude I pointed out that similar but far more complicated situations occurred in the 15th century music we were playing on the concert, that the notation of the day made all of this very clear (but still often difficult to perform) and this presentation was just an introduction to brain-bending musical interpretation and paleontology, and what the modern early music player experiences with most concert preparations.

The first thing I'll mention (and without going into detail or jargon that excludes the lay music lover) is that the notational system in which composers such as Guillaume Dufay, Hayne van Ghizghem, Alexander Agricola, and Pierre de La Rue were writing was developed over a period of time and reflects the complicated nature of their music. Rhythm (including length of notes, and how notes are divided into groups of two, three, or more parts), poetry and syllabification, rules for mutation of hexachords within the polyphony and within the individual lines, are all addressed clearly. The number of special symbols to indicate change in speed, mensuration, or note division are minimal. It is very clear. I once felt comfortable reading and playing from this notation. It made sense, and gave a certain freedom from the copious amount of information that the modern music student/scholar/performer absorbs and has to subsequently filter when faced with a specific repertoire. [But, as with most things that people learn, the "use it or lose it" effect occurs.]

The biggest issue for me, when transcribing this music into our standard modern notational system, is that any rhythm outside of a duple becomes a hybrid and has to be notated as such (well, many of them do not have to be notated; logic and context frequently dictate what needs to happen but MANY musicians are so literal in interpreting what is on the page that the hybrid symbol must be put in place). So, in addition to having the written note with a specific value that is often the incorrect value and requires a modifying symbol, there is the text underlay, and the modern "convenience" of bar lines. For me, bar lines are jail bars, restricting, hindering, or disrupting the interpretation by what they represent in our modern sense. Bar lines were invented for the convenience of the publisher/printer/scribe, and, until the past 150 or so years, served no musical function except in rehearsal. I constantly tell my students that they have to reconcile the difference between the convention of notation and the rhetoric of the music.

OK, so you have modifying symbols and distracting markers in the modern transcriptions but it is at least now in a language that everyone involved can understand. We can all at least start from there and begin the process of stripping away the modern symbols and get to the raw information. And people can be, and have been, very successful with this, especially when they are able to consult a primary source document. When the modern transcription causes some confusion for even the experienced early music players, a quick check of the primary source, in our case facsimile reproductions of the music mentioned above, we can at least look at what the 15th-century person saw. This is very helpful. For our program being able to look at the primary source for most of the music clarified several things and made a lot of the related musical decisions for us.

In one case we were not able to check the primary source (only because I ran out of time during the concert prep to make a separate trip to the local library that has the facsimile edition of the piece we were playing). The performing edition was made by a very serious and dedicated and well-informed amateur, and without whom we wouldn't have been able to play the piece or even consider playing it, and to whom we are very thankful. It was, however, not without some issues that a professional player/scholar would have clarified in the transcription. One particular section was transcribed in such a way that even with a multitude of hybrid modification symbols, it was still confusing to modern players with a lot of experience playing this repertoire.

So we envoked our past research, closely examined the modern transcription, and were able to determine what it LIKELY was in the original (soon I'll get to the library and confirm of confute our interpretation; watch this space for updates), and based our performance on that.

Did we have to go through all of this just for one concert? Probably not, from a listener's point of view, but perhaps if we didn't, the listener wouldn't have had quite the same experience and some of us might not have been able to sleep well afterwards.

Tom Binkley challenged us almost daily with this question: "What do I need to know to play this music?"

A lot.

The answer is: Bob Dylan and James Brown (or, too much counting can be dangerous)

2008-03-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Baroque Jeopardy!
The category: Baroque Performance Practices.

The question: What two modern musical icons are also masters of Baroque performance practices?

I’ve never been much about the words to popular songs. It has always been about the rhythms and melodies. But I’ve never turned away from any performance by Bob Dylan. It is very gripping, regardless of the quality of his voice. I had my own epiphany not long ago when I figured out why his performances have been so attention-grabbing to me. He is a master of rubato, of stealing (or making) time where it seems none exists. And he does it while playing an instrument in one time and rhythm while seemingly singing in another. And it sounds effortless.

Baroque players speak of rubato all the time (Italian: rubare, to steal; rubato, stolen time). In our formative years of playing early music, we’ve spent hours learning the concept of making or finding time that seemingly does not exist (but it is there, believe me; ask my students how I send them on what they must feel is some bizarre musical archaeological hunt), and then more hours realizing it in rehearsal and performance. I feel the best way to teach this concept to people now is to just have them listen to someone like Bob Dylan. And then listen again and hopefully have some sort of written copy of the music in front of them. We generally put too many informational filters on when we play classical music. We don’t have to. We merely need to remember to reconcile the difference between the notation of music and the rhetoric of performance. The printed page is not the music.

Since the Godfather's death, I've watched interviews with James Brown’s former band members. They all spoke of one thing: James Brown always wanted them to play “on the one.” Basically giving each measure one strong beat and the rest of the beats fall where they may. As I said earlier, counting to one is a lot easier than counting to four. How can you get lost if you only have to count to one? If your series of numbers to count is only one, how can you mess that up?

I don’t think Mr. Brown went to the Paris Conservatoire, the Julliard School, or even the Berklee School of Music, nor did he subject himself to hours of study of 14th century polyphony and then determining that the best way to play complicated rhythms was to basically ignore them and treat them with a musical democracy where all notes are created unequal but counted in one. I also don’t think that the band ever got lost while playing a piece of music. And why is that? Right! Because they were counting “on the one.” I don’t know how long I played and studied early music before this count to one epiphany hit me in the head. Since that day I've enjoyed all music so much more than I used to. "I feel good."

Baroque Movies (or, how to define esoteric and arcane)

2008-02-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

These were sent to me in an e-mail over ten years ago. If someone knows who created them, please let me know so that proper credit may be given.

For the lay person, composer dates are given below.

Heinrich Schütz, Heinrich Scores
The story of a German hockey player and his attempts to win the affections of the Fraulein of his dreams, in spite of the fact that she's a fan of the rival team. The second clause of the title refers to what happens in the final scene.

The Full Monteverdi (apparently there is a DVD out with a similar title of Monteverdi madrigals)
A group of unemployed workers decide to raise money by performing Monteverdi's opera Orfeo in the nude.

Schein
The story of a mentally disturbed harpsichord player who enters a performance competition.

Scar Latte
A movie about a gang of hoodlums that like to meet in an upscale coffee house.

Orlando the Lasso
A western with Madonna and Mia Cara told not from the viewpoint of any of the human characters, or even the horses, but the rope.

Or . . .

Tale of a time-traveling, gender-swapping British noble who winds up in the American Old West where he/she makes a living doing rope tricks.

Joe's Can
Little Joe's quest to get into his lunch sometime between the invention of the can and the invention of the can opener.

Johnny Can!
A battle movie. All seems lost until the officers realize that Johhny Clement can do all kinds of things that no one else in the army can. Inspirational? No, it's for the birds.

=======
The composers--

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672)

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Wrote a well known and oft-performed opera, Orfeo

Johann Hermann Schein(1586-1630)

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). Incredibly successful in spite of his father. He should have starred in Schein. When the long-suffering son was 25 years old he successfully secured a petition to take control of his life from his father. Spent most of his career in Spain, away from the controlling nutcase.

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725). Successful composer, and father of Domenico. Calling him a control freak is an understatement.

Roland Lassus (aka, Orlando di Lasso)(1532-1594)

Josquin des Pres (1440-1521)

Clement Janequin (1485-1558). Two well-known vocal pieces by Janequin are Escoutez tous gentilz, ("La bataille de Marignan;" "La Guerre") (The battle) and Le Chant des Oiseaulx (The song of birds).

Cyborg Nation (or, hang up the phone and look where you're going!)

2008-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

This is a rant

For years science fiction writers have discussed various technological implants for communication, weaponry and self-defense, and general life enhancements. As a child I thought the most cool thing would be to have a blaster of some sort come out of my index finger, or be able to call someone across the country just by saying "call Person X." The MCAT just got a voice-recognition software to help her avoid further injury to her upper body from frequent computer use. Seems pretty sci-fi to me.

Portable phones are one thing. This blue tooth cr#$%^&*! is another, especially when I'm saving the planet every day by riding my bicycle to work, the grocery store and farmer's market, and for exercise, while these knuckleheads, too engrossed in their own pathetic, self-absorbed, pompous windbag, monologue-spouting-pay-attention-to-me-because-I-have-technology existence, are driving their gas-guzzling SUVs with only one (1) person inside all over the road AND the bike paths that are clearly marked, not caring if they almost hit me or run me off the road. To quote the legendary Mr. T, "I pity da fool!" I catch who does that to me or anyone else saving the planet by cycling. I'll use my relatively low-tech mobile phone to document his vehicle and identifying license plate and everything else that goes along with turning someone from obnoxious road hog into the bride of Bubba in the local lock up. Ah, for the digital blaster of my sci-fi dreams . . .

Cars aside, there are the pedestrian cyborgs, with their communications device embedded in their ear, carrying on conversations, occasionally ranting, sounding very much like the homeless people I used to encounter while WALKING to work (again with the planet saving) in Los Angeles (ok, sometimes I took the bus). I saw a person lugging his garbage and recycling bins to the street corner while doing the homeless cyborg routine.

Everyone has a right to certain things, to be sure, and talking to someone on the telephone seems to be one of these things. I, however, have a right NOT to be part of someones work or personal conversation. (I also have a right to expect people to obey the liberal traffic laws of the United States.) Are our lives really that important that we need to be rude to people just so we can have a conversation? If you are riding the city bus while yakking your head off in a loud voice on your phone, in a tone of voice that makes it seem of the utmost importance, you are certainly not as important as you think you are. You are on the bus, for crying out loud! Or are you wallowing in your gross insecurities and making your public display to cover them up. If you are going to be obnoxious in public, at least do it directly, as, for example, two of my favorite bus riding people, known to MCAT and me as the O.D.G. (Obnoxious Droning Guys 1 & 2). ODG1 latches on to some poor woman at least 3 days a week on the ride home and just talks and talks and blathers and blathers and drones and drones and the poor woman who insists on subjecting herself to this treatment can only nod her head or grunt an acknowledgement that she is still conscious. ODG2 has a group of friends who all ride the bus in both directions with him. ODG2, unlike ODG1, has a loud speaking voice and apparently nothing resembling self-consciousness or shyness. He'll talk about his life's most intimate details (romantic encounters excepted): his finances, psychotherapy, and his views on just about anything (usually current events that seem barely newsworthy). I'm sure EVERYONE the length of the bus can hear him. Unlike ODG1, ODG2 actually let's his friends speak more than 2 syllables before he continues. ODG1 is less entertaining to me because his voice turns into a white noise and gets tuned out. ODG2, however, because he is aware that his friends want to speak to him, has an irregular rhythm that cannot be tuned out and so I've come to listen intently to him, trying not to laugh out loud when something particularly amusing (ironically, that is) comes out of his mouth. No, wait, let me call it what it is: incredibly stupid, not particularly amusing. By the grace of God, I have mastered the fake coughing fit for just such an occasion.

These two people are at least being direct when they start their activities. Not as direct as me when I want people to pay attention to me. I advertise to the general public when I'm going to do something that requires public attention. And people pay to hear it. That it is music (with a short lecture before hand) and not random droning speech seems a minor detail.

The embedded ear piece people are something else. The whole concept of people running around having publicly private conversations like Nick Nolte's and Felton Perry's characters in the movie, Down and Out in Beverly Hills just blows my mind. Are they that desperate for attention?

It reminds me of a particular Dilbert comic strip. Dilbert boasts that he has managed to make a computer the size of a cracker. Ratbert snatches it out of his hands and pops it in his mouth. Dilbert screams: you ate my laptop! Ratbert's eyes glaze over, his arms point out in front, in a parody of Mary Shelley's monster, and says: I'm a cyborg.

You have a right to talk on the phone. I have a right not to hear it. And if you compromise your driving skills while on the phone and I'm on my bike, you are going to pay, legally or otherwise . . .

Recorder Players (or, the 9 levels of evaluation)

2008-01-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

Early music workshops ask the participants to rate themselves prior to the start of the workshop. This helps the faculty put people in a group class or ensemble that is appropriate to their playing level. There are generally three (sometimes four) levels: Beginning, Intermediate (upper intermediate), and Advanced.

For me these three (or four) categories do not adequately address the needs of both participants and teachers.

Here are my categories for evaluating recorder players. Please note that in all of the time I've spent teaching privately and at workshops, only one person has stepped up and embraced Level 9.

1. New I: New to recorder and music; recently learned to read music.
2. New II: New to recorder but not to playing and reading music.
3. New III: New to recorder but not to music and with very good rhythm.
4. Intermediate I: Can play all the notes on either C or F recorders, solid rhythm.
5. Intermediate II: Can play all the notes on either C or F recorders, can read treble and bass clefs, solid rhythm, won't run screaming from complicated rhythms, can read "alto up an octave."
6. Intermediate III: Can play all the notes on either C of F recorders, can read treble and bass clefs, good at reading complicated rhythms, can read "alto up."
7. Advanced: Can play all the notes on both C and F recorders, can read treble and bass clefs, not afraid to try an alto recorder in G, or voice and sixth flutes in D, good at reading complicated rhythms.
8. Recorder Hombre/Mujer: Can play recorders in C, D, F, G, read treble, alto, and bass clefs, octave transposition, comfortable with 14th-century rhythms.
9. Recorder Weenie: Afraid to try recorders in G and D, refuses to learn to read another clef.

Are there any questions?

L'Hyver: La saison de Noël

2007-12-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

OK, it is that time of year and this seems to be going around so I'll just post it and let Providence take care of the rest.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Both.

2. Real tree or artificial? I play reproductions of historical instruments, often using facsimile editions. What do you think?

3.When do you put up the tree? Before Christmas.

4. When do you take the tree down? After January 1.

5. Do you like eggnog? Soy egg nog.

6. Favorite gift received as a child? I didn't get presents as a child . . . seriously, I do not remember any particular gift as outstanding.

7. Do you have a nativity scene? Not even at gunpoint. We have scenes with lots of musicians.

8. Hardest person to buy for? N/A. My strategy is to give people gifts that I like and they usually like them. Or everyone is lying and re-gifting. Perhaps I should check e-bay on occasion.

9. Easiest person to buy for? My wife.

10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Ugly pajamas when I was 9 years old. I cried, was laughed at for crying, and was forced to wear the hideous things.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards? USPS. I like to "go postal" as they say.

12. Favorite Christmas movie? 1. Bad Santa; 2. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; 3. The Bishop's Wife.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Whenever the mood strikes me. Often on summer vacation trips.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Only several years after the fact. It was something I never wore and after someone admired it I decided it needed to go to a good owner who would really appreciate it.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Food. I fantasize about having my own cooking show on the Food Network so every night is an excuse to cook something fun, not just at Christmas. If I have to choose, then I'll go with ancho chili pumpkin pie, or . . . Pompe à l'Huile.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Both.

17. Favorite Christmas song? Noël: "Vous qui desiré sans fin" It is a great tune for baroque ornamentation.

18. Travel for Christmas or stay home? Stay home or drive across town only.

19. Can you name all of Santa's' reindeer? Only at gunpoint . . .

20. Angel on the treetop or a star? Neither.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? Both.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of year? The increased vampire population. Seattle has few daylight hours this time of year and that attracts vampires from outside the Northwest.

23. Favorite thing about Christmas? Wearing my Union suit all day and spending time with my loved ones.

The reality of middle age (or, my perception needs new glasses)

2007-10-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

OK, so I took the "Which Superhero Are You?" quiz, thank you very much. I came out 65% The Flash, then 60% each for Iron Man and Spider Man.

It was subsequently pointed out to me that while I was fast (of foot; of fingers I still am), and after studying martial arts for about 12 years I was somewhat acrobatic, the only superhero quality I still possess is physical strength, although that may be on the way out as I've not slammed any iron in months.

So at someone's prodding, I retook the quiz and came out with slightly different results (but not necessarily more conclusive). As long as I don't have to plug myself into the outlet at night to function in the morning, I can live with this.

Your results:

You are Iron Man

Iron Man		65%
Superman		60%
Spider-Man		60%
Robin		58%
The Flash		55%
Green Lantern		55%
Batman		45%
Supergirl		43%
Wonder Woman		43%
Hulk		40%
Catwoman		40%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Predators (or, Are you Type A or B?)

2007-09-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

Not long ago a friend sent me a link to the "What Star Trek Character Are You?" website.

You answer some questions and then it produces a picture of the character you most identify with. The friend who sent it to me turned out to be Worf. I was Captain Kirk. Seemed to make sense at the time.

I started thinking about different personality types after seeing this clip on YouTube. What are some real-life equivalents for this?

The animal equivalents of the personality types for me are Great White Sharks (Type A) and Pythons and/or Boas (Type B). We'll get to Orcas later.

Great white sharks are always moving, always doing something, always on the lookout, voracious, fearless, confident. The snakes are more reflective, take time to do things, then act quickly (but briefly), then back to being reflective.

There are several people in my close group of friends and family who fall into the more active category (you know who you are). Some days they scare my last meal out of me, the way they devour information, process it, and are tireless on stage while spewing out an incredible amount of energy. Me, I'm one of the snakes. I'll think about it for a while, then I'll go swallow a pig or small rhinocerous, and then rest while reflecting on this recent acquisition of knowledge. Ever eat a rhino? It takes quite a bit of energy and you don't feel like doing much else afterwards.

When I get together with some of the GWS folks, it seems we upgrade as a group to Orca status, the top of the food chain in the ocean. And orcas work together to achieve their goal, whether it is to feed from a school of cod or mackerel, stray seals, a shark who wandered into the wrong barrio, or just to play a concert.

Let's hear it for a good ensemble dynamic.

Practice what you preach (or, Flutist, heal thyself)

2007-09-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been on a practice regime. The kind of practice routine that I've not followed in months. No. Years.

Practicing things in an organized manner.

Small increments, big chunks, whole movements for continuity, different tempos, allowing specific sessions for developing ornaments, some technical exercises away from the music, and all following a prescribed agenda.

Following a set of processes to achieve a goal. I just made what seems to be an incredible technical breakthrough. I'd always been able to do this one particular thing but now it seems incredibly relaxed and enables me to do a few more things that I never considered because I was tense during the other thing. Come to our concert on October 6 and you'll hear it for yourself.

All the things I've been telling my students for years, and watching some of them do with great results, that's what I've been doing.

It seems to be working.

Who knew?

Would someone please pass me the crow before it gets cold?

Charlie Parker & Dolly Parton (or, Baroque ornamentation: playing the notes that aren't there)

2007-09-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Over the years I've read and practiced many measures of baroque ornamentation examples (took a look at some examples last night, in fact, while confirming some 18th century tempo indications). Between 1585 and 1752 (and beyond in both directions!) there is no shortage of primary sources for this information. The modern baroque music player thus has no excuse for not being at ease when improvising ornaments in a piece, or creating a prélude ad extempore. As I slogged through these I came to the realization that most of what I was learning was how to invent, extemporize, or emphasize the notes that aren't there. Now when working with students on ornamentation, we spend a lot of time acknowledging the notes that aren't there and how they are just as important as the written notes.

If I catch myself being too predictable or too measured and regular in creating ornaments, I turn to the two performers who integrate the process so easily that it goes mostly unnoticed by the novice listener (a listener who just takes in the whole experience and enjoys it): Charlie Parker and Dolly Parton.

Yes, I consider these two musicians masters of baroque ornamentation. It might come as news to the one still living, but, hey, my ears are my ears, and my perceptions are my perceptions, and my experience is what it is. Having trouble executing that tierce de coulé or the port de voix? Grab one of Dolly's early recordings and you'll hear the French ornaments executed as if she were channelling a 17th-century musette player from Avignon. Agonizing over how to play a gazillion-note cadence in the space of a half-bar in an Italian sonata? Listen to Mr. Parker play just about any standard tune. You might find yourself saying, "hmm, he doesn't look like he's related to Tartini."

Now for the backstory (there is always a backstory, eh?).

In October 2003 I programmed a concert called Culture Clash: Music from France and Italy. It had a lot of new information for our audience, including the first of our commissioned pieces, and a piece by a Polish composer in an Italianate style. Except for the brand new piece of music, when I was putting the program together I realized the common element was the importance of the notes that are not notated, or, the notes that aren't there.

I discussed this program theme with the band who said, as usual, great. Give us our music, please, and where on the program do I get to improvise a prélude? When I discussed the program theme with other musicians, early music and non-early music, the responses were universal: How are Giuseppe Tartini and Jacques-Martin Hotteterre anything like Charlie Parker and Dolly Parton? How is baroque music anything like jazz? My IM (Inner Monologue) response to these questions was: "You've got to get out more!" or "you need to listen to some music, Bucko!" or "have you ever listened to Charlie Parker or Dolly Parton? Have you even listened to French Baroque music?" or, in exasperation, "You knucklehead!" What I said out loud was more along the lines of, "you should take another listen to Charlie Parker/Dolly Parton and Italian baroque music/French baroque music, then it will be clear to you."

Was I imagining the connection? No, actually. And after I gave my pre-concert lecture on the subject, complete with my colleagues and I playing examples from pieces on the concert, and a recording of my favorite baroque piece of Charlie Parker, "Summertime," which includes his CPE Bach-style cadenza before the final "ritornello" of the orchestra, our audience got the connection right away.

What caused my performing musician colleagues to react the way they did? Gross insecurities that over the years has helped them to build an intellectual insulation to keep their ideas safe from the perceived pestilence of non-classical music?

[Side bar: I here refer the reader to Baroque Northwest's "Closing the Gap" series, where we demonstrate that back in the day, there was just music, not "classical" vs. "traditional" in a tag-team, steel cage, segregated CD store departments death match . . . ]

I've never played jazz, but thanks to my brother and my mother, my earliest musical memories are of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Lilly Pons; it was an imprinting that to this day makes me feel warm and fuzzy whenever I hear any of those artists; I was 10 years old before I first heard rock'n'roll or non-operatic classical music.

I feel that it is merely a lack of intimacy with the respective styles of music that causes the knee-jerk reaction to my comparison. Yes, people can play baroque music from France and Italy and enjoy it thoroughly, and they can listen (who could imitate Mr. Parker and Ms. Parton without sounding, well, like an imitator?) to other music and enjoy it thoroughly. But until they start to listen "outside the box," they may never hear the common elements.

[Please note that I am not comparing Tammy Wynette to Anton Webern. Also note that many of my extemporized licks come not from studying Telemann or Quantz but from listening to Van Halen.]

The Magnus Liber (REVISED)

2007-09-06T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Magnus Liber Pineda Dictae:

I can take this guy (respect every piece but fear none; observe, think, then react and you can play anything you want).
Speed doesn't kill if you know how to drive (musical decisions are never based on technical limitations).
No guts, no groupies (This needs no explanation).
Carpe per diem (seize the per diem)
Just brew it (or, as Mark Twain put it, "Talk about a war by a soldier who has been in one is more interesting than talk about the moon by a poet who has never been there;" or, simply, put up or shut up).
If in doubt, get off the stage (or, as the Boy Scouts of America say, "Always be prepared;" if you are not prepared, what the heck are you doing on stage?).
The car is a Zen-do, not a weapon (the vehicle is for transportation, not for venting anger; "Don't drive angry" -- Bill Murray in Groundhog Day).
Eat your crow while it is piping hot (own up to your mistakes right away; crow tastes really bad if you let it get freezer burn; a nice temperanillo or a sip of Cuervo helps it go down).

Gene Autry or Aerosmith? (Or is it Tex Ritter?)

2007-08-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

After my daily browsing of blogs, I started to think that if it were not for the inspiration of others, I would not have any inspiration. And the realization that I often need an outside stimulus to inspire me. There is, however, the mantra I learned in my first day of Introduction to Musicological Research, way back in August 1983: "The first rule of research is to exploit the work of others." That seems harsh on first hearing, but with merely a wee bit of examination, in a literal sense it is true, for 99% of all musicological research. When you pick up a book, article, piece of music, or anything that someone has written down, be it a primary or secondary source, you are using the work of someone else to begin your own. Now that I live with a professional librarian, this mantra now extends to the people who put that centuries-old print (or microfilm) in the library catalogue or on the shelf (see, for example, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteo 29.1, or "F") for me to find and use.

Where do Gene Autry, Aerosmith, and Tex Ritter fit into this?

A colleague sent me an email (and also to another colleague) complaining about how a "cutting contest" for flute players was organized. I disagree with the complainer's sentiment; for me, the way the event was organized was a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Inspired by the whining (my outrage at ridiculous things often serves as an inspiration; talk about an endless source of outside stimuli), I dove into something I'd not done since 2000: start writing an article for publication. Yes, I've spent the last 12 years doing serious research for concerts ("What do you need to know to play this music?"), but in written program notes the information has had to be watered down for the general concert going audience, most of whom wouldn't give a rodent's gluteus maximus to learn about the harmonic structure of a particular movement in Zelenka's ZWV 181 (they might, however, be interested in knowing that Jehan de Lescurel was "executed for debauchery", or, as one of my mentors put it, "he was hung for raping nuns!"), or why Helm is better than Wotquenne. Thanks be to Providence, I seem to have remembered a lot more from my music history and performance practice classes than I thought. It could, of course, just be that I enjoyed reading about this sort of thing so it has stayed with me for decades, regardless of any classes I slept through in graduate school. The end result here is that I often don't need to consult the physical sources of the information because I know what they contain. If I need to leave a documentation trail for publication, then I'll need to put my hands on the material.

[Side bar: in a pre-concert lecture, the savvy crowd asked to hear examples of Pythagorean, pure, and equal-tempered intervals after I talked at length about them, including a visual aid to help understand the difference; yes, I pulled it out of my back pocket and gave them what they wanted, and yes, they gave themselves whiplash by snapping their heads back upon hearing the difference.]

No, I'm not going to tell you what the article is about. If it gets published I'll tell you where to find it.

So where do Gene Autry, Aerosmith, and Tex Ritter fit into this?

Well, I'm back in the saddle again, the saddle of documenting my research to make a point, one that will stand up to close scrutiny, petty jabs, and one that hopefully will inspire others to examine the topic closely (and, hopefully, for the scholar-performer, improve their performance).

But which version of Back in the Saddle? These songs were my first reaction to doing this type of work again. But was it happy? Looking for trouble? As I put more time into it, Tex Ritter's “High Noon” lyrics entered my brain and I started to feel that this article was also taking care of something that has haunted me for over a decade. Before I can move on, I've got to shoot Frank Miller dead.

A Musician's Manifesto (from 2000)

2007-08-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

A Musician's Manifesto

I love my job and it is sometimes glamorous, but people often tell me, "you're so lucky to travel the world and get paid for doing it, just to play your flute" or "you've got it easy! Wait till you have to get a real job."

Lucky is winning the lottery, not getting hired over and over again to play concerts! I don't just "play" my instrument. That's what other people do. I perform and deliver. That's the difference. And who's got it "easy"? Everything is "real" about my job: not seeing my family, friends, and students for weeks at a time, living out of a suitcase, sitting on planes, staying mentally sharp when I'm jet lagged, not eating decent meals because of wacky schedules, sleeping in strange beds that don't fit me, standing in front of strangers who've paid hard-earned money for entertainment and intellectual stimulation, playing fabulously and reaping the rewards or playing just well enough to get rehired, pressure, stress, and being at my best during the sometimes rigorous task of talking to people in the receiving line when on rare occasions all I want to do is change my clothes, have a glass of water, and go home. These things are all real!

I've got a real job and it's a great one. That's why I picked it.

Seattle 2000

The Gauntlet: Part 1 (or, tell me again why you are whining?)

2007-08-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I had a student who had muscular dystrophy. He taught me many things, first being that there is more than one type of muscular dystrophy. The second is that all students, regardless of who they are, do pretty much the same things when taking lessons.

Student ABC was very interested and excited about learning to play a musical instrument. I embraced the challenge of teaching someone with some physical limitations.

As it turned out, the physical limitations did not prohibit playing the instrument. Student ABC showed up for his lessons, and, initially, practiced and prepared diligently, and made progress. For me it was an enriching experience. It gave me bragging rights. I taught a man with muscular dystrophy to play a musical instrument.

Ultimately, as students do, the preparation, practice, and dedication decreased and student ABC became just like many students new to an instrument. He lost interest. He paid his money for a whole semester of lessons so he spent the remainder of the term going through the motions. I used to take it personally, but eventually realized that all students do that in the course of their musical education. It had nothing to do with his physical limitations.

It also confirmed for me that a person's home life is a significant factor in whether one will stick with an instrument or not. Among other things, it seems that ABC's brother would "gong" him, as in the Gong Show, while ABC was practicing. That type of environment is not conducive to regular practice or keeping your spirits up.

The course ended and we parted ways on good terms. I told him if he wanted to come back, I'd always have a space available for him in my studio.

This experience was beneficial to me and a source of terror to my other students.

"I taught a guy with muscular dystrophy to play the recorder." It taught me how to work with someone who had no concept of physical technique and what could be done to correct that. He had no idea his fingers could move that way. It either never occurred to him or people just told him he couldn't do something and he believed them. It also made me incredibly unsympathetic to students who have no such physical limitations. This became, for a short time, a mantra for me when students whined about encountering difficulty while playing: "I taught a guy with muscular dystrophy to play an instrument. What's your excuse?"

If I may paraphrase Albert Einstein, responding to some one's incredulous remark about how could a Japanese man play the music of Mahler with such intellect, understanding, and passion: "People are all the same."

2007-07-25T21:56:00.001-07:00

No loopholes (or, there are no atheists in agréments)

2007-07-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

After my post about rhythmic responsibilities and how to minimize counting mistakes by using large note values as your building blocks (The Metronome Will Set You Free), it was inevitable that some people would try to weasel out of the proper execution of 18th-century ornaments in general and trills in particular. In this case, playing trills incorrectly.

Thus:

1. Start the trill on the note above the main note
2. Start the trill on the beat, regardless of what your underlying pulse may be

Don't make me say this again.

An Early Thanksgiving (or, Eat Your Crow While It's Piping Hot!)

2007-07-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all of my friends and colleagues, especially those in the Blogiverse (or is Blogosphere more in use?) for helping me to keep things in perspective. Things such as life, music, the music business, the world, world and national politics, beer, bad beer, great food, and so much more.

Any recent desire to whine and complain about anything has gone away, replaced by compassion for those whose life experiences are more intense and stressful than mine. Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to ask "What's not wrong" instead of commenting on all that is perceived to be wrong with our lives (what a concept; an enlightened version of "no whining"; my brain is still boggled that such a viewpoint exists). Or, as one of my undergraduate classmates was fond of saying, "It's all a matter of perspective." Then he'd go on with something such as, "if you think you played badly in the concert then you did play badly and you'll have a bad experience to remember. But if you focus on what you learned from playing badly, then you didn't play badly at all. You got better."

So, now if I catch myself about to start whining, I'm reminded of what another friend said to me. "Eat your crow while it's piping hot. It goes down better and has less of an aftertaste."

Here's to perspective, compassion, and what's not wrong. And thanks to my friends and loved ones for helping to keep my perspective.

I understand that temperanillo goes really well with piping hot crow . . .

The Metronome Will Set You Free (or, It is hard to get lost when you only have to count to ONE)

2007-05-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

Several of my students record their lessons. They say it helps them immensely in their practice between lessons. I've adapted my teaching style to help them on the post-lesson tape listening. For example, I will say aloud where to begin, instead of just pointing and saying "start here." That way, when listening with the music in hand, they know where to look (e.g., page 2, line 3, 2nd measure; or just "measure 35"). I also shout messages directly to the tape recorder, e.g., "XYZ will practice abc slowly before moving to the next step."

Recently one of the tape recording students, Student XYZ, sat down and said that after listening to the previous lesson, he was reminded of something I said a few years earlier: "Practice with the metronome every time you practice. It will set you free."

Student XYZ was initially baffled by that statement. How could something so rigid make your playing more free and expressive? But somewhere between a few years ago and the most recent lesson XYZ had an epiphany and finally understood what it meant.

First I need to say that when I give students the task of using the metronome, it is with specific instructions.

Chorus: "Why?"

Play everything very slowly. I mean REALLY slow. My metronome only goes as slow as 40. I'd like it to at least go down to 25, if not 20.

Chorus: Why?

Playing things slowly gives you the opportunity to really program your body to put every note in its proper place, and gives one the chance to play a piece without missing any notes. That is the cosmetic reason. There is an internal component. Having a slow beat in your ear will help you internalize a slow beat when we start counting things on the half and, ultimately, the whole note. One or two slow beats per bar.

Chorus

One half-note at 40 beats per minute (bpm) is two quarter notes at 80 bpm. One half-note at 80 bpm is two quarter notes at 160 bpm. On the quarter-note can lead to some fast and frantic toe-tapping (not allowed in my studio except when playing traditional music). Counting larger values forces you to think of groups of notes, and, ultimately, groups of bars, and not get hung up, bogged down, distracted, and so on, by a bunch of small note values. They are just notes. The big beat helps you turn those small notes into music.

Playing on the big beat gives you more freedom and reduces your responsibility to the time keeping. First, it is much more difficult to get lost if you only have to count to one (OK, sometimes two). Second, your responsibility when counting the breve, or the whole note/whole bar, is limited to getting from beat one to beat one on time. What you do in between, even when playing with others, is your responsibility.

Side bar: My limited experience playing traditional music leads me to believe that while there may be toe tapping, foot stomping, other percussive effects with various body parts, they are not used to keep people in time or to keep from losing their place (I seriously doubt that people who have been playing a particular traditional repertoire for years need help keeping time to the music). To me it seems they are another instrumental part of the music. Toe tapping in classical music, however, is yet another insecure bad habit brought on by a neurotic perception of what passes for a good performance. It helps you set the bar pretty low. "If I just don't get lost, then it will be a good performance." Right. Of course. That's all you need to be a successful classical performer, the ability to not get lost in a concert. Were that the case, I'd have run back to my accounting studies decades ago.

For me, the goal of counting large note values (big beats) and recalibrating your internal metronome, is to expand it to cover 4, 8, or 16 bars or one large phrase as one enormous beat. At any tempo. That is your freedom.

An excellent example of an 18th century piece where you can use this in both slow and fast tempos is the Sonata in D, Op. 1, by Johann-Joachim Quantz. The first movement, Grave e sostenuto, and the second movement, a Presto in 3/4, are the slowest and fastest tempos from the Baroque. Grave e sostenuto according to Quantz (my memory may be faulty here) comes out to around 38 for the eighth-note (that's pretty slow). The Presto comes in at 168 for the quarter-note (that's pretty fast). With both movements, it would be easy to get bogged down on the small note values (38 for the eighth-note? We'll be here for weeks! 168 for the quarter? How will be play those 16th-notes???) and forget about the phrases.

But, if you've practiced counting breves and whole-notes, you'll see the phrases more clearly in the ultra slow movement, and be able to look at a couple of lines of music in the fast movement as one enormous beat. If you think slow, you'll be able to play fast. And that is another concept my students are gestating.

Don't Forget to Breathe (or, what to do when you can't prepare as much as you want)

2007-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

More on adrenaline and stage fright . . .

From the Magnus Liber Pineda Dictae:
"If in doubt, get off the stage (or, as the Boy Scouts of America say, "Always be prepared;" if you are not prepared, what the heck are you doing on stage?)."

Last weekend I was one of the special guest artists at the 2007 Texas Tech Flute Festival. In conjunction with the Caprock Early Music Association, I had a full weekend of events: coaching the Tech collegium's recorder ensemble, giving a masterclass for the flute students who were working on baroque repertoire and introducing them to baroque ornamentation, a solo recital (200 years of flute music in less than an hour!), and presenting a show-and-tell-petting-zoo of early wind instruments (flutes and recorders). It was quite an honor to be invited and I had been looking forward to the event all year.

The Flute Festival/Caprock event gave me the opportunity to present material to an eager group of students, to spread the Gospel of early music and historical flutes, and to introduce modern flute players to what I call the "Dark Side" of flute playing. In brief, the Dark Side is merely acquiring the knowledge that you can color outside of the lines, move away from the party line that is modern orchestral flute playing, and just take responsibility for your own musical decisions. Not thinking outside the box, but thinking outside of the bar line.

I was prepared for all that I needed to do for the students, and when the focus of what I was to do changed slightly, so what? My job was to teach, coach, help, inspire, advise, whatever, and if I advocate flexibility in playing music, being open-minded to new ideas, and encouraging people to go outside of their comfort zones, then who am I to be rigid in my teaching plans? The flute professor has built an impressive flute studio and she knew exactly what her students needed from the guest artists and I was happy to help.

Normally this sort of gig is as stress-free as any concert or lecture-demo or presentation can be. This time, however, my timing and personal planning could have used a little help. The previous week and weekend I was involved in a significant chamber music concert with my friends and flute-playing colleagues Jed Wentz and Janet See. In the preparation for that concert I neglected the one small detail that needed to be addressed in my solo concert in Lubbock, Texas. *I was playing 200 years of flute music in about 45 minutes on 4 different flutes with 4 different embouchure holes with 3 different sounding lengths (with what seemed to be only 4 fingerings in common), 2 different temperaments, and 4 wildly different pieces of music. In a different context, each one of the pieces is, well, a piece o' cake to perform well (given adequate practice, etc.). Even any two of them. But the 4 different pieces/flutes played back-to-back in short order was something for which I neglected to adequately prepare. It could have been one of those occasions where a big jolt of adrenaline surges through your body and helps your concentration. If that happened, it must have gone into someone else's body because I didn't notice any surge, rush, blush, or increased wattage to my body's electrical system.

The end result was fine. The students got exposed to a tremendous amount of information in a short time, the rapid change from one flute and style of music to the next kept everyone fully engaged, and ultimately I had a great time doing it. I did feel, briefly, that each piece received a substandard performance. But once I got over myself and stopped whining (did I mention that there is an embargo on whining in my studio?), I took a look at the big picture and felt as if I had earned my keep at the festival (watching the video of the performance in the Dallas airport while I anxiously waited to get home on standby after my main flight was cancelled helped assuage the angst about the performance).

What does this all have to do with breathing and being prepared? All professionals have, at one time or another, had to walk out on stage before they felt completely prepared. I was definitely prepared in terms of being in shape (just played a big honkin' concert the weekend before and crammed in a lot of extra practice hours before the first rehearsal) and having prepared my pieces (played them all in concert a few times before, and felt as if I had prepared them enough in the time between the previous concert and getting on a plane). What I forgot to do (I blame the distraction on my excitement at being able to spend time with my friends, meet new colleagues, and teach new people) was putting the concert pieces in their proper context and to practice my transitions from flute to flute. It didn't occur to me that I needed to do this until my final big practice session on Friday. Then it hit me: "What knucklehead thought this* was a good idea, anyway?"

Oh.

Right.

Me.

Not good, great. A great idea . . .

Then the sage advice about Stage Fright came to me: "Don't forget to breathe."

The concert was at 1:30 the next afternoon. At 10:00 on the morning of the concert I had the chance to warm up in the concert hall. I start playing and it sounds like complete dog food (and we all know what dog food sounds like when a hungry dog gets to it first thing in the morning). Not a good sound. After I took a big breath ("don't forget to breathe"), I realized that my body thought it was 8:00 AM, not 10:00 AM, and who in the world sounds good at 8:00 AM? Or 10:00 for that matter? After that I felt good to go. Made a mental note to remember to breathe before, during, after, and between the pieces. I also decided that in order to acclimate myself to each flute as I went through them, I would play short preludes before each piece. That way I'd have the opportunity to adjust to the different embouchure, flute length, hole position, and general characteristics of each instrument before I dove into the music.

It was helpful but my brain still had to be fully engaged on every note (where was that adrenaline???). No out of body experiences on this concert. This kept me from completely cutting loose in a few places. The brain occasionally over-engaged which was not a good thing, and at the end of the concert there was a small bowl of clam chowder on stage at my feet.

So what. The reality of the event: it wasn't about me. It was about the listeners who got exposed to many new things in a short period of time. And that was the goal.

Stage Fright (or, "Don't forget to breathe!")

2007-04-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

"Adrenaline? We don't need no stinking adrenaline!"

"I'm so tired. I'm really looking forward to that surge of adrenaline when we walk out on stage."

So said my colleague as we were sitting backstage, 5 minutes before curtain, after a long day of travel, rehearsal, and being taken to dinner by our hosts BEFORE the concert (what brain trust thought that was a good idea?). We were completely wiped out, physically and emotionally. My answer to the low energy status: switch from recorder to flute on a piece that we rehearsed the day before and just 3 hours earlier in the day (and that we played on the first concert of the season). Had I practiced it on flute ever before? Well, I looked at a few bars at 7:30 PM while the others were on stage doing their final tuning. The stage manager comes for us. We walk out on stage. Lots of people, lots of applause, lots of energy and excitement coming from the audience, we took our places . . .

It all started almost 20 years ago. My family encouraged me to play at my mother's funeral. "Your music was very special to her. It will be a nice gesture and the family will really appreciate it." I could barely remember my name that day but I got up and with my nephew, we played a duet and then I played a solo. After that, everything else I ever played in public was, well, just a concert. A concert that I wanted to play and where people came willingly and with expectations of being entertained and having a good time. In theory, everyone involved wants to be at a public concert. Why would anyone get nervous about performing?

After that day, I never had any symptoms of the typical pre-concert jitters that people get. No urge to vomit, no shaking, no being spacey and forgetful, no on-stage panic, no loss of motor skills. I definitely have a heightened awareness of everything going on in the concert, and an excitement about the anticipation of the event. In the months before any big concert, I do, however, go through a bizarre mutation of being incredibly worried and insecure, getting the shakes, a little nausea, some scatter-brainedness, and so on. But as the concert plans get confirmed, that all goes away.

This journey has been very educational and liberating. With some near disasters along the way. I like to think that because of the way I prepare I would have reached this same point without having the perspective of playing at a funeral (haven't done another since, and likely will not again in the future). Teaching a "How to deal with stage fright" class and classes in general body awareness while playing have helped both my students and me.

The main thing I learned from playing at the funeral was to fully prepare for every public performance, which includes putting various scenarios into the practice regime. You may be able to play all the right notes at the right time and stay with your metronome mark in the cozy confines of your practice space, but can you do it in front of the audience if the concert hall is ten degrees cooler than the rehearsal space? Could you do it if the audience is so close they can see your music ("What is the crowd like?" "Overflow. They are sitting on the floor right in front of the stage. They are so close they'll be breathing on your thigh")? Could you do it if you were tired or jet-lagged? Can you find the energy to do it when there are less than ten people in the audience (remember: they paid their hard-earned money for a concert and it is your job to provide it)? Have you practiced in front of a mirror? A twofold exercise: you'll have a moving body in front of you, which could be a distraction, and you'll be forced to examine the way you look while performing. A frightening event the first few times you try it.

Pardon me while I lecture (ok, pontificate): Once you learn how to play the right notes at the right time, THEN you are ready to prepare for the performance. The rhetoric. The concert theme. The context of the performance. The intellectual and emotional message you want to convey (the subject of another posting, forthcoming). And more. Playing concerts is much more than playing the right notes at the right time while wearing the right clothes on the right day. Most audiences want more than the minimum.

Speaking of the minimum. The minimum requirements of a professional: show up at the right place at the right time with the right tools for the job prepared to do a good job whether you want to or not.

How do you know when you've prepared properly? When I can play my pieces through to my satisfaction while having a conversation with myself (the subject of which can run the gamut from concert context to planning the grocery shopping for the week), then I'm pretty sure things are ready for public consumption.

[Side bar on practice: since my senior recital, I've not practiced more than two hours in a day. I usually do it in 45-50 minute sessions with a 10-15 minute break in between. It may not seem like much time but the reality is that once I start, I don't let anything distract me. If you can keep your focus for that much time it will be just as exhausting physically and emotionally as if you played for twice the time. And in a concert you'll never play more than 50 minutes non-stop, or more than two hours. You just need to protect yourself from distractions AND maintain your focus on the task at hand. And you don't need to cover everything in every single practice session. I view it as a gym workout. Monday is legs, Tuesday is upper body, and so on. One day is technical work on difficult passages. The next day is context and continuity and non-stop playing of the pieces. And so on. ]

The main thing is to just sit down and do it in an organized manner. If you have to go through certain steps to prepare a good omelet, why wouldn't you do the same with your practice? Do you get in your car and drive around aimlessly and hope you arrive at work/school/grocery store at the right time?

I have found that there is one downside to making a strong effort to always be prepared and feeling confident about walking out on stage: there is such a thing as being too relaxed. How relaxed is too relaxed? Well, I've fallen asleep on stage, in a concert, three (3) times in the past 17 years. One time I was so asleep that I was drooling. Another time my head just fell forward during a piece that I wasn't playing but had to be on stage. And the third time the applause from the piece I had to sit out woke me up. In all cases my performance was not compromised, and in only one case did anyone notice that I had fallen asleep (when you are the tallest person on the stage and your head suddenly jerks forward, everyone notices). In the other two cases the people sitting right next to me didn't notice (maybe their stage fright kept them from thinking clearly?).

OK, so being prepared entails many things. When asked for advice on how to manage the anxiety of performance, the first thing I tell people is "don't forget to breathe." You'd be amazed at how many people tense up and forget to do this, even though it is essential to sustaining life. People think I'm kidding, but when I tell them to make a note to breathe in their music, before they start playing, then they take me seriously. What happens when you don't breathe? Your brain doesn't get any oxygen and you lose your ability to think clearly. Once you master the first item on the Stage Fright Help List, you almost don't need the rest of the list (if one even exists).

. . . bowed to the audience, and got in position to play. I looked at my friends on stage with me and saw that there was absolutely NO adrenaline surge for anyone. We were on our own, with a tough concert ahead of us, including a demanding piece that we commissioned. And we were exhausted. So what did we do? Our jobs. And we had fun while doing so. How did we manage this? We prepared properly. Amazing what happens when you do that. Who knew?

The Magnus Liber

2007-03-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Magnus Liber Pineda Dictae:

I can take this guy (respect every piece but fear none; observe, think, then react and you can play anything you want).
Speed doesn't kill if you know how to drive (musical decisions are never based on technical limitations).
No guts, no groupies (This needs no explanation).
Just brew it (or, as Mark Twain put it, "Talk about a war by a soldier who has been in one is more interesting than talk about the moon by a poet who has never been there;" or, simply, put up or shut up).
If in doubt, get off the stage (or, as the Boy Scouts of America say, "Always be prepared;" if you are not prepared, what the heck are you doing on stage?).
Eat your crow while it is piping hot (own up to your mistakes right away; crow tastes really bad if you let it get freezer burn; a nice temperanillo or a sip of Cuervo helps it go down).

Recruiting Band Members (or, "Don't let him hear you do that!")

2007-03-26T15:28:00.000-07:00

Some might say many things in my musical life have happened by accident; that I've been in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the right time. Or that these things were preordained. Or that my subconscious mind planned them all along. After reading Dharmonia's recent post about memory, I wonder if any of it ever happened except in my mind. Did those bruises from getting whacked on the arm repeatedly by the Blind Owl and Swift Turtle after a few concerts, in which I dragged them to the brink of musical disaster only to put the breaks on just in time, really exist (where does it say that playing fast is a crime)? Well, if the bruises didn't really exist, the admonishments after-the-fact certainly did. And so did the feeling that I'd pushed people to a place where they did not imagine they could go, or have any desire to go, but that they later felt good about having visited (yes, I felt a little smug). As a reviewer of a group I heard last year wrote, "If no one goes over the top, how will we know what is on the other side?"

The MCAT and I agree that I am NOT a "Type A" personality. Some of my colleagues will scoff at this. Some might whack me on the arm for saying something that reeks of total BS. The MCAT almost choked while sipping water when a friend and colleague, whom I hold in the highest esteem, said to her, "I just can't keep up with Kim." This from the man to whom I have resigned myself to being his second. My Type B+ personality aside, I am curious to go where no man has gone before when playing music and look for players who are willing to go there with me. And if there is some kicking and screaming as an accompaniment, it is only temporary.

As a teacher I coax the students out of their respective comfort zones. Any time someone says "I can't" I respond with, "you're confusing 'can't' with 'won't try'." Without fail, every student I have ends up being able to do things they didn't think they could. Not because I'm some genius at solving technical problems, but, I believe, because I inspire in them a sense of self-confidence (and I do point out a few small things to improve their efficiency). And, after playing things under incredibly close scrutiny, with me barking instructions and encouragement right in their faces, playing in front of an audience must seem to them like a picnic without any ants.

That is not how it works with my colleagues when we get together to prepare a concert. I have an idea in my brain of how something should go and I try to communicate that clearly in words and through example. But sometimes, you just have to play it down a few times so that everyone gets the character of the piece in their ear (and to embed the tempo into their bodies as well).

It is not, to be sure, all about bashing through things at full volume and light speed and dragging people with you. There is some subtlety involved. And often through someones casualness, I learn something about that person's perceived limits. For example, once upon a time I prepared a concert and asked one string player to join me and then I "recruited" Blind Owl who, at the time, was merely married to the early music mob but not yet fully submerged in the whole early music world. Things were going well in the concert prep, and I was pretty happy about it all. The concert day arrives, we do the pre-concert warm up, and as I set about putting all my music and instruments in their place before leaving the stage, I hear String Guy noodling on the last piece of the concert. He's going MUCH faster than we had ever rehearsed. The look on my face must have given me away because Blind Owl immediately said, "Don't let him hear you do that! He might do it that way in the concert!"

The concert starts. We get to the last set, two estampies from my favorite manuscript. London, British Museum Add. Mss. 29987. I play a little prelude and then dive in to the first piece at the "new" tempo. String Guy bails on playing the passage work with me and plays drones for the first couple of lines. Blind Owl is right there with us, not flinching. We race to the end, incredibly high energy, and 90% of the notes. Raw, but effective. We end that piece and without a break String Guy immediately goes into his own pre-scheduled, improvised prelude. He stops and I dive in, still high from the energy of the last piece at the "new" tempo. Again, String Guy avoids the passage work and drones at the beginning. On this one Blind Owl was supposed to wait one phrase and then come in, but at the sound of the new tempo, he jumps in right way (in his words, "I wanted to get in while I still could"). Again we wail to the end, even accelerating as the piece neared the end. The crowd, most of them hard-core, "I'm earlier than thou" serious, critical types, explodes in applause and hollering. We get up, bow, Blind Owl looks at me as if to say, "you bastard!" We walk off the stage, come back for a curtain call, leave again and then the flogging commences. It was worth it.

Binkley comes up to me and says, "it was better than I thought it was going to be." High praise, indeed.

After that, the Gauntlet was thrown down and now the regular gang of players knows that when we all get together, something will happen. Turns out that some of them are, in fact, grandstanding divas waiting (hoping?) for "something" to happen. And others pick up said gauntlet and slap me in the face. For example, I once said to Swift Turtle , "player ABC will be there so I'm going to increase my practice regime. I want to be the best player on the gig." He replied, "you mean the best wind player . . . "

But the reverse is kind of fun. "When we got to measure xyz, I thought we were in for an 'Oh, s___t-there-goes-Kim moment."

Payback: this time it's for real . . .

As stated in an earlier post, I not only look to play with really good people, but they must meet a few criteria: they have to be nice (but still have strong opinions), willing to go beyond the mere notes on the page, and willing to help expand the horizons of the usual concert, not just early music.

Please refer to the Magnus Liber Pineda Dictae for the sought-after attitude. A wee bit of orneriness doesn't hurt, either.

"It's supposed to be hard! If it were easy, anyone could do it!"
--Tom Hanks, in A League of their Own

On the job training (or, Frying pan? What frying pan? Those look like flames to me!)

2007-03-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem

"Kim, on the next concert I want you to play a short piece between every set, immediately after each group is finished, so the flow of the program won't be interrupted by any applause."

"OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem."

It seems I was always saying, "OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem," whenever he suggested something to me. It was my timid way of saying, "Oh my f$%^&*@!ing God! NOW what???" It was always in the context of a performance that was usually less than 72 hours away. [In one instance it was 6 hours away when I was 1. conscripted into service and 2. given my material. But that's another story for another time.]

This time, however, was the first time. It seemed innocuous enough. I had tons of unaccompanied pieces from the 13th through the 18th centuries. At the time, I had been playing, practicing, and studying early music for 12 years. Piece o' cake. A snap. No problemo. [At a memorial service that I organized for the students of the Early Music Institute shortly after Tom's death, I read from a letter I had written him, essentially saying goodbye, as we all knew he was dying. In that letter I told him that I had certain expectations when I started my studies in the EMI, followed by a joke, "you laugh at my naivete." This story here was no doubt the first laugh.]

The EMI secretary, herself worthy of a rant at a future date, called me at home and left a message: "Mr. Binkley would like you to write down the pieces you'll be playing so I can put them in the program." So I wrote down four pieces by Jacob van Noort (Dutch, 17th century), for solo soprano recorder. Typed it nice and neat, delivered it to the office the next morning, a day before the concert. Later that day, around 3PM, the secretary sees me in the hallway and says, "Mr. Binkley says you can't play those pieces. You have to play preludes."

Well, if those Branles by van Noort are not suitable as preludes, then what the devil is and what does Binkley want??? That was my Inner Monologue (IM). What I said was, "OK, what does Mr. Binkley want, exactly?" Tom hears this conversation from his office and comes out and says, "Kim, you have to improvise preludes between each group. You'll go from Baroque music to Renaissance music, and then from Renaissance music to Medieval music. You'll need to start in one period and end in another."

"OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem."
IM: "Are you kidding me? I gave up getting laid last night so I could practice these insipid pieces like a fool so I could be ready for the concert and now you're telling me I have to improvise in a bizarre melange of early music styles, just so you can keep the audience from clapping???"

"Oh, you'll need to start in the key that the first group ends, and end up in the key of the first piece for the vocal ensemble. And then in the middle of their set they'll need you to mutate to a different key before one piece. The countertenor can't sing high enough so they are transposing to a key he can sing in."

"OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem."
IM: Wait a f*&^%%$#@! minute! The first group is doing a cantate by Clerambault at a=415 Hz. The vocal group is at a=440Hz. And the Medieval group is at a=460 Hz! What the f*&^%! is this sh*&^%$#~!???? How many frigging axes do I have to carry on stage?"

Did I mention Tom could read my mind?

"You'll have to do this all on one recorder, for continuity."

"OK, Mr. Binkley, no problem."

I was lying. It was a problem. It was a problem so big I had no idea what I was going to do right after I ran to the bathroom and yakked up and flushed away my 12 years of early music experience, experience which led me to believe that I actually knew something. Yes, I was going to spew those 12 years and then some into the toxic wasteland that is the Indiana sewer system, along with everything else still running around in my intestinal tract.

Instead of a complete jettison of my previous experience, my brain kicked into overdrive. Running at high speed but without any navigational equipment, but high speed nonetheless. Many thoughts came to me: fake an appendicitis attack; drop out, drive back to California and finish the degree that I started as an undergraduate, accounting; play the pieces I practiced and either start or end on the appropriate note; show up at the wrong venue and pretend that I didn't know where the concert was supposed to be. Within the first few hours of the full-frontal Binking I'd just received, it never occurred to me to actually practice what I needed to do. That would have been logical. No, throwing away everything I'd worked for up to this point in my career seemed a better option than actually learning how to do something new. [How do you spell knucklehead?]

Finally, after wasting most of an evening, logic and reason returned to my world view. I began to make a plan. First step, engage the first rule of research: exploit the work of others. How many treatises on ornamentation and diminution had I waded through not only as an undergraduate but also in my first couple of years of graduate school? More than one, certainly, and I realized that I could pretty much play licks from any of them if I thought about it. So they were all learned in the easiest key on whatever instrument I was playing, but what is a little transposition among licks? [I've since become almost indifferent to the concept of keys; embracing more the character that each key brings to my respective instruments.]

Once the concept of switching centuries in mid-piece was digested, the concept of mutation had to be addressed. Thanks be to Providence, I actually learned something (against my will) in my undergraduate music theory classes. Who knew? So I made a little chart in my head of what key areas I needed to be in and move through to get from one place to another. The wacky vocal ensemble issue involved a tritone modulation. Piece o' cake. A snap. No problem, Mr. Binkley.

The singers actually wanted to rehearse with me. Two of them were particularly whiny and bitchy about getting the pitch from a recorder (the bass and one of my exes; also a topic to be addressed in the future, as it pertains to studying and performing early music). But it did provide some valuable insight: I was unable to realize in sound when working with other people what my brain had mapped out clearly and logically.

Solution: write the progressions and modulations on a 3 x 5 index card, set it on the floor of the stage at my feet so that I could look at it right before playing each prelude. The card would be placed in such a manner that no one would see me do it, and no one would see me refer to the card during the show, other than the people sitting next to me on the stage, IF they even bothered to acknowledge my existence; they were worried about their own respective Binkings. [It turns out that one (1) person noticed from the audience, the legendary Blind Owl. He even noticed that I flinched right before the last prelude as I was standing up to play; there was a little hitch as I took one last look at the 3 x 5 card near my feet.]

The concert starts. I must have run to the bathroom 6 or 7 times in the 10 minutes before we had to be on the stage. The baroque ensemble played a prelude as the curtain opened (a pre-composed prelude by Jacques-Martin Hotteterre) so that no one would be able to applaud, as is the tradition of concerts at the Indiana University factory. They finished their piece and I started playing before the last note had finished reverberating, and before the unskilled, untalented, flamboyant, and tactless tenor singer could do something subversive.

I was playing, noodling my fool head off on the first prelude, spewing air through the recorder as if I were trying to blow out birthday candles in the next room. After a couple of phrases I remembered that I needed to mutate and relied on what I've come to recognize as a bit of photographic memory. I looked up as I was playing and could see my 3 x 5 card and started reading the progressions and then it was time to end and hand it over to the vocal ensemble. And I had not voided my bladder in the process. I would live to see another day at the EMI (a curse or blessing? The jury is still out on that one)!

After the concert, whose show was justly stolen by the Medieval ensemble (that was a rockin' group of people), people swarmed around me to ask about those pieces I played. Did Binkley pick those pieces to fit exactly between the other pieces? Who wrote them? "No" and "I did" were the answers. Then the Blind Owl says to me: "I saw you flinch just a little and look down at the card right before the last prelude." Someone saw the card on the stage! "After your first piece I noticed that you were looking at the floor right before standing up and that's when I noticed the index card. Did you write down progressions or something?"

Whoa. With that observation, the Blind Owl inadvertently planted a seed in my brain that he would later see grow into a tenacious vine that refused to die as I conscripted him (along with many others over the past 20 years) into going beyond any concept of comfort zone. But that, too, is another story for another time.

Tom finally came up to me and said, "good job. Just what I had in mind."

"No problem, Mr. Binkley."

I'm a MENTOR?

2007-02-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

A much younger and now a very fancy colleague said to me a few years ago, "You're a great mentor."

One colleague said to me about another colleague, "You've single-handedly turned Crispian Spunt [not the real name] into a top-notch performer by putting him in sink-or-swim situations."

Recently I spent about 20 minutes on the phone consulting with a player who has attended one of my workshops about repertoire for an upcoming competition. I have difficulty referring to professional adult players as my "students." Client is a term with which I am more comfortable but some find that term pretentious or misleading. [Side bar: All music teachers are both consultants, guidance counselors, and therapists in a broad sense; the difference between us and other occupations that use those same descriptive titles is that we are not giving medical or relationship advice (we better not be). Guidance in which direction to take as a musician, or what pieces to play. Therapist in the sense that we diagnose mechanical problems associated with playing an instrument. And consulting on a course of action for both of the previous issues. And those other professions don't hesitate to refer to their people as clients.]

After I hung up, I said aloud: "I guess I really am a mentor to younger players." To paraphrase the M-Cat's response: "DUH!" Followed by something along the lines of, "everytime you get an e-mail with a question about repertoire, concerts, technical problems, you are serving as the mentor to your students." [Clients, I say to myself.]

OK, so how did I get to be a mentor? Did I ask to be? Did I actively seek out this role? Or did it just happen? What sort of responsibilities are involved? More importantly, do I want to be a mentor to young players? If so, why? What do I get out of it?

Validation. It seems to be that simple. By marking a clear and relatively painless path to a set of goals (a set of goals that are fed by many paths, most with various types of obstructions, snake pits, and pitfalls, to be sure) for other players, the mentor's own work gets validated. That seems to be true in my case. And compassion. You just don't want people to experience the same pain as you did. Let them find their own new pain (it is inevitable); it will help them as they become mentors.

It benefits both parties. As I tell my students every time the sign-up sheet goes out, they are more than a source of income to me. My own skills as a player improve from working with even the most inexperienced beginning student.

Who were my mentors? In graduate school there were two, sort of, and it seems that neither one showed any visible signs of being in the mentor role but what I took away from them at two different stages of my musical education have been invaluable. Much of it lay dormant for as long as 20 years before manifesting. The advice was never far from my consciousness, but it didn't seem applicable. And then one day it was all incredibly relevant and I felt as if I'd been experiencing my career with a pillow case on my head. I could hear, smell, touch, and sort-of-kind-of-maybe-see, but I certainly couldn't taste anything or get the full experience that came when the pillow case was removed. My gut reaction when the epiphany hit me: Those bastards! Why didn't they just *&^%$#@!ing TELL me this in the first place???

Because I wouldn't have learned it any other way . . .

I'm not actively selling myself as a Mentor, but I've now embraced the role.

Invaders from Norway

2007-02-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

I'd like to retell the story of an ACTION PACKED morning on the Fremont-Ballard Border (the area known as FreLard) in Seattle.

I was thinking how most American men my age or younger, unless they live on a farm or in a rural area, or grow up in a family with a tradition of hunting, have never had the experience of dispatching a wild beast, for food or in defense.

In my case, however, I had the grisly opportunity of killing a wild animal (OK, a rat, but a BIG rat; without the tail it was as long as one of those big yogurt containers--32 Oz or something). The M-Cat and I wanted it to be a mouse (Johann, our professional exterminator, said that everyone wants to have mice and no one wants to have rats; unfortunately for them--and job security for him--it is almost always rats that people have in Seattle).

This killing, unfortunately, was for neither food nor defense, but for correcting an error. We had traps set in an ideal spot, an area between stove and cabinet at the end of the rat pathway, but moved them to a spot on the known rat pathway so Junior wouldn't see them or accidentally step on them or worse. I thought they were then in the ideal position for rat catching but the M-Cat thought otherwise (living with someone who is always right has its perks, to be sure, but sometimes . . . ) and meant to move them back to their original places. Please note that we had engaged MOUSE traps to catch RATS (see Johann's comments above).

Sometime between 11:00 PM and 5:15 AM (don't ask why I was up that early), as I fed the cat I noticed that both traps were sprung, and had flipped out to be in front of the stove near their original position, and there was NO rat in them. How could that be? Then I noticed that a rat was huddled near the wall, way back between the stove and the counter. It must have stepped on them or something, and certainly did not go into them headfirst as it should have. So, I waited for a while, did my morning refreshing, then set about determining whether or not the creature was still alive, stunned, or badly wounded. It was still alive. Stunned at best, but certainly wounded enough to keep from climbing back into its escape hatch (they ate through my steel wool/duct tape blockage and now use it much as a cat uses a cat door).

My Plan:
Further stun the creature with ammonia, sweep it out to the kitchen floor proper, scoop it up in the dustpan, deposit it into the yogurt container, and then to the trash.

What Actually Happened:
I dumped the ammonia on it and it RAN LIKE THE WIND into the kitchen proper before I could sweep it. I did manage to sweep it with the broom against the moulding of the sink counter (sort of like playing hockey with the rat as a puck), poked it once to get it out to the kitchen floor proper (all the while this thing is running the gauntlet towards the cat bowls), and once on the kitchen floor I whacked it brutally, viciously, and accurately on the head with the broom ONCE, thereby killing it (the broom is one of those hideous green plastic things with synthetic brush; the whacking area was the plastic part that holds the brush to the stick). Just to make sure it was in fact dead, I whacked it again with even more force, thereby making it resemble a rat/flounder combo. Elapsed time: 7 seconds from pouring ammonia to final whacking. Score now reads Casa Pineda 2, Rats 0. The first rat actually did go into the MOUSE trap properly. Now I understand the mob term "to whack" some one. Then I scooped it into the yogurt container and dispatched it to the trash.

Exciting, a little frightening (not sure why; how much bigger than a rat am I?), and, well, to quote Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "it didn't suck." Now I feel bad for the poor thing, that the trap didn't break its neck in less than a second and it had to suffer wounded until I broke its head and neck in a 7-second adrenaline-charged fury, complete with Tiger-style Kung fu yells (teh! TEEEEEEEEHHHHH!!!! TEH!). The whole experience made me think of Farley Mowat in Never Cry Wolf. No way am I ever eating a rat, never mind one drenched in ammonia.

Then I went to work and sat, in a calm setting, and waited for the first phone call of a distraught parent or confused dermatologist. My Rite of Passage made me better equipped to reassure the parents that called that day that everything would work out OK for their family. And to the dermatologists who called I was more calm and reassuring when telling them that the testing we offered was done free of charge.

While I was at work, the M-Cat called Johann and he took care of our little problem with the Invaders from Norway (Thanks, Mr. Columbus, for bringing them with you! What a nice gift!).

By killing the rat, approximately 14-15 cm, 0.1 kg, with my 192 cm, 125 kg self and weapon, I have achieved a Zen-like state. A friend asked if I really used ammonia or if I just wet myself and was using the ammonia story as cover . . .

2003

Early Music Man (a song)

2007-02-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

EARLY MUSIC MAN
(sung to Secret Agent Man)

There's a geek who lives a life of danger
To every book he reads, he stays a stranger
With every citation he makes
Another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see it published

EARLY MUSIC MAN, EARLY MUSIC MAN
They've given you a codex
And taken away your name

Beware of illuminations that you find
A pretty face can hide an evil mind
Oh, be careful what you say
Or you'll give yourself away
Odds are you won't live to see it published

EARLY MUSIC MAN, EARLY MUSIC MAN
They've given you a codex
And taken away your name

Readin' in the Codex Montpellier
Then layin' in a Paris alley next day
Oh, don't you let the wrong word slip
While kissing persuasive lips
Odds are you won't live to see it published

EARLY MUSIC MAN, EARLY MUSIC MAN
They've given you a codex
And taken away your name

Kim Pineda, 1999

No guts, no groupies (or The Tao of Binkley)

2007-02-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

The M-Cat suggested to me that the Binkley students of my generation, and perhaps some from the earlier generations, get together and write his biography. A biography not so much about the man but about his effect on each individual musician, and how it has shaped our respective careers. The Blind Owl has begun, in a sense, with his own blog about 100 greats in 100 days. Ultimately the collection, with enough contributors, could be called Binked: The unauthorized biography of Thomas Binkley, as told by his students.

I tell my students that there is a gestation period involved in truly learning a new technique or absorbing a new concept. In my own experience a couple of things have taken around ten years to manifest. One case was more an epiphany. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Today's entry into the BinkBlog:

Johann-Joachim Quantz's essay, On Playing the Flute has chapters on how one should judge various aspects of music and musicians. Binkley had his own version. It is best explained in the form of a dialogue.

A student walks into Tom's office and lets him know that s/he would like to sing for him (in the hope that s/he would subsequently be asked to perform in an upcoming project).

Scenario I
Student I: Mr. Binkley, my name is __________ and I'd like to sing for you.
TB: OK, go ahead.

Student (gasping): You mean right now???
TB: Of course! You said you wanted to sing for me. Go ahead. Whenever you're ready.

Student (eyes wide in fright): But I need to warm up. I . . . I need an accompanist. I don't have . . . any . . . any . . . m-m-music with me.
TB: OK then, good-bye.

Scenario II
Student II: Mr. Binkley, my name is __________ and I'd like to sing for you.
TB: OK, go ahead.

Student (swallows hard, eyes wide): OK. (Student starts to sing "Star Spangled Banner" or "Rejoice" from Handel's Messiah, or Gounod's "Ave Maria," with bad timing, marginal pitch accuracy, but full volume, warming up into the proper character as the piece progresses. People outside of Binkley's office cringe at some of the intonation, raise eyebrows at the excessive vibrato, and wait patiently around the corner for the singing to stop so they can hear hysterical laughter, loud sobbing, or a door opening and slamming and the sound of running footsteps as the student tries to outrun his/her shame.)

TB: Thank you.

Guess who got the gig.

I have found that I have similar expectations for both my students and my colleagues. With my colleagues it is more a matter of finding people who are open minded and willing to try almost anything. I dragged my quartet through the wringer for a few years before realizing that things would be even better if I asked them to help pick the projects and build the programs. I learned long ago that no one is indispensable, no matter how well you play. I also made a choice a long time ago to not waste my creative energy working with anyone who is a good or great player but not a team player or with anyone who is just one bad vibe after another. I haven't dedicated my life to music to endure puerile behavior and present a compromised product. The people in the audience work hard for their money and when they buy a ticket to a concert they expect certain things. A temperamental, grandstanding diva making other players unhappy is not one of them. Ultimately something like this is going to express itself in the performance.

So, not only does a player have to be really good (I enjoy pushing myself by playing with top-notch players, players who can do things I can't do or that I want to do better), but they have to work and play well with others. If you are a jerk, feel free to lose my phone number because you are never going to set foot on the stage with me. And you've got to be able to wing it, both for fun and in a musical crisis. Unless the stage is on fire, once the piece starts, you've got to keep going.

Tom was all about attitude. Watching him inspired me to come up with what the Blind Owl dubbed the Magnus Liber Pineda Dictae
(I was misquoted in an EMA magazine article in the year after Binkley's death; I made up these slogans, not Tom, but he was the inspiration).

I can take this guy (respect every piece but fear none; observe, think, then react and you can play anything you want).

Speed doesn't kill if you know how to drive (musical decisions are never based on technical limitations).

No guts, no groupies (This needs no explanation).

Just brew it (or, as Mark Twain put it, "Talk about a war by a soldier who has been in one is more interesting than talk about the moon by a poet who has never been there;" or, simply, put up or shut up).

If in doubt, get off the stage (or, as the Boy Scouts of America say, "Always be prepared;" if you are not prepared, what the heck are you doing on stage?).

Realizing I was choosing my professional collaborations with these Binkley-inspired criteria was a bit of an epiphany. We are all devoted to music, to be sure, and any resemblance to grandstanding divas is purely coincidental.

My first step towards this musical backbone came in 1986 when I stood up in the middle of what was supposed to be a dress rehearsal that Tom was supposed to merely oversee (he ended up coaching 3 singers for 30 of our 50 minutes of stage time) and yelled, "Mr. Binkley! We've got to run the whole program!" Dead silence. An uncomfortable pause. The longest 3 seconds of silence ever experienced. I felt an urge to urinate. I expected to get my face ripped off with one of his legendary verbal tirades. Instead he just looked up at me, said "OK," and smiled an acknowledgement: "the boy has a spine after all."

I had passed my audition.

-- kp

Musical Mass Transit

2007-01-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

My Evening Commute
Christmas in Seattle (December 2005)

I thought my bus adventures were taking a turn for the good last week when I helped an elderly man get up from his seat. Apparently his arthritis is so acute that once he sits down anywhere he needs help getting up. I wondered why he sat on the very edge of his seat the whole trip. It gave me a good feeling to help someone out in this environment; it can range from pleasant to smelly and violent in a span of two city blocks.

The turning for the good made a wrong turn yesterday on my ride home from downtown Seattle's First Hill, also known as "Pill Hill" because of the many hospitals in close proximity to each other.

Nothing unusual on the first few stops. A few students from the local Catholic high school, some Christmas shoppers leaving work early, the usual crew of Seattle's Great Unwashed, and a few Seattle University students (a Jesuit college near the hospitals).

And then it happened. The mom with her six-year-old son got on the bus. They had difficulty with that because the child was reluctant, no recalcitrant, about boarding the bus. After the bus driver very curtly told them to get on, the mom basically dragged the child on by one arm, which caused the child to begin his expletive-laced howling and whining agenda. Once on the bus, by this time very crowded, with only two seats visible to me from where I sat, he tried to escape his mother. Each time he tried, she grabbed him and he then hollered "OW! OW! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" followed by "you're an idiot!" (usually repeated a few times, as a chorus). Clearly the adult forgot that adults, not children, make the rules and the children follow them. Clearly the mother forgot that a child needs boundaries and limits on many things, among them how to behave in public and how to avoid disturbing strangers.

I thought it would calm down once we got a few blocks and he was sitting on his mother's lap. No. The poor child never once stopped whining, crying, yelling at his mother, and continued his mantra, "you're an idiot." This was going to be the longest 4 miles of my life, I thought. A couple of African-American gals said in a less-than-sotto-voce, "my, oh my," and "what is this" and "I can't believe it," as only members of the African-American community can. [As a side bar here, I must say that I grew up around African-Americans and have ridden many buses in my day with single African-American mothers with multiple children in tow and never once have I heard any of those children be out of line for more than 5 seconds without being reminded of where the boundaries and limitations were for them in public.]

At one stop a bunch of people got off and the mother and child moved so each now had a seat. The child sat by the window and I fully expected a multitude of pulls on the cable that signals a stop for the driver. No big deal because it stops frequently anyway until we hit a certain stretch of road. Instead a "dialogue" between mother and child ensued, complete with wrestling the child, grabbing various objects out of his hands, his yelping, apologizing, and of course, his mantra, "you're an idiot!"

Many things ran through my mind: should I say something, if so, in what tone (gentle, stern, or screaming and stomping my feet in the middle of the bus)? If I don't scream at them, should I be helpful, snide, or rude, direct, and threatening? I considered briefly the idea of making a fake phone call on my cell phone to Child Protective Services, loud enough so she could hear me; at this point they were one seat ahead of me and on the other side of the bus.

I tried to let it all wash over me and treat it as white noise, because the child never once stopped making vocal sounds. But it was not regular enough to turn it into white noise. Then my musical training kicked in. The text repeated often enough so I thought of the various medieval formes fixes. Is it a rondeau, ballade, or virelai? But no, the text didn't follow those patterns. Then it hit me: of course! It follows an ars nova motet, similar to the polytexted pieces by Philippe de Vitry, with a repeated Tenor line in talea! Now we were getting somewhere.

Ultimately that was no help. Even during a thorough analysis of a piece, you still have to listen to it. We crossed the bridge that separates my neighborhood, Fremont, from the rest of the Seattle. I debated getting off the bus 3/4 of a mile from home to escape the noise/diaglogue/abuse/bad parenting, but it actually started to rain (not the drizzle that we usualy get that hardly constitutes "rain;" this was the real stuff and I was wearing cotton clothes, a big no-no in the Seattle winter). Each time the child tried some new thing to defy authority, the mom tried to speak calmly or grabbed his wrists or put her arms completely around him. Speaking calmly led to "you're an idiot!" Being grabbed by the wrists resulted in "OW! OW!" Putting arms around the child brought "I'm sorry! Let me go, you idiot!"

Just when I thought I would get up and say something, like "thank you; you've made me realize what a great parent I am," or "if I see you again I'll call Child Protective Services," the man sitting directly behind them said to the child, "you need to shut up because I can't take it any more." I'm sure he was trying to sound angry and tough but he hardly raised his voice. The child ignored him. Quelle
surprise . . .

By the grace of God, my bus stop was immediately after this guy spoke up. Normally I say "have a good day" to the driver. This time, however, I held him responsible for the chaos on his bus so I said nothing, barely showing him my bus pass.

The grisly ride home did, in fact, validate my parenting skills, as well as remind me of all the things in my life for which I am thankful.

Thanks be to Providence, the days riding this apocalyptic bus route are over.

Mass Transit in Seattle

2007-01-31T08:44:00.000-08:00

My Morning Commute (December 2005)

"I'll take Bus 46 at 7:19 to the UW, hop on the Health Science Express at 7:45, be in the office at Harborview Neurosurgery Academic Office by 8:00 a.m."

My naiveté continues to amaze me. I strolled out the door at 7:15, knowing it takes 2 minutes to walk to the bus stop, NW 43rd and Leary Way; the bus has a scheduled stop at 8 th NW and NW Market at 7:19, which should give one plenty of time to catch it by leaving at 7:15.

As I was one block away from Leary and NW 43rd, I watched Bus 46 drive by without stopping. So much for a relatively redolent-free trip to the Patricia Bracelin Steel building.

No problem, however, about getting to work in a timely manner. Right on schedule, Bus 28 arrives at 7:35. I said good morning to the young redhead who in previous weeks has been recovering from a broken foot or leg, and has had a series of walking casts. This morning she had regular shoes on and walked with a bounce to her step (I would too, if I'd just gotten out of a cast). She smiles and says good morning. She allows me to board the bus ahead of her. Age before beauty, I guess . . .

Bus 28 heads down Dexter. Major event: someone decides to sit next to me (please note that even on the most crowded days, it is rare when someone decides to take the seat next to me). A tall blonde wearing too much eye makeup and hair that made mine look well-coiffed, and holding some sort of smoothie breakfast in a bottle that was making me hungry as she guzzled most of it down by the time we hit 3 rd Ave downtown.

I exit Bus 28 at Benaroya Hall, resist the urge to buy coffee and a turkey sandwich, and wait patiently for Bus 3 or 4.

I wait.

I wait some more.

I continue to wait.

I wait while regretting not buying the coffee and turkey sandwich. My bowl of oat bran flakes has long ago been turned into fuel for my apparently massive (129.6 kg) body.

Bus 4 appears at the corner. It is so packed with people you cannot see the lights on. I wonder if my co-worker Cliff is on board somewhere in that carnage of crawling flesh.

Bus 4 stops at Benaroya Hall. Five people get out. I see a glimpse of interior light. Ten or so people try to get on; a few are left out in the cold as the door shuts.

Then I notice her. She's holding a McDonald's coffee cup and seems surprised that the door shut right in her face after no more people could climb into the bus. She starts pounding on the door, then the side of the bus as it pulls away, yelling, "Hey! What is this?? Hello! I'm right here!"

The bus accelerates, and this seemingly innocuous person metamorphoses into Psycho Bus Lady (PBL). She chases after the bus, now in the left lane, gesticulating and yelling at the bus and driver as it heads down the street. The bus easily drops her and she continues to walk to the next bus stop, presumably. It should be noted here that the 3rd and Union (Benaroya Hall) stop has been designated as a Yellow stop for certain buses. PBL stops at the next stop, which is Blue, a place where Buses 3 & 4 do not stop.

Within 30 seconds of Bus 4 leaving, Bus 3 arrives at Benaroya Hall. It has about 15 people on board. The bus has lots of light, lots of seats, and little smell. I get on. It is now 8:35 and I've been waiting there over 20 minutes. I should have grabbed that turkey sandwich at the mega chain store of coffee vendors. . .

Bus 3 passes the BLUE bus stop where PBL is waiting. She looks surprised and then outraged that the bus didn't stop at the wrong place. She begins chase again, and resumes her gesticulations and verbal tirade, while maintaining the integrity of her coffee. At the next stop, clearly marked in YELLOW, PBL has the opportunity to catch up because a man in a wheelchair needs the handicapped lift to get on. PBL enters the bus and I expect her to make a scene. Because of my foul mood at having missed two buses and standing in the cold without coffee and turkey sandwich, I am fully prepared to be her and the driver's worst nightmare: a large man in a bad mood who is yelling at the top of his lungs at a psycho nut bag who is badgering the driver because he did his job properly.

I wait. PBL does nothing. As she enters she sees a friend and begins a calm chat with her, leaving behind her PBL personality. This only makes me more certain that she will re-morph into PBL.

But no. There is only the usual chatter by people who live on the fringe of society and who have only cursory contact with soap and a vague idea of personal hygiene. The bus gets crowded. Then more crowded as we stop at City Hall. If only there was the screaming toddler from yesterday on board for me to channel again.

We stop at Harborview Medical Center, three blocks from the office, and the bus erupts in a flow of people wearing hospital garb and the haberdashery of the homeless.

Next stop, the South Seas Market, right across the street from the Pat Steel building where I work. As the bus approaches the stoplight, the man in the wheelchair decides now is the time to undo his seat belts, even though his stop is two stops away. He thinks he's getting off and tries to cut in front of the three of us who actually are leaving. He sees the error of his ways as I bump into him on my way to the front. The bus is still moving at this point. We stop, one person almost falls over at the sudden issue of brakes, and I barely show my pass to the driver as I leap off the bus, almost running as I hit the ground.

I realized I could have walked from home in half the time that it took to miss two buses and ride two others. And could have made coffee at home AND an omelet. Live and learn.