Musicianship

Not good

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I like to use a Socratic-ish method in my private lessons, and ask my students questions. It means that I have this conversation several times per day:

[Student plays.]

Me: How did that sound to you?

Student: Not good.

Me: What didn’t you like about it?

Student: It didn’t sound good.

Me: What aspect of it didn’t sound good to you? The tone? the pitch? the phrasing? the articulation?

Student: Um, I guess the articulation?

Me: What didn’t you like about the articulation?

Student: It wasn’t good?

It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?

Photo, David Bailey
Photo, David Bailey

Often the “not good” is a combination of factors, but if my students can identify even one of them, then they can immediately start working in a focused way to improve it. If it’s just “not good,” then they tend to just play it again from the beginning without any clear approach to making it sound better, and repeat until frustrated.

Part of my job is to help them identify and verbalize the desirable and undesirable phenomena in their playing, and to teach them the techniques for manipulating the variables involved (breath support, voicing, embouchure, finger technique, and tongue technique, to name the most obvious ones). But it’s up to them to take that information and run with it. For my students to become independently-functional musicians, they need to learn to listen critically to themselves and troubleshoot.

For yourself and for your students, don’t be satisfied with bland value judgments (it sounded “good” or “bad”). Be factual and descriptive about what you hear, and tackle problems in a methodical way. Practice smart!

Playing full-spectrum music

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I’m far from being a photography expert, but I do have one trick. (This is a music-related post, I promise.)

In general, good photos take advantage of the eye’s full light-to-dark range. In other words, the very darkest part of the photo should be very black, and the very lightest part should be very white.

Here’s a photo that doesn’t meet those criteria—the darkest and lightest parts of the photo are both sort of medium-grayish.

blah

But a quick “auto-level” procedure in photo-editing software (like the free Gimp) corrects this by adjusting each pixel of the photo, basically making the dark ones darker and the light ones lighter:

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Individuality, conformity, and music students

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I found myself relating to Jennet Ingle’s recent blog post about an independently-thinking oboe student and the subjective qualities of tone. I related both to the student and to the teacher.

… I had to lecture a student on Sound a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t believe how uncomfortable it made me.  It is truly such a personal thing.  I felt like I was criticizing his smell, or his personality – it was that delicate for me.

I don’t actually think I am leading him wrong in insisting that he sound more “American” to fit in at his Midwestern college – but I hated telling him so.   I would love for him to use his own unique voice and have it be accepted for what it is.  But instead I have to encourage him to get more generic, and to sound more like everyone else.  This rubs me wrong, philosophically.

I have been in the position as a student of trying to do something that I think is a personal artistic expression, and being told that I need to toe the line. I have also been in the position as a teacher of watching a student pursue an individual course that conflicts with what I am trying to teach.

Should music students (or students in any kind of artistic field, for that matter) be expected to conform, or allowed to explore freely? By letting a student do his or her “thing,” am I incubating innovative, boundary-smashing Art? Or am I failing a student by not grooming them in the established tradition?

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Sorry, but you still can’t bring your reed knives on US flights

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There has been some buzz (no pun intended) among US reed players about an announcement from the infamous Transportation Security Administration that some knives will be allowed in carry-on luggage starting next month. But make no mistake—your reed knife will still need to go in your checked bag or it will be confiscated at a … Read more

It’s not too soon

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Frequently I think about something one of my teachers said to me as an undergraduate student. I was preparing for a rapidly upcoming recital, and played one of my repertoire pieces in a private lesson. There was a tricky page turn in the printed sheet music, and my run-through came to a halt while I … Read more

Memorizing scales

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As I’ve mentioned before, my university students are subject to a scale proficiency exam. Most arrive at the university “knowing” at least some major scales, but most of them will also have to learn at least a few new ones and maybe put some old ones into a new format.  For their exam, the scales need to be memorized well enough to play three randomly-selected major ones, and three randomly-selected melodic minors.

For some students, there are technical barriers to this:  untrained fingers, insufficient familiarity with alternate fingerings, or tone production issues in extreme ranges. Some also struggle with nerves or other psychological baggage (“I’ve never been good at scales, Dr. P.,”). Even among students who are moving rapidly through advanced repertoire, and have all the necessary facility to play the scales, there are some that find the memorization to be very difficult.

metronome
Photo, CZMJ

Here are some of the issues that my students have:

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Why do some instruments transpose?

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I find it difficult to explain to the uninitiated the concept of “transposing” instruments. The what is confusing. The why is worse.

To get the what across, I usually have to resort to an example: “Okay, so it works like this. If I am playing an alto saxophone, and I see an F-sharp on the page, I think ‘F-sharp,’ and do the correct fingering for F-sharp, and then I blow into the instrument and an A comes out.”

Sometimes a visual representation is useful (here are transpositions for some common woodwind instruments):

Instruments Written pitch Sounding pitch
Piccolo
Down an octave
Up an octave
Clarinet in E-flat
Down a m3
Up a m3
Flute, Oboe
(non-transposing)
Bassoon
(non-transposing)
Clarinet in B-flat, Soprano saxophone
Up a M2
Down a M2
Clarinet in A
Up a m3
Down a m3
Alto flute
Up a P4
Down a P4
English horn
Up a P5
Down a P5
Alto saxophone
Up a M6
Down a M6
Contrabassoon
Up an octave
Down an octave
Tenor saxophone, Bass clarinet
Up a M9
Down a M9
Baritone saxophone, Contrabass clarinet in E-flat
Up an octave and a M6
Down an octave and a M6

This system is, shall we say, “difficult:”

  • Composer/arranger/copyist: “What was that transposition for alto flute again? A fourth, I think, but was it a fourth down or a fourth up? Or was it a fifth?”
  • Conductor: “Let’s see, the alto saxophones have an E and a B, the tenor has a D-sharp, and the baritone has a D-natural. So that chord would be, um…”
  • Educator: “Okay, everybody play a B-flat scale. I mean, ‘concert’ B-flat. So C for clarinets and tenor saxophones, G for altos and baritones, E-flat for English horn… or is it F for English horn?…”
  • Gigging musician: “I need to buy the fakebook in E-flat. Hmm, and I guess I also need the B-flat, in case I play clarinet on anything. I wonder if I’ll need the C book for flute, too? Wait, let me make a phone call.”

(And that’s just the system used for the modern band and orchestral instruments!)

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On purple violins

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Photo, Glamhag

I’m a little late commenting on this, but I still think it’s an issue worth addressing. Last month there was a minor scandal over an incident in a Farmington, New Mexico school orchestra program, where a beginning violinist was informed that she would not be allowed to use her own, um, unique instrument. Most of the reporting on the story took a similar tone to that employed by the Los Angeles Times:

The gift violin was a surprise from her grandmother. The color was purple, the girl’s favorite.

Lopez encouraged her daughter to stand up for what she believed in. “I told her, ‘Camille, you’re not like everyone else. We’re all different.'”

“She’s done with the orchestra class,” Lopez said. “She switched out. She no longer plays.”

Lopez said she’ll never know whether the decision ended the career of a budding Yo-Yo Ma. “I’d pay for private lessons if I could afford them,” Lopez said. “But it doesn’t matter now, I guess. Camille is taking choir now.”

The Times story sets up the uninformed reader for outrage: an underprivileged but spunky girl, a gift from a grandmother, stifled individuality, personal “beliefs” under attack, abandoned dreams, and a stodgy, stuffy establishment.

But a more careful reading of the Times story reveals some details that won’t escape the attention of music educators.

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Things that aren’t jazz

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Photo, frawemedia

Okay, first of all: what I’m talking about here is the “mainstream” jazz tradition, insofar as such a thing exists (you can make a good argument that it doesn’t, really). “Jazz” is a wide net to cast. To flip it around, if I were going to list things that aren’t “classical” music, I might say “use of the electric bass guitar” or even “microtonality.” Are those things really mutually exclusive with classical music? No. But they are not part of the tradition of the Viennese masters, not what your local community orchestra would play, not what most people think of when they think of classical music.

One misconception that many classical musicians seem to have about jazz is that since it has strong improvisatory elements, it must be very free and unstructured. I think the opposite is true: improvisation, at least in the mainstream-bebop/hard-bop-influenced style, requires fairly strict structural underpinnings. None of the following works well when someone is trying to improvise:

  • Free forms. Form in jazz is much stricter than in classical music. Most common jazz tunes have one of two forms. The first is precisely 32 bars in 4/4 time, with four eight-bar sections: AABA. The second is precisely twelve 4/4 bars, a “blues” form. Anything that doesn’t fit exactly into one of these categories is most likely very closely related to one of them.
  • Free harmony. Bebop and hard-bop jazz are extremely tonal. While improvisers may play pitches that fall “outside” the chords, it is almost always within a tonal framework: the notes function as upper extensions of the chords, or at least they are used in a sort of polychordal way that has reference to the underlying harmony and will ultimately resolve back to it. The idea that “there are no wrong notes” isn’t exactly true; notes can definitely sound very wrong if they aren’t properly contextualized with regard to the harmony.
  • Free or changing meter. Jazz makes frequent use of polymeter and syncopation, which can give the impression of shifting meter, but most jazz doesn’t actually change meters, especially in improvisatory sections. The polyrhythms and syncopations work because they are overlaid on an unchanging metric pulse, and resolve to it.
  • Rubato. Tempi also tend to quite strict in jazz playing. A musician might “lay back” in the beat or stretch a rhythm, but the underlying pulse doesn’t change. (In my experience, jazz players generally have much steadier internal metronomes than classical musicians.)
The freedom that improvisers do have is to create melodies over these fairly rigid structures. The rigidity gives the improviser a predictable framework to work with (or perhaps against). At a more detailed level, there are certain melodic characteristics that classical musicians tend to associate with jazz, that I don’t hear when I listen to jazz or play with fine jazz musicians:

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The value of a musical instrument

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My instruments are valuable. Here’s why: Most of them cost a lot of money. Replacing any of them would be expensive, possibly even prohibitively so. (If you haven’t already, get a good insurance policy from a company that specializes in musical instruments!) I worked hard at choosing them. When I bought my oboe, I went to … Read more