Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
This is a bit of one of the excerpts that I provided for my saxophone students to play at their beginning-of-the-semester band auditions.
I heard some very fine playing during the auditions, but many of the students were fooled by the “senza vib.,” with some going so far as to use fairly extreme vibrato at the beginning of the note.
As my blog readers already know, of course, senza vibrato means without vibrato.
I think it’s a fairly common mistake for musicians at, say, an undergraduate collegiate level to either ignore or guess at the foreign words in a musical score. But the consequences can be, well, comical.
As musicians we all have to be little bit multilingual. I recommend this inexpensive, portable, and excellent source to my students and to all of you:
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
Lately I’ve been on a diet that has a weekly “cheat” day. Six days out of the week, my meals are Spartan, but on cheat day I get to eat whatever I want.
My guess is that isn’t the ideal way to manage my waistline. I would be better off eating more regimented meals every day. But I would burn out and quit. The cheat day is a compromise. It cedes a little ground to my sweet tooth, but keeps me going back to lentils and broccoli for another six days.
Every so often I decide to revamp my practice routine. It’s always ambitious. I plan hours of long tones, a battery of scales and exercises and etudes, piles of classical repertoire, and new jazz tunes. I see myself drilling every aspect of my playing for hours and hours every day.
It usually goes well for a few days, and then fizzles out. I tell myself that I’m not getting my routine done because of a deadline. Or a conflict. Or because I just needed to sleep in a little that day. But the truth is that I’m burned out—I’ve given myself a practice routine that I can’t or won’t sustain.
It’s often said that the best diet is the one you stick to. I think that’s good advice for practicing, too. It would be great to do a super-intense practice routine every day. But if a little lower intensity is what prevents burnout, then so be it.
If you are finding your latest practice routine to be hard to keep up, ask yourself what you can do to make it a better experience. What will bring you back again the next day? Shorter sessions? More frequent breaks? Fewer things to practice? A greater variety of things to practice? More structure? Less structure? A weekly “cheat day” when you get to skip scales and play whatever you want?
A practice routine, like a diet plan, should be good for you and should help you reach your goals, but it should also be something you can sustain and even enjoy.
In lessons and ensemble rehearsals, I frequently ask students to mark in something they missed—an accidental, a stylistic nuance, a breath.
Sometimes they tell me they already marked it. They assure me they will get it right the next time.
As you might guess, I am less than convinced. The marking didn’t do the trick this time, so why should it work next time? Or next week? Or in the performance, when you’re playing under pressure and with distractions?
If the marking you made didn’t work, do a better one. Can you make it…
…more visible? Maybe beefing up that faint little pencil stroke will help. If you’re concerned about marks you might want to undo later, make photocopies and mark those (or go digital).
…clearer in meaning? Circling a note you got wrong doesn’t add any information to the page. Instead write in the sharp you missed, or a reminder of what key you’re in, or even the note name if that helps. You can use symbols if you will be 100% clear on what they mean (even under pressure), but don’t be afraid to use words.
…earlier? If you keep forgetting to do the crescendo in measure 32, consider putting a reminder in bar 28 that it’s coming up. That gives you an extra moment to process it mentally and be prepared before the crucial moment arrives.
Every marking should make your playing better. If it doesn’t, change it!
Sometimes when my students get paying engagements for the first time, I joke with them that they are now “professional” musicians. That’s true in a sense, but I think there’s more that goes into being a true professional.
If you are a college student aspiring to be a professional musician, here are some things you might ask yourself:
Am I reliably on time to things?
Do I always have a pencil? Extra reeds? Whatever else is needed?
Do I show up to rehearsals with my parts learned and ready?
Do I have a sense of what my time and talents are worth, and a firm but polite way of expressing that?
Do I meet and exceed my teachers’ expectations?
Am I willing to play any part, including the less-prestigious ones? Am I willing to put my best into supporting someone else’s solo moment, even if I think that opportunity should have been mine?
What are the most common issues my teachers or ensemble directors mention about my playing? Am I addressing those in a focused way?
Am I responsive to useful criticism, thick-skinned against non-useful criticism, and able to tell the difference?
Is there anything about my playing or demeanor that would cause stress to someone who hired me for a gig? Am I currently stressing out my teachers, directors, or fellow students?
Graduation from college doesn’t guarantee you any gigs. Become the person that other musicians want to work with.
I attended a small jazz festival a number of years ago, which included student workshops with some of the festival’s headline artists. Unsurprisingly, some of the first questions asked in these workshops were about the artists’ equipment choices.
The responses varied widely. A few of the artists were excited to talk about their instruments, mouthpieces, and so forth, and to offer glowing testimonials.
Others responded less enthusiastically. One of the festival’s biggest-name artists mocked a student for even asking the question. The student slumped down into his seat as one of his idols berated him in front of everyone.
But I was especially impressed by one artist in particular, whose equipment choices are well-known and widely-imitated. “Well, I use _____, _____, and _____,” he explained, “but there are a lot of really good options out there, and what works for me doesn’t work for everybody. Plus, you should know that lots of music stores sell equipment with this brand name, but it’s not really the same product anymore as the one I bought decades ago.” Then he moved onto another question.
I thought this was a very effective, responsible, and respectful way to answer the question: he didn’t make the student feel bad for asking, and he didn’t encourage the student to buy something specific that might not really be a fit. I also admired the brevity and matter-of-factness of his answer—it cast the question as what it ought to be: a curiosity, rather than something of great importance.
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.”
Printed jazz music often uses chord symbols to indicate the music’s underlying harmony. As with the Roman numeral system used in classical music theory, jazz chord symbols may be used as a tool for analysis. But they are also used for performance, like Baroque figured bass notation, with the musicians using the symbols as a framework for improvising melodies and/or accompaniments. In jazz, the symbols are generally non-specific with respect to inversion, and players of chord-capable instruments (such as piano or guitar) in jazz are accustomed to making independent choices about inversion and voicing. Depending on the situation, printed jazz music may include written notes only, or notes plus chord symbols, or even chord symbols alone.
Simple major triads aren’t common in most “modern” (post-1940) jazz. But in the rare cases that they do appear, they are indicated with a single note name:
C major
The letter “C” above the staff is the chord symbol. The notes shown on the staff here are the corresponding pitch classes, stacked in root position in the thirds familiar to students of classical theory, though a jazz musician, composer, or arranger would rarely voice a chord in this way.
Almost always, there should some variety of seventh specified, using the numeral 7 (and when it isn’t specified, it is often implied). By convention, using the 7 alone with a note name indicates the lowered seventh:
Yes—or like English/French ‘sans.’
Interesting, so it’s like the Spanish word ‘sin’