Air Support and the Low-D Penny Whistle

4 March, 2021

One of the commonest complaints about playing the low-D whistle is running out of breath. While a simple solution is to take more breaths, it doesn’t really address the source of the problem (and the musical phrasing of the piece you’re playing may not justify taking all those breaths). A better solution is to optimise the air moving through the instrument so that it’s not wasted. A common mistake when playing up the octave is to simply blow harder. While this works (sort of), it’s precarious and creates a harsh sound.

Fast Air

Consider this well-intentioned attempt to describe of air control in which the instructor describes “cold” and “hot” air.

Improve air usage

This is really good material although it never properly defines “hot” and “cold” air. Those terms are concepts only as the temperature of the air is never the issue. What’s at issue is the speed of the air as it passes through the instrument. Therefore, it’s better to use the more common terms, “slow” and “fast” air. In the video, the speaker correctly identifies that fast air (she says “hot” air) is produced by pursing the lips and supporting from the diaphragm. Not mentioned, and important to the process, is adjusting the tongue position in the mouth.

Fast air is a method of condensing the air as it moves through the whistle. It’s the same idea that aeronautics maintains when describing lift: Lift, the force that directly opposes the weight of an airplane, holds the airplane in the air. The low pressure created by the shape of the wing forces the air to move faster and pull the plane up.

Translated into whistle, you’re trying to make the air move faster by moving it through a smaller chamber. How you do that is with tongue position. Very often, players play with an “awe” vowel sound, but that moves the air through the instrument too slowly. It’s wasteful and consequently, the player runs out of air quickly. In the aeronautic lift analogy, it’s like putting a rocket booster onto a glider to achieve lift. Yes, the plane goes up but not through its design — it does it in spite of its design.

To play with fast air, practise by saying the word “Hugh”. Where does your tongue go? It should go up and forward. The effect is a smaller chamber through which the air passes, thus forcing the air to speed up (the Lift effect).

Octave Exercise With Fast Air

First, experiment playing with an “Awe” tongue position (what the nice lady in the video describes as “cold” air). You’ll find that you have to blow harder to play higher notes. But if you play with a “Hugh” tongue position, the upper notes will float out effortlessly. Experiment until you can control exactly when the note will jump the octave. My approach is to play with a fast air “Hugh” tongue position just backing off enough to give me room to control when I want to play up the octave.

Practice this. Play slowly and observe the slur marks.

(Not So) Small Victories

9 December, 2020

December 9 marks an anniversary worth commemorating for however many years I have left on this planet: One year ago today, my right leg fell off.

Perhaps I exaggerate but from the standpoint of walkability it was, like, effectively gone. There was I on my way to a session to record Jeffrey Ryan’s Arbutus when I felt a sudden crunch from somewhere deep within the hip socket, and in that instant the short distance from escalator to approaching Skytrain seemed inestimably far. But like a pro, I made my way to the studio on my one good leg.

Say what you like about suffering makes…art…better, I do remember composer Jeffrey Ryan saying—as he piled me into the waiting taxi bound for home—that it had gone…very…well.

Daniel of course nearly fainted with horror at the sight of me, but I smiled a “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” grin of denial about the whole leg affair and demanded we pull out the champagne to celebrate the victory.

Little did my besotted brain realize at the time how this little mishap with the right leg would catapult from fender-bender into the car wreck that is cancer. But then, who imagined last December, as they drained magnums of bubbly and extolled over their resolutions, what a 365-car pile up 2020 would turn out to be? We were so innocent back then.

Jason 20 Mar 20 St. Paul's Hospital for MRI scan.
20 March 2020, Jason braves the corridors of St. Paul’s Hospital in search of an MRI machine.

Fast forward half a year later. Half a year of radiation, chemotherapy, crutches, walkers, canes, intravenous zolodronic acid treatments, Hickman line insertions, blood clots, blood thinners, shingles, tooth extractions, a stem cell transplant, the loss of family (my mother) and friends (my dear friend Caryn) to cancer, all etched in high relief against the backdrop of Covid-19; all of these things that made that day in late September when my beard and moustache floated away like milkweed in an autumn wind seem like a minor inconvenience. As indeed it was.

It was recently pointed out to me by someone with a more balanced view of Facebook than I possess that I am remiss in not providing an update of my cancer journey. In response, I’m happy to report that most of the tribulations I describe above are history and that I am on the road to recovery. Apart from some pain killers (for residual shingles-related neuropathic pain), and a blood thinner (for that blood clot that’s taking its sweet time to dissipate) I’m not currently on any treatment, although the nature of Multiple Myeloma (it’s treatable, but not curable) means that I will be going on to a programme of mild chemotherapy for the next couple of years.

I have heard that some people experience a health crisis in their early senior years (I’m 61 now so I think I qualify) but then once that’s dealt with, enjoy several more decades of excellent health. God willing, and some investment in a naturopath to keep me in tip-top shape, I’m working to stave off the return of the beast for many, many years to come. That’s my plan and I’m sticking to it.

Courage, a thin line

31 August, 2020

Jason at Spanish Banks

Today marks the beginning of a new phase in my Multiple Myeloma journey. Multiple Myeloma is a form of blood cancer that affects blood production in the bone marrow, most notably the right hip and a couple of vertebrae down my back.

I finished chemotherapy a couple of weeks ago — a process I more or less powered through with few negative effects. This next leg of the journey is designed to wipe out the remainder of the cancer and give me a spanking new immune system.

When What
23–31 August

I’m receiving Grastofil injections to coax stem cells out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream where they can be collected. In the old days they used to perform a bone marrow biopsy, but now they give Grastofil injections. These mobilize blood stem cells out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream where they can be collected more easily.
1–2 September

Once all my little stem cells are mobilized, I’ll be hooked up to a gizmo similar to a transfusion machine, which filters out stem cells from the blood where they can be put into cold storage (for up to seven years I’m told, so I can perform a reboot if I want and install a younger me).
4–5 September

I’m also going to have a Hickman Line (a type of catheter) inserted into my chest to facilitate injections and IV insertions over the coming weeks. To insert the Hickman Line, doctors make an incision in my chest into which they insert a tube that makes its way down my jugular vein to “just above my heart”. I’m a little freaked out about this procedure, but I’ve been told it’s really no big deal. Still, the Hickman Line will protrude from my chest for a month, during which I must not accidently whack the tubes sticking out of my chest or open one of the little plastic shut valves and allow my “blood from gush out”.
8 September

With all this gear in place, I’ll be ready to receive a super blast of chemo down the Hickman Line to destroy all stem cells — the good and the bad. I’m told this may also destroy all body hair so good-bye covid hairdo and that lovely lockdown moustache I’ve been working on.

More importantly, zapping those stem cells performs a factory reset on my immune system, requiring extreme vigilance against viruses or infections. My childhood inoculations also get tossed so at some point — once my new immune has rebuilt itself a bit (say, to that of a three-month-year-old) — I’ll need to be re-inoculated for chicken pox, measles, and polio, and so forth.
9 September

The day after the chemo blast, the doctors will transplant those preserved stem cells back into me. If all goes well, I’ll be good to go (less that all-important immune system) after a few weeks of recovery.

Recently I listened to a Simon Sinek talk in which he described courage as something that requires a community (it’s not solely an individual’s responsibility). Sinek aims his talks primarily at business leaders, but what he said rings true for me when I think about how my sense of courage has increased each time I receive a call, a text, a prayer, or a delivery of cookies. Having a community cheering me on has helped me power through whatever pain and difficulty the treatments have presented. And for that, I’m deeply grateful.

My Soul Upon My Lips

5 August, 2020

To my great delight, the long-awaited CD featuring works for solo woodwinds arrived in my mailbox today.

The CD, My Soul Upon My Lips, was produced by Redshift Records with funding from Canada Council. It features works by Jeffrey Ryan for flute, oboe, bassoon, alto saxophone, alto flute, clarinet, English horn, contra-bassoon, and me! The tárogató is the odd man in the lot. I recorded Ryan’s Arbutus for tárogató and piano (with Corey Hamm).

This release of this album has particular significance to me because the day of my recording session happened also to be the day of my mysterious accident that caused me to lose my mobility. On my way to the recording session, my right leg suddenly stopped working and I had to phone Jeffrey from the Skytrain station to come help me make my way to the recording studio. It was probably shock that got me through the session as it went rather well and we even finished up a half hour earlier than our time allotment. Four months on, the cause of the accident was diagnosed as cancer rather than simply a sports injury.

It looks like the official release of the CD is sometime in October, which will coincide with the for-the-time-being end of my cancer treatments.

Rules of Time Travel

11 July, 2020

The idea for Symphony in E (the novel) originated with a set of Rules of Time Travel I concocted one day. The overriding rule was that you couldn’t change past events for famous personalities. I went looking for lesser names and found some artists and musicians who’d died in obscurity leaving behind little more than a masterpiece or two. One story worth writing involved the Limbourg Brothers, that trio of Dutch miniature artists from Nijmegen who left us Les Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry—one of the glories of late Medieval painting. Then I found the tragedy of young Hans Rott, the 19th Century Viennese composer who was so ignored and abused, he went mad at age 22. His beautiful Symphony in E — not performed for one hundred years — still sparkles with youthful optimism. In my historical fiction, I connect the story of Hans Rott’s life (1850’s – 1880’s Vienna) with the story of his Symphony’s premiere (1989 Cincinnati) using the following rules of time travel:

1. You Don’t Need A Machine

In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller uses a machine to physically transport himself to another time period. While this method is expedient, it is difficult to control. Compare it to picking a flower using a backhoe—all the subtlety is lost.

Other forms of time travel do exist—you may have even experienced time travel faintly yourself just using your five senses. If hearing a song learned in childhood makes you swoon for a moment, or smelling something rich and exotic reminds you of an ancient spice market, you have experienced time travel in its most rudimentary form. In order to make the leap to advanced time travel, your senses need to be aided by stronger agencies.

2. Importance Of A Talisman

Talismans are physical objects that, when held in the time traveller’s hand, allow observation of or travel to another time period. While talismans can open the portal to time, the fear of inadvertently setting off an episode of time travel simply by touching a talisman is ill-founded. Talismans work only when possessed by parties in both time periods, and when they are coupled with one or more unique abilities on the part of the time travellers involved.

3. Shared Abilities And Transcendental Knowledge

Sharing unusual abilities  and transcendental knowledge such as water divining or déjà vu can help time travellers make the leap. These abilities can be grounded by a strong talisman as they are highly unpredictable. They’re also hard to detect. How would a time traveller know that possession of an ability such as lucid dreaming is a component of time travel? 

4. Strong Psychological Experiences

When two persons are imprinted with a similar psychological experience, a resonance is formed that can serve as a conduit for communication across time and space. Strong psychological experiences are often traumatic, so the time traveller is wise to observe carefully before digging into their own painful memories. This type of time travel is the most unstable although once mastered, it can prove to be the most rewarding.

5. Not All The Rules Of Time Travel Are Yet Known

We work with what we know. Maybe in the future we’ll understand more.