How I Spent My Summer Holidays (and other terrible misfortunes)

7 September, 2018

This summer, I attended a couple of music festivals State-side. The first was the Lake Placid Chamber Music Institute Seminar, a week-long string seminar with yours truly in the role of “token wind player”. The second, Balkanalia, was a celebration of music and dancing from the Balkan countries (where I also got to play my tárogató). Held in a summer camp by a meandering stream not far from Portland, Oregon, it was more of a stretch for me musically than the usual fare of Beethoven and Brahms. Still, most of my efforts this summer were devoted to preparing the Clarinet Quintet by Brahms, one of the paramount works of chamber music for the clarinet. This afforded me the opportunity to work it up to a performance level.

To do that, I relied on the following tools:

  • Performing with a recording – I had several recordings (Martin Frost, Andreas Ottansammer, Karl Leister, and Yona Ettlinger). I sucked the recordings into the Practice Pro app on my phone where I could loop sections and slow them down until I was able to at least reasonably emulate some great recordings. Doing this also helped me learn the quartet parts intimately.
  • Tuning exercises – Too often I’ve left tuning until the end and then more or less hoped for the best, but this time I sat down with not one but two tuners. I’d play long tones, intervals (particularly those found in the Quintet) and scales. Playing also with the above-mention recordings in Practice Pro allowed me to repeat sections slowly until I was absolutely sure of my tuning.
  • Firing up that old metronome – While playing with a metronome helps ensure a consistent tempo, it was more for the subdivisions that I used the metronome here. Nowadays with metronome apps, you can program all sorts of fancy sub divisions. The Quintet’s Adagio movement contains figures for the clarinet that must sound almost improvised while being metronomically precise.
  • Alexander Technique – In order to play in a more relaxed many, I recently took up Alexander Technique. My biggest takeaway so far (and it’s a big one) is locating my centre of gravity while I’m playing lower in my body than I do. The result has been that I now support the air from the base of my spine rather than just midway down my back.
Performing for the locals in the Adirondacks.

Reading

In addition, I found the time to do more research into the life and times of a composer (in this case, Brahms) than I’d ever done before.

I particularly enjoyed reading Johann Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the book that kicked off the Romantic Movement. I also read Jan Swafford’s tome, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, and took a crack at Frederick Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (although it really antedates Brahms, it helped me understand the influences in Brahms’s later life when he wrote the Quintet).

Music Listening

As I read the Brahms biography, I listened to key works and made many exciting discoveries, including his late piano works, the Four Serious Songs, and many other chamber and choral works I’d never heard before. To give a sense of the various forks of interest I took, the list below provides audio proof of music I researched  as I set out to understand where Brahms enigmatic Clarinet Quintet fit in the greater scheme of things.

What I learned

In retrospect, I wish I’d understood better what my status would be in Lake Placid (I came expecting to play the entire Quintet with “the best string players available”), but instead I played only one movement and even that was beyond the playing abilities of the players involved. While the Balkan music proved to be quite challenging (in a good way), the final performance venue proved to be quite challenging (but in a bad way) more or less guaranteeing a fiasco.

Morning tárogató warm-up by the river.

Still, I worked hard to prepare and learned more than had I done nothing at all (a trajectory that might otherwise have occurred). It’s in times like these that I’m reminded of Michel de Montaigne’s wise words, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

Convect Your Way to Success

2 April, 2018

Convect Your Way to Success Or What I Learned from Continental Drift

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were two theories bandied about to explain the curious matching of coastlines, most notably the near-perfect spooning of South America into Africa.

One theory put forward was that Earth must have been much smaller in the past and then expanded—like a balloon—forcing the coastlines apart.

The other theory was that the continents simply lost interest in each other and over millennia gradually drifted apart.

Hobby-horse-continents

Originally, the Expanding Earth theory held the dominant sway among those concerned with such phenomena while Continental Drift held little. But over the ensuing decades of research, the two theories reversed their polarity and now Continental Drift has gone mainstream relegating Expanding Earth to a back eddy of angry comic book artists ranting late night on myspace.

I drift. And why not?
It’s good enough for continents; why not me?

The problem with an Expanding Earth is that there’s no known (or plausible) source for that expansion. Where’s all the extra matter coming from and what’s moving it? Whereas Continental Drift has a clear energy source, Expanding Earth has none. You can’t move anything, least of all continents, without energy.

Continental Drift’s energy source emanates from the earth’s core where gravity (the Earth’s and the Sun’s) is heating up the mantle and causing convection to put pressure upon the surface. A common analogy for this process is soup boiling on a stovetop causing its surface scum to move (continents are scum—you heard it here first).

Yes, Continents Drift.
But Whither They Wander, They Care Not.

I knew a man who insisted that medieval maps, with all their childlike inaccuracies, were in their day actually truthful depictions of the world at that time. In his understanding, it was Continental Drift that had rendered the maps inaccurate.

I should have asked if the fanciful marginalia depicting griffins, sea monsters, and galleon-devouring leviathans was also factual, they presumably having mysteriously died off just as the Age of Reason dawned, “Thar be monsters! Oh wait. Never mind, they’re gone now.”

There is an ocean of truth that separates how we perceive things and how they actually go. Imagine, as in the scenario above, if we had gone from Gondwanaland to the present setup in under 500 years. What a bumper-car ballet that would have been—land masses scudding across the seas, their inhabitants waving helplessly from the hilltops as they sailed past. Morocco would say “Farewell”, to Nova Scotia while “Hasta la vista!” would come a final chide from South Africa as Argentina departed bound for pars incognito. “Hey, mind your steppe!”, Nepal and Tibet would sneer in condescending unison at the careless approach of the Indian…ahem…sub-continent.

Other than deep time and incalculable amounts of basalt, what’s the difference between continents and people? If India were—half way along its route into Asia’s underbelly—suddenly to stop mid ocean and say to itself, “Where was I going with this again anyway?” Continents simply drift, but it’s fair to say they never digress.

Continents Drift, but People Digress

As previously discredited, Expanding Earth postulates that there was a smaller Earth, then something (magical) happened, and the Earth became larger. Expanding Earth is pure fantasy yet it does serve to explain how dreamers dream.

I don’t mean visionaries or people who live to see their dreams fulfilled. I mean, unrealistic people or any of us when we’re thinking unrealistically, because let’s face it, it’s in us all to waste a portion of our lives dreaming fruitless nonsense.

We think, in these times, “I’m small and then when something magical happens, I’ll be bigger.” But if we’re to affect real change in our lives, we have to follow the lead set by the continents under our feet. Such change requires constant pressure and patience—the universe is taking care of patience (in spades!)—so it’s our job to take care of pressure.

Continental Drift is sometimes a very personal matter, although in a general sense it can be summed up in the following six-step process:

Step 1:   Set your course in the direction you want to go and then start going there. Talk to people, build your resources, take action, do things, most of all…apply pressure.

Step 2:   Expect nothing (you’re not likely to see any results for a long time). Don’t miss this step—it’s very important.

Step 3:   And don’t digress. Keep applying pressure in the direction you want to go.

Step 4:   Eventually something’s going to give. It will happen like a jolt—like an earthquake. It may even seem like magic (it will certainly seem like magic to others who don’t see all the pressure you’ve been applying). You will have moved incrementally in the direction you want to go.

Step 5:   After the jolt, the pressure will be released for a time. Nothing will start happening again. Don’t worry.

Step 6:   Repeat steps 1 through 5.

That’s it! It’s not magic. Sometimes drifting moves mountains. Hell, it’s good enough for continents, so why not you?

“No man is an island,

entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were.

as well as if a manor of thy friend’s

or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind;

and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”

—John Donne, 1572–1631

The Moon and the Leaf Blower

5 December, 2017

Moon&LeafBlower

Apart from the noise and the self-evident futility of the common leaf blower, what most disturbs me about the whole practice of charging money to fling nature’s bounty into the neighbour’s yard is its name. It lacks a certain…poetry.

In English, we’ve employed clever tricks to give everyday joe-jobs a sense of honour and wonder. These include translation into dessert-sounding Romance languages and obfuscation with marketing bumf (aka, bull).

Take our penchant for French titles. Translating some plain old English thing into French instantly transports it from the mundane suburb where it resides to the court of Louis XIV. Thus, “Kitchen Help” is elevated to “Sous-chef”, “Hairdresser” is blown away by “Coiffeur”, and “Civil Servant” escapes all its grey servitude in the guise of “Attaché”.

We also like to upmarket ordinary jobs by inventing bullshit English job titles. This technique effectively euphamizes their true nature, transforming the lowly “Dishwasher” into a “Ceramic Technician” and the “Garbage Man” (in addition to solving the need for gender neutrality) into the commanding “Waste Aquisition Officer”. This practice circulates so widely it scarcely raises eyebrows anymore, as in the “Marketing Assistant” who now can claim status as “Social Media Guru”.

But “Leaf Blower”…hm. That one stands awkwardly in its field (both the job and the machine)—unadorned and entirely lacking any pretension of upward mobility.

What if we borrowed a little from French—would the title gain some of that gallic allure if we opted for “Coureur de Feuilles”? Has a certain je ne sais quoi, non?

Or taking a more technical tack, we could simply render “Leaf Blower” as “Astro-arborist”, as in “Dammit Jim, I’m just a doctor, not an Astro-arborist!”

“Ah, Moon of my Delight, who know’st no wane,
The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain!”
—Omar Khayyám

Celebrate National Upspeak Day?

22 October, 2017

BC Ferries’s busy route plying the waters between Victoria and Vancouver sees lots of tourists, many of whom have no idea about (or care for) the local marine life they’re sailing over.

Perhaps that’s why the crown corporation has seen fit to add a biologist to its retinue of stewards, cashiers, and deckhands—to provide a little eco®–friendly PR about local marine life up top as their powerful propellers churned it up down below.

On a recent trip, the particular onboard biologist on duty delivered her short talk on marine ecology—entirely in up-speak…

She:

“Eelgrass is a flowering plant?”
We:

(Silence)
She:

“It’s found along the coast of BC in sub-tidal areas?
We:

(Silence with a few looking about for the exits)
She:

(Before anyone could decide whether to accept or refute her previous semi assertions),
“Marine animals depend on it for their survival?”

By this point, her up-speak had an urgency that was making everyone uncomfortable. Those who hadn’t already left were now fidgeting with their phones (perhaps hoping the answers could be found there—you never know, debarking might be preceded by an exam). I tried to listen and learn something, but finally got up for coffee and some other less arduous distraction.

On Being in Tune

8 September, 2017

OnBeinginTune

Last night on YouTube, I interspersed viewings of hurricane Irma raging across the Caribbean with research into what other clarinettists consider to be playing in tune. My conclusions: This is a poor time to book a Caribbean holiday and, two, most people have not the slightest notion why they are proponents of long-tone exercises.

Playing long tones is like a religion that’s degenerated into empty gestures of devotion. Lacking any concept as to the intent of long tones, one tuning guru said, “The purpose of long tones is to, well, here’s how to do them…”, and he proceeded to play. Later, he added “Long tones are necessary so you can check your pitch”, but as he played, my tuner registered huge pitch swings (I don’t know what criteria he was using to check his pitch—he had no tuner in sight). For him, playing long tones is an act of faith.

Another proponent of long tones kicked off her presentation with the statement, “The reason for playing in tune is so you can play with a piano or other instruments.” While this isn’t entirely incorrect, it entirely misses the point of playing long tones. The primary purpose of playing long tones is to play in tune—with yourself. Each pitch is in tune relative to pitches around it, so once you’ve played a note, the note to follow must correspond in tuning with the first. Also, there are laws of overtones to consider, which is where Mr. Pythagoras enters with his observations about sound waves. A pitch an octave above its predecessor will vibrate at double the rate—if it vibrates at any other rate, you’re out of tune (or you’re not even playing an octave).

Out in the weird world of YouTube, there’s a tuning troll who wants to take issue about tuners and how people use them. He’s learned about Natural tuning and Tempered tuning and wants to use his knowledge to bludgeon the long-tone gurus for their well-intentioned but inaccurate videos. Tuning Troll has a good point, but I think it’s an erudite sideshow designed to distract from the simpler task of playing relative pitches in tune. And here’s why.

Tuning systems don’t even come into play when considering unisons and octaves, which is why they’re a good place to start. Parenthetically, they come in later when looking more deeply at relative pitches and harmonic structures. For example, the note B is tuned differently within a G major triad (it’s the third, which means in Natural tuning it needs to be lower than Tempered tuning would assign it) compared with an E major triad (it’s the fifth, which is relatively higher). For now, stick to unisons and octaves and the good old Pythagorian way.

I’ve left the identities of the above-misguided tuning gurus anonymous, but I’d like to call out this one excellent video on tuning. It’s by master clarinettist Jose Franch-Ballester. I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with him and learn first hand what his approach is, and in my sessions (and most importantly for you, in the following video), he explains the purpose of long tones. It’s almost all you need (well, that, and a couple of iPads) to get started playing in tune.