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.
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.
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.”
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.
Like Paula Jardine’s A Night of All Souls, Mark Haney’s “11’ for brass ensemble, about the Renfrew Heights Veterans Housing Project, brings people together in open dialogue about death and through it a renewed respect for the courage of life.
It was a dark and stormy night…
Remember, remember
It was a dark and stormy night…but that wasn’t enough to stop Mark Haney’s brass players from strapping on their rain gear and heading into Mountain View Cemetery for this year’s A Night of All Souls ceremony.
Mark was following a thread similar to Paula Jardine (creator of A Night of All Souls), which is to bring people together in open respect and dialogue about death and the dead. And with this being the centenary of the First World War, Mark Haney’s “11” is also helping to shed light onto a Vancouver neighbourhood touched by war—and maybe even heal some ancient wounds.
11 Questions
When I asked Mark, a professional double bass player by trade, how he came to be writing music in a field so far removed from his occupation, he started by describing his years as a commercial musician “just gigging and trying to make a living”. He alluded to a few professional disappointments that prompted him to question his core purpose as a musician. He concluded that what he needed to do the kind of projects that he loves—the ones that fascinate him most—even if the money wasn’t there. Then one night in 2000 at the bar at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the famed double bassist Edgar Meyer bottom lined it for him: “If you wanna write, you gotta play; if you wanna play, you gotta write”. Mark knew he had to start creating his own music.
Mark Haney shields a fellow musician from the elements at last Saturday’s A Night of All Souls. Photo courtesy Tim Matheson
Two years ago, Mark approached the Parks Board for an artist studio residency at the former caretaker’s suite in East Vancouver’s Falaise Park. The field house stands not far from the Renfrew Heights Veterans Housing Project, a neighbourhood with a unique history that would become his focus for writing and telling important community stories.
Among the many materials Mark Haney and fellow researcher Diane Park uncovered at the National Archives was this one featuring wartime musicians, including Mark’s Doppelgänger on double bass, flanked by tubas. Photo courtesy Library and Archives Canada.
The Greatest Generation
As Mark began his research, he was shocked to discover how much he didn’t know about the Second World War. “It’s not like the Hollywood war films at all”, he said, “There were no tours of duty—most men were in the war for four or five years.” He described the scene of D-Day in which they “turned people into cannonballs” driving them up onto the beaches of Normandy even as their comrades around them were mowed down. In preparation, soldiers trained for months on the beaches of England to “head inland no matter what.” “You can’t fail”, was the drill and “You don’t help anyone. Period. Get inland.”
Edge of darkness
After the war, many veterans returned to Vancouver suffering from what today would be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They bought homes in the Renfrew Heights Veterans Housing Project, but with no support other than similarly traumatised veterans, problems began. “It was a tough neighbourhood”, said Mark describing the problems, which included physical abuse and alcohol, as the veterans tried to lead normal lives. But, feeling more and more isolated from mainstream society, the veterans retreated into their homes and the local Legion Hall. Many of their children bear the scars of a war fought before they were born.
Aerial photo of Falaise Park and the Renfrew Heights Veterans Housing Project during construction. Photo courtesy Library and Archives Canada
Mark realised that the stories of these veterans and their families needed to be told. “It’s a living history we’re about to lose”, speaking of the veterans but also the Project kids, now in their 60’s. But to tell their stories, he first had to earn their trust.
What is your name?
As a gigging musician Mark knew how to put on a show, but the last thing the veterans needed was a showman. The veterans had had a lifetime of training at being shut down, so their first inclination was to close ranks. “What’s your agenda?”, they’d ask, “Who are you?” and “What do you want?”, they’d demand.
Marketed to veteran’s as a “working man’s Shaughnessy” the houses were actually tiny. Construction of the Renfrew Heights Veteran’s Housing Project in 1948. Photo courtesy Library and Archive of Canada
Who among you lived in the Project?
As a tough community that’s been together for years, there’s a lot of pride too, but Mark added, “Along with the pride and the community, there’s an edge of sadness—always”. He’d have to prove through his music that he was interested in them as individuals, and that his project wasn’t a flash in the pan—he would see it through to completion. “My piece is about eleven individuals in the war”, said Mark, “I composed it to put a human face on the wars.”
Laura Williams was part of the Women’s Division of the RCAF. After the war, she and her husband Frank Helden moved into the Project. Their daughter Betty Helden became a big supporter of “11”. Photo courtesy Betty Helden
Even so, he learned that some veterans couldn’t go to Remembrance Day events. “They’d stay home and cry”, he said. Often they’d go to the Legion and drink, but it was more wallowing than release from the pain, “All they did was re-live the war”.
Not all the veterans represented in “11” have passed away. Diane Park, a videographer who’s working with Mark on “11” mentioned 99-year-old Edmond Champoux. “He’s very much alive and a big supporter of ‘11’. He has shared stories with us of surviving the horrors of D-Day (as an Engineer he was one of the first on the beaches at Dieppe), as well as the Battle of Falaise Gap”, she said adding, “He lived in Renfrew Heights from the early 1950’s until moving to Burnaby two years ago.”
Edmond Champoux during the war. Photo courtesy Edmond Champoux
When were you born?
Mark found ways to help make people feel comfortable and open up. Last summer, he put up a display about their story at his field house. “It was very touching”, he said, “I learned so much in so many ways, by communicating and working with people who grew up in the Project.” Gradually, people began warming up to him. They still needed somebody to talk to, and as they began to open up to him, the stories increased.
At A Night of All Souls on Saturday, Attendees could come in from the rain for tea and gingersnaps and view the display created as part of the “11” project. Photo courtesy Tim Matheson
To put humanity into the story, Mark developed a system of numbering in which each of the 11 brass instruments would spell out the name of an individual veteran (using only the letters from the veteran’s name that corresponded with musical notes). At Mountain View on Saturday night, some of the players actually played at the gravesite of the deceased veteran whose name they represented.
When did you die?
Although Mark scored “11” for brass instruments, he was sensitive to avoid any direct military references. In the drizzle on Saturday night, the brass players sounded sombre and perhaps a little amphibious too as they called out to each other from around the cemetery. “The last section I wrote follows the solo trumpet asking ‘When did you die?’” Mark said, “As each of the 11 musicians said their date, it was more like writing dialogue than music.” Huddled under umbrellas around the smouldering Swedish torch (a burning log set on end), we listened to waves of brass polyphony waft through the cemetery and occasionally letter/notes would well up in great wet chords.
On Saturday night at Mountain View Cemetery participants volunteered to hold umbrellas for the beleaguered musicians making it a truly immersive experience. Photo courtesy Tim Matheson
Falaise Park
Mark’s been getting reports of friends and relatives of the veterans who are planning trips (from as far away as Edmonton, Calgary, and Nelson) to attend this special Remembrance Day concert in Falaise Park. He hopes for perhaps less rain than at Mountain View, but then laughs, “We now know we can do it in the rain if we have to”.
Together with Diane and the 11 musicians, they plan to accommodate all sorts of groups by providing wheelchair accessibility, an opportunity for nearby school children to sing a new song-version of “Flanders’ Fields”, and Linda Jones, a veterans’ entertainer (and Project alumnus) will sing once again. Afterward, everyone will gather in the gym at nearby Vancouver Christian School for coffee and snacks, where the display materials will put a human face on courage in the face of war and tragedy.
