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.
My own journey as a musician has been through many migrations itself, and at times has all but gone extinct. Following my formal music education (University of Toronto, Banff Centre for the Arts, etc.), and a two-year stint with the Prince George Symphony, I became a regular extra freelancing with the Vancouver Symphony. After my near misses auditioning for the elusive orchestra job, I found that I’d basically sculpted myself into the sort of a player who might win an orchestral audition, but little else. In other words, I was left feeling more like a service provider than a performing artist. A long silence followed.
Voice of the tárogató
Then, following a fateful encounter with a certain tárogató, the flame was relit. When a Hungarian cellist-friend in Kelowna called to ask if I’d “learn his tárogató” to as to play it at the Okanagan Hungarian Centre, I didn’t expect to fall in love with the instrument so fast. I soon found a maker in Budapest to build me an instrument I could call my own.
In 2017 when I produced the concert Refuge, I sought to tell the story of the contribution made to Vancouver by the arrival of 200 Hungarian university student and faculty refugees following the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Their contributions notably impacted BC forests practices and their presence is still felt today both at UBC and throughout the province. The concert drew large numbers from the Hungarian community as well as the general public interested in learning about this unusual BC refugee community.
“On behalf of the University of British Columbia, I am writing with warm congratulations on the completion and upcoming performance of Refuge. This legacy is something that UBC is very proud of and one that we cherish and celebrate.”
— Santa J Ono, President and Vice-Chancellor, UBC
Voice of the woodland caribou
There’s a larger community in British Columbia that I believe the tárogató can touch. A while back, I ran into composer Glenn Sutherland at a Vancouver Symphony concert and after various pleasantries, he described his work as a field biologist tasked with finding out why British Columbia’s woodland caribou were making their way onto the endangered species list. It’s so easy to feel helpless when confronted with such environmental catastrophes, but even so, I wondered what I (what we) could do to help let people know of this unfolding disaster.
Then I remembered a comment of Jeffrey Ryan’s at a rehearsal for the tárogató piece he’d written a couple of years before: “There’s something wild about the tárogató…” and I thought perhaps there was something we could do. As the idea of a composition developed, it became less a didactic message about the caribou, and more about giving a voice to the animal itself—as much as possible to tell the story from the perspective of the caribou. Thus was born the longer-range project, Caribou Crossing. But before that, I have decided that I need to develop and extend my own techniques on the tárogató itself, thus the short-range development project—Finding a New Voice for the Tárogató.
Finding that voice
The tárogató’s capabilities have been only lightly documented. When I went searching for a fingering chart, for example, I invariably found something appropriate to a novice player (one fingering per note).
My work on the tárogato showed much richer possibilities with multiple fingerings that could be used both for colouristic effects and to facilitate difficult passages. Here’s an example from the tárogató I developed while learning Jeffrey Ryan’s challenging Arbutus for tárogató and piano.
Quite apart from being unquestionably sexy and having a reputation as savvy trendsetters, musicians also have a nerdy side. When string players visit their favourite luthier to have their bows rehaired, they will talk with disturbingly fevered intensity about the relative merits of Appaloosa over Arabian horse hair required for the job. Pianists tie rubber bands to their fingers to increase dexterity, and are known to also have preferred rubber band manufacturers, about whom they argue on Internet forums. Of course, none are worse than oboists who have no social life whatsoever. How could they? They spend the greater part of their lives sealed up in basement cells shaving their reeds down to a microscopic fineness; then, emerge only to perform and complain about how much more work they need to do to achieve reed perfection. To a lesser degree, it’s the same for other woodwind players of reed instruments: As a rule, most reed players can’t tell a bad reed from a bad week.
By taking up the tárogató, I seem to have painted myself into a particularly arcane corner (even by musician standards), so it’s no surprise that I too find myself just as prone to the same sort of nerdy obsessiveness as what dogs players of other instruments. It was inevitable.
Working on Adam Hill’s “I Will Stay Here” for tárogató and electronics
When I commissioned my tárogató from Toth & Tarsa of Budapest, I was provided with a deluxe menu of options similar to what you might expect when purchasing a custom Tesla or investing in a teak plantation. I could choose the wood (cocobolo), the fingering system (I chose the German Albert system over the French Boehm only because I’d been playing a borrowed Albert system tárogató prior to investing in my own horn), and the mouthpiece style (I naturally chose one that would take a clarinet reed over one that took a soprano saxophone reed—there are no tárogató reeds).
My tárogató’s birthplace – Toth & Tarsa, Budapest, Hungary
When my tárogató arrived, I was delirious with joy and didn’t mind some of its funky tuning (“hey, it’s a folk instrument!”) and its limited range (only two octaves compared with four on the clarinet). Gradually, however, that nerdy musician thinking started to peer into the room and make suggestions about how—if only I tweaked this or bought that—my playing would improve unstoppably.
All my neighbours are out of earshot of my practising, so it is to their good fortune that they missed out on the months of squawking that transpired as I attempted to extend the range of the instrument. While clarinettists can chose from a number of method books that contain vast anthologies of fingerings for every note on the clarinet (I have one such book with over forty fingers alone for the altissimo G#), the tárogatónist must contend with a miserable starter’s fingering chart displaying but one fingering per note. Working on the two new works I commissioned from Jeffrey Ryan and Adam Hill forced me to extremes, so thanks to them and a lot of aforementioned squawking, I have now amassed quite a handsome new chart of tárogató fingerings.
Caution should be taken when attempting these fingerings as they have only been tested on the Albert system tárogató (nobody knows for sure what would happen on a Boehm system tárogató).
Just as tárogató reeds are not known to exist, tárogató mouthpieces are a rarity. You can’t just march into your local guitar and drums music store and demand to see their display of tárogató mouthpieces.
My tárogató came from Budapest with a pleasant sounding mouthpiece, but with nothing to compare it against, I really couldn’t be sure if it was good or not. My quest for a superior mouthpiece led me to Dr. Ed Pillinger of Middlesex, England.
Dr. Ed is a skilled craftsman who spends most of his days whittling away at custom clarinet and saxophone mouthpieces. But every now and then, some tárogató-wielding colonial who’s heard he makes a good Stowasser copy, rings him up. I now have two “Pillingers”: one is pitched at about A445 (European pitch), whilst the other is pitched appropriately for North America at A440. The doctor and I had to find a cure in the latter one when the former one proved untunable and untenable with piano (or anybody on this side of the pond).
Photographed on arrival (nothing makes social-media light up like the arrival of new tárogató mouthpieces).
With all this nerdiness now becoming a fixture in my life, I was instantly smitten when clarinettist François Houle let me try his new Ishimori Kodama II ligature (the thingy that holds the reed onto the mouthpiece). Smitten enough that I couldn’t be stopped until one of these babies was flying its way to me from Japan (of all places).
Ishimori & Co. wins “World’s Shortest User Guide” award for 2017.
All of these marvels together has done much to strengthen the tuning of the instrument (no more excuses) and improve my confidence in the upper register. I’ve yet to start affixing tape into tone holes, a laborious practice to coax individual notes into pitch by adding successive layers of electrician’s tape (or as I’ve recently learned, “Kapton tape” available at any fine purveyor of model train accessories). Tone-hole taping will undoubtedly commence once all the new equipment has had time to settle in.
A marvel to behold – New Pillinger mouthpiece with even newer Ishimori ligature.
So if ever you have romantic thoughts of the life of a musician as some care-free communion with the muse, think again: Musicians are about the nerdiest people you’ll ever meet.
Jason plays a custom Albert-system cocobolo tárogató made by Toth & Tarsa of Budapest, Hungary, a replica Stowasser mouthpiece by Pillinger Mouthpieces of Middlesex, UK, a Kodama II ligature by Ishimori Wind Instruments of Tokyo, Japan, and Légère Signature synthetic reeds formulated by Guy Légère of Montréal, Canada.
On 30 April 2017 (4pm), The Tárogató Project and St. Philip’s Church (Dunbar) presents “REFUGE” a concert of Hungarian music and stories (old and new) of refugees to Vancouver. St. Philip’s Anglican Church, 3737 27th Avenue West, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Last year, when I created Generations as a homage to the many generations that built St. Philip’s Anglican Church in Dunbar (to honour the church’s 90th anniversary), the idea came to me of tying together a narrative of music with a story line.
The first rule of such an approach is to avoid hitting the audience over the head with the story, so I left a lot to their intelligence and their own personal creativity to figure out.
The music selections where lightly connected to the idea of intergenerational connections (A string quartet by “Pappa” Haydn, Songs my Mother Taught Me by Antonin Dvorak, and the feature work, Timepieces by Jeffrey Ryan, which I had commissioned as a memorial to my own father).
This year’s concert part of The Tárogató Project springs from a similar idea—it weaves together three distinct stories:
1) The musical part is a journey through the literature (or some of it) of Hungarian music (from simple shepherd’s songs to grand Romance to newly commissioned works for the tárogató),
2) the next part explores the story of the Hungarian refugees, particularly those from the University of Sopron who came to Vancouver and made a positive impact on the city, UBC, and forestry practices in BC, and
3) the final story deals with the contemporary unfolding drama of today’s refugees and the challenges they face making their new home, Vancouver, home.
The music will weave its own thread leaving the other two stories to drive the narrative (and the music to provide meditation points).
The date is 30 April 2017 (4pm) at St. Philip’s Church (Dunbar).
It all started almost immediately after the last concert, Generations, which I had organized at St. Philip’s Church. That concert played on the theme of intergenerational connections featuring the Jeffrey Ryan piece, Timepieces, I’d commissioned (but never performed) ten years earlier.
Following the concert, I invited Jeffrey over for dinner and it was he who goaded, no encouraged, no challenged me to submit a BC Arts Council grant application to get funding to commission some new works for the tárogató.
I guess the timing was good, because the three weeks left before the deadline turned out to be three weeks I had with no structured plans. I wrote the grant.
The way these things work is you write the grant and then forget about it for months and months before you hear anything. So come August and much to my surprise, I was awarded the grant and The Tárogató Project was born.
The Tárogató Project is designed in two phases:
Phase one – Commission two compositions for the tárogató by BC composers. I chose Jeffrey Ryan and Adam Hill.
Phase two – A public performance of both works on a concert marking the 60th anniversary of the arrival of refugees from the Hungarian Revolution to British Columbia. By telling the story of the one group of Hungarian refugees to Vancouver, the concert seeks to provide insights into the positive cultural impacts of refugees and immigrants to life in Vancouver.
