Coming to your from a megabus somewhere in between Kingston and Toronto… I just got back from Houston, Texas! My hotel wasn’t that close to Rice, but I decided to walk it anyway. Google directed me to a route almost entirely on residential streets with huge, nice houses and PALM TREES where I felt very safe (except for the omnipresent Canadian semi-disbelief at the idea that at least some of the houses I was walking past probably contained guns.) I also had my final chamber music performances of the semester last week. My quintet– by quintet, I mean violin, clarinet, horn, bassoon and double bass!– performed an arrangement/parody of Till Eulenspiegel entitled Till Eulenspiegel Einmal Anders (Another Way), and my sextet performed the Poulenc two nights in a row on different concerts. The last concert of the Poulenc was also my last time playing chamber music at McGill with our oboist, Alana Henkel. Alana is an amazing oboist and equally good English horn player who just graduated from her Masters’ and left this weekend to start the next phase of her life in Minnesota with her husband. You can find her at http://alanahenkel.com –she is an excellent musician and a wonderful person and I highly recommend her if you need an oboist in her area! This week I have family and pops concerts in Niagara, go back to Montreal to make up the theory exam I’m missing the day after tomorrow, and then finally back to Toronto for the holidays!
I just got my copy of the CD that the NYOC recorded this summer, and am very excited to listen to it! We spent two days recording in the Multi-Media Room at McGill, and the CD includes Mahler’s Ninth symphony and the commissioned work for this year, which was written by McGill student James O’Callaghan. It doesn’t seem to be up on iTunes yet bu you can buy a physical copy here !
Yesterday, the musicians of the McGill Symphony orchestra (well over a hundred of us!) played to a nearly full house at Maison Symphonique, the home of the OSM in Montreal’s place Des Arts. Here is some media coverage of the event– Claude Gingras says it best in his last paragraph: Année après année, Hauser anime avec la même passion cet orchestre constamment renouvelé. Les effectifs changent, forcément, mais le résultat demeure toujours du plus haut niveau. On ne voit vraiment pas qui pourrait remplacer Alexis Hauser à McGill! (Year after year, Hauser animates the constantly renewed orchestra with the same passion. The players change, but the result is always at the highest level. It is difficult to see who could ever replace Alexis Hauser at McGill!) I feel incredibly grateful to have been able to play in Hauser’s orchestra for the last two years of my time at McGill. His energy, musical intelligence and kindness are inspirational to all the students he conducts, and I look forward to another semester-and-one-third of music-making at McGill!
Recently, I got a new toy! It’s an MD Reeds profiler, which I ordered at the end of last school year after a period of some, although by no means exhaustive, research of the profiler market. I admit I was partly lured in my the shiny price tag– at $600, it’s less than half the price of a lot of the other models I was looking at. Since it seems to be getting generally good reviews from the bassoon community and some people are even saying the design is an improvement on existing models, I decided to give it a go. I’m only just in the process of finishing my first batch of reeds with the new profiler, and since I’ve only ever used two profilers before (the Ben Bell profiler we have at school and a borrowed Popkin to top off my cane supply this summer) I’m probably not in the best position go give a comprehensive review. However, it seems top be working great for me so far. Since I had never set up a profiler on my own before, I definitely appreciated how easy the MD model is to adjust– for instance, I didn’t know where I would want the ramp to be, so I just made a bunch of cane of a few different settings, changing them quickly and easily using the click-wheel underneath the ramp. Now I just need to buy a shaper and then I can make reeds completely independently of the school’s equipment, which will be nice since they have pretty strict rules about when you can sign it out and bring it back. Yay!
I played my first concert with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra last over the weekend. Here’s some local news coverage of the show: http://youtu.be/QnWJrB93auw
As well as going to school for bassoon, I am also doing a minor in the Music Education program at McGill. Due to extremely poor course planning on my own part, I only officially added the minor to my program this year. However, I had taken music education courses in the past, played in shows conducted by an excellent conductor in the education program who recruited mostly education students for his pit orchestras (well, no bassoonists in the education program anyway), attended workshops hosted by the music education council (there was an awesome one last year where some drumline guys came in and taught a bunch of us simple drumline patterns, an activity which due to the sheer amount of noise involved I suspect is probably better suited to a football field than a classroom) and went to the parties and events hosted by the music ed council. However, now that its actually on my transcript I have quite a few music ed classes to finish up this year before I graduate. Among them are two conducting classes: Basic conducting this semester, which is exactly as the name would suggest, and Instrumental conducting next semester, which is where you get to conduct the “lab band” made up of the students learning secondary instruments in the wind, brass and percussion techniques classes. (I played french horn in the lab band last year while I was taking Brass tech! :P ) I’m preparing for the first practical test in Basic conducting this week, and I have to say it’s kind of kicking my ass. The simplest thing, such as making it clear in advance that the next beat will be legato and not marcato like the previous beats, looks awkward and completely unfollowable when I conduct the test material in front of a mirror. Even the beat patterns, which I hardly had to think about when we did conduct + sing assignments in musicianship/aural skills class, just don’t look quite good enough when I have a baton in my hand. (Also, I already broke my baton. Oops. I was very disappointed to find that there was in fact no unicorn hair inside of it, or indeed any other magical object appropriate to a wand core. That’s what you get for $10 I suppose. It is now sporting some classy yellow electrical tape.) I’m trying to approach the 5-10 bar fragments that we have to conduct for our test like I would prepare an excerpt. First I need to think of the tempo that’s indicated based on a melody I know I can call to mind in the correct tempo. I’m using the opening of the Mozart concerto for the two fragments that are around 60, the opening of the Poulenc sextet for the one that’s around 132, and Beethoven 4 for the one that’s at 80. None of these are entirely satisfactory since the tempi are all a tiny (hopefully unnoticeably) bit off from the indicated tempi and none of the moods or time signatures match up to what I have to then conduct based on their tempo. However, I would rather use slightly less accurate pieces of which I’m used to having to remember the tempo than pieces that match exactly in metronome marking, character and meter but that I have to search for and call to mind with more difficulty. Then I have to remember to breathe! When I played in lab band, it always seemed like the silliest thing that none of the student conductors could ever remember to breathe with the ensemble. Now I understand that it’s actually hard to get used to breathing as if with the intention of making sound, and then… not producing any sound with the air you’ve taken in. After that, what I find most difficult about the actual conducting is being able to prepare character the next beat without taking over the character of the previous one. Fortunately, since I’m taking this class later in my degree than I would have if I had planned to do the minor from the start, I know lots of other students who have finished that class and gone on to more conducting classes. I’m meeting with a friend tomorrow night to conduct for her. Hopefully I’ll feel comfortable with the basics soon! In other news, this weekend was the first MGSO concert of the year. The program was Verdi’s Forza del Destino, the Ginastera Harp Concerto, and Dvorak 8. My only part for that concert was principal in the harp concerto, which was awesome since it was a unique piece to get to play and the schedule gave me lots of free time. However, today we had out first rehearsal for the next concert, including an initial run through of Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2. This concert I’m playing principal on that and on a piece by Kaija Saariaho which involves quite a lot of spoken German in the wind parts, and third on the overture to the third act of Lohengrin. So I have more work in orchestra this semester, but that’s okay since this concert will be at Maison Symphonique! Okay… now back to trying to figure out how to conduct fermatas.
Oops… I haven’t written here in a while. In that time, things have happened! First, the last week of the summer I went to camp! The Interprovincial Music Camp is a terrific camp outside of Parry Sound which I attended as a student in high school. Fraser Jackson, the contrabassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, was on faculty there, and after my first year at the camp I became his student and stayed in his studio until I left for university. Then, last year, Fraser emailed me and asked if I would like to come back to camp as his Faculty Assistant. Every faculty member is allowed to choose an assistant, usually a university-aged student of theirs or a young professional player, to teach with them at camp. So this was my second year doing that and it was awesome! As well as being a great experience teaching, it’s also lots of fun because all of the faculty assistants, many of us who know each other from school or summer festivals, live together in two big cabins near the entrance to the camp, with our own fire pit and easy access to the lake. Unlike the camp councillors, who are usually similar in age, the faculty assistants have no responsibilities to deal with the campers other than in strictly musical contexts, whereas the councillors have to take care of a cabin full of kids and– having been a camper, I can imagine how difficult and frustrating this must be– keep them quiet at night. Because there aren’t usually too many bassoon students, I also get lots of time to practice at camp, which is awesome since the camp takes place the week before the return to school and thus the auditions for the university ensembles. One of my favourite things to do at camp is practice outside, which you sure can’t do in Montreal for most of the year! I was happy with how the audition at school went, and although this concert I’m only playing one piece (principal on the Ginastera Harp concerto) next concert I get to play principal on Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2– and at Maison Symphonnique, instead of McGill’s Pollack Hall where the McGill Symphony Orchestra usually plays! Then, two days ago, I did another audition, for the Niagara Symphony Orchestra in St. Catherine’s, for whom I’m happy to say I am now principal bassoon! The audition day was a doubleheader in which they hired for both principal oboe and bassoon, and I’m really excited to play my first concert with them in almost exactly a month (they had already hired a bassoon and oboe for the first concert, so myself and the winner of the oboe audition are playing our first show on the second concert of the season.) However, I don’t have a contract or a detailed rehearsal schedule yet, so it remains to be seen how much I’m going to have to wiggle out of McGill obligations for Niagara stuff! Now I can finally take a break from practicing excerpts (except for Rite of Spring– since the MGSO is playing it on the last concert of the first semester, the McGill bassoon studio is holding a separate audition for the principal part that will take place some time later in the semester) and focus on Bach’s 2nd cello suite, which I will play in a masterclass for Nadina Mackie Jackson next week. She is coming to perform the bassoon sequenza in an enormous Berio extravaganza concert next Friday. I actually love Berio, so I’m really excited to hear it! (Check out my colleague from this summer, Sam Fraser, performing a hilarious comedy act entitled “The Lost Berio Sequenza” at the NYO talent show this summer: http://youtu.be/DMUoqpLzqJU )
One of the things that I didn’t mention in my last post was my audition for the Winnipeg Symphony, which I played during the first day off from NYO (and made it back in time for madrigals the next morning!) Obviously, I didn’t win the job, or I probably would have mentioned it. However, I am enormously glad that I did the audition. The main reason is that my low playing and tuning in that register improved enormously from the preparation I did for the audition. For some reason, when I got back from India and started preparing for Winnipeg, I suddenly got fed up with always having to worry about whether I was gonna be able to play a low D, for example, low enough, and decided to just learn how to do it already. Easier said than done, of course, but at some point you do have to say it! The first thing I did was play a huge number of long tones in that area, and experiment until I figured out what to do with my mouth in order to manipulate the pitch while keeping the note stable. (I lowered my teeth. Which isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation, I know, but sometimes you just need to think about it and practice it the right way for it to actually click…) I also had a few lessons with Sam Banks, the second bassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, who encouraged me to start making reeds specifically for low, soft playing and let me play some of his in order to understand what that could actually feel like. By the time I got to the audition, I could play the excerpt from Brahms violin concerto, for example, without being worried that the notes wouldn’t speak, which was–embarrassingly– a huge revelation! It also came in handy when I got back to NYO, where I was playing 2nd on the Sibelius violin concerto. Anyway, besides improving at that specific aspect of my playing, it was also a huge challenge to prepare for the audition in less time than I had to prepare for KW (a month as opposed to three months) and continue my preparation the week before the audition while taking part in NYO. Although it was difficult to find time to practice during the week I was doing both, it was also enormously helpful to be surrounded by so many faculty members willing to volunteer their time above and beyond the regular coachings. Gabe Radford, the 3rd horn of the Toronto Symphony, was particularly helpful– he always leads a discussion/lecture with the faculty on auditioning, which all of the wind and brass students attend and can ask questions at, and after that I asked him to listen to some of my excerpt in a mock audition style. I ended up playing three “rounds” for him, each one beginning with me waiting a few minutes outside the door to his office, as in a real audition, and practicing thinking the kinds of thoughts I would want to be thinking before walking into the audition room. He was even able to tell me some things about how the setup of the audition would be, having played in that orchestra himself. The audition itself went really well for me. Almost everyone there knew each other from various places (and most were from Ontario) so it was a very friendly atmosphere. I was very calm and played everything exactly as I had practiced it, which is really all you can ever ask for! I have to admit, although before I played I didn’t let my thoughts get away from me and concentrated only on playing well, in the time between when I finished playing and when they announced the second round I allowed myself to get my hopes up and thus was slightly disappointed when they only took one person (not me) into the second round. Luckily all the rest of us were friends, went out for lunch and had a pleasant day in Winnipeg anyway. (We later found out that they had stopped after the second round and didn’t end up hiring.) As per the advice from Gabe’s audition seminar, I emailed the personnel manager asking for comments on my audition and got some very helpful comments from the principal bassoon, as well as finding out that I had been short just one vote to advance. All in all it was an excellent experience. I don’t think I would want to do an audition in the middle of a summer program like that again, but I’m certainly glad I did this time. My next audition (after the ensemble placement audition at school) will be for the Niagara Symphony in mid-September!
Last Sunday, NYOC 2013 played our final concert in the University of British Columbia’s Chan Center in Vancouver. That was the last stop of the tour that started at Koerner Hall in Toronto; we then went to Ottawa to play in the National Arts Centre, Montreal to record Mahler 9 in the MMR and play at the outdoor Theatre de Verdure (the only venue I’ve ever played where there was a real live moat around the stage…), Calgary in the Jack Singer, Edmonton at the Winspear, and ended in Vancouver. There were chamber concerts throughout, which is new for the NYO; usually the chamber music is finished after the first two weeks of the training session, whereas this year every wind group and a few string groups were asked to play additional concerts in churches or hospitals. Luckily my group played in Cambridge, not far from Kitchener-Waterloo, not too long after the chamber session had ended so we didn’t have to worry about finding space in our brains for chamber music once the tour started.
Here are some videos of our quintet performances:
Our first performance of Tombeau de Couperin: http://youtu.be/O4syGFzOyIs
And again a few weeks later, at the additional concert in Cambridge: http://youtu.be/-GFmcZ4EZ-8
Our second quintet, by Kelsey Jones (a former professor at McGill!) http://youtu.be/l7l5e8o0VZk
The tour started pretty quietly, travel-wise, in Toronto, with a whole free day. We took advantage of some rooms at GGS and U of T to make reeds. Ottawa was next with its endless tourist attractions; I ended up going back to my very favoritest bar ever, the Zaphod Beeblebrox club in Byward Market– where you can get a real live Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster!– to hear a folk band that half the NYOC oboe section went to high school with. Small world… On to Montreal, where Kevin and Bianca discovered the joys of the Oversize Score collection in the library.We then took a plane to Alberta, where we saw some wildlife, some mountains, and took an early morning hike up one of them before finally arriving in Vancouver! Michelle, one of the oboists in the section, invited the whole double-reed section over to her house for dinner in Vancouver. Her mother, as well as being a lecturer in engineering at UBC, also runs Twinklebelle, and had tons of amazing accessories lying around the house waiting for trade shows or to be shipped out. We tested some designs of ornamental flower accessories for her, which she ended up allowing us to wear for the next day’s concert! (Only the black ones, of course…) Now I’m back in Toronto and have two weeks before I hopefully ship out to the Interprovincial Music Camp to work as a Facuty Assistant for a week, and then head straight back to McGill for a new school year!
For the past three days I’ve been at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener-Waterloo, working with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. This is my third year in the orchestra and the first time that the session has been held at Laurier– the previous two years have been at Western University in London, Ontario. The first two weeks of the orchestra are in fact a chamber program, so I’ve been working with a wind quintet. Generally the wind quintets are assigned a simpler, often Classical piece for the first week of the chamber session and a more substantial work for the second week. The second-week pieces are going with somewhat more obscure Canadian music this year, with my group doing a quintet by Kelsey Jones (which in my opinion sounds like a cross between Hetu and Shostakovich) and another group playing Erik Ewazen’s Roaring Fork. However, for the first week were assigned a Haydn divertimento (from which Brahms’ Haydn Variations take their theme) which was quite short, and we ended up visiting the Laurier music library to borrow some other quintets to read. We got a Danzi quintet, the Nielsen, and the wind quintet arrangement of Tombeau de Couperin– and somehow ended up deciding to entirely replace the Haydn with the Ravel for the concert on Friday! Needless to say, there has been and will continue to be quite a bit of woodshedding going on before the concert. At the same time, I’m in the final stages of preparation for the Winnipeg audition. I fly out to Winnipeg after my last rehearsal this Saturday, play the audition Sunday morning (Sunday is a day off at NYO except for a concert in the evening which I have arranged not to play in) and fly back Sunday night. For Saturday night I’m staying it a place from airbnb.com where the host turns out to be a musician who’s been playing with the symphony! Overall I feel pretty good about the excerpts. It’s somewhat difficult that I’m at NYO right now since the amount of playing I’m having to do in a day– with all of the rehearsals, practicing for the Winnipeg audition, learning the part for the Ravel for Friday, and preparing for the placement audition for the orchestral session– is rather more than I would prefer for injury-prevention purposes. Fortunately I only have three more days that I have to worry about the Winnipeg excerpts! In the meantime, in all my obviously plentiful spare time, I started working on a piece of can to be hand shaped and profiled. Also in the bassoon section are two students who both hand shape and profile their cane. Although I certainly wouldn’t switch too that method for all of my reeds (difficult to, as the saying goes, “fill a bucket full of reeds” when each one has to be processed by hand), I’m interested in the hand profiling especially as it seems like it might be very instructive regarding the properties of bassoon cane, and even illustrative on aspects of trimming. After all, the distinction between profiling and scraping a reed is less substantial than it seems. The profiler that we use at school scrapes so thin that it essentially begins the finishing of the reed for you, but I don’t want to be dependant upon one specific profiler to be able to make good reeds. Anyway, so far all I have is a piece of cane left rather lopsided by my clumsy freehand shaping, so we shall see how it progresses.