My jury is played, final assignment turned in, and I’m back at my parents’ house in Toronto learning to drive and practicing the rep that I’ll be playing for the rest of the summer. So, here’s a partial (I’ve probably forgotten things…) list of repertoire I played this school year. In no particular order, and with a varied assortment of ensembles:
Berlioz: Corsair Overture (1st)
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto #1 (2nd)
Scheherazade (1st) -Beethoven 3 (2nd)
Stravinsky: Symphonies D’Instruments a Vents (2nd)
Stravinsky: Mass (1st)
Nielsen: Wind Quintet
Debussy: Nocturnes (2nd)
Petrushka (1st)
Tchaik 5, only the 3rd and 4th movements (1st)
Gounod: Petite Symphonie (1st)
D’Indy: Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1st)
The Miraculous Mandarin Suite (2nd)
Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto (1st)
Claude Vivier: Orion (3rd)
Mozart Requiem (1st)
Parsifal: An Orchestral Quest (2nd) (a Canadian work, an hour-long orchestral arrangement of music from Parsifal which was utterly wonderful)
Paquito D’Riviera: Aires Tropicales for woodwind quintet
My big project for the first semester was the KW audition and for the second was my jury, for which I played the Osborne rhapsody, Saent-Saens Sonata, a Vivaldi concerto, and the Tansman Sonatine.
Tonight I was practicing a passage in the Saint-Saens Sonata that I was having trouble with; I thought I had worked it out a few weeks ago, but somehow the sloppiness had crept back in. I was frustrated with how I was practicing it– a few boring rhythms, inching the metronome up by a number of clicks that always either seemed so slow as to be agonizing or too fast to be doing much good– had had been thinking recently (prompted by overdosing on The Bulletproof Musician and Study Hacks blogs) about how to improve my use of my time in my practice. After reading a few trumpet player’s obituaries and remembrances of great CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth, I had been reading over recently a page called “Bud Herseth Lesson Notes”, and noticed that he emphasized playing only on the mouthpiece quite a bit. I began to wonder what the woodwind equivalent would be. I know that I can’t play the Saent-Saens sonata only on my reed, but– doh– I can play it only on my mouth! Singing your part is something that everyone, including me, knows you should do, but I rarely hear people singing their music in the practice rooms at school– sometimes brass players, but never woodwinds, and I had certainly never done it. Sure enough, when I tried to sing the line, it came out a jumbled mess. So I practiced singing it slowly, while watching the music and playing the notes with my fingers. I discovered I could even sing wrong notes when watching the music– many of the middle Gs often came out as an A! Once I had corrected this, and gotten my singing up to a reasonable tempo (not quite the final tempo, which is a little past the limits of my vocal technique…) I found I was able to put the run together on bassoon with much more ease. I wonder how much easier the movement would be if I had learned to sing the whole thing before ever putting it on the bassoon… I guess the moral of the story is, those things that everyone knows you should do? I should do them.
You know how there are some books that you walk out of totally convinced that if only everyone read that book, maybe the world and all of humanity could be saved from itself? The kind of book that makes you want to drop everything and become a high school English teacher just so that you can make the greatest number of people possible to take a crack at it? I finished one such book recently, which I picked up in the second-hand bookstore across from the Conrad Centre in KW. Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing The Universe is the kind of book that defies explanation. It isn’t about anything, really. Well, it’s autobiographical, but only in the sense that Dyson’s life has encompassed so many experiences and thoughts that it is the best springboard he has for a general discussion of all of the things that are. I first heard of the Dyson family through George Dyson, Freeman’s son, who wrote a book (which I read on the recommendation found in an article by Neal Stephenson) called Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. This book is in part based on the experiences of his father, who worked on the project, and is fascinating in a “how on earth have I never heard of this before????” kind of way. Disturbing the Universe touches on Orion, as well as Freeman Dyson’s work during the second world war (not on the Manhattan Project, although he fell in with that crowd very shortly afterwards), space travel in general, the implications of advances in biology, and many more subjects which are always treated in discussion with reference to objects of art, which is unusual and refreshing for a book written by a physicist. This is perhaps not surprising, though, for Freeman Dyson’s father– also named George– was a composer and the Director of the Royal College of Music during the war (and responsible for keeping it open for the duration of the war, against the wishes of the government.) Although I admit I haven’t made a thorough study of his music, I was quite struck by his Concerto da Chiesa for string orchestra, which opens with a fantasy on the chant Veni, Veni Emmanuel. So much for the background. There is very little to say about the actual content of Disturbing theUniverse save that, as with all great books, you have to read it if you actually want to know what it’s about; if it could be summarized efficiently what need would one have for the whole book? Perhaps you could have some use for this mystifying tidbit from it, typical of Dyson’s accounts of his interactions with his fellow distinguished physicists: “The first time I met Teller was in March 1949, when I talked to the physicists at the University of Chicago about the radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman. I diplomatically gave high praise to Schwinger and then explained why Feynman’s methods were more useful and more illuminating. At the end of the lecture, the chairman called for questions from the audience. Teller asked the first question: ‘What would you think of a man who cried “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”, and then at once drank down a great tankard of wine?’ Since I remained speechless, Teller answered the question himself: ‘I would consider the man a very sensible fellow’.” Can’t argue with that kinda logic. Happy Easter!
About a month ago, I did my first professional audition, for the 2nd bassoon of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. All in all, it was not so different from an audition here at school. For the ensemble auditions in the bassoon studio at McGill, there are two rounds. In general, those who make it to the second round will be in the McGill Symphony Orchestra, and those who get cut after the first will be in the Wind Symphony or Contemporary Music Ensemble. For my first two auditions, I didn’t make it past the first round. So, when I made it into the second round for the first time, I was so pleased that I allowed my concentration to slip while playing the second round (which, I rationalized, didn’t matter since I had already made it into orchestra.) The next time, however, I was prepared to concentrate through both rounds and aim to win the audition or improve my standing instead of just being content with being in orchestra. In the KW audition, I made it into the second round and then got cut before the finals. I found much the same thing happened– since I didn’t want/feel prepared to take the job anyway, and since I hadn’t even really expected to make it into the semis, I wasn’t particularly concentrated while playing them and made some stupid mistakes. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether avoiding making those mistakes would have gotten me into the finals, but at least it would have been more because of the panel’s preferences and less a matter of having to cut me by default because I made an unacceptable number of mistakes. However, all in all it was a very positive experience, and left me wanting to do it again, with higher aspirations. The one thing I will do next time that I should have this time was to check my hotel room for anything that might keep me awake and get a room change as soon as possible if there are any problems. When I arrived it was extremely cold outside, and I was so glad to be a room with a heater that I didn’t think about the fact that the heater was extremely noisy and came on and off according to the temperature in the room with a clunk which, as I discovered when I went to bed, was loud enough to wake me up every time. At midnight I finally called the front desk and asked to be moved to a room with a different type of heater. I was settled in the new room at 12:30, asleep by 1… and slept through my alarm, waking up half an hour before my time slot in the audition began. Whoops! Luckily I played third in the time slot, so I actually had exactly the right amount of time to warm up and not enough to hang around getting nervous. I’ll hopefully be doing a similar audition next year…