After the concert on Friday, we have a four day long weekend with NAO. Most of my housemates went to Toronto for the Pride festivities, but I came to Kitchener instead to visit my partner, my mom and see some concerts at the National Youth Orchestra, which is training at Laurier again. Last night I went to a faculty concert where David Hetherington and the percussion students played Tan Dun’s Snow in June, and the string faculty played Schubert’s Quintet. Today we went to Balzac’s– the coffee shop– with one oboist from Brott and one from NYO, and as we were all walking out we saw a sign for CAFKA-- Community Art Forum, Kitchener and Area– about something called In Search of Abandoned. A guy inside the building, which happens to be the Communitech Hub, came out and asked if we wanted to see it. We said OK, so we went inside and were led through multiple card-access-only doors to something called the HIVE: Hub Interactive Virtual Environment. It seems like a pretty rad place to work. On the way we saw stuff like this:
Inside the HIVE, three of us got normal 3D glasses and one got special “pilot"s glasses”, which had three little extra motion sensor knobs sticking out of each side of the frames. Then we were in the middle of a bunch of virtual mountains. The pilot controls the perspective on the mountains– if they’re looking down, you see them from above– and uses a steering wheel and some ropes to control the speed and direction.
The exhibit ends today, so you probably can’t go see it. Sorry. Suckerrrrrs!
(If you want to see something else cool, I’m going to one of the NYO’s free chamber concerts tomorrow. There’s a Mozart flute quartet, Berio’s Opus Zoo– aka the quintet piece that has always eluded me but I really want to play as soon as I find enough other people who are down for it– Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, and the Brahms horn trio. You can find the complete list of NYO chamber music, faculty, and full orchestra concerts here.
On Thursday was our first concert with the National Academy Orchestra! We played Mozart’s Jupiter symphony, the Mozart Requiem, and a piece by the director of the choir who came in for the Requiem. This Friday we have our next concert, which is all Beethoven (a celebration of Beethoven in Eb major?) with the Emperor concerto and Eroica symphony. You can find the full list of concerts here: http://www.brottmusic.com/concerts-tickets/2014-concerts/
The last concert, I should add, has the Rite of Spring, the Firebird suite, and three other pieces on the same program…
So, for the past few years, I had been keeping a deep, dark secret.
I couldn’t drive a car. Physically or legally.
This wasn’t always a deep dark secret. I grew up in Toronto, five minutes away from a subway station. If I wanted to get anywhere inside the city (and, as a true Torontonian, uh, why would you ever want to get anywhere not in Toronto? Come on.) The fastest and cheapest option was the TTC, a station conveniently located 5 minutes from my house. I went to a public high school whose admissions criteria were entirely based on proximity and which feeder school you were coming from, so all of my high school friends were in the same position. In my high school, when you turned 16 you had a party and then continued to walk, ride your bike or take the TTC everywhere you needed to go. Probably a few kids learned to drive, but there was none of the mass excited counting down to your 16th birthday and thus your first permit that I now know there to be in many other places. Nobody really talked about it!
So, when I graduated high school I had no idea that not being able to drive was at all out of the ordinary for someone entering the adult world. When I went to McGill, of course I met many more people who did drive. Almost all of the students from the U.S drove and many even owned their own cars, and of course anyone from a more rural area had felt the necessity of driving as soon as possible. However, since Montreal is also a major city with well-established public transport, very few of the McGill students who did drive actually did so regularly during their degrees (with the exception of those from areas surrounding Montreal who already had cars and were living at home, but I even know lots of people in that position who took public transit.)
The moment at which not driving became a problem was when I won the job in the Niagara symphony. Of course, for a while I had been getting the feeling that I would have to learn to drive eventually. As a freelancer, especially, it’s necessary to be able to transport yourself independently to whatever city or location today’s gig is in. However, since I won the Niagara job before I finished school, I wasn’t expecting to be entering that world of the “freeway philharmonic” so soon. Fortunately, for most of the Niagara services, I was able to find a regular carpool from Toronto with a player who had a van and thus ended up being more or less the NSO chauffeur (sorry, Andy…) However, for the first time I was among people who were living the freeway philharmonic life constantly– driving to a different city every few days to play with a different orchestra. I realized that, although I still wanted to eventually win a full-time job with a major orchestra, I would probably end up being that kind of a freelancer for a while first– and I was pretty excited for it! It may not be the kind of job stability that most university graduates are expecting, but there are worse things, especially when you’re young, than to have constant adventure, excitement and really wild things thrust upon you by your job(s).
In that kind of company, admitting that I couldn’t drive became more embarrassing, because not driving means you’re probably not working much. Which, of course, I wasn’t. But just because you’re the youngest member of an orchestra and the only one still in school (in a different province) doesn’t mean you need to go around reminding everyone of that!
So, I started commuting back to Toronto not just for Niagara gigs, but also (on different occasions) for driving lessons. This was, to say the least, highly inconvenient, and I often cursed my clueless high-school self who could have just done it while actually living in Toronto,and avoided all this fuss.
When I got the Thunder Bay job, however, I was glad that I was putting in the effort to get it done even at this later date, because I can’t imagine not being able to drive in Thunder Bay. I can’t even walk to a grocery store from my apartment in Thunder Bay, and not because my apartment is poorly located. (Actually, most of my neighbours are Lakehead professors, so I’m assuming the neighbourhood where all the professors live must be a pretty good one.)
I finished all of my driving lessons, coming 6 hours on the megabus for each one. Every time my instructor asked if I’d been practicing I just laughed. Naturally I know the value of practicing, and would if I could– but when, and in what vehicle, would I have been practicing? Sooooo, I was actually kind of surprised when yesterday I passed my G1 exit test and got my G2 on the first try! Whereas the G1 is a learner’s permit and doesn’t allow you to drive alone or on the highway, the G2’s only restrictions are that your blood alcohol must be 0 (I rarely drink anyway), you can only have as many passengers as working seatbelts (uh… isn’t wearing a seatbelt required by law anyway?) and you can only drive G class vehicles (alas, my motorcycle dreams have been dashed!) In fact, the G2 is so similar to the full G licence, and lasts for so long as a valid licence (I have to take my G road test by 2018) that lots of people forget they don’t yet have a full licence, forget to take the G test, and end up back at the beginning with no licence at all :P (I’m going to remember to do the next test in time, though!)
The road test was really pretty easy, and only lasted about 15 minutes. My parallel parking wasn’t great but then, she asked me to do it right in front of a driveway that sloped down to meet the street, so no wonder I couldn’t tell where the curb was. There are a lot of stories instructors like to tell of people who failed the test and had to turn back before even getting out of the parking lot, but… you have to remember that those were likely 16-year olds making dumb 16-year old decisions that the examiners deemed too unsafe to even let them out on the road. So, maybe there is an upside to my having waited for so long to learn to drive. :D
Since Convocation and my crazy rash of gigs ended, I have been relaxing ’n stuff! Pretty much every day I go to the U of T music school to practice. For the past while the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute has been going on in there, so the practice rooms were open (and exciting people like lutists and baroque oboists were populating them!) Now that’s ended so I’m back to finding someone to open the hallway for me, or if it’s fairly busy just banging on the door. On one hand, I’m not really supposed to be in there. I’m not a U of T student. I’m not any kind of student (yee-haw!) On the other hand, music students from other schools would come visit at McGill all the time, and of course someone who needs a practice room and knows how to put it to good use would always be let in to our practice hallway. It’s just a polite thing to do to offer comrades a practice room when they’re traveling :P So, I don’t feel too bad about imposing on U of T. Besides… It’s June. It’s not like the rooms are in high demand. The only irritating thing is that unlike McGill which has handy counter space and free-floating music stands, U of T just has pianos.
If anyone from U of T is reading this, I promise I’m not spilling reed water all over your pianos! I’m very careful.
I’m working on my music from NAO, as well as the Nussio Variations on a Theme by Pergolesi as a personal project. It’s a bit bizarre working on solo rep with no timeline for it, and not even a weekly check-in with a teacher to measure my progress on it. I have no idea when I’ll get to play it… Nadina did mention something about her doing a masterclass or workshop at NAO, but I don’t think the whole piece will be ready for a public performance by then, and I don’t even know what kind of class it would be in the first place or if that would be a possible venue for my performing it. I’d like to put on some kind of recital some time before I leave for Thunder Bay, in a hospital or church or something, so I would need to chose some more music. I’d like to do some Bach, probably the flute partita in A minor. I really like Bernaud’s Hallucinations as well. Anyway, that’s all far away… In the next few days I just need to move to Hamilton!
Although it feels like longer since I’m not even moved out there yet, the first concert of the Brott Music Festival is actually in only slightly over a week! We’re playing my favourite piece by Mozart– the Requiem– along with the Jupiter symphony and Beckett’s An Offering of Songs. You can buy tickets here: http://www.brottmusic.com/2014/05/mozart-requiemthe-genius-of-amadeus/
As well as, um, finishing my degree, I spent most of my last year at McGill reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
I first heard of this book when my dad was reading it a few years ago along with a virtual book club called Infinite Summer (the website for which still has preserved for posterity an excellent collection of essays and resources on the book: http://infinitesummer.org/). I read a few pages, considered the back pain involved in carrying around a copy of the thing in my bag, and forgot about it. This year, I was reading an essay-novella-thing by one of my favourite authors, Neal Stephenson, called In The Beginning Was The Command Line. (ITBWTCL is a fascinating essay, if somewhat dated, exploring the relationship between computer operating systems and wider trends in North American culture. It’s way more fun then I just made it sound like.) ITBWTCL contained an intriguing reference to DFW’s essay E Unibus Pluram. (Which you can read, I’m not sure if legally, here: http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf) I’m up for reading pretty much anything Neal Stephenson thinks is worthwhile, so I looked up the collection containing E Unibus Pluram, entitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and checked it out of the library. It was the titular essay that got me. (Read, in its original appearance in Harper’s, here: http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf) DFW is the kind of writer whose enormous talents include the ability to make you say “THAT’S what I actually meant! That’s exactly how I would express what I think if it had occurred to me to do so!” Everything he writes, even if it appears to have nothing at all to do with your life, within a few sentences has you convinced that in fact it is exactly relevant to you, in fact essential, that his thoughts were a part of your being that you were never able to express without his help. Or, as one of the contributors to the Infinite Summer website put it somewhat less pretentiously:
“On the #infsum Twitter channel, catchingdays called Infinite Jest “the first shuffle novel“. That’s a great analogy. The book as like a compilation of Wallace’s favorites, semi-randomized to keep you on your toes.
And do you know why shuffle mode is so popular? Because every once in a while, wholly by chance and when you least expect it, you hear something that you’ve loved all your life. For me it was Eschaton, falling, as it does, squarely on the intersection of two lifelong interests: Cold War politics and games. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew, and the radio did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel that truly resonated with me.”
Needless to say, the next thing I picked up after ASFTINDA was Infinite Jest. As a disclaimer, I should say that I didn’t physically pick it up; I downloaded it and read it on the Overdrive iPad app, which in my mind has several advantages over the traditional format in the case of this particular book. Firstly, it’s lighter. It usually strikes me as somewhat silly when people claim the supremacy of tablets and ereaders over books on he grounds of weight alone– how much weight does carrying around one book really add? Well, in the case of Infinite Jest, a lot. Secondly, easy endnote control. Infinite Jest has a lot of endnotes– 388 of them, many of which are both quite long and important to your understanding of the book– and if you’re reading a physical copy, you’re going to need to have two bookmarks on the go to keep track of where you are in the main text and in the notes. In Overdrive, the endnotes are just hyperlinks, from which you can navigate away from and back to the main text as you please. Third, you can bookmark as many passages as you like! Overdrive remembers where you were the last time you read the book, but I also have a collection of bookmarks at my favourite passages of the book, which with a physical book would have to be accomplished with extensive dog-earing. So, all that to say: if you are going to read Infinite Jest, and have the option to do so via tablet, I recommend it!
With regards to my own reaction to the “shuffle mode” novel: for me, the entire novel seemed as if it were actually intended as a philosophical exploration of music school and the musical profession. It’s an easy connection to make, of course, since much of the action centers around an elite jr. tennis academy, and as all of the musicians who have been usurping sports psychology for decades know, there’s not a whole lot of difference mindset-wise between training to be a pro athlete and training to be a pro musician. And, as much as I try to slog through the tried-and-true Don Greene et al be-a-macho-winner-lifestyle-training-programs, what I really connected with, psychology-wise, is the philosophy that the James O. Incandenza, founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, recruited his coaches on the basis of. Head coach Schtitt’s principles are explained as:
“Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is what is he word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion.”
Is this not exactly the state of mind in which it is necessary to approach auditions? At NYO, Gabe Radford always said that the goal of an audition, any audition, no matter how badly you want or need the job, must always be only “to play well.” The audition is the occasion for playing well. Without playing well, of course, you can’t win the job; but if your only goal is to win the job– O cruel world!– you probably won’t play well! But then, of course, if you adopt the “play well” goal with the purpose of tricking yourself into being able to win the job, well, hopefully you’re really stupid, because you’d have to be to not see right through yourself.
So the only way to truly play well (and thus have a hope of ever getting a job) is to really sincerely adopt Schitt’s principles, whole-heartedly, and really become the kind of person who walks into an audition with only the goal of self-improvement, regarding all the other players and in fact the job and the entire musical profession itself as nothing more than the occasion for meeting the self. And the thing is, there is no element of self-deceit in this; if you choose to attend an audition as an occasion to meet the self, then that is what you are there for; it doesn’t matter what anyone else’s attitude is.
Of course, really truly not caring about winning is easier said than done:
" As Schacht sees it, Schtitt’s philosophical stance is that to win enough of the time to be considered successful you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all. Schacht does not care enough, probably, anymore, and has met his gradual displacement from E. T. A. ’s A singles squad with an equanimity some E. T. A. ’s thought was spiritual and others regarded as the surest sign of dicklessness and burnout. Only one or two people have ever used the word brave in connection with Schacht’s radical reconfiguration after the things with the Crohn’s Disease and knee."
Schacht– a student at the tennis academy who has decided that after graduation he would like to become a dentist, not a tennis star– is a character highly recognizable to anyone who’s gone to music school: the one who entered with all the musical promise in the world, whose path altered so drastically over the course of their time in music school that those who leave with more of less the same goals as they entered with have no idea what to make of them. For Schacht it was Crohn’s disease and a bad knee that pushed him out of tennis and into the wide world of “doing something else,” as the phrase goes; for musicians it might be focal dystonia, or nerve damage, or fears for your job prospects, or just a pressing feeling that your life could be better spent. Wallace captures perfectly the mix of disdain, fear and a strange kind of envy that many musicians– the ones with fellow tennis student Hal Incandenza’s balls-to-the-wall attitude, anyway– feel towards those who give up The Dream:
“Hal Incandenza, who’s probably as asymmetrically hobbled on the care-too-much side as Schacht is on the not-enough, privately puts Schacht’s laissez-faire down to some interior decline, some doom-grey surrender of his childhood’s promise to adult grey mediocrity, and fears it; but since Schacht is an old friend and a dependable designated driver and has actually gotten pleasanter to be around since the knee…Hal in a weird and deeper internal way almost somehow admires and envies the fact that Schact’s stoically committed himself to the oral professions and stopped dreaming of getting to the Show after graduation– an air of something other than failure about Schacht’s not caring enough, something you can’t quite define…Hal can’t quite feel the contempt for Teddy Schacht’s competitive slide that would be a pretty much natural contempt in one who cared so dreadfully secretly much…”
If you’re a student or professional musician, I think that speaks for itself.
In the end, Infinite Jest is like so many works of music: it’s impossible to say what it’s truly about. If it were possible to summarize accurately, there would be no need for its existence. The only way to “explain” a Mahler symphony to someone is to play it for them; and the only way to know what Infinite Jest is about is to read it.
(If you have read Infinite Jest, and like me don’t really keep up wit the latest in popular music, you may have missed this Decemberists music video when it first came out. Behold: The Decemberists’ Calamity Song, featuring Eschaton!)
Last night I went to a concert by a Toronto group that I had never heard before. The group of 27 (specifically mentioned at the concert– no capital “g” on “group.” Apparently they’re very specific about that.) was playing a “DIY Symphony”. The first half had four symphony options on the menu: Mozart 38, Haydn 83, Schubert 5, and Beethoven 1. The audience chose which movement hey would like to come from each symphony. He first movement was done by applause-o-metre, with students from the orchestra’s outreach program at the Dixon Hall and Regent Park school’s music program helping measure the applause, and we ended up hearing the 1st movement of the Haydn. The 2nd movement was chosen by auction: some lucky kid had his parents pay to let him choose which slow movement he wanted (he chose Schubert) and part of his prize was also that he got to sit in the orchestra for the rest of the first half! The fourth movement was chosen by secret ballot before the show, so the remaining movement was to be whichever composer hadn’t been chosen. When the movement from the Mozart symphony was performed, it was done as a side-by-side with the string players from Dixon Hall and Regent Park. Unlike most side-by-sides (we did one with he Niagara Youth Orchestra just last weekend!) the kids were placed on the outside of the string section, so one of the students got to sit concertmaster!
The second half of the concert was Beethoven 7, which I just played last Sunday with Niagara so it was interesting to hear it again with this orchestra. They sounded great, and significantly more rehearsed than for the first half (part of the concept of the DIY portion was that they were sight-reading the chosen movements.) At the intermission Nadina, who plays principal bassoon and has recorded many concerti with the orchestra, showed me her lefreQue! The lefreQue (I SWEAR THE Q IS CAPITALIZED THAT’S HOW IT’S SPELLED) is a Dutch invention that seems to be catching on among North American wind players. It’s a metal bridge that you place on either side of the joints of your instrument using silicone bands. I admit that I’m a little bit skeptical based solely on the information on the website (http://www.lefreque.com), which contains such mumbo-jumbo as “lefreQue does not add but gives in return” and “On a flute you slide the pieces into each other, thereby effecting a sound breach, which again will be corrected by using the lefreQue.” There isn’t any particular information on what exactly a “sound breach” is or how putting another piece of metal on your instrument is going to correct it. However, I have to put my skepticism aside for the moment because everyone I know who has tried the device loves it and says that they hear a definite difference in the quality of tone! Which is really the only metric that matters, I suppose. Nadina certainly sounded excellent in the concert, although of course I didn’t get to hear the same concert with and without bassoon lefreQue :P
On the whole I really enjoyed the concert and will be back to hear them again if I’m around. I ran into a bunch of people I knew including my elementary school strings teacher! Toronto may be a big city but it’s still a small world!
So for the past little while I’ve pretty much been living the freelance life… by which I mean I haven’t slept in the same place for more than three or so nights in a row since finishing McGill. It’s actually been pretty awesome, and I’m almost done with all the work I have scheduled before the start of the National Academy Orchestra: next week I’m playing second on two pops shows with the Toronto Symphony, and then I’m going back to Montreal for Convocation, and then my lease starts on the house I just signed for with a few other NAO musicians. I don’t (at the moment…) have anything scheduled between when our lease starts on June 1st and when the orchestra starts on the 16th, so I guess I get two weeks’ vacation! NAO goes until mid-August, and then I’ll be up teaching at the Interprovincial Music Camp as per usual. And then I have the whole month of September to get settled in… Thunder Bay! I have been offered a one-year position playing second in the Thunder Bay Symphony for next season! Although I’ve been enjoying a taste of what life would be like as a freelancer in Southern Ontario, it’s amazing to have the stability of a full-time job– even if it is only for a year– right after graduating from my undergrad. Although I would like to go to grad school at some point (okay, there’s one grad school in particular I kind of have my heart set on) I didn’t feel prepared to do a big grad school audition tour while putting together my first-ever recital this year. But I admit I regretted it a little when the acceptances started coming in for everyone in my year who had done that: Juilliard, Colburn, Royal College of Music, and plenty of other exciting and prestigious places where my colleagues from McGill are about to go start the next stage of their musical lives. So for me the fact that I now have a job for next year is validation that I made the right choice for myself by putting off grad school auditions.
Three hours after my recital ended, I had my first post-school rehearsal :P That week I was playing fourth on the Verdi Requiem with the orchestra of the Société Philharmonique de Montréal. That concert was on Good Friday, and the bassoon section was Marty– my first teacher at McGill– playing principal and two other students from McGill besides me. The next day I took the Montreal-Toronto Megabus hopefully for the last time, and crammed in an Easter party before going to Kitchener to do some school shows with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony the first half of last week. The latter half of the week was Niagara, who had the Sultans of String in, and we performed both a childrens’ show with them and a full pops program. All of the music on those programs was written by the Sultans, and it was really good! Some in the orchestra even went up to the lobby to buy their CDs and get them signed (as band leader Chris McKhool said, “buying our CDs is definitely the safest way to take us home with you tonight!”) So, between travel Montreal-Toronto-Kitchener-Toronto-St. Catherine’s and all the rehearsals and concerts, this is actually the first day I’ve had off after my recital. On Thursday I’m flying to Thunder Bay for their audition, and then have another concert cycle with the NSO (Cosi Fan Tutte overture, Brahms Piano Concerto #1, and Beethoven 7!) while simultaneously chaperoning at the Ontario Student Classics Conference (http://www.classicsconference.org/), which I attended as a high school student and just happens to be 1) the exact same dates as NSO masterworks 5 2) at Brock University, 3) hosted this year by my former high school, and thus 4) provides me with a free room at the Brock residences for this concert cycle. Sweeeet. Then I have to get all my belongings from my soon-to-be-former place in Montreal, find a place in Hamilton and move into it, because I’m going to be playing in the National Academy Orchestra for the summer! I only auditioned for two summer festivals this year (oops!), NAO and the NAC’s Young Artist’s Program, and although I got into both and was hoping to be able to go to both, they ended up conflicting in such a way that I wasn’t able to get a sub for NAO as I was hoping. So, I reluctantly had to pass up the YAP for this year, since NAO is a 9-week orchestral program that pays a minimum of $430 a week to each apprentice. However I’m very happy to be able to participate in that, especially with both Rite of Spring and The Firebird on the program! Happy summer!
Two weeks ago I was away teaching the bassoon students of a private French high school in Saint- Jacques, at the school’s annual band retreat. The retreat takes place at the Abestos Music Camp, which is not a thing I would have ever guessed existed in Asbestos (yes, Asbestos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/as-asbestos-industry-collapses-a-towns-fibre-is-torn/article4560402/") However, air quality issues aside, it’s a very nice site, although the “camp” atmosphere was diminished slightly by the fact that there were a few too many feet of snow for, say, marshmallow roasting.
I was there for two camp session, the first being Secondaire 1 and 2 (equivalent to grades 7 and 8) and the second being secondaire 5 (equivalent to grade 11, the last year of high school in Quebec before CEGEP.) Sec 3 and 4 also had a camp, which was the very first camp which I wasn’t teaching at. At both of the camps I only had one student, as bassoon tends to not be a very popular instrument for high schoolers. It doesn’t take a huge amount of thought to figure out why. Even in high schools with a large music program, there aren’t often very many actual instruments, which means that whatever kid chooses to play the bassoon probably won’t be able to play in a section with their best friend, unlike the “let’s play clarinet together!” kids. The bassoon looks large and intimidating and, frankly, uncool. Band teachers generally know more about the more common band instruments (as they should!) so the bassoon doesn’t get as much attention as the others.
My sec 1 student was an example of an excellent instrument assignment decision on the part of her teacher (a McGill grad that I worked on oprettas in the McGill Savoy Society with!) She was tall and looked natural holding the instrument, and at her first lesson gave me a long list of instruments that she had played before the bassoon. She had picked up the bassoon because she wanted a challenge, and wanted to prove herself equal to this “next level” instrument. She had only been playing the bassoon for eight months but was playing in both the sec 1 and sec 2 bands. The first lesson I introduced her to the concept of flicking, and the next morning in band rehearsal, although she hadn’t quite absorbed which key was for which note, I saw her thumb moving around with definite intent to flick! No matter what she sounded like– probably worse than before, since she was distracted with trying to integrate a new concept into her playing– the fact that she immediately starts working on integrating a new habit into her playing, even if it makes things harder at first, makes me believe that she will have an excellent prospects with any instrument– and indeed any pursuit of any kind– that she wants to get good at.
All of the teachers at the camp said that sec 5 is generally more difficult to teach than sec 1, which makes sense. Beginners have no established habits and will try new ways of doing things, and are enjoying the rewarding learning curve that comes from the first year of playing an instrument. It’s thrilling to go from not being able to make a sound to being able to play music together with other people, and the sec 1 players are still in the middle of that exhilarating feeling. By sec 5 they’ve discovered that music takes just as much work to get good at as anything else, and are getting ready to move on to CEGEP so it may not be foremost in their minds any more. My sec 5 student had been playing for 5 years, since sec 1, which I realized was only a year less than I’ve been playing. The first lesson was more or less the same in that I introduced her to flicking. “Yeah,” she said, “someone told me about that before, but I’ve been doing it this way for a long time so I didn’t change it.” I couldn’t really blame her. If I had been playing an instrument for five years and was suddenly told that there was a whole other category of keys on my instrument that I had to start using on notes I thought I already knew how to play (even if they usually weren’t in the right octave)– I wouldn’t want to change, either! Over the course of the sec 5 session I got used to reminding her to flick whenever she was struggling to put her tenor notes in the right octave, and to her credit she did seem to be trying. However, the music she was playing in band was quite demanding, so there were a lot of things for her to be thinking about at once.
Her rhythm also seemed to be a little off– not surprising since she seemed quite confused about the purpose and function of a metronome when I took mine out– so at one point I asked her to simply clap her rhythm with the metronome. After several unsuccessful attempts, I put the metronome on 60 to the quarter note and asked her to simply clap eighth notes. She couldn’t do it. The division of the beat simply refused to settle in. The next day, I asked her to sing her line. “Oh, I can’t sing.” she pronounced decisively. “Sure you can,” I said, “Let’s just find that first F.” I played the F, sang it, and asked her to sing it too. But even when I tried to direct her to it – “a little higher! Not quite that high!” she couldn’t find it, and seemed to have no idea when she was even getting closer.
So, I had been spending my time trying to adjust her embouchure, increase her air support, improve her tuning and bothering her about flicking all when she basically had no concept of rhythm or pitch! It simply hadn’t occurred to me at first that these elements might be missing, but thinking about it it makes sense. This student had an excellent band teacher who set the kids up very well and concentrated on scales, good rhythm and tuning in class. However, I think it has to do with the nature of teaching the bassoon in these settings that she had been left behind on essential elements of musicianship. I’m sure simple rhythms were drilled a lot when she was in sec 1, however, it seems like once she was given a bassoon to try to figure out, the sheer mechanical challenge and confusion of the instrument pushed all other thoughts out of her mind. Rhythm became someone else’s problem, and pitch was a toss-up determined by whether she happened to put down the right fingers or not.
I felt sorry for her, because I can’t imagine she was having very much fun in band class. For me, at least, it would be incredibly stressful to be trying to play complex music, and being surrounded by people who seem to know what they’re doing, while lacking the fundamental skills to even really understand what’s going on rhythmically, melodically or harmonically, and having to just follow along blindly and hope it works out. I believe that all humans are fundamentally capable of learning music, and I think if she had been placed on another instrument maybe she would have fared better. However, of course I also think it’s wonderful that the school is teaching bassoon in the first place! I would never want a school to stop teaching bassoon just because it’s difficult for band students to learn.
So, I think what I learned about teaching bassoon is this:
1. Potential bassoonists need a strong base of general musicianship skills before picking up the bassoon– probably stronger than would be needed for other woodwind instruments, where the initial technical demands on the student would be reasonable enough for them to be able to keep filling in the gaps in their skills while learning the instrument. In my case, I had played violin for ten years as a kid, and had experimented with plenty of other instruments before settling on the bassoon. Obviously that’s not the path that every new band student will be coming from, but spending a lot of time listening too classical music, singing, clapping rhythms and using methods such as Orff and Kodaly before touching a bassoon would make sure that the fundamentals are set down. Another alternative in a band context would be to simply assign future bassoonists to a different instrument for a year or two. (Flute seems like a good option since it would teach them good breathing habits without giving them any preconceived notions of reed embouchure.)
2. Bassoonists need private teachers. All players do better with private teachers, of course, but with most other woodwinds it’s easy for the band teacher to notice how they’re doing and direct them appropriately. Bassoonists tend to get ignored, firstly because the teacher probably isn’t as knowledgeable about the instrument and also because the teacher doesn’t want to put too much pressure on a kid who’s taken on a complicated challenge. This particular school actually has private teachers for the rest of the instruments who visit the school every so often to give lessons, which is probably part of the reasons their bands are so good! However unfortunately they’re the only school in that area that teaches bassoon, and since the school is quite remote they’ve been having trouble finding a bassoon teacher able to drive out there.
I think this can be applied in private teaching, as well. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to turn away a student who wants to learn bassoon just because they don’t have another instrument under their belt already. However, a heightened focus on listening, singing and speaking/tapping rhythm could be useful to set students up on the instrument. Of course, this isn’t as exciting for the students themselves– they want to play! But hey– I started in Suzuki and spent my first lessons on the violin playing on a souped-up cereal box. (It’s a good idea: http://teachsuzuki.blogspot.ca/2011/04/why-use-box-violin.html) They can handle it.