The last time I was at the National Music Camp, I was 14 and played a bassoon for the first time in the beginning bassoon elective. This summer I returned as a faculty member. (Full disclosure… once I started playing bassoon in earnest, my allegiance was firmly to the other music camp, on the grounds that the dining hall was quieter and they didn’t make you do “evening program,” so I never actually attended as a camper on bassoon.)
I didn’t take all that many pictures– one of the excellent things this camp did was take away all the camper’s phones, so there just wasn’t much photo-taking culture in the absence of ubiquitous devices. To be honest, I suspect a lot of the kids (those who didn’t sneak them in anyway, that is) were relieved to have them gone for a week. Hey, maybe they’ll do the same for the faculty in the future!
Laurel leading a very cozy band sectional
A bat taking a rest outside the bassoon studio (I realize this does not exactly look like the peak of bat health, but at least it flew away and we didn’t have a dead bat to deal with…)
Not a camper any more… they can’t force me to stay in the loud horrible dining hall… ate all my meals on the dock with my buddy Montaigne.
Very good doggo getting ready to listen to faculty wind quintet rehearsal
Arcady Ensemble’s “Garden Walk” concert– the first half was a setup where, instead of musicians assembling in a central location for a concert, musicians are spread out through the Whistling Gardens playing solo works with related thematic material, and the audience walks around through them. Ronald Beckett’s music is always fantastic and the dedication of his audience to the ensemble is impressive.
My spot in the garden
The entrance to the performance space
Who am I to disagree?
Back in Regina to play Aura Pon’s Romp and Repose.
Our old house for sale… (not by us, the landlord had planned to sell it when we moved out)
That cat in the window of that place on Albert
SCARY SWOLE BUNS I MISSED YOU
This week we played two iterations of a holiday circus show— one in Brandon, and one in Regina. The first show, in Brandon, was in a hockey arena, and featured a Wheel of Death, which I’d never gotten to see live before. Unfortunately, the show in Regina was in the Conexus Arts Centre which is too small for it.
The part for Sleigh Ride featured the signatures of everyone who’d played the show recently– so of course the following evening I got a text from Mike Hope of the Calgary Philharmonic, who was playing the show that evening. (In the Saddledome, so they did have enough room for the wheel…) Sign your rental and touring parts, folks! :D
- As I mentioned, I memorized the piece to play for a recording with piano, but used the music in performance with the orchestra. I taped together the part such that there were no page turns during movements, but it still left a page turn in between Craeb Uisnig and Dathi, which are attaca. I wrote in the rest bars at the beginning of Dathi on the previous page, and waited to turn until mm 15, the 2/4 bar where the wind section is making the most noise.
- Mm 41. Let me tell you a story. When I first heard Judith Leclair’s recording of this, I didn’t like that she played this bar legato. Nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t like it, and wanted to play it more emphatically. Except every time I tried, I cacked at least one note in it. When I tried it legato, presto, cacks gone. After several months of this, I gave up and played it legato. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.
- Mm 45, move a little… compared to what? Unclear, but I chose to interpret this as move a little compared to the dramatico section immediately preceding it, and consequently my tempo for 45is a little bit slower than for 35: better to not sound rushed on the runs in what should be a fairly calm section, at least for the first few bars.
- Mm 46 in the second edition of the bassoon part is, mystifyingly, marked 45a in the score and orchestra parts, and the numbering discrepancy remains for the rest of the movement. I’ll here continue referring to location by their marking in the bassoon part.
- Mm 50: 80 to the EIGHTH. Not the quarter. Jesus Christ. (At least, this is closer to the tempo of both recordings, and… well, try it yourself and see.)
- Mm 70 I played the easy version. Sue me.
Or, as my partner and I took to calling it, “the crab uprising.” Although this was the most difficult movement to learn and memorize, it turned out to actually be one of the easiest in performance. The solution (for me, and the conductor and orchestra I performed it with) was to just completely cede control to the conductor. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, and having a steady beat to follow made it easy on me— and not having to try to follow me made it easy, I hope, on everyone else.
Taking a survey of all two commercial recordings of the piece, the eventual tempo of both is 160 to the eighth. Towards the end of my preparation I was playing it mostly at 170, but I put in my order for 160 anyway, and was glad I did— it felt just slow enough in performance to remind me not to rush.
Since I had decided in advance that I would ask to be a follower, not a leader of this one, I also made a few different videos of myself conducting it at tempos between 150 and 176, and then later also asked my husband to conduct it while standing beside me to practice watching out of the corner of my eye. Both helped a lot.
On to the specifics:
- Start whisper locked Breathe with conductor’s upbeat for a relaxed-feeling first bar.
- Mm 3 R4 on F#, hold flick key for C (and all subsequent notes in that register when locked, obviously.) Lock will pay off in mm 6.
- Mm 7, and all of the triplet runs coming up, are at risk of rushing, take them easy.
- Mm 9 unlock during quarter rest Mm 15, 16 L fingering only on runs
- Mm 17 hear the timpani in rests Mm 31 L hand only for C# and high A
- Mm 32 L for Db, then use a fingering involving R4 for the F# so you can keep R4 there while slapping down the usual L hand for A before sweeping the L thumb up for the rest. My experience with this run was that focusing on hearing the high A would ensure the rest of it popped out easily, whereas stressing about the very top of the run would cause the entire upper range to cack.
- Mm 35-37 For me this run was all about not rushing, and by extension, figuring out which notes I was most likely to give short shrift in the race to the top. Technology to the rescue, with slow-downer apps. I use the iOS app Anytune, but there are plenty of others available: just record yourself at tempo with no metronome, slow it down, and see what you’re really doing! For me, once I had gone through about a year’s worth of slow practice and various rhythmic tricks to work it up to tempo, the note that I most often skipped or rushed over was the F in the second beat of 36. Again, if I concentrated on that note, and also cast a glance in the direction of the C at the very end of the bar, preparation took care of the rest and it popped out.
- Mm 43-44, essentially the same process as the previous big run. In the interest of full disclosure, my accuracy rate was slightly lower on this one, but locating my anchor note (the high B in the last beat of 44) and calmly concentrating on nailing that note still generally produced at least an acceptable smear, mercifully ending on a high D.
- Mm 75, do not even try to breathe in that rest.
- Mm 76, last eighth note beat: a forcefully articulated E, then just lift R 2 and 3 for a passable-under-the-circumstances F#. I did a lot of practicing of just this beat, then adding on the runs leading up to it piece by piece. - Mm 88 The only trill fingering I could figure out for this was to play a high C with the D flick key, then trill R3. At least on my bassoon, it wasn’t ideal in that it had a tendency to cack if pushed too hard in the swells. Luckily the orchestra is the main event in those bars anyway, but if anyone knows something better, grab your time machine and HMU a year ago, thanks.
- There’s an eighth rest in the orchestra before the bassoon enters at 97, so hear the silence before jumping in.
- Note the difference in the rhythm between 98 and 99.
- 103-109 these statements can be out of tempo, but really why bother.
- 115-120 I had a hell of a time with cacking these Bbs, and I honestly have no idea why. What eventually worked as to give each one the slightest separation in the air before each one. Hopefully not too noticeable.
- 123 They’re only sixteenths, no rushing.
- Before the beginning of this movement would be an excellent time to blow out your tone holes.
- Mm 30 I found this sextuplet weirdly prone to fumbles for a long time. Used the L only for Eb and R4 for Gb. I struggled for a long time with the last note. Using the D flick key for it makes it super easy, in tune, easy to fade… oh, if it doesn’t have water in it. If it does have water, all that will emerge is a pathetic gurgle. Also, there’s no way to figure out in advance what state the tone hole might be in, and I found mine frequently managed to fill with water— somehow— during the movement, even if I cleared it out beforehand. So about a month before the performance, I finally threw in the towel with it and started using the C key, gradually shading with the L 2nd finger to help with the fade.
Continuing on to the second movement!
- Interestingly, much of the concertmaster solo part is marked in various shades of soft. Bassoonists, who are conditioned by Beethoven symphonies to know that “p” stands for “play out” and “f” stands for “fuck it, this is the someone else’s responsibility,” tend to take dynamic markings with a heavy grain of salt, which can be lent to a violinist friend in a time of need.
- I don’t know why, but before this movement starts, I constantly have the urge to put the whisper lock on, and need to remind myself to… not.
- Mm 12, useful to anchor the mind on the Bs.
- Mm 22, it is tempting to get started early on these, but the B and the C take place on the second and fourth eighth notes of the bar, respectively.
- Mm 29, I found it helped with overall cleanliness to: 1) out of all the notes that take place on the second eighth note beat, focus on the open F; and 2) on the first eighth note beat, play the E with the overblown single-finger fingering, not the full E fingering, and then flick the A that comes after it. Mm 38, things are getting a bit heated rhythmically, and Chris Millard made the extremely helpful suggestion that, instead of feeling the first half of the bar as a triplet, that you continue feeling it in eighths (ie with the emphasis, internally, on the B.
- Mm 39, theoretically the same should apply to the identical figure in he second half of the bar. For some reason, though, I was never able to feel it that way. Go figure.
- Mm 43: so, is there a difference, practically, between the rhythm in this bar and in mm 11 et al? Reach for the stars, friend-o! Or don’t. I doubt anyone will notice or care. I think I tried to make a difference between the much more obviously juxtaposed 45 and 46, by which time the bassoon is accompaniment and it doesn’t matter anyway.
- Mm 48, I found focusing on the E of the fourth eighth note beat made the thing marginally more likely to happen.
- This cantabile section is a memorization nightmare. I went by the rule of thumb that most of the held notes have two beats happen during their tenure— whatever their actual length might be— and memorized specific deviations from that rule. Once I had it in my head, I actually had to look away from the part during the performance, or the visual would cause me to second-guess what I knew was correct.
- Mm 101-102 it is very easy for the triplet-sixteenth rests in the middle of the beats to be too long, especially if you are attempting to play the rhythm in the latter half of 100 as a true sixteenth pattern. I found that these two bars had a tendency to drag, but then 103-105 are easy to rush. Neither option is particularly recommended at this point in the shitstorm.
- Mm 108 should feel like it is happening in slow motion. The violin shot in the middle of it has nothing to do with anything.
- I found it helpful to avoid breathing in the first eighth beat of 109.
- Mm 114-116 more slow-mo. If you rush here, you are gonna experience some intense regret real soon.
- The most difficult part of the next section is just not letting the excitement get you you. It’s pure movie-star John Williams but for 117-125 I just had to stay on the back of the beat, listen to the bass clarinet and section bassoons during the rests, and focus on anchoring on the G#s in 123 and 125.
- The most difficult part of mm 130-131 is literally everything. By the time I performed the piece, I could play these bars correctly. It took two years. Ways that I practiced it, at various points:
- Slowly, obviously. Really slowly.
- Omitting the entire upwards run, focusing on the interval between the first note of each beat, and the triplet at the beat
- Omitting the triplet at the end of the beat, focusing on the septuplets as groupings of 4+3
- Focusing on specific notes as anchors: for me, the ones that were most important to concentrate on nailing were the Bb and E in the first septuplet run, the C in the sextuplet, the A in the triplet immediately following the sextuplet, and then the final septuplet isn’t too bad with an emphasis on the octave between the Gs, and aided by the one-finger E and overblown open F.
Don’t let the wizard get you with the broom on your way out.
One week ago today, I played John Williams’s _Five Sacred Trees _with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra.
I actually didn’t choose this piece. Bradley Thachuck, the music director of the NSO, asked if I wanted to play it; I had heard of it, of course, and said yes… and then listened to it. That was in February of 2016; I ordered the part right away and started practicing it. And continued practicing it, pretty consistently, for the next two years. This turned out to be a little bit overkill, but actually… not all that much.
Over the course of the two years that I invested in it, I learned, re-learned, memorized, and agonized over every bar in the piece, so now that it’s all over, it seems like it would be worthwhile to write it all down in the form of detailed notes about how I played it. These are not, of course, instructions to be followed; what worked for me may not be best for someone else, and some of these decisions were only arrived at after a practicing process that was in itself valuable. They are, though, the kind of thing that I think I would have appreciated reading two years ago; just a list of issues and how one person chose to work through them. With a standard like the Mozart concerto, you already begin work on it with an idea of what the issues and choices are, bar-by-bar. Here are some ideas about Five Sacred Trees.
A note on memorization: I did memorize it, and made a video recording with piano for memory, both for rehearsal and archival purposes. When I mentioned to Stephane Levesque, who played the piece with the OSM, that I was hoping to perform from memory, his horrified reaction made me reconsider. Stephane rarely forbade me from or forced me to do anything, as a student, but when he did there was usually a very good reason, so a strong reaction from him, based on performance experience with the piece in question, seemed worth paying attention to. I ended up having the music in front of me in performance and found some parts of it– like the opening cadenza, and much of Dathi– easier with my eyes closed, while some parts, like Tortan and Craeb Uisnig, were easier with eyes open (but I was still very glad I didn’t need my eyes glued to the part, and could swivel to communicate easily with the conductor and concertmaster.)
I’ll post these by movement, so here are my notes on Eo Mugna.
- Opening: Big breath out, empty lungs. Small breath in and out at the bottom. Big breath in. There’s a crescendo on the first note, but leaving too much room for it makes the entrance sound timid.
- Mm 4, whisper lock on.
- Mm 5, eighth notes long to contrast with the accents on many of the other eighths in the opening.
- Mm 7, there is a decrescendo on the low C in the 1st edition, removed in the 2nd. I settled on a slight decrescendo but still an emphatic vibrato and ending to the note.
- Mm 8-9, I chose to take a large pause and then play this section with all legato eighth notes.
- Mm 10, long low C and then accelerated up the run, using the R4 F# and found that anchoring my attention on the Bb ensured it emerged cleanly. I probably worked this run up from quarter=20 about fifteen separate times, and it stuck a little more each time.
- Mm 11, started extremely slowly and sped up, with the last two eights aided by the L-only Eb fingering.
- Mm 12 aided by a firm grip on the low G. The final D of the bar is, for some reason, extremely intuitive to play as an eighth note in the tempo of the new section, which it is not. The conductor requested that I elongate it, so I did, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to just play it as a quarter in the new tempo, which would be an excellent length.
- My tempo for the main section was intentionally rather fast: more like 85 (to the marked 72-76.) I like this tempo because it allows the entire theme to be played comfortably in one breath, and because the marked tempo sounds draggy to me, but maybe I’m just young and impatient.
- So, what’s the difference between a grace note and a thirty-second in this passage? I have been reliably informed that John Williams, when asked this question, had no strong opinion on the matter. One could make a case that, in the interest of not confusing the cello section, who unlike the bassoonist are individually tasked with playing this theme in unison with other people, the second quarter beat of mm 13 should be deliberately placed on the beat and not a moment before, whereas the second quarter beat of mm 16 should have the grace note placed slightly ahead of it.
- Mm 19, I rather enjoy that the first half of the bar contains a sixteenth note instead of the expected thirty-second, and make possibly an inappropriately big deal of it.
- Mm 21 could be interpreted as a change of character and a bouncier articulation, and I was planning on doing so, but once I was actually standing beside the cello section taking their shot at the theme, it suddenly seemed a little obnoxious, and I smoothed it out.
- Memorization-wise, mm 27 and 36 are easy to mix up and end up in the wrong place. My mnemonic was that the first time is fancier (grace note before the 2nd big beat of 27, omitted in 36) and started higher, and the second time around I just want to get it over with (no grace note) and end lower (the downwards run starts on G in 37, E in 28.)
- Mm 29, the low D looks like it should have to be quiet. It doesn’t; it will be swallowed by the bass clarinet and the wind section anyway, so whatever volume will be best in tune is fine.
- I put the lock on during the low G in 28 and remove it after the D just for peace of mind.
- Mm 34, I play the first A of the run long and the high A with the L hand only. Mm 36-37 is conspicuously lacking in dynamic guidance, but with aggressive section that comes after it, I decided to go for loud.
- Mm 52-53: should the first bassoon note have a clearly audible attack, or should it start in the ring of the orchestra’s final chord? I’ve heard it both ways, but chose to observe the accent and make sure by attack was heard.
- Mm 55 whisper lock on in caesura.
- Mm 55-56, all the eighths have legato markings, which makes a nice contrast with 53-54 and also with the sfz in 57, where I took Chris Millard’s suggestion to conceive of it “like a frog burping.”
- Mm 57-58: are the eighth notes grouped six and three, or do the slurs stand in contrast to the emphasis that is properly place on the first and second quarter beats of 58? After all, this section is essentially meterless, yet he still put a bar line in the middle of this ascending line and chose the vehicle of eighth notes to convey the desired pitches. There’s a strong argument for the latter, but I chose to phrase with the slurs.
- Unlock before mm 59. 59, grouped the run 3-3-4 to accelerate.
- If memorizing, I implore you to not play mm 16 where mm 62 should be.
- Mm 64, I like the sfz interpreted as a lift before the downbeat of the next measure.
- Starting mm 66, it’s easy to get too soft, too fast. The dim only starts in mm 70.
- For the final D, I added R thumb and 2.