Last weekend I played La Mer and Fountains of Rome with the Ontario Philharmonic, which is in Oshawa; I’ve driven to that orchestra before, but I ended up carless for some services this time, so took the train as far as it goes, Hamilton to Oshawa:
A small miracle: on my way home from that concert, the Oshawa to Hamilton train by necessaity passing through a minor town in between where there was a concert apparently attended by a couple people at least… my train pulled out of Union station ten minutes before the reported end of the Taylor Swift set.
At a choral concert last month, I read in the program that one of the involved choirs’ next concert was Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with the Hamilton Philharmonic, one of my favourite pieces, which I got to play some of last year, but hadn’t expected to ever play for real. “I can’t believe they’re doing Alexander’s Feast in Hamilton and I’m not playing it,” I thought, distraught, and manifested an email hiring me for it the next day.
That concert was paired this week with a chamber music concert of Mozart’s Gran Partita, which fatigue-wise is not really what you want to have a dress rehearsal for right before a concert of Baroque continuo.
The setup for last night’s concert: you know the party’s really getting started when they bring out the third harpsichord.
I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…
Which I won’t need next week, because next week’s Baroque show is BWV 149, a bassoon part that calls to mind Bach sitting at his desk thinking “gee, I sure hope someone completely reinvents this instrument in a hundred years or so.”
The Burlington Performing Arts Centre is very committed to ensuring things to not fall in the orchestra pit. Which is appreciated, however, has the amusing effect that the conductor needs to stand on the podium located under the net while sticking their head out of this… conductor hole.
Playing La Bohème this week, calling to mind the words of my conducting teacher, Alain Cazes, at music school: “If you ever have the chance to listen to a Puccini opera with the score, you will freak out! I guarantee it! You will freak out!”
Pst of basic (but somehow also, seemingly, top-secret) info from Bret Pimentel, Use your metronome most of the time, with some excellent quotes:
I know very few musicians who have the problem that their tempos are too steady. It’s important to practice the tempo nuances too, but if you can’t play the line in perfect time then you probably can’t do a convincing accelerando/ritardando.
In my experience, there are two kinds of musicians who think they don’t need a metronome. One is the top 1%, who have spent a lifetime developing world-class musical abilities. The other is beginning and intermediate musicians, who haven’t learned the value of metronome work because they haven’t done it enough. Don’t mistake a top-level musician’s musings for good beginner advice.
The day before yesterday, while integrating line charges, I put Handel’s Alexander’s Feast on to keep me company; an oratorio on the text of a very silly Dryden poem, which I like because it has sick tunes and also because I love Alexander and particularly Alexander portrayed as a complete wacko clown.
Please, Mr. Stone, I don’t want a thinly veiled Iraq War allegory, I want whatever the hell this is! (Talbot Shrewsbury Book, 1444)
“What a goofy oratorio,” thinks I, integrating, “too bad I’ll probably never get to play it.” Though, only playing the bassoon here would not quite be sufficient. Much as we all know that playing percussion is just as difficult, subtle, and lifelong an enterprise as playing any other instrument (not even counting all the loading and unloading while everyone packs up and goes home!), Now strike the golden lyre again is the kind of timpani part that makes you think, “hey, I could play that. In fact, I want to play that. I ought to play that! I GOTTA play that! Someone get me two big drums to bang RIGHT NOW!”
…and then, the very next day, what should appear in my very own inbox but a gig full of Handel, including three numbers from Alexander’s Feast. (But only on bassoon. Womp womp. )
Got a Landwell in an under-the-table-stand knife deal at the halftime of pops with the Hamilton Phil tonight… now I have to learn how to sharpen a knife like an oboist properly
Speaking of unexamined cultural assumptions– such as the notion that a number “goes” in order from most to least significant digit-- all of the light switches seem to work in reverse here. As in, the light is on when it’s in the down position, and off when it’s in the up position. This feels wrong, as if there must surely be some real, physical justification as to why up-on/down-off is the correct way for a light switch to work, which of course there isn’t.
Which reminds me of this document which showed up on my RSS reader a few weeks ago: Musical Pitch is Not “High” or “Low”, about different metaphors for pitch. Which was the first time I’d seen it suggested that the idea of high and low pitches is a metaphor; it’s so deeply ingrained in Western musical culture that it feels as if it must be a literal description of physical reality.
And sure, high notes are “high frequency”– but then also, they’re “low period,” so why not that definition instead?1 High notes seem “high” if you play an on-the shoulder string instrument because your hand is closer to your face… but then, if you play a between-the-legs string instrument, high notes have your hand closer to the ground. Vocalized, “high” notes feel higher in the body– but that’s because the only piece of objective physical reality at play here is that shorter objects produce “higher” pitches, and in the context of singing that translates to a higher feeling in the body. If you wanted to map shorter vs. longer objects to a vertical axis, though, a reasonable way to do so would be to stand them up on the shared reference point of the ground– in which case the terminating point of a shorter object is lower to the ground than the terminating point of a longer one, which is higher. And indeed, several cultures and studies on the list do indeed use the high/low metaphors in that other, “reversed” fashion.
I was playing a concert recently with a rather speedy Bach continuo part. As I was practicing, it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had happened to the technique of double-tonguing on the bassoon in the first part of the 20th century.
Plenty of Baroque continuo parts, including those usually including bassoon, contain passages that only the most freakish of wagglers could single-tongue. It seems obvious that Baroque bassoonists must have been able to double tongue; and sure enough, in JJ Quantz’s chapter on articulation, after describing several tonguing techniques including double tonguing, he notes:
Why Quantz thinks you can’t double tongue on the oboe is a mystery for another day (or for a Baroque oboist to tell me); the point is, bassoonists were known double-tonguers in 1752, if not known good-reed-havers.
Why, then, did double-tonguing seem to disappear from the toolbox for a period of time? That it did is of course anecdotal, but it does seem to me that among the generation of professional bassoonists who got jobs in the early or mid 20th century, it was very much an optional technique. That generation is largely gone from the active playing scene, but many people still have stories of teachers or older colleagues who didn’t double tongue, and I have even heard it said by some of those players that bassoons don’t double tongue, or that if they do it is a new invention. (This does seem to be largely true on clarinet. “Fucking slur two tongue two… shit!”)
I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…
