Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Baltimore

I’m really liking Baltimore — or, at least, this little bit of it that I’ve been hanging around in. My “dorm” and several of the buildings where I’ve been having classes and seminars are part of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) campus. It’s apparently a very old college (founded in the early 1800s?) and some of the buildings are magnificent old things with marble and ivy and amazing tile floors and such. There are also several very modern-design buildings. The residential parts of the neighborhood are loaded with fabulous old brownstones and tree-lined boulevards. We’re in the Bolton Hill neighborhood which, I’m led to understand, is well known as being fairly swanky. I am just love, love, loving this neighborhood! I often walk to and from my rehearsals and classes (versus taking the free shuttle bus) and it feels a lot like being back in college — but without all the neurosis and poverty.

I could get into this on a permanent basis!

The Mount Royal train station is in the foreground and the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall is in the background.

It's hard to get a feel for the really cool scale and appearance of this building from the picture. But... very cool.

BSO Academy Piccolo Master Class

There was so much useful and interesting information present by Laurie Sokoloff that there was no way to note all of it. So, these are just some disjointed blurblets that I wrote down. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of my transcription of all of the alternative fingerings she mentioned. I did my best. Here we go…

• Recommended book: The Complete Piccolo by Jan Gippo
• Recommends the piccolo flag for cleaning the little beast.
• Your metronome absolutely needs to have some kind of volume control so you can hear it. Make sure you get a tuner that REALLY goes all the way up to high C (on he piccolo). Recommends the Korg OT 120.
• Playing piccolo is a big job. There’s nowhere to hide. You have to tune to the established pitch of the orchestra, whatever that might be.
• Recommends the Keefe and Burkart piccolos especially. The old Zentners were good student piccolos. They’re no longer manufactured but you can sometimes find them on eBay. For playing outside, the metal-headed resin-bodied Yamahas are probably the best of the lot.
• Remember that wood and silver piccolos have different bores. Alternative fingerings that work on one may not work on another. (And sometimes don’t work even on the same kind but a different maker.)
• When BSO has had auditions for their 2nd flute position they’ve had between 100 and 200 people apply. There are many very good players and competition is very stiff.
• Mary Kay Fink in Cleveland is a phenomenal player.
• Intonation issues: High D# and E are often sharp (as in flute). Lift the pinky. High A, if sharp, add 1 and 2 on the right hand and half-hole the end of the picc with your little finger.
• Going from high A to high E can be difficult. Try quickly lifting the pinky while making the transition.
• Alternative fingerings… these fingerings are “left hand”|”right hand”
• 2nd octave B: 123|123, or for the “squeaky gate” sound 1Th3|124, very quiet is 1Th23|1234
• 2nd octave C: 123|13, or progressively to raise the pitch, 123|134, 123|1, 123|14
• 2nd octave C#: Th23|234 (can think of as D with the two F# keys), or Th23|24
• 3rd octave D: to bring the pitch up Th234|14, the “Gippo D” Th234|234
• 3rd octave D#: regular fingering and add Tr1
• 3rd octave E: lift pinky, add Tr2
• 3rd octave F: add Tr2
• 3rd octave F#: to make higher Th13|23, to make lower Bb13|23
• 3rd octave G: No help!
• To keep the piccolo stable in your hands when playing fast, leave as many fingers down as you can without jeopardizing sound and musicality.
• Check out the San Francisco Symphony’s DVD Keeping Score: The Making of a Performance – Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. It’s supposed to be very good.
• The secret to playing the especially hard picc part in the 4th is to keep the G# key open as long as possible. In the section with the 32nd notes, the F doesn’t want to speak. Keep G# open to mid register F. On thumb Bb for the whole solo. G#: 234|234, F: Th14|12Tr24, Eb: Bb1234|___. And if that makes any sense to you, best of luck. I doubt I got it right and I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to play the 4th on picc, but hey — you never know.

And that’s it!

BSO Academy Day 4

Another somewhat easy day today. The schedule:

• 11:30 am – 12:30 pm   Full orchestra rehearsal with Marin Alsop. I learned while browsing the web late last night (or was it early this morning?) that Ms Alsop is a protege of Leonard Bernstein. How extremely cool is that!? And, unknown to me before just a couple days ago, the BSO released a new recording of Bernstein’s Mass a couple years ago. The Mass has always been a favorite of mine, so I immediately downloaded it from iTunes and am looking forward to listening to it when I’m not exhausted.
• 12:30 – 2 pm   Lunch, fabulous as always.
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm   Piccolo Master Class with Laurie Sokoloff. As you might imagine, this was wonderful. She has so many great stories and knows so much about the world of the professional orchestra musician and, of course, is an expert on the piccolo. I’ll write a separate blog entry with my notes from this one.
• 4:30 – 6 pm   Flute trio rehearsal. We perform tomorrow night.
• There’s also a concert tonight from 7:30 to 10 pm with a reception afterwards. It’s solo repertoire (all instruments) with piano accompaniment. I’d go except I didn’t sleep at ALL last night (ongoing insomnia problems) and I really REALLY need to try to get some serious sleep tonight.

BSO Academy Performance Anxiety Seminar

I’m one of those very lucky people who doesn’t have a big problem with performance anxiety. This is not to say that I don’t sometimes become nervous about performing — especially solo passages — but it’s not generally debilitating. Usually, a few deep breaths to calm myself before playing is enough to keep total panic at bay long enough to get through whatever I need to play. I know quite a few people, though, who really do have a problem with it. These seminar notes are for them!

• Many fears come from childhood: annihilation, being ignored, being in power, criticism, being disappointing, embarrassment, failure, loss of control, memory loss, rejection.
• Since we cannot control our audience, we have to control what we CAN: our performance.
• Prepare: imagine you’re performing, play for other people, do positive self-talk (people want me to play well, they like me, I’m going to ace this passage), act like you’re confident (fake it ’til you make it).
• The 10-second Centering Exercise: Inhale 5 seconds, exhale 5 seconds (in through the nose, out through the mouth). Add an “incantation” while doing the inhale/exhale such as: I am calm and centered, I expect nothing, I feel supported, I embrace this moment, I love my work, I make my meaning.
• ** My favorite by far is “I expect nothing.”
• Detachment training: Don’t think thoughts that don’t serve you.
• Disidentification: Detach your identity from habits or outcome.
• Remember that when you’re criticized for your performance, it’s almost never personal.
• Other approaches: the drug Inderal to slow the heart rate (beta blocker — not sure how I feel about this one), yoga, reorienting, visualization, affirmation.

BSO Academy Feldenkrais Seminar

Before this Academy experience, I had never heard of Feldenkrais. I’m sure there’s WAY more to it than I’m going to try to describe here, but this is what I understood of it. It’s a technique and series of “exercises” for challenging and broadening your habitual ways of moving.

All of us, as we age, become accustomed to moving in fairly specific ways. These patterns of motion become ingrained and after a while they define what we believe we’re capable of doing. Feldenkrais has you moving in ways most of us wouldn’t normally move and it really does seem to free you up in terms of range of motion and muscle tension.

Anyway, so here are some blurblets that I took as notes:

• Most of us don’t really know ourselves “in movement”.
• How to sit: So if a tiger came into the room you could very quickly get up and run away.
• Stand being ready to walk. Be best able to overcome inertia.
• Sit forward in your chair, your arms “light”, and your trunk (body) in such a place as to cancel the weight of the arms.
• Muscles get used to habitually working only in certain ways. You need to challenge muscles and joints to work in different ways.
• Don’t wear tight pants and belts. They constrict your movement, your breathing, all kinds of things!
• Learn the full range of movement of your shoulder blades. For musicians, shoulder blades are hugely important.

The woman who ran the class had us doing different exercises while seated in chairs and, I’m telling you, it was remarkable how freeing the experience was.

Feldenkrais: Worth checking out.

BSO Academy Day 3

Today was a relatively light day and that was most welcome! Here’s the schedule:

10 am – 11 am Combined wind and brass sectional

11:20 am – 12:30 pm Full orchestra rehearsal with Marin Alsop

12:30 pm – 2 pm Lunch. And let me just say a little about lunch. It’s super nice. They feed us at tables set up in the Meyerhoff Hall’s main lobby, so it’s all bright and sunshine-y and you can see people passing on the street who look in at us with envy in their eyes. “Those people must be very special. They’re having fancy catered lunch in a prestigious symphony’s hall!” Yes, yes indeed. We are very special. The lunches have been good. Today they had a couple different salads. I got the one with cranberries and walnuts and goat cheese. They also had a couple different kinds of meaty sandwiches which, of course, I did not eat. And they had a giant fruit plate. And pretty much whatever a person might want to drink (non-alcoholic, of course). It was really good.

2 pm – 4 pm Feldenkrais. You may be saying, “Felden-what??” I had never heard of it before, but I had the impression that it was sort of like the Alexander Technique. I didn’t think I’d find it interesting or useful but I have to admit, I misjudged it. I’ll write a separate short post about it later tonight.

4:15 pm – 5:15 pm Conquering Stage Fright. I’ll write a separate post about that, too.

And that’s it! I’ve got the rest of the night off! Hurray!! I could have signed up for a walking tour of part of Baltimore, but I figured I’d be wanting some time off by now and I was absolutely right.

Besides, I needed to be back in my room and online for a special “webinar” I’m enrolled in called “Treating Peritoneal Cancer with Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC) from a Patient Perspective and from the Surgeon’s Perspective”. That’s at 8 pm. Should be interesting.

BSO Academy Practice Seminar

As before, just a series of thoughts that I jotted down.

Musicians are always thinking of one of these three things:

1. I should be practicing right now.
2. I should have practiced more (last week/last year/in school/when I was younger)
3. I’m absolutely going to practice more (tomorrow/next week/this summer)

Heh, heh… too TOO true!

If you don’t bring positive emotion into the practice room, you won’t accomplish anything.

“Fake play” a few times before actually playing something.

Practice is taking things apart and then putting them back together again.

Treat practicing like a game that you can “cheat” at so you always win

1. slow the notes way down
2. leave notes out
3. just sing the music

Recommends biofeedback software for help learning what it feels like to be relaxed (which is how you should feel when you’re practicing) (and when you’re performing): emWave by HeartMath.

What you do during the rests is as important as what you do when you’re playing.

The only true kind of practice is practice of music. There is no effective practice of technique.

Our goals should be to increase BEAUTY while decreasing EFFORT.

BSO Academy Day 2

Another wonderful and really busy day!

8 am – 9:30 am   Private lesson on piccolo with Laurie Sokoloff. Wow! What a really nice person and so smart about playing the piccolo! I only hope I can remember at least half of what she told me. One thing in particular that really “got” me is that I’m using way more air than I need to. And because I’ve got all this air under pressure, my tonguing is much harder than it should be. Less pressure on the air coming up from the lungs means the tongue can be much lighter. Make sense? It sure did to me! Not surprisingly, the Breathing guy (Mr. Fedderly) said something very similar about wind players in general.

10 am – 11 am   Winds and Brass Sectional

11:30 am – 12:30 pm   Rehearsal with the full orchestra with Marin Alsop. Zow!! Exciting! Fun! But absolutely no time for screwing around. She marched us right through most of both pieces.

2:30 pm – 4 pm   Combined flute master class and sectionals for groups 1 and 2. (The group 1 people are playing Mahler and a couple other pieces.)

4:30 pm – 6 pm   Chamber Music rehearsal (same as yesterday)

7:30 pm – 9:30 pm   Practice Techniques. This was another wonderful seminar done by a brass player — this time the orchestra’s principal trumpet. As with the Breathing seminar, I’ll create a separate blog entry for my notes so they’ll be easier to find.

BSO Academy Breathing Seminar

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to a seminar last night that was led by a guy (the BSO tuba player) who studied with the very famous Arnold Jacobs. If you’re not a woodwind or brass player, the majority of this will make no sense to you at all. It may make no sense even if you are a woodwind or brass player — because I’m just going to transcribe the little blurblets that I took as notes. This is mainly to immortalize them for my own use, but if they’re interesting or useful to you — well, all the better.

Here we go…

A good breath is suction without friction.

Take a really deep breath and hold it. At the same time bear down with your lower abdominal muscles as you might if you were seated upon the porcelain throne. Now — note the location of your tongue while you do this. For some people it’s forward in the mouth tucked up against the back of the top teeth. For others it’s curled into the back of the mouth. Inevitably, the people whose tongues are curled back are going to be the ones with the most articulation problems.

Relative air flow rates (“something or other” per hour) for different instruments:

• Oboe 7
• Trumpet 30
• Trombone 60
• Tuba 120-140
• and the only other instrument that approaches the flow rate of the tuba? Yup — the flute. (Most flutists already know this, but it astonishes a lot of the brass players.

It’s normal to have a moderate “up” movement in the shoulders as the rib cage expands.

Don’t try for “100%” inhalation or you will lock up.

Increased air PRESSURE results in decreased AIR FLOW. Decreased air pressure results in INCREASED air flow. It’s counter intuitive, but true. (Sombody-or-other’s Law)

Recommends the book CHOKE: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

Say this sentence out loud: “Time to talk.” That is all the harder you should tongue!

Most people are using WAY too much air pressure.

Playing is just like speaking. You breath in an effortless manner and phrase sentences. Playing is (should be) like that.

Since playing higher notes requires more air pressure, you need to set a LOWER baseline level of pressure for your playing so you can still play high without locking up.

For a perfect natural diminuendo, just keep the same air flow and let it run out.

During practice, try playing the same phrase (or entire piece) with five or six different kinds of emotional content.

Make up words and sing the piece.

In performing, it’s not for the musician to have the emotional experience. It’s for us to provide that for the audience.

BSO Academy Day 1

Contrary to what you may have gathered from the majority of my recent posts, I do actually do things besides obsess about Pseudomyxoma Peritonei and my upcoming surgery.

One of the most enjoyable things I do is play the flute. This week, I’m thrilled to be participating in the BSO Academy in Baltimore, Maryland. (There’s some weird synchronicity going on with Baltimore, I think. My new doctor and hospital are also in Baltimore.) Anyway, the Academy is a special week-long event with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra where competent amateurs rehearse along side the professionals and, at the end of the week, perform in concert with the orchestra in the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. We also get to participate in masterclasses, sectionals with the professional musicians, seminars on various music-related topics, and chamber music groups.

Let me tell you first about the fabulous soiree the BSO put on for us Sunday, then I’ll describe what yesterday — the first full day of the Academy — was like. First, we were treated to a performance of the Verdi Requiem — which was stunningly beautiful. Then we got to go up on stage for orientation. THEN, they had a cocktail hour in the lobby of Meyerhoff Hall with all sorts of fancy-shmancy appetizers, and then after THAT, a really swell buffet dinner. I met some nice people but was glad to get settled in my room in the Meyerhoff House — a housing building for students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). I have my own bedroom in a 2-bedroom apartment sort of thing. My roommate is a horn player who, for her daytime job, handles international taxes for a big pharmaceutical company. On Monday morning she and I had breakfast with a guy (an older violinist participating in the Academy) and it quickly became apparent that the guy and I were like-minded liberals and my roommate…. apparently not so much.

It took tremendous self-control, but I succeeded in not lipping off too much about how UNDER taxed most big corporations are.

Anyway… let me tell you just a bit about Monday’s agenda.

10 am – 12 pm   Flute Sectionals with Emily Skala, the principal flutist for the BSO. She’s very nice. We did some preliminary run-through of the two pieces my group is playing. That’s the Rimsky-Korsakov Capriccio Espagnol and the Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphosis. I’m playing first on both (with Emily and one other participant). As far as solos go, on the Rimsky I’m playing the cadenza and other solos in the 4th movement, and half of the solos in the 5th movement. On the Hindemith I’m playing the solos in the Turandot Scherzo

12 pm – 2 pm   Lunch

2 pm – 3 pm   Injury Prevention Seminar (I actually skipped this to go to Target to pick up some essentials that I hadn’t brought. This dorm room is spartan.)

3:15 pm – 4:15 pm   Alexander Technique Seminar. I have to admit that I’m still not persuaded of  the usefulness of this.

4:30 pm – 6 pm   Chamber Music Rehearsal. I’m playing a flute trio with the BSO’s second flute, Marcia Kamper, and another BSO Academy participant. We’re doing the Haydn Flute Clock Sonata and we’ll be performing that in a concert on Friday night. Marcia is really nice. Very approachable. I like her a lot.

6 pm – 7:30 pm Dinner

7:30 pm to almost 10 pm   Breathing Seminar. This was with a tuba player who studied with Arnold Jacobs. Most of you who are musicians will know that name. There was a lot of really interesting and useful material presented and I’ll try to do another blog post at some time containing some of what I took away from it.

While I didn’t sleep all that well on Sunday night, I conked right out last night and slept soundly.

More later about the ongoing adventure! I’m having a great time!!