Barry Blogs

Mozart 2nd mvt. - Context

2012-02-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

Mozart Bassoon Concerto, 2nd movement: Context

Using the same argument as I did in a previous blog about the opening phrase of the first movement of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto, I'd like to look now at the second movement.

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written for the bassoon, in part because of its sublime first phrase:

In nuts and bolts music theory terms it can be described as a long note rising a perfect fourth with a grace note above that decorating a 4/3 suspension on a strong beat and a resolution.

The argument I used for the first movement was that Mozart, when writing the first phrase of that movement was using a motive he'd developed over time and used in other pieces prior to writing the Bassoon Concerto. He used it again a few times after that.

The same holds true for the first motive in the second movement. Here are some prior examples:

Below is the opening of the first movement of his first string quartet, written well before the Bassoon Concerto (followed by a listening example):

Next is the second movement of the Symphony #21(In the listening example, the second movement starts about 7 minutes in.):

Next is his string quartet, K. 172(note the same intervals and suspension in the 1st violin on beat 3):

In this listening example, the second movement starts at about 4'15" in.

Here is Mozart's ultimate setting of the figure: "Porgi amor", the Countess's aria from The Marriage of Figaro.

You can see and hear how rich the raw material of this motive was for Mozart!

By the way, I can't claim to have discovered any of this myself! Stanley Sadie in his book, "Mozart, the EarlyYears" makes the connection between the Symphony and string quartets excerpted above and the theme for the second movement of the Bassoon Concerto, calling it the "Porgi amor" theme.

Musicologist Neal Zaslaw, draws a similarity between the theme and "Che faro senza Euridice" from Gluck's "Orfeo et Euridice" from 1764. This was a highly influential opera and "Che faro" is the most performed aria from it. Perhaps Mozart knew this music. Look closely at measures 3 and 4 and you'll notice a similarity.

A conclusion to be drawn from all this is musical themes don't exist in a vacuum. They are permutations of motives with the composer has been working, sometimes for years. They bubble up from a holding place somewhere in the brain and get reworked and put in a new context. Old wine in new bottles!

Listening choices - YouTube, Naxos, etc.

2012-02-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

As I said in a previous blog, today we have more access to media than ever before. We can listen to much of the classical repertoire for free and often watch a video of the performance.

As an "old guy" I can bear witness to these changes and find them on the whole to be very positive developments. I don't use these new resources as much as younger musicians do, since I still have an extensive library of CDs, LPs and even a couple of 78 rpm records (also some wax cylinders!) to refer to.

In the "old days" there were certain "gate keepers" -- record companies, critics, agents, sponsors who chose musicians for their projects. In most cases these musicians had paid their dues through auditions, competitions, concertizing, etc. Although there was certainly cronyism at times, mostly the performers were given recording opportunities based upon the marketplace as controlled by the record companies and the buying public. If it didn't sell, you weren't given another opportunity. If you didn't perform in support of your recordings, generally they didn't sell well.

While my above description may be over simplified, this was basically how it was.

Today many of the gate keepers are gone or are much less powerful. More opportunities are available to enterprising, self-motivated musicians.

As I've said before, though, with increased freedom and opportunity comes increased responsibility. When control is taken away from critics and record companies, the listener has a much wider field of performances to choose from.

In the classical world this poses an especially thorny problem. Classical music is by definition devoted to quality. In order to grasp the full essence of a great piece of music, it's very important to seek out the performances and recordings that best showcase this.

Over the past couple of years, I've noticed my students have been using on-line sources like YouTube, I-tunes and Naxos Music Library more and more for their study. I think everyone would agree that, along with many excellent performances, there is a lot of junk on these sites.

People use them for many different purposes - entertainment, serious study, novelty, etc.

Here are some guidelines I'd follow if I were a young bassoonist:

Before listening, educate yourself on which soloists, ensembles, etc. are considered tops in their field.
When possible, try to choose recordings by those artists.
Remember that many of the best performances have yet to be uploaded to YouTube and other sources. There is a whole ocean of great recordings from the past out there. You might be missing something.
Therefore, if you are a college music student, your school's music library is probably your best source for listening! Don't be afraid of those dusty LPs sitting on the shelves! A little crackle and hiss won't hurt you!
Regarding style, remember that amongst bassoon players there is still something of a divide between German, French, and American styles and sounds. Some of the best bassoon soloists are German or French, but sound, vibrato, etc. may not be what we go for in the U.S. and vice versa.

Below is the first page that comes up on YouTube when searching for "Mozart Bassoon Concerto". On the page you will find a few commercial recordings, several live performances by students, one recording on trombone, and even a clever ad for an old Sony cassette player being sold by a former student of mine, using a performance she did of the Mozart while studying with me to demonstrate the cassette player.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mozart+bassoon+concerto&oq=mozart+bassoon+&aq=0&aqi=g9g-s1&aql=&gs_sm=1&gs_upl=16959l20133l0l21920l17l16l1l4l5l0l285l2166l0.5.6l11l0

Next I searched for "Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto".

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tchaikovsky+violin+concerto&oq=Tchaikovsky+violin&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=1&gs_upl=230140l234950l0l236602l18l17l0l9l9l0l248l1362l0.7.1l8l0

Note the first several names on this page: Heifetz, Oistrahk, Perlman, Jansen, Kremer, Chang. Violinists visiting this page will have a much easier time finding great performances of this piece than bassoonists will on the Mozart page!

What gives here? Certainly there are more famous violin soloists than bassoonists, but where are the recordings by Thunemann, Turkovic, McGill, Garfield, etc. on "our" page?

Who has an opinion on this? Let's hear from you!

On-line sources -- good or bad?

2012-02-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

Technology is neither bad nor good. It's in the use of technology where we find good and bad choices. The classic example of this is in the harnessing of the power of the atom.

Through technology, musicians today have more access to music and recordings than ever before.

Through YouTube, I-Tunes, Naxos Music Library, IMSLP and other sources one can find just about anything, much of it free or extremely inexpensive.

With this much access also comes responsibility. In a discipline like classical music, it's important to be discriminating. However, none of these sites offer critiques, editors or even aggregators to help the consumer find the best edition or best recording. While you can find discussion of the merits of a performance on YouTube, often the commentators are anonymous.

In a performance on YouTube of a mass by Josquin des Prez, we don't know whether the commentator is a musicologist/conductor who's specialty is music of the Northern Renaissance or simply an enthusiastic teenager reacting to her first hearing of this kind of music.

Like most things on the Internet, discernment is in your hands.

In a previous post, I discussed some disturbing trends in interpretation of the first phrase of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto. One commentator, Mike Macaulay may have uncovered one of the reasons for the tendency to play the first note short and accent the second note.

Here is the first page of the concerto as listed on IMSLP:

This is the Peters Edition.

Here is the first page of the Universal Edition.

As you can see, no staccato, no accent. We are left to ask, "WHO put them there". This question can only be considered if you have access to the earliest source.

Not until we are able to see the original or "Urtext" can we really be sure what the composer left and what an editor has added.

Note the dotted line slur in Universal measure 4 and the editor's suggested rhythm for the grace notes in measure 5. Both suggestions are made so that we can see the original AND the suggestion at the same time. This is correct practice for editions.

In the case of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto we don't have the original manuscript. The Universal Edition uses the first edition, second printing of the piece published by Andre Offenbach in 1805. Mozart's widow, Constanze sold many of her husband's manuscripts to Offenbach after his death to pay her debts. This is the earliest edition we have and, therefore, must be considered the most authoritative.

For years many American bassoonists learned the Mozart Concerto using the edition made by J. Walter Guetter, one of the preeminent bassoonists of the 20th Century. This is the edition I used when first learning the piece. While the edition contains many fine ideas for interpretation, it is vastly different from the Universal.

I was shocked to see the Universal Edition after so many years with Guetter. There were so many mannerisms in my interpretation that no longer made sense after looking at the Universal.

Here's an edition of Milde Concert Study #27 from IMSLP:

Here is the first page of the Merseburger Edition which dates from between the World Wars.

In the Merseberg, there are NO dynamics on the page! This leaves a lot of leeway to the performer. With leeway comes responsibility. That means applying your own musical logic and instincts to the piece along with your understanding of acceptable performance practice, even music theory.

In the IMSLP edition, many of these questions have been solved for us already by the arranger, Alek Ferlazzo. However, unless we see what Alek was working with, we don't know which decisions are his and which were made by Milde. This is important to know.

A side note: Google tells me that Alek may be a high school bassoonist(?) He obviously has great skill with Sibelius. I want to commend him for his work and generosity in sharing his editions and uploads.

A similar situation applies in Simon Kovar's edition (International Music Company) of the Milde Concert Studies. Kovar made many fine suggestions, but took a lot of liberties with his editing when compared to an older edition like Merseburger, Hofmeister or Cundy-Bettoney (which are basically the same). The trouble is, once again, without access to these editions, we don't know what is the editor and what is Milde.

When I teach the Mozart I require my students to purchase the Universal Edition. For Milde it's Cundy-Bettoney or Hofmeister.

That's enough ranting for one post. Soon I'll devote some time to discussing the virtues and pitfalls of YouTube and Naxos.

Mozart Concerto and auditions -- the first phrase

2012-02-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

You're looking at what has arguably become the most important phrase ever written for the bassoon!

While there is much other great music written for our instrument, the nearly exclusive use of the Mozart concerto in auditions has made this opening phrase extremely important for bassoonists today.

At our recent second bassoon audition, I had a chance to sample what some of the best bassoonists do with this phrase in an audition. Since it's the first music we hear from a candidate, the phrase serves as a musical handshake -- a first encounter with that person's musical beliefs.

Many on the committee that day felt the handshakes coming from the Mozart were more like vise grips! Excessively firm and rough. The first note was often played as though the person shaking your hand was in a hurry to get to the next person in line -- extremely short and accented.

Another trend we noticed was -- along with chopping off the first note -- a tendency to treat the second note like a stressed syncopation. Thus, the first phrase came off sounding like "dut-DAHH"!

I've thought about this trend for a while and have come up with a couple of possible reasons for why this mannerism has grown like a virus.

Nerves.
Younger players (most of our auditionees were on the young side) listening indiscriminately to bad YouTube performances, etc. More about YouTube as a force for musical good or evil in another post.
The half note on beat two, being longer than the quarter on beat one, will sound more stressed than the quarter on its own simply because it lasts twice as long.

But is this effective? Is this musical?

Is there a precedent in Mozart for this motive? If so, can we understand what he might have thought it should sound like when composing it?

Let's take a step back and provide some context for the Concerto. Written in the summer of 1774, it's generally agreed that this was Mozart's second original concerto, the Violin Concerto #1 being the first. The earlier piano concerti are all arrangements of works by other composers and heavily influenced by Leopold Mozart (whose influence is now given even more weight in the early compositions than was once assumed).

All composers used models for their early work. Even Mozart did not compose new pieces without referring to the work of others or his previous work. This is especially true of his youthful compositions.

In understanding the context for the first motive of the Concerto, it's important to acknowledge that many composers used motives, themes, etc. over and over again, reworking them for the different pieces they were writing. This is the nuts and bolts of composing.

All of which is to say that the first notes of the Bassoon Concerto are not a unique musical gesture. They are simply one variation on a larger theme at work in Mozart's mind around 1773-1774.

Here is how the opening motive is stated in the Violin Concerto #1 of 1773.

Below is the opening of the Bassoon Concerto.

Note the following similarities:

Same key: B♭major
Same orchestration: strings, two oboes, two horns. Note the chords on the first two beats in the violins are EXACTLY the same in each piece-- more about this later.
Same opening two-note motive - quarter then half note.

Now listen to the opening of both pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Sry3mW23w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPqM_XYlUY8

I didn't label the two clips, so you might be surprised at how similar they sound at the start!

Above is the opening of the Violin Concerto #3, written shortly after the Bassoon Concerto. Notice the similarity of motive (quarter, dotted quarter this time, though), with bar one on the tonic, bar two on the dominant.

Listen to the opening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiqaaO1SYT0

Once again, the similarity is obvious.

Now, let's look closer at the scoring. It's interesting to note that each concerto begins with double or triple stops in the violins. Clearly, Mozart wanted a full, rich sound on the first note.

In order above are:

Violin Concerto #1
Bassoon Concerto
Violin Concerto #3

If you accept my argument that these motives are closely related in rhythm and scoring, then it follows that the bassoonist should play the opening motive with this context in mind.

Therefore, a short, and unemphasized first note has no place in the style of the Bassoon Concerto!

The violin cannot play a note as short as the bassoon, since the violin is a naturally resonant instrument. (The bassoon is not - see Arthur Weisberg's The Art of Wind Playing for a good explanation of this phenomenon.) In addition, the violinist must grab two or three notes at the same time. Time and space must be made for this to happen.

For the bassoonist to execute the opening in a musically appropriate fashion, therefore, he/she must leave time and energy for the first note to sound and place the second note carefully.

A great image for success in execution is to imagine two down bows. The first down bow uses the whole bow, the retake for the next note provides just the right amount of separation before starting the next note.

Here's a great example of this technique. Joshua Bell plays the Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Start at about 9 minutes in and you'll hear the cadenza. In it there is a series of dramatic down bow notes. Notice the length and spacing required for this group of notes. It's perfect for the opening of the Bassoon Concerto!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmvEdfNYsEg&feature=related

No syncopation!

I do not believe the second note (half note) is a syncopation. A syncopation is rhythm in which a note other then a downbeat or a note on a strong beat is emphasized. Look at the scoring of the three pieces above once more and you'll see that Mozart, in putting violin chords on the first beat, was quite clear that the second note in the bar should not be emphasized at the expense of the first note.

So what we are left with is two notes of equal strength separated by just enough space to make each sound clearly articulated.

That was a lot of time and space spent on two notes! However, as I said above, these two notes are often the first sounds someone who is evaluating your playing hears and thus, makes them very important. It would be interesting to know what Mozart would have made of all this fuss about his little Bassoon Concerto!

Here is a link to a recent performance of the Concerto by David McGill, the Principal Bassoonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It's one of the finest live performances of the piece I've ever heard. The streaming will be available until the middle of March, 2012, so listen soon if you can. The Concerto starts just before the 15 minute mark.

http://cso.org/Page.aspx?id=19241

Orchestral audition perspective

2012-02-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all the wonderful comments on my previous blog about the recent Second Bassoon audition we had here in Cleveland. Since people have been responsive to this topic, I'd like to continue on this thread for a while.

Please reply, ask questions, give your experiences! This is a crazy way to get a job and I can only offer my perspective and experiences (limited though they may be).

A Fresh Perspective

Today I'd like to offer a fresh perspective on performing an audition. When taking an audition, it's hard to remember why you wanted to do this thing called music in the first place! With the pressure, the nerves and the often depressing experience of being just one of many great musicians on the day, remember that you WANTED to do this, so why not try to enjoy yourself!

One way to show your enjoyment and love of the music is to try to imagine you're playing these excerpts for people who have never heard the bassoon before and don't know the music.

Forget about that panel of experts out there listening. Remember, each of them came to music this way -- uninitiated and raw. There's still a part of that in each of them you can try to reach.

How many times have you played the bassoon and had someone in the audience come up and say, "I didn't know the bassoon could do that - or sound that way!" If they've never experienced the bassoon that way before, then they've never really HEARD the music you're playing before either. Try to play at all times with these people in mind.

I find it refreshing and empowering to try to be an ambassador for the bassoon. It's hard to do this in an audition, but using your imagination is helpful in avoiding letting your nerves get control of the audition.

Even more important, imagine yourself as an ambassador for the music you are playing. You are playing some of the greatest music ever written and it's your job to show the listeners (even if they are really jaded orchestral musicians) the wonders of what you've brought to play.

Thus, the Mozart Concerto becomes a wonderful display of the nobility and grace of the instrument and not a grim minefield of mistakes waiting to be checked off by the committee.

You do have a heavy responsibility to represent our much-maligned instrument and its low-calorie repertoire well, however. To do this you must play in a way that gives the listener a sense of the context each excerpt along with the style and flavor of each little one or two minute segment. Remember that with a committee made up of mostly non-bassoonists, the general impression you leave must be very clear and distinctive.

In my experience, committees do not generally listen with music in hand. Sometimes, only the bassoonists listening will know about a particular dynamic or nuance in an excerpt (and sometimes even they won't notice). Yes, the details are very important, but players often lose the forest for all the attention they're giving to the trees.

Once I played in an orchestra that played a concert at a clarinet conference. I asked the young clarinetist in the orchestra next to me if he was nervous playing for all the clarinetists in the audience (which included Stanley Drucker and Larry Combs, for instance). This guy was known for his arrogance and replied, "No, I'll just pretend I'm giving them all a lesson"!

I'm certainly not suggesting that you need to adopt this level of arrogance when performing, but remember, when you audition, it's your chance to show those listening how great the music that you're presenting is, how much you love playing the bassoon and what a wonderful time it is to share this with other people.

That's what it's all about, isn't it?

Neo-Ragtime CD

2012-02-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'm excited about a new recording that's just come out. It's a 2-CD set of music inspired by ragtime by composer/pianist, Bryan Dykstra.

I'm playing on two of the pieces -- Curly Maple Rag and Lancashire Rag. These pieces were originally written for Chicago Symphony Principal Bassoonist, David McGill when he was playing in our orchestra. The title of the first piece alludes to a type of maple sometimes used in bassoon manufacture. The second is the name of the street on which David lived when he was in Cleveland.

I really enjoyed working on these pieces with Bryan, who is Professor of Piano at the College of Wooster here in Ohio. He was inspired by the ragtime fad of the 1970's typified by the music of Scott Joplin used in the movie, "The Sting". Bryan's compositions, while not slavishly imitative of Joplin's music, exhibit the same carefree lilt and danceable quality of original ragtime.

In addition to the two pieces for bassoon and piano there are many for solo piano, and other woodwinds with piano.

I'm especially happy with how the recording of my sound came out in this project. The sessions were done at Audio Recording Studio in Bentleyville, Ohio by Bruce Gigax, who is also the audio engineer for the Cleveland Orchestra. Bruce worked magic on my sound in his studio and the results really show!

Here is a short clip of "Curly Maple":

http://youtu.be/TDL9ziesE18

And here is one for "Lancashire":

http://youtu.be/83aYY1q8b14

The two pieces make really nice, short recital additions, maybe also as an encore or two.

For music, please contact one of our trusty double reed music dealers like Trevco-Varner or Gail Warnaar's Double Reed Shoppe.

For a CD, visit Centaur Records. I will not be selling this CD myself.

Miami Marathon

2012-02-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

Along with 25,000 other people, I ran the Miami Marathon last Sunday. Actually, I ran the half marathon part of the race, as usual.

This was the fifth time for me for this race. It's got to be one of the most beautiful race courses in the country.

This is a photo of the start of the race. It begins at the American Airlines Pavilion (on left in photo) where the Miami Heat plays their games. I won't go in the building to see a game anymore because a certain former Cleveland Cavalier plays there now.

Then it goes over to Miami Beach via the MacArthur Causeway. At this point the sun is not up yet. The bridge has purple lights shining across the water. To the south you can see the cruise ships docked at the port.

Once you get to the beach the sun has started to rise. As you run north it's easy to see some of the clubs are still open and going strong. There are a lot of spectators along the course cheering.

After eight miles, the course goes back across the water on the Venetian Causeway. This part of the course is made up of roads through very exclusive residential areas built on small islands joined by bridges. Below is a photo of an aid station on the Venetian Causeway during this year's race. It's a big job helping the runners to stay hydrated!

Once back in Miami proper, the course goes through a rather sketchy section of Miami before veering off from the marathon course to finish in a park just south of the basketball arena. By now, if it's sunny, the usual heat and humidity begin to take their toll. It's a good time to finish.

This year I took a little longer to finish - 1:39:45 or about 7:37 per mile. My best for this course is 1:35:57.

Since I'm a very competitive person, I thought about what might have slowed me down this year.

Besides being a year older, I missed a good couple weeks of training in December battling a nasty sinus infection, so perhaps I wasn't quite in tip top shape.

Also, it was hard to avoid indulging in holiday eating and drinking. Being 5 pounds lighter might have helped.

Maybe the biggest factor was the start, though. I think there were about 8,000 more runners compared to last year. The corrals were jam packed with people. It took me seven minutes just to get to the starting line after the start. It took a couple of miles for the crowd around me to thin out enough for me to safely run my race pace.

I love running this race and will do it again if we're down there at the right time next January!

Coffee and Dining in Miami

2012-01-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

We just got back from the first week of our 2012 Miami Residency. Actually, we are now calling our time there "Cleveland Orchestra Miami", complete with Art Deco logo.

Although we were quite busy there, I did have some time to seek out more coffee places. My favorite remains Espressamente, the Illy espresso bar in the lobby of the Bayshore Marriott where the orchestra stays.

The bar has a sleek, modern design that highlights the coffee machines and accessories.

One night I had a tasty dinner at David's, a Cuban restaurant on Meridian Road just north of Lincoln Road in South Beach. It is one of the few good, affordable restaurants in the area. Below is a photo of my pollo asado, black beans and rice and fried plantains.

Afterwards I had a cup of Cuban coffee. It is made using an espresso machine, but there the similarity ends. The coffee usually has little or no crema on the top and is made very sweet. Not sure if it's cane sugar, but there is a wonderful, syrupy sweetness that is balanced by the strong roast of the coffee.

Later that week I found an interesting Italian coffee bar called Pinocchio. It's on 8th St. in South Beach just off of Ocean Drive. The bar is filled with things related to the story of Pinocchio.

The espresso there was just OK, but maybe I'll try again when it's not so busy.

Another great place for coffee is the Nespresso store and coffee bar on Lincoln Road. It's on Lincoln just east of Alton Road. The store is beautifully designed with the boxes of coffee pods and the pods themselves used in the design. You can order coffee made from one of a dozen or so types, ogle the fancy machines and even buy one there if you want. Nespresso has a mail order coffee service that's nice, too.

Here I am at the bar.

We also had a Bassoon Dinner in the middle of the week. Jonathan Sherwin, John Clouser and Hugh Michie (who is subbing on second bassoon) joined me at Cafe Nuvo in the Spanish Village neighborhood for skirt steak.

Second Bassoon Audition

2012-01-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

We held an audition for second bassoon last Sunday. From around 200 applicants, the field was screened by resume -- in some cases, by recording-- to 46 invited candidates. From that number, 37 attended our audition.

The audition was held on the stage of Severance Hall. The candidates played from a position in the middle of the stage, approximately where the second bassoonist would sit in the orchestra. The audition committee sat in the hall on the orchestra ground floor. A series of room dividers was put in front of us as a screen to provide anonymity in the first round.

All applicants in the first round played the exposition of the first movement of the Mozart Concerto, the first four lines of page 2 from the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, the solo from the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony #4 and, in some cases, the second bassoon part from the opening of the second movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto.

We chose six candidates from the first round to hear again in another round. Excerpts asked for that round were:

Mendelssohn Symphony #3, second movement tutti passage just before letter F
Tannhauser Overture opening
Ravel Piano Concerto in G, 3rd movement, 2nd bassoon part only
Bach B minor Mass, Quoniam
Verdi Overture to "I Vespri Siciliani" opening three passages

After hearing all six play and following brief discussion, the committee and Franz Welser-Most decided that we had heard no one who was sufficiently qualified that day for our second bassoon position.

Results like these are frustrating for all involved -- auditionees, committee members, music director and personnel managers. I'd like to devote the rest of this blog to sharing my thoughts as to why the day was not successful.

In spite of the result, I think our audition system works pretty well. Not only do we try to give applicants the opportunity to prove their worthiness, we try very hard to be discriminating during the audition process. It is much more difficult and painful to deny tenure to someone who, after being hired, demonstrates deficiencies during a season or two of performing. Better to do the weeding carefully from the beginning, if possible -- at the audition. If that means not hiring anyone, so be it.

First of all, we don't usually invite that many people to play live, so we're not trying to filter through a couple of hundred players over several days. We usually try to conduct our business in a single day's time.

Second, those that are not invited based on their resume are given the opportunity to submit a recording of their playing for evaluation and possible invitation. This is not just a bone thrown to those younger, less experienced players we may not want to hear. Indeed, four of our most recent hires started their audition process at this stage and were only invited after the committee had heard them.

Regarding the second bassoon audition, we invited only one person from the group of recordings to the live audition.

Third, because we limit the number of live auditions, it is usually possible for Franz Welser-Most to hear all candidates in every round of an audition. This is very unusual -- maybe unique among major orchestras. Having him in from the beginning lends more focus and discipline to the listening we do.

So what happened Sunday?

I would summarize the lack of success in two ways:

1. A great majority of the candidates did not seem to have good control, pitch or evenness of tone in the low register. This is extremely important for any second bassoonist and was signally lacking in most of the playing we heard.

None of the second round candidates displayed mastery of the soft dynamic, secure articulation and solid intonation in the Tannhauser excerpt, in particular. This one and the Brahms Violin Concerto from the first round were the "money" excerpts for me.

In addition, there were a number of players who exhibited a rough, percussive style in the Mozart Concerto. Accenting every downbeat, emphasizing bar lines, and using explosive articulation in a piece that has a nobility and grace made the bassoonists on the committee embarrassed at times for the way our instrument was being treated.

2. Most of the candidates did not "play the hall". While it's generally not possible to play in the audition space prior the event, players can usually try a few notes to check acoustics. It's smart to make small adjustments in approach based upon what you hear coming back to you after checking some notes. I usually play a few detached notes to hear the reverb time and then go. Choose your best notes! This is not a time to check things about which you are not sure!

Be aware that when playing technical passages, if the committee is sitting out in the hall or is placed far away from you, it may be necessary to take a click or two off of your tempo so what you play will be clearly heard. Severance Hall has world-class acoustics. The stage is very sensitive and projects the sound into the seats with ease. There is no need to strain or over play to put your sound out there.

So many Figaros and Ravel piano concertos we heard just sounded like a blur.

Nerves, a lack of awareness of the acoustics and an inability to gauge how the performance is heard in the seats made many candidates rush through technical passages.

There is another factor to consider: a majority of most audition committees is made up of non-bassoonists. They will be listening with different ears. Many will be more concerned with a general impression, instead of focusing on the specifics of bassoon playing. A surprising number will be rather unfamiliar with some of the repertoire you're playing -- especially second bassoon parts.

Those auditioning need to keep this under consideration.

I hope what I've had to say here will shed some light on how things played out last Sunday and help any of those we might hear for this position in the future.

At this point, it's unclear how we're going to proceed to fill the position. Another audition needs to be scheduled. I can't speculate on how we will go forward at this time.

Inspiration

2012-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

Today, I'd like to share some recent listening and watching I've done on YouTube with you.

First is a performance of Schumann's song, "Mondnacht" (Moonlit Night) by German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Fischer-Dieskau was one of the great singers of the 20th century and the most-recorded baritone in history. He was a master at interpreting the German Lied (song). Coupled with a fanatical dedication to the poetry of the text, he possessed a ravishingly pure and focused voice that he could manipulate to bring out the meaning of the lines he was singing.

In "Mondnacht", you'll hear his beautiful, long-breathed legato and gentle phrase endings. If you need something to relax you after a hectic day, just listen to this. You don't even need to know German to get the mood.

There are several versions of him singing this song. I like this older one with pianist Gunther Weissenborn. Fischer-Dieskau's voice sounds more fresh and pure in this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBGyJvHe0kc

There is another one with Christoph Eschenbach that is just as good, and perhaps offers a more nuanced interpretation. This one also has a very clever, minimalist graphic to it. German readers will notice that it takes the lines of the poem and creates a new poem by the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34oBTWLxcso&feature=endscreen&NR=1

Vladimir Horowitz

Horowitz was known for giving larger than life performances of the big Romantic concertos and other works for piano. Here he takes a very simple piece, Schumann's Arabesque and interprets it with great subtlety.

The piece is structured in six sections -- an "A" section that returns twice, interspersed with two contrasting episodes and finishes with a short coda.

Notice what Horowitz does with the "A" sections! The first time the theme is presented very clearly and simply. When the "A" section returns, he adds nuance with more ebb and flow to the tempo. His playing here exhibits a graceful and tasteful use of rubato. You may want to keep time with your foot or finger to see how and when he bends the tempo.

When the "A" section returns for the final time, it sounds distant, like a reminiscence. It sounds like a romantic memory from the past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYDSiFh1uiA&feature=related

Now for some non-musical inspiration!

Since today we observe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday today, I thought I'd include a link to one of his most inspirational writings, the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail".

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

A new shaper!

2012-01-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

I have enjoyed using my new shaper, made for me by Paul Deegan of MD Reed Products. He has expertly copied my old Berdon #6 fold over shaper, making its design in the form of a straight shaper.

This copy is much more exact than the one made earlier for me by the Fox Products Corporation. The design of this shaper has a little wider throat compared to most other bassoon reed shapes. This helps mitigate a slight narrowness in sound I notice with my 7000 series Heckel. I think it helps broaden the sound and even the scale on most bassoons as well.

The flair from throat to tip is moderate. A large increase in width from throat to tip would (assuming an already-wide throat) make the reed unwieldy and unstable.

There is a decent amount of back flair (the reverse flair from the narrowest point near where the second wire goes to the butt), meaning that a good amount of beveling is helpful for proper tip opening contour.

Cane fits in this shaper with the bark side facing up. This is opposite from the Fox shapers, so those used to a Fox will have to flip the cane. It's not easy to see which way the bed is contoured (concave or convex) so it's possible to crack the cane when screwing the shaper parts together if the cane is loaded upside down.

The shaper mates with the MD Profiler by indentations made in the gouged side of the cane near both ends. The indentations are made by two sharp ferrules set in bottom side of the shaper. When the two sides are screwed together the indentations are made. These indentations help the reed maker center the cane on the cane barrel of the profiler for profiling. You can see the identical ferrules on the cane barrel in the photo below.

The shaper is easy to use, however, I noticed that it scratches easily under the knife. I contacted Paul about this and he will hard anodize the surface of the metal in future batches for greater durability, making them scratch-proof.

Straight vs. fold over shapers

Bassoon reed shapers are made in two different ways: straight and fold over.

Above is a photo of a Rieger fold over shaper. The cane is first profiled and folded in half. Then it is slipped over the metal tongue on the left in the middle. One side on top, one on bottom of the tongue. The desired shape of the reed is machined into the tongue. The two arms are rotated over the cane and clamped down. The excess cane that hangs over the sides of the tongue is cut away. This is how the design of the tongue is copied onto a piece of cane.

Here is a photo of a straight shaper, showing the widest point (A), most narrow (B) and butt (C) of the design. With a straight shaper, you start without profiling, using a gouged piece of cane. I have described how to load the shaper above. The overlapping cane is cut away, much in the same way as it is with a fold over shaper.

I have used a fold over shaper for years and am quite used to it. However, I must say the straight shaper is MUCH easier to use. Since the cane is unprofiled, you don't have to deal with the very thin, delicate cane near the fold that is normal with a fold over shaper. Unlike using a fold over shaper, there is no chance the cane is going to slip around the shaper while using it and virtually no chance you will ruin the cane with a slip of the knife and the cane won't come apart at the fold. All of these are hazards with a fold over shaper.

Here are some tips on how to shape with a fold over shaper. Scroll down to the "after profiling" section and read steps 3-5. There is a short video of me shaping (snore!!)

Knife work is easier and somewhat safer with a straight shaper, too.

So why use a fold over shaper? To begin with, many bassoonists shaped cane by hand, without use of a shaper. When this technology became available, prominent teachers had machinists design shapers with the dimensions of these shapes in mind.

With a fold over shaper, the taper only needs to be duplicated once (right side and left side must be symmetrical), so that was the easier route for the machinist. This was the predominate method of shaper manufacture for years. Indeed, it is much easier to copy a fold over shape and manufacture it than it is to convert a fold over shape into a straight shape.

Conversion requires not only precise copying of the shape, but also must account for any contouring of the shaper surface from left to right. Some makers leave this area perfectly flat, others contour to match the curvature of a piece of cane. Any copy needs to take this into consideration.

Also, in making a straight shaper, the tapers of the shape must be reproduced three times (top right, top left, bottom right, bottom left).

However, with computer programming, this can now be done easily.

A very thorough discussion of the two types of shapers is found on the Herzberg Projects website. Take note: Herzberg uses the term "flat" when referring to a straight shaper.

A new profiler!

2012-01-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

This post marks the first anniversary of this blog. I hope you readers have found it useful, revealing and entertaining. I have enjoyed doing it. I look forward to the next year of posts and have several topics ready for investigation.

I will devote this post to news about a new profiler made by Paul Deegan of MD Reed Products. My students and I have recently purchased these tools.

The profiler is remarkable for two reasons: price and quality.

Price

The profiler sells for $599, making it one of the least expensive on the market. MD also made a straight shaper for me that is a copy of the Berdon #6 that I regularly use. More about the shaper in my next post.

Many college bassoon students have access to profilers owned by their schools or teachers while enrolled. After graduation, in addition to paying off considerable debt, they often find themselves without access to a profiler. While not as sophisticated, this profiler is much more affordable than the VanHoesen Hunt, Rieger, Herzberg profilers, for instance.

There are other profilers available at this price point, but this one is the best I've found for the money.

Quality

A wealth of information on the manufacture and adjustment of the profiler can be found at MD Reed Products

Perhaps the most unique feature of the profiler is the way you adjust the thickness of the cut. This is done by rotating one or both of the adjustment wheels found at both ends under the ramp that the cutting arm wheel follows.

One wheel adjusts for the reed tip area, the other for the back of the blade. The wheels are rotated manually, without the need to loosen and re-tighten set screws or without the need to remove posts to shim. However, the wheels lock in place and cannot be moved by accident. Thus, it is quick and easy to adjust the profile on this machine.

Other profilers I've tried at this price point do not offer some of the options that this one does:

Customized ramp design

I sent Paul Deegan a list of my ideal measurements for the spine of a profiled reed blade and he designed a ramp to my specifications. While not exact, it came in very close to what I wanted. We are now working on some refinements. I have not encountered another dealer who is this interested in getting thing so exactly right for a machine at this price.

Spine or no spine option

The tungsten carbide rods protruding from the cane barrel have a machined flat spot that makes a very slight spine on the profiled blank, giving a start to the thin sides/thick center "horizontal" profile necessary for a finished reed. This can be removed simply by rotating the rod or ordering without the flat spot.

Scoring on the cane barrel

The cane barrel is scored at the midpoint for scoring the fold and at both ends for proper centering. This can be done for cane of varying lengths. Mine is scored for 120mm cane.

In the photo above you may notice what looks like two set screws set into the metal just before the end score marks. These make indentations to the gouged sides of the cane that mate with identically placed screws in the shaper. If you shape first, the marks are made when setting the cane in the shaper and screwing it shut. After shaping, the cane can be easily centered on the profiler's cane barrel (photo above) because the cane locks in place when indentations are set in over the screws in the barrel.

This is especially important if you use an eccentric gouge and put a spine in the profile. With these indentations and screws, it's very easy to line up the cane on the barrel and get a symmetrical profile in relation to the gouge.

The way these tools are mated is similar to the Herzberg profiler and shaper.

The blade

The profiler comes with a carbide blade and a spare. MD Reed Products offers a sharpening service with postage paid by the company. My blade is very sharp and cuts beautifully. It is set to cut a thickness of .005" at a time.

Product review time out

I'd like to take a short time out from this review to talk about how to profile effectively using any machine. No, profiling is not dummy-proof! Here are some tips:

Use very little downward pressure on the cutting arm when profiling. Excess pressure may rip the cane and can compress the cane fibers. If the blade doesn't cut well using this method, then it needs sharpening.
Do not be in a hurry! Flip the barrel several times and take your time finishing. Don't finish one side all at once. Again, haste can result in ripped cane and an inaccurate profile
Watch for cane fibers in the forks, in the blade clearance or on the ramp. Get these out of the way before starting the cut or you won't get the profile you want.
Profile in one direction. Don't return the cutting arm with the blade contacting the cane. This can dull the blade and "iron" the cane. Instead, return the cutting arm with the blade slightly raised above the cane. Make a very flat oval shape with your wrist instead of a simple left-right motion.
If you notice the cane becoming so thin that it is transparent and you can clearly see the barrel through the cane, STOP!! The profiler may be out of adjustment and by stopping now, you will avoid scraping the barrel with the blade.
When finished profiling you can score the collars and center marks by holding a knife point to the surface of the cane and rotating the barrel with your free hand.

Back to profiler review

Here is a demonstration of the MD profiler.

In short, I am very impressed with the quality and options available with this profiler for the price. There are other profilers more sophisticated with more options, but this is the best one out there dollar-for-dollar.

Though it offers just a very simple spine and none of the tip detail of a Herzberg or VanHoesen profiler, it is extremely well-made, durable and reliable. I have my reasons for not owning one of these fancier profilers. I'll discuss them in a future post.

I use this profiler in conjunction with a straight shaper that MD copied from my old Berdon #6 and a Rieger tip finisher. This gives me what I need in a good reed blank.

My next post will investigate the shaper.

Winter weather and the bassoon

2011-12-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

It's winter in our area now, so my thoughts have turned to building a fire in our fireplace, enjoying the glow of the Christmas tree and holiday activities.

However, now that the heat is on in our buildings and cars, it's also necessary to deal with the dryness caused by the heat and what it does to reeds and bassoons.

I use a small humidifier in my bassoon case, wetting it each day to impart some moisture to the bassoon. This helps prolong the life of the instrument, keeps pads resilient and wood from contracting or even cracking.

Other remedies include adding orange peel to the inside of the case every few days and using a string dampit. The dampit should never be put inside the long joint as it may cause mold to grow in the bore there.

Reeds also require special care in the winter.

Some time ago I hosted William Waterhouse for recitals and master classes at Interlochen and Michigan State University. It was January during his tour and I remember him noticing that reeds would dry out in his mouth while playing. Being British, he was not used to this experience due to the humid air brought to the British Isles by the Gulf Stream!

Indeed, there are times in the winter where I have found it necessary to stop during a performance or practice session to re-soak my reed. The dryness closes the tip and inhibits free vibration in the blades.

Humidifying your reeds while at rest is helpful. I use a special reed case with a hygrometer and a small piece of wet sponge in an air-tight chamber to keep the reeds humidified.

A more simple solution is to put the reed box in a plastic bag with a small hole cut in it and add some orange peel to it, putting fresh peel in every couple of days.

With all of these methods, it's important not to overdue the humidity and watch for mold!

Saint-Saëns, part 2

2011-12-14T11:36:00.000-08:00

Our concerts with Marin Alsop last week went well. It was a difficult week for all involved with music that was mostly not standard orchestral repertoire squeezed into three rehearsals.

We generally have four, sometimes five rehearsals for a concert cycle, so it was challenging to put the program together with less rehearsal than usual. The first rehearsal for the week was 36 hours before the first concert, so there was also less time to react and absorb what we did in rehearsal before performing.

I'd like to spend this post talking about a particular passage in the first movement of the Saint-Saëns. It is a passage that gives everyone involved trouble. I'm sure it has been a problem since the inception of the Organ Symphony. I know I've struggled with it every time I've played the piece.

This passage occurs twice in the movement and there are several other ones that are similar with articulated 16th notes.

Context

The tempo marking is Allegro Moderato, the meter is 6/8. The tempo usually clocks in the range of dotted ♩ = 72-84. Although the pattern always starts off the beat, there is always a pickup ♪ and downbeat ♪ every three bars in the bass line.

The pattern above starts with tutti woodwinds all articulating together. Then, at the "p" marking, the texture thins out to just two clarinets and one bassoon. It is this particular spot with the clarinets that I want to examine.

What Usually Happens

In rehearsing this piece it's very easy for the woodwinds to get apart from each other and to get off-track from the strings and conductor. This type of passages poses an extreme challenge for articulating on a woodwind instrument. Common problems are:

Slow tonguing speed
Inability to double-tongue when needed
Double tongue goes too fast
Players start the pattern after an eight rest instead of a 16th rest
Some players rush while others drag

The difficulty seems greatest for clarinet players, few of whom can articulate as fast as the rest of the woodwinds and fewer still can double tongue. I would place bassoonists a close second, though.

When this passage doesn't fit together, a few things commonly happen.

The conductor may give ground on the tempo and slow it to help the woodwinds.
The conductor may ask the woodwinds to accent the beats in each bar to make sure the passage stays together. This is a terrible idea which I would resist. The accents usually slow the passage down further by making the articulation heavier. It also comes at a very awkward part of the pattern (see excerpt above) and gives a very unmusical inflection to the line.
The woodwind players agree on who will lead in the section to keep it together.
Some players make leave out a few notes to stay in place.

What Type of Passage Is This?

Sometimes understanding what kind of passage the composer is using is helpful in solving technical problems. Of course, recognizing what the passage is makes for better music making, too.

Those of you with piano skills will recognize this passage as a type used by pianist/composers quite frequently.

The bottom of the score shows the string section playing the 16th passage. On top of this the upper woodwinds play a counter melody that emphasizes the beats while the brass, timpani and basses give pickups and downbeats.

Composers for keyboard instruments used this type of phase shifted rhythm to give the piano or harpsichord a fuller texture. The off-beat 16ths give the keyboard a more sustained sound by filling in sound between the beats.

This is usually accomplished by having the right hand take over the offbeat stuff (the string parts in the example above), giving the left hand the bass line and beats (brass, woodwinds and basses). Generations of pianists are trained at an early age to play with the hands striking at slightly different times (instead of exactly together).

Saint-Saëns was an accomplished pianist and organist, so it's not surprising that he would use this technique. However, it's much easier for one person to control both hands than for a whole orchestra to divide itself up this way, since the orchestra is trained to play together and not apart!

Here is another example from the last movement of the Organ Symphony.

Here the strings lead with the melody on the beat. The same melody is outlined in the top note in each group of six in the piano parts (always the third note in the pattern). However, this comes off the beat and sounds after the strings have played the same pitch.

Problem Solved (for now!)

By the Thursday night performance, the woodwinds got this passage together. We did a little rehearsing separately and a few of us talked a bit about how we were approaching the 16th passages.

Here's what we came up with:

We thought of the 16th passage as starting on the beat. In other words, we pretended as though the passage had been re-barred so the 16th rest at the beginning of the passage was gone.
However, we started the passage at the right time in relation to the conductor's beat, i.e., a 16th rest's worth of time later.
We continued playing as though the passage were on the beat with each change of pitch corresponding to an eight note beat.
Assuming correct tonguing speed, we ended at the right time

In other words, we played as though we were in a slight time phase shift with the rest of the orchestra. Above all, we didn't look up to watch the conductor, for her beat wouldn't be helpful at all.

Ka" syllable on a conductor's beat can really mess up the double tongue.

I realize there's a lot of "inside baseball" in this particular post, but I thought I'd use this one to give a detailed glimpse into problem solving with a very specific example.

I should add that others in the woodwind section may have approached the passage differently from me, but the result was the same - together. I think the oboes and flutes and second bassoon were all double-tonguing while the clarinets and I were single tonguing. Some may have felt more comfortable thinking of this passage as starting as printed - with an offbeat 16th note. It doesn't help to force your way of looking at things on others if they're not receptive or if they just solve problems in a different way. The end justifies the means!

Barber and Saint-Saëns

2011-12-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

This week's program features Samuel Barber's First Symphony, Camille Saint-Saëns' Third Symphony (The Organ Symphony) and Leonard Bernstein's Serenade for Violin and Orchestra.

Our conductor will be Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony's Music Director. Unless you count Mitsuko Uchida's occasional conducting from the piano, this will be the first time since 1977 that a woman has conducted the Cleveland Orchestra!

I have been practicing the Barber for a couple of weeks now, since it has a very difficult set of bassoon solos. The Saint-Saëns also has some tricky passages, so I've been brushing that up, too.

The solos and difficult passages in each focus mainly on fast articulation and tongue and finger coordination. To sharpen my skills in those areas, I've been practicing my scales at different metronome markings using different articulations.

Saint-Saëns

I've also been practicing fast articulation using my single and my double tongue. For me, the tempo for the 16th note passages in the Saint-Saëns first movement can fall at the upper range of my single tongue speed and can go into the lower end of my double tongue range.

This means practicing these passages between 69-88 for the dotted quarter. The movement is in 6/8, so that means tonguing six 16th notes per beat. The lower and upper range are really too slow and too fast musically, but you'd be surprised at what sometimes happens in a rehearsal or performance! It's too easy to get locked into a particular tempo and then have to change speeds. I'll try to avoid rigidity and hope to manage these spots at many different tempos successfully.

I have a clarinetist friend who believes you should prepare technical passages so you can play them faster than they should go. That way the proper tempo feels more comfortable - not a "white-knuckle ride". I also believe you should be able to make a technical passage sound musical at a speed that is slower than ideal performance tempo. This can also be a challenge. For instance, it's hard to phrase a solo like Bolero at ♩=66, but I've had to play it at that tempo!

Back to the Saint-Saëns, though! The passages discussed above present some specific problems for the woodwind section because they start after the beat, yet the pitch changes make the passage sound like it's solidly on the beat, yet phase-shifted over from the downbeats of the lower strings and timpani.

Success in this (together and steady) requires a certain amount of team work and cool-headedness in the woodwinds. The passage needs to start at the right time - one 16th note after the beat and remain steady throughout. Once you start it, you can't make an adjustment, so you have to start tonguing at exactly the right speed upon entering. With variations in tempo from rehearsal to rehearsal and performance, this may mean switching from single tongue to double tongue if the tempo is faster than the last time through. That's why it's important to cover many different tempos in your practicing.

What I've found in the past is that I'm able to use my single tongue (always a better choice when it's a comfortable speed) for the exposed articulated passages, but that my single tongue tires during the longer "ff" tutti passages, so I rely on my double tongue for those. However, everyone is differently endowed with tonguing speed, so some others come to different conclusions than I do in cases like this.

Ironically, after all this sweat and labor, the effect for the listener should be a pleasant, slightly off-kilter murmur -- more of a texture than a riveting technical passage! Listen to this and you'll see what I mean!

Barber

Barber wrote this symphony in one movement with four sections. The structure corresponds roughly to the traditional four movement symphony. There is a slow, dramatic opening followed by a quick scherzo, a lyrical slow section and a dramatic ending.

These piece contains some thorny solos for the bassoon.

You need nimble fingers and clean articulation to make these work. The tempo can range from about dotted ♩=138 to the printed dotted ♩=152. There are also some interesting dynamics in the solos.

I listened to a very fine recording by Neeme Jarvi and the Detroit Symphony for study, but I also want to mention a classic recording of this piece. Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra recorded it in 1954. My parents owned an LP of this and I listened to it growing up.

The performance features my former teacher, K. David VanHoesen. It is one of the finest examples of his playing on record. There are not many recordings of his playing, which is a shame, because he was one of the truly great bassoonists of his time. He made this recording shortly after assuming his position as teacher of bassoon at the Eastman School of Music and joining the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra. Prior to that he had been 2nd bassoon in the Cleveland Orchestra(!) for two years with George Szell.

There is a clip of this performance on YouTube. The scherzo section begins about 6'45" in. Listen for his brilliant technique and clear articulation. You may need to turn up the volume because the bassoon solos are in very light passages. The last one -- near the end of the clip -- is unaccompanied.

The part for the Barber is not in the public domain, but those wanting to learn it can find the major solos in Schoenbach's 20th Century Orchestra Studies. This would be another piece I'd include in a list of lesser-known orchestral bassoon parts to practice on a monthly basis. I'd hate to have to sight-read this part!

Varied program follow-up

2011-11-26T08:19:00.000-08:00

There are some nasty viruses going around in our area. While John has recovered, he wasn't quite ready to resume his usual role by Friday, so I'm playing the whole program on these concerts. Phil Austin, our recently retired second bassoonist, is back substituting on third bassoon for Till Eulenspiegel. It's fun to play with him in the section again!

When faced with a sudden increase in your workload, it's important to prioritize. It may be unrealistic to expect everything in the parts to feel comfortable and secure by concert time, so learning to let go of certain things that aren't vitally important is helpful.

What to Look For

I'd never played Strauss' Aus Italien before, so that piece required the most study. I did some listening and as much practicing as I could in the short time between assignment and performance. Listening with the music in front of me, I picked out sections where there were bassoon solos and important lines so I could make sure those were in really good shape before the concerts. Also, I always look for any "pp" passages or anything low and soft because those spots often require delicacy and finesse. It's also good to know what instrument(s) you're accompanying in those places before you play them.

What to Let Go Of

With a long, taxing piece like the Strauss, it's necessary (considering the heavy program and my short learning time) to find places in the music that you can let go of, if needed.

At the end of the first movement, there is a soaring bassoon solo with a couple of high Bbs that is preceded by a taxing five-bar passage of whole notes. If I had an assistant playing this line, I could rest and get ready for the solo. Indeed, in the "old days" of the Cleveland Orchestra (including my first year) we routinely played these big pieces with extra players doubling the lines to beef up the woodwind texture in tutti passages. The players could also be used to give the principal players some relief.

Since it was one on a part, I had to play the passage before the solo. It was exposed enough that the 1st bassoon voice would be missed.

In situations like this I try to play as comfortably as possible. That means not too loud or too soft. Both extremes tire the embouchure.

In "ff" passages there are opportunities to either lay out or play less to save the embouchure as well.

In cases where time is really short for learning a piece, you can also let up on tutti passages of extreme technical difficulty. It's better to stay out of the way and let the other bassoonists or whomever you play with carry the ball. Fortunately, unlike some of his pieces, the Strauss had no extreme technical passages.

Till Eulenspiegel

Moving up to first bassoon for Till Eulenspiegel offers some challenges. I would include this piece, along with some others such as Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2 and the Firebird Dance Infernal in a list of pieces that you should practice on a monthly basis whether you are playing them or not simply because the passages in them are so difficult as to be nearly impossible to learn in a short space of time. That way, when a performance of one of these comes up, you're ready.

One of the few advantages of growing old is that there's not much you haven't seen or practiced before. It's nice to be able to rely upon years of experience when a tough piece of standard repertoire comes up.

The passage excerpted in the previous post is just one of several in Till that offer a supreme challenge to the technique of any bassoonist. Years of slow practice and previous experience in performance made it possible for me to brush these passages up and get them ready for performance in just a few days.

Nevertheless, I found myself having trouble with a particular three-note combination in this passage. It's the Till motive.

When playing the slur, sometimes a note wouldn't speak or there would be a squeak in the middle of the motive.

After trying it many times and getting frustrated, I decided to take a more calm approach and see if I could figure out what actually was going wrong. I was able to narrow it down to two technical problems.

1. I wasn't always covering the half-hole going from G# to A. While not hurting the A, it really caused trouble with the F, which sometimes squeaked or didn't speak at all.

2. Sometimes I was glossing over the fingering for F after the A. It's important to "gun" for the A to get the spirit of the motive clear, but since the tempo is so fast, it's easy to miss the F on the way to the B. By focusing more on the F and really trying to feel the F fingering in my hands the motive came out clearly.

I did a lot of slow practicing to get a clear feel for the left index finger closing the half hole and for the fingers in both hands feeling the F fingering securely. By the way, there are some fingerings for the F that make this slur easier, but they all sounded false and out of tune when I tried them.

I tried very hard to relax and be calm when the passages came up in rehearsal and performance, too.

Everything came out clearly in the performance last night, but I've got two more to go. We'll see how it goes!

A varied program - or a week the life of an assistant principal bassoonist

2011-11-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

This week the Cleveland Orchestra plays a really nice program.

Strauss Till Eulenspiegel
Mozart Piano Concerto #17 with Jonathan Biss
Strauss Aus Italien

Our conductor is the MET's new principal conductor, Fabio Luisi. My part assignments are 3rd bassoon for Till and 1st bassoon for the Mozart. This looked like a nice week for me because the Mozart has a terrific bassoon part and I'm finished with the concert by intermission and can go home then!

The Orchestra always presents a good program with a fine conductor around Thanksgiving. In Cleveland, many people like to show off the Orchestra to their visiting relatives over the weekend, so we usually have packed houses.

This morning before the first rehearsal a phone call from Severance Hall came telling me that John Clouser was feeling sick and may not get through the morning rehearsal. I was home raking leaves, since the rehearsal was completely devoted to Aus Italien, which I don't play. A few minutes later I got another call asking if I could come play the rehearsal, since John had gone home. I dropped my rake and got in the car!

I made it there for the last part of the rehearsal, so at least everyone played some of the piece with an intact first bassoon part. I'm assuming John's just got a flu bug and will be OK for our performances, but this could potentially change my outlook for the rest of the week.

As Assistant Principal Bassoon, it's my job to understudy programmed pieces I'm not assigned and be ready for situations like the above. I have had to play concerts without rehearsal on any of the music with short notice before, so I've been in more nerve wracking situations than this one and done just fine. I spent the rest of the afternoon today after the rehearsal listening to and practicing Aus Italien and brushing up on the 1st bassoon part to Till Eulenspiegel, just in case. With any luck I'll be back to Plan A tomorrow morning!

At any rate, here's how I plan to "attack" the Mozart and Till Eulenspiegel. The Mozart requires a clear, resonant bassoon sound with a solo presence, whereas Till has a few soft low passages and lots of technical parts, but little of importance for the 3rd bassoon. I may use my #1cc bocal for the Mozart since it has a really singing tenor range and use my #2cc on the Strauss for its great sound, scale and secure pitch in the low register. Some reeds may also commend themselves to me, but I'll save my choices until after I've tried them in rehearsal tomorrow.

When practicing the Till 1st bassoon part, I recalled a few things that the bassoonist must notice that aren't apparent in the part. Some of them come in the passage with the most difficult technical passage that's closely followed by the Till theme.

The beginning of this part is almost unplayable at the proper tempo, but can be managed with lots of hard work. Matching the tempo of the first four bars to the rest of it can be tough because of the urge to rush when things get easier!

Starting at 33, the bassoon has the main theme but is marked "pp". I have never been in a situation or heard a performance in which the bassoonist could really afford to play this "pp" and be heard. Strauss' scoring is just too thick here. The bassoonist must play this theme at "mf" or even "f". I would also do this when playing it alone, such as at an audition. This shows your knowledge of the context for the solo and comports with what experience tells us you must do.

There is a famous misprint at the end of the passage. The bassoon line is in unison with the viola part, which goes right up to the C. The bassoon line should ascend to a high C, not go down to an F. There is a clef change missing in the part! The bassoon re-enters at 35 in bass clef.

Audition recordings

2011-11-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

The Cleveland Orchestra will be auditioning bassoonists this January for our open Second Bassoon position. Applications have been received, resumes reviewed and some have been invited to audition.

Like many orchestras, we acknowledge the possibility that there may be some inexperienced bassoonists who deserve to be heard at the live audition, but may not be invited based upon their resumes. Therefore, those not invited based upon how they look on paper are given the option to submit a recording of their playing for review and possible invitation.

Those who choose to do so must record a short list of repertoire and send it in before a deadline. The audition committee for that position listens to all the recordings and makes a decision in each case whether or not to invite.

It would be easy to be cynical about this part of our audition (Are they really listening to my recording or is this just a way of trying to seem inclusive and fair?). However, two of our most recent hires started their auditions with their recordings.

Today our committee listened to the recorded bassoon applicants. We heard 25 recordings. Each person recorded the exposition of the first movement of the Mozart Concerto, Marriage of Figaro Overture, Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony second movement solo and the second bassoon part to the slow movement from the Brahms Violin Concerto.

Out of the 25 applicants, only one person's playing stood out as acceptable. While some of our committee members were unable to listen with us and, based on this a few more may be invited in addition to this one, it was surprising to us how poor the quality of the field was.

We discussed this briefly afterwards. I thought it might be helpful to some of you to read a summary of the most common faults we heard.

1. Almost all of the applicants exhibited intonation trouble. The opening of the Mozart can be quite revealing. The skip from F1 to Eb3 was rarely in tune = F1 sharp, Eb3 flat. The first trill was generally out of tune. The low notes in the Brahms were almost never down to pitch.

2. Many players had trouble with keeping a steady pulse in the Concerto and in Figaro. Lots of rushing!

3. Very few had a good grasp of the Mozart style. So many people played the first note with no vibrato or life in the sound, landing with a heavy accent on the half note afterwards. We heard lots of heavy, aggressive playing with accented beats and rough articulation.

4. There was a lot of poor phrasing and a lack of legato in the Tchaikovsky.

I'm sorry if this sounds grouchy, but keep in mind everyone who made these recordings had the technology to record these excerpts over and over and time to listen to the result to see if it was acceptable before submitting.

Thus, there's really no excuse for any of the infractions listed above.

I'd like to address the rest of my comments to any younger players who will be making a recording in the near future for someone who will judge their playing.

1. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the easy access to recording devices such as a Zoom or other excellent portable recorders has made younger players more casual about the quality of their recordings. Remember that the most important component of recording equipment is the microphone (or microphones). There is nothing out there that can compare with the microphones to be had in a good recording studio. Garbage in garbage out.

Many young people routinely listen to music on their laptops or portable devices. These will never compete with the quality of a good playback system in a good acoustical space. It's impossible to tell how you really come off without this setup, even using headphones or earbuds. Many of the sound files people listen to now are compressed or have a low bit ratio, so much of the quality is missing. We have gotten used to this.

We listened to the recordings in the Severance Hall sound control room played through the system speakers.

2. Here's where I really start sounding old. . . In my day of doing this, I used to pay someone to record me -- preferably in a studio where everything, including noise could be controlled. I still think it's worth it, especially based upon what we heard today.

3. Along with paying someone and going to a studio, it's helpful to have a friend go along who can arrange things for you -- music, water, help move equipment if necessary, make notes during the recording and listen back with you.

4. The recording technician for two of my CDs says to budget recording time this way: For each minute of recorded music, plan on 10 minutes of recording. This 10-to-1 ratio will ensure you have the time you need to get a really good take for everything you play. If you need more time than this, perhaps you aren't ready to do this project.

5. Save enough time to listen to individual cuts and listen especially carefully to judge the final product before sending out. I'm sure if some of the applicants we heard had really listened to what they sent us, they would have done the recording over.

6. Make sure the beginning of your recording is especially excellent. This may be the only part that's listened to. I know we passed on many people today after just hearing the Mozart Concerto.

7. Remember that some of the people listening to you won't be bassoonists and won't know what's difficult for your instrument and, for that matter, won't care!

8. With that in mind, try to listen to yourself in a more global manner. There are many parameters used in judging someone's playing. It seemed at times that many of the applicants we listened to were only concerned with accuracy or with rhythm. What about a beautiful tone, good intonation, phrasing, etc.?

I'll close this post with a list I stole from a friend of mine, Dan Silver, Professor of Clarinet at the University of Colorado. It's a great list of what comprises musical artistry. Whenever I think I've mastered something, I find it helpful to look over this list and see what may be missing. Thanks, Dan!

Musical Artistry

Fundamentals

· Command of rhythm, pulse, ability to subdivide

· Technical accuracy

· Pattern recognition in reading music (scales, arpeggios, etc.)

· Beauty of tone

· Accurate intonation

· Control of dynamics, large dynamic range

· Control and variety of articulations

Finesse

· Variety of tone color

· Seamless legato

· Even passage work

· Appropriate vibrato

Interpretation

· Playing exactly what’s on the page first

· Clarity of the aural concept (what does the inner ear hear?)

· Sense of style

· Points of tension and release in the musical line

· Control of line, phrasing

· Use of rubato, if appropriate

· Knowing context of specific piece

· Performance practice

Physical and Mental

Mastery of the "Inner Game"
Body awareness and use
Stage presence, presentation
"X” Factor

Opera in Vienna

2011-11-07T05:50:00.000-08:00

The Viennese treasure opera and Vienna's Staatsoper is one of the centerpieces of the city. It was the first large public building rebuilt after World War II. The world's top singers and conductors perform there on a regular basis.

I had some free nights during our stay this time, but ended up not seeing any performances this time. In the past I've enjoyed seeing Billy Budd, Magic Flute and the Viennese premiere of the complete version of Alban Berg's Lulu (in 1983).

Das Rheingold and The Barber of Seville were showing on consecutive nights, but Rheingold was sold out and Barber had tickets starting at $160 and up and featured a less-than-stellar cast, so I opted out.

I did, however, find some interesting opera-related things to do on those days. For lunch I met with Eric Halfvarson, the Hunding and Hagen in the Staatsoper's Der Ring des Nibelungen. His father was the director of the high school choir in my hometown of Aurora, Illinois.

We didn't know each other, however, as he was out of high school by the time I started there. We met for the first time over lunch last week at Maredo, an Argentinian-style steak house across the street from the Staatsoper.

I brought along our contrabassoonist, Jonathan Sherwin and Eric brought along Katarina Dalayman, the Brünnhilde for the Staatsoper Ring Cycle. It was fun to talk shop with them and peek inside the world of opera for a while!

That night I went with a friend to a lecture on Die Walküre, the Ring opera that was to be premiered that Sunday. The lecture took place in the home of a former Episcopal priest who lives in Vienna. He served us wine and finger food and then presented a lecture on the opera. He does this on a regular basis, providing a preview to operas that are about to premiere at the Staatsoper.

The group at the lecture consisted of mostly English speaking visitors and ex-pats. The lecture was very informative. Our host used the Boulez/Chereau DVD of Die Walküre, stopping the opera when he wanted to elaborate on something. By necessity, he left out large sections of the nearly 5-hour opera, but I would guess we watched about 2 hours of it.

Coffee in Vienna

2011-11-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

Coffee is an art form in Vienna. A whole culture built up around the bags of beans the Turks left outside of the city when they were defeated in 1683. Soon coffee houses sprung up everywhere.

There are many ways coffee drinks are made in Vienna. Originally, the coffee was named according to how it resembled the color of the robes of various monastic orders. Thus, you can order a Franziskaner or a Cappuziner (our Cappuccino). I think there are others as well, but not as common. The ratio of coffee to milk accounts for subtle differences in the color.

In Vienna, coffee is always served with a small glass of water, the spoon resting on top of the glass. It arrives on a silver or pewter platter.

The milk drinks are served with Schlagobers on top and sometimes with cinnamon or chocolate shavings.

A Grosser (or Kleiner) Brauner is straight coffee served with a small pitcher of hot milk for you to add.

Coffee houses are institutions that attract tourists, artists, writers, intellectuals, etc. You should not be in a hurry when you enter one. Each has its own special atmosphere and decor. I visited three while here this time; Cafe Museum, Cafe Sperl and Cafe Schwarzenberg.

Here is a photo of my Franziskaner at the Cafe Museum.

This is my Cappuccino at Cafe Schwarzenberg.

This is my breakfast at the Cafe Museum. You can see the Grosser Brauner coffee in the middle. The red hat is keeping my soft-boiled egg warm.

Vienna

2011-11-05T09:51:00.001-07:00

Seven nights in Vienna! We played four concerts in the Musikverein and one in Linz (about 2 hours by train). The Musikverein is one of the world's great concert halls. The acoustics are great, especially in the audience. On stage you feel a little bit naked when playing, but you can hear everyone in the orchestra really well.

The weather was grey and humid, so my reeds felt a little mushy. Our librarian brought next week's music, so I picked up my parts and looked them over a bit.

I stayed in an apartment near the Naschmarkt (Vienna's huge outdoor market).

This is a great city for exploring by walking, taking a street car or train. Getting around is very easy. Christmas markets were starting to appear towards the end of our week.

We are due to return in 2013. Right now, I'm eager to get home and see my family again.

Cologne

2011-11-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

I went with a friend to Cologne on a day off. Otherwise we would just have a few hours in the afternoon on the day of our concert to see the city. We were scheduled to fly to Vienna after the concert that night.

Cologne is one of my favorite cities. It has a world-famous cathedral, the Rhine river, its own special beer (Koelsch) and way of serving it, lots of Roman ruins and friendly people.

I found a great coffee place there with lots of old espresso machines lining the shelves up high.

We climbed the tower stairs in the cathedral and were in the belfry when the bells chimed.

The concert hall in Cologne is fairly new and beautifully designed. It is underground, below a plaza that goes out to the Rhine. Skateboarding on the plaza is "verboten" during concerts because it can be heard in the hall. The hall is large, but gives an intimate feeling. The audience is close and visible while you play.

Our concert went well. Afterwards I had time to go to a very old brewpub (dating from the Middle Ages) for a quick dinner before getting on the plane.

Luxembourg

2011-10-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Luxembourg yesterday. It's a charming town with a very different character from Paris.

The old city is built on the various levels of a river basin and ravine. There are ruined forts and a large castle, lots of moats, vestiges of the Middle Ages all around.

The main part of the old city consists of a large pedestrian zone overlooking the river. There are lots of retail stores and restaurants in this area.

The other component that is noticeable in Luxembourg is the vast EU headquarters. Just outside the old city there is a huge corporate office park where all the bureaucrats work. Across the highway there are art galleries and the concert hall.

The hall's interior is beautiful, spacious and comfortable for players and audience. The acoustics are good. It's easy to hear each other on stage and there is nice feedback coming from the hall when you play. It's not Carnegie Hall, but much better than Paris!

Everyone seemed more relaxed in our concert here last night. I was more comfortable and found a new reed for the Mendelssohn. There's hope for my reeds for the rest of the tour!

Looking out in the audience while warming up, I noticed a sea of grey, black and blue suits. This is certainly a government town! No one seemed to be trying to make a fashion statement.

The audience received our performance warmly.

We have a concert tonight featuring the Shostakovich Cello Concerto with Truls Mork. His only performance with us is tonight. We rehearsed the piece just once this morning. That's the way things go on tour sometimes!

Paris

2011-10-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

Our next stop was Paris. We played two concerts in the Salle Pleyel. This hall was opened in 1927. On the first concert, Ravel conducted the world premiere of "La Valse". Stravinsky conducted the Firebird Suite on the second half.

Here is the place where Ravel lived during that time. It's on the Rue Carnot right near the Arc d'Triomphe.

The Salle Pleyel, like all the other concert halls in Paris is surprisingly mediocre. It has bright, boomy acoustics and it's very hard to play together on the stage. There is a strange ricochet in attack from the back of the orchestra. Articulation is very immediate and harsh.

We spent most of the morning rehearsal before our first concert working on ensemble issues caused by the bad acoustics. We've played this repertoire a lot lately, so it's certainly not the case that we aren't familiar with it. The hall environment made things difficult.

I'd like to digress a bit and talk about reeds and touring, as this was my main concern for these concerts.

We were about halfway through the tour at this point and the reed I liked best for the Mendelssohn 3rd Symphony was getting a little old and tired. I spent a couple of hours in the hotel room breaking in several new ones I'd brought with me, but weren't ready for "prime time".

I really wanted to use something new for the Mendelssohn concert; something that responded easier, had more stable pitch and required less manipulation for dynamics and colors. However, it became clear in the rehearsal that this hall exacerbated extremes in dynamics, colors, articulation such that fitting in and even hiding in certain passages was the wiser choice.

Oddly, I had no trouble projecting. This is often difficult in brash, splashy concert halls, but not this one. So it was back to "Old Faithful" for the concert. I found the concert a very stressful, difficult experience, but the audience was very appreciative, nonetheless.

You may wonder what I do to test my new reeds and how I know when to put them in the game. A hotel room is a very tough environment for good feedback on the reed's sound, so I rely on feel in the embouchure and how the reed takes the air I give it when I doubt what my ears are telling me.

I take a dial indicator with me and take the reed down to within a couple of thousandths of an inch of finished measurements. The back of the reed near the collar may remain between .035 - .032" (about .002-.005" thicker than finished), but I take the tip area down to exact measurements or at most .001" thicker.

The crow pitch should be an F. This ensures that the reed will play well in tune and be stable, but flexible when necessary and have decent response.

After checking several reeds, sometimes it's not clear which one is really the best. To sort them out I do a couple of tests.

Crow the reed starting "ppp" until a multiphonic starts to sound. Blow a crescendo and see how long into the crescendo the multiphonic lasts. A good reed will start the multiphonic early and remain that way longer into the "f" than others. This reed will have a large dynamic range and play very softly when needed.
Put the reed on the bassoon and play some hairpin long tones to see how the reed handles dynamic changes.
Play slurred broken arpeggios to see how the reed handles changing modes of vibration. The smoother the better. This quality can be improved by making sure the blades are symmetrical in thickness and contour at all points.

If a reed passes these tests, then I'll feel brave enough to try it in rehearsal. Once in the performance space I almost always tweak the reed somehow, whether it's opening or closing the tip with pliers, scraping the tip some more, removing cane from the channels, etc.

I feel it's necessary to try to adjust the reed to the space in which it's being used. Some people are nervous about making such adjustments while rehearsing or playing a concert, but, if the reed's nearly finished anyway, the adjustments I make are minimal. After many years, I know a few things to leave alone (e.g., heart of the reed, shape, very tip). These are all set in place well beforehand.

Back to Paris!

I had some wonderful dinners in the Latin Quarter on my time off and went on a walking tour of composers' houses and apartments. One place of importance for bassoonists is the Theatre des Champs Elysee, where the Rite of Spring had its infamous premiere in 1913.

I found the Parisians less haughty and condescending than I had heard or noticed in the past. We had great weather and I tried what little French I knew. Maybe that helped!

Pyrenees hike!

2011-10-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

We had a free day after our Friday concert. Some of the orchestra stayed in Madrid, others went to Valencia (our next stop) a day early to look around.

I had other ideas.

Early that morning, Dan McKelway (Assistant Principal Clarinet) and I went to the Madrid train station and rented a zippy little 5-speed Diesel Citroën. Armed with maps, backpacks, boots, trek poles, etc. we drove 5 hours north to the Adresa National Park in the Pyrenees, just south of the French border. Dan had chosen an area that we could drive to and get right on a scenic hiking trail that would get us into some mountainous terrain quickly.

We stopped in the little village of Torla, just short of the park entrance and found a great hotel with a world-class view that had a room available, checked in and put on our hiking clothes and packed our backpacks.

We drove to the park entrance, parked, found the trailhead and set out at about 2:00pm.

For the first two hours we hiked steeply up the side of a mountain through beautiful wooded terrain.

Near the tree line we started a long traverse towards a coll.

Our goal was a climber's hut called El Refugio de Girza. We could have dinner or at least a snack there and then hike back to our hotel.

The weather was perfect – blue sky and between 40-60°, depending upon altitude and whether or not you were in the sun. Because we were in a park, the only people we saw were other hikers (very few that day and most going the other way because it was afternoon).

No ski slopes, only one jet trail, no planes, helicopters. In other words, very remote and pristine countryside.

For a long time we couldn’t see where the hut was, but we knew it was there from our maps.

In a few hours we started to lose the sun and it became apparent that we weren’t going to make it to the hut. It came in view and we hiked further towards it, but decided to turn back because of the time.

We took a different route that featured some adventurous descents at first. We navigated a short section of cliffs where chains and posts had been pounded into the rock to help you rappel down the rock face. After our decent we followed a very wide path near the bed of the river that must have filled up this gigantic valley at one time.

It was good that the path was wide and rather level, because for the last 2 hours of the hike we were in darkness, using our headlamp and flashlight to find our way!

We got back to the parking lot and found the car, drove to the hotel room, dumped our packs and went into the little village to find dinner. It was late and the town was so small that we weren’t sure we’d get anything to eat. The thought of going to bed hungry after a day full of physical exertion was not a happy one!

We did find a restaurant that was still serving dinner. We found the dining room full of fellow hikers and enjoyed the food and atmosphere!

The next morning we got up early and wandered into Torla for a short look around before getting in the car again.

To my surprise, the village was alive with runners preparing for a race.

A half marathon was to start in just a few minutes. It was a point-to-point race, staring in the village and ending in another, completely up hill!!

We checked out of the hotel shortly after the race started and got on our way to Valencia. While driving I kept noticing large fields of cane growing by the side of the road.

We got to Valencia with time to spare, but had trouble finding a drop off place for our rental car. With time running out before our evening sound check we parked the car near where we thought was a likely place by the train station and took a cab to the hotel, checked in and walked to the concert hall.

After the concert, we found the return lot with help from the hotel concierge. Then we went out to a restaurant in the old section of Valencia for a dinner featuring the local dish, paella.

Madrid

2011-10-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Madrid!

We arrived at our hotel around noon and I began to settle in. I’ve found the best way to beat jet lag is to get out and get some vigorous exercise. Fortunately, there was a park nearby that was perfect for runners and walkers.

Later that night I got together with a friend at his hotel for drinks and something to eat.

His hotel was near the Puerta del Sol (the location of huge protests this spring) and had a beautiful rooftop restraurant terrace.

The concert hall in Madrid is rather nondescript looking from the outside, but very fine on the inside. It has good acoustics, tending towards the clinical and dry.

However, it was very easy to hear everyone and play on the stage. Our rehearsals and concerts were sandwiched in between services by other orchestras. There were two concerts each night. We played the early shift on Thursday (7:30pm) and the late shift on Friday (10:30!!).

Other orchestras played on those nights, too. The populace seems to be hungry for classical music! Both concerts we played were packed – the first one certainly sold out.

Tour Preparation

2011-10-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Cleveland Orchestra embarks on a 3-week tour of Europe starting tomorrow. For a short summary of its long-term goals in Europe, read this article in today's Plain Dealer.

However, I'd like to use this post to shed some light on what tour preparation is like for me in the week before I get on the plane.

The week before is always busy and stressful. I must accomplish the following:

Teach extra lessons during the week, if possible, to make up for the time away.
Process reed blanks to take along.
Think about which tools I need with me.
Take music for all 1st bassoon parts for tour repertoire I'm not playing to understudy.
Refill prescriptions.
Fill out medical forms for doctors to use.
Do laundry!
Pay bills.
Call my credit card companies so they don't shut down my accounts when I charge things in foreign cities.
Pack for three weeks of changeable weather in different parts of Europe.

The staff behind the scenes of our orchestra works very hard before and during these tours. Stage hands are busy carting out wardrobe trunks and instrument trunks and loading them after the last home concert. Personnel, Marketing and Tour staff are very busy preparing and work around the clock during the tour.

We take two doctors from the Cleveland Clinic with us for medical help. These trips can be a wonderful working vacation for them (they often bring spouses) or an action-filled three weeks dealing with an emergency or two or flu outbreaks.

Logistics are different for foreign tours. After the last concert at home we must have our trunks loaded with instruments, concert attire, music, etc. We will not see these until Thursday (Saturday was our last concert). Some of us hand-carry our instruments in order to stay sharp (pardon the expression!) in our hotel rooms prior to Thursday when we have our first rehearsal and concert.

This time lag is necessary for the travel time with the cargo and it gives us aday to pack and a day to start to get over jet lag before we begin the hard work of playing concerts in different locations.

Some of my tour assignments in the past have been light, so I've felt comfortable with packing my bassoon and not seeing it for a few days. This time, I play Mendelssohn's 3rd Symphony on the first concert in Madrid, so I'm keeping my bassoon with me on the way.

Concert programming for the week prior to a tour can be unusual. We use these concerts to try out tour repertoire before leaving. This time there was a 24-hour period in which we played 3 concerts of different repertoire (with only the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in common)! Since the tour repertoire is often large enough for three or four concert-length programs, the home concerts can become a hodge-podge predominated by pieces that we haven't performed recently or ones that are especially challenging.

In this busy time, I try really hard to carve out some time to spend with my family before leaving. It's very tough on them when I'm gone. I look forward to these tours with a mixture of excitement, anticipation and resignation.

There will be some free time on this trip, so I've got some tentative plans for some fun.

a hike in the Pyrenees
hunt for composers' residences in Paris
a free day exploring Cologne
seeing Das Rheingold and/or Barber of Seville in Vienna
visiting the Funerary Arts Museum in Vienna -- something I've never quite had the guts to do before

If some of these plans work out, great. If some fall through, it will also be nice to just bum around, go out with friends or rest in my room.

I hope to blog pretty regularly while on this trip, so look for some posts in the coming weeks.

Adaptability and the Stravinsky Mass

2011-10-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

We performed the Stravinsky Mass last week. It's a really quirky, fun piece to play.

The Mass is scored for 10 wind players and chorus. It's best done in a church with small vocal forces. Some parts are for solo voices and the top two lines are preferably sung by children. It is acerbic, contains a lot of polytonality and is very concisely written. There are no wasted or unheard notes in any of the wind parts.

My student, Joe Cannella, thought it would be interesting to hear how we put this piece together, given the small forces and unusual stage positioning. Thus this post.

If you'd like a recording to reference while reading this, click on the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR8H0BlF3YA&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL5A3F135441AC80C0

This is the stage setup we used. Though it seemed the most logical, the arrangement posed some logistical problems that needed to be solved.

Putting the brass on the front edge of the stage required them to hold back with attacks and delay more than usual. Generally, those in the back of the orchestra work hard to stay on top of -- or even slightly ahead of the beat -- to make up for the distance between them and the front of the orchestra so the audience will perceive no lagtime between them and the violins, for instance. It was quite the reverse in this case, for I know our brass players had to delay entrances so they could be with the chorus.

Although I was a little closer to the conductor than I like to be (!), it was nice to be able to see our brass players' embouchures and gestures. This is never a possibility in the full orchestra.

Although we only had one (!) rehearsal for this piece, during it we were able to get comfortable playing together pretty quickly through watching and listening.

In our orchestra we look to the conductor (in this case, Franz Welser-Möst) for bringing us in, dictating tempo, etc. but not really for maintaining time and playing together. We try very hard to bring a chamber music ethic to everything we do. Thus, it's more about listening, watching each other, remembering how it went in rehearsal than following the stick.

This means being knowledgeable of other players' parts, especially when they directly affect your own. It means communicating visually, writing in cues, listening and picking up on other people's body language all in the service of playing together.

Articulation/reaction time

One area of concern in this piece is matching articulation and judging reaction time for entrances. There are parts in the score where it's clear Stravinsky wanted a blended chorale sound.

Other times he certainly wanted heterogeneous articulation for various reasons. In the excerpt below the bassoon provides punch to the trombone long notes but not much else.

This gives the bassoon/trombone line a harpsichord-like articulation with a little sostenuto thrown in.

Stravinsky and Prokofiev used this blend of two disparate articulations all the time. Here it is in 2 bassoons in the Symphony of Psalms:

Going back to the section from the Mass excerpted above, the bassoon begins the passage with the oboes as part of a double reed choir, switch to spicing up the trombone line and go back to double reed choir again. What I tried to do is match the oboe articulation (a bit longer, perhaps, than my usual Stravinsky staccato) and then be VERY crisp to make the trombone combination more pungent, then back to oboe choir.

I like to think composers like Stravinsky, Brahms, etc. enjoyed making the bassoon switch roles in one passage because they thought of it as a very versatile instrument!

Later in the Mass, Stravinsky turns the tables and has the bass trombone punctuate a bassoon line:

Read the Instructions Carefully

With the advent of the 20th Century, composers became less sure that their pieces would be interpreted accurately. Mahler's scores abound with directions not to do this or that (nicht schleppend!). Stravinsky didn't admonish as such in his music, but he was very meticulous when marking scores and parts.

The Mass contains some very unusual markings in the bassoon parts. Notice in the excerpt below that, while everyone else is marked legato or slurred, the bassoons are marked marcato in articulation. The sound of everyone's long sustained playing can romance the bassoonist into skimping on the marcato, but then the passage would lose its flavor. Perhaps the idea of a pizzicato bass is what's elicited here. A commonplace in baroque music (think Air on the G string).

Another spot that warrants close attention is this passage from the Credo. I scratched my head a lot trying to understand why the tenuto quarter notes are there.

Then in rehearsal, I heard Franz go over this passage with the Chorus alone. He wanted a flowing line that led right to the last syllable of each phrase. In every case this coincided with my tenuto quarters. So the tenutos (not in the Chorus lines, by the way!) serve as a landing place for the phrase and underline the Chorus' breathing and phrasing. Smart guy, that Stravinsky!

Playing with a chorus

In the passage just above, I had to be careful not to drive the rhythm too much with all the meter changes because if I did, I would get ahead of the chorus. Remember that mixed meter is just Stravinsky's way of grouping rhythms in a phrase. Visually it looks fragmented, so I always try to look for the pattern or the big picture when changing meters. Also, the Chorus adopted a more flexible, flowing approach to the text and wasn't trying to be too rigid.

Going for the big picture helped me start with the Chorus and phrase with it. If the passage were purely instrumental, I might have given it more punch and drive, but it helped to think of it more this way:

Generally, a chorus acts just like any large group. Members try to fit in, not stick out or lead; thus, there is a certain inertia in the action of a chorus.

Since we usually play in front of a chorus, I can't see it. So there's a certain amount of "feeling" my way around, listening for breathing or movement, etc. Balance is often an issue. Sometimes music balanced in rehearsal without a chorus needs to be adjusted with the chorus. The Stravinsky, being for small forces, wasn't a problem, though.

The Mass has some wonderful moments. There is the typical high register solo for the bassoon:

In the Sanctus, Stravinsky depicts the smoke rising from the swinging censers in the procession through the nave of the church to the altar in the trombones:

This is played three times (Holy, holy, holy).

The bassoons outline the footsteps down the aisle in the procession described in Benedictus "qui venit" (who comes in the name of the Lord):

Sorcels on YouTube

2011-09-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

I've posted another performance on YouTube. This one is "Sorcels" by Patrice Sciortino.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30bPopTbgiw

"Sorcels" is for solo bassoon. It's a very tough piece with some very imaginative extended techniques. It includes flutter tonguing, multiphonics, shakes and timbre trills. Though very challenging, these extended techniques add to the surreal nature of the piece. If handled skillfully, they can give the impression of the bassoon's sound being transformed by the music into an altered state. Instead of calling attention to themselves they fit into the fabric of the composition.

It's written using a 12-tone row, but is very accessible for the listener. There is a lot of call and response, perhaps depicting a sorcerer, his medium and his audience or participants. There is a jazzy middle section and lots of virtuoso flourishes. It covers the total range of the instrument from low B to several high f's.

I'm not aware of a commercial recording of this piece, so anyone playing it could use this clip for study. It's from a recital I gave in Cleveland this May.

I'd like to thank Jeff Lyman, bassoon professor at the University of Michigan for making me aware of the piece, and Alexandre Ouzounoff, its dedicatee, for corresponding with me about the piece.

Akron race (MEEP -- MEEP!)

2011-09-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

The Akron Half Marathon went pretty well. The weather was just about perfect for racing -- cloudy, cool and NOT rainy. The temperature was in the mid-50s.

This year's race had 13,000 participants -- their biggest race ever. Yet, when lining up at the starting line, things were organized and spaced out very well. They try to get runners in the "corrals" 20-30 minutes prior to starting, so it can really get claustrophobic in there before the start.

Not so, this time. Like some races, the faster your projected finishing time, the closer to the starting line you line up. Since the Akron race has a big relay component, a good portion of the runners are there just for fun or because they're part of a family or a group from work that has formed a relay team. There are also not as many "elite" runners as in some of the bigger races (e.g., Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon), so the area near the starting line isn't usually very crowded.

I lined up with the 3:05 marathon pace group. There are pacers in these races that run with signs listing the predicted finish time for that group. These people have to be in great shape to hold a sign while running a marathon and finish at a designated time. It helps those running to stay on pace.

Our pacer was a young guy who was sporting a running "skort" -- a short skirt newly fashionable worn usually by women -- with blue and red polka dots!! He was able to keep a lively monologue going during the race with advice and stories for those around him while running.

The pace group's 3:05 finish time computed to a 1:32:30 half marathon or about a 7:04 mile pace. I trained at a 7:00 mile pace, but have never raced that fast before. This was an aggressive move up in pace for me, having managed a 7:11 mile pace for a half marathon last fall as my best time.

It was not to be. I stayed with the pace group for about the 5 first miles, then started to fall off the pace. The Akron course is very hilly and there are some hills at mile 6 and 7 that slowed me down. I hung in there, though and manged the really nasty hill at around mile 11 just fine.

I turned the corner at the entrance to the Akron Aeros' ballpark and turned up the speed, finishing the race with a time of 1:34:21, my best time for this course and my second-best half marathon time ever.

Akron's mayor was at the finish line to shake everyone's hand. I guess he's up for re-election this fall!

Next race is the Towpath Half Marathon in two weeks. A really beautiful, FLAT, race course along the old Erie and Ohio Canal Towpath between Cleveland and Akron. I have run my best times there in the past, so maybe I'll best my time from Saturday.

MEEP-MEEP!!!

2011-09-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

This Saturday morning I'm running the Akron Marathon Half Marathon. This will be the fourth time I've run the race. It's a very well-organized race with lots of home-town participation. It starts in downtown Akron and end there in the Akron Aeros (AA baseball) ball park. Mayor Don Plusquellic shakes EVERY runner's hand at the finish line. Now that's a politician!!

Last year I finished sixth in my age group. Several thousand people run this race. There is the marathon, the half marathon and a 10-K relay.

Since I've run this one before, my goal this year is to improve on my time and maybe move up in the standings in my age group.

I've been training for the race for 2 months now. I have used a half marathon training plan from Runner's World. It's very aggressive, with a mixture of long runs and track interval work.

It teaches your body to find its "gears" when running. In particular, you learn to hit and maintain your goal race pace and 2 faster gears. With good practice you can reproduce many laps on the track within a second of each other for pace.

There are two other sources I've used for inspiration with my running recently.

One is the Maximum Aerobic Function training of Philip Maffetone. His method helps you build a strong aerobic base by exercising at the top of the aerobic threshold. This is the maximum heart rate at which the body is only burning fat. Above this zone, (roughly 60-70%) of your maximum heart rate, your body starts burning sugar. This higher rate is much harder on the body. By building a strong aerobic base you delay the depletion of glycogen and the buildup of lactic acid in the muscles (that's what causes the burn when you exercise) that occur during an endurance event like a marathon. This makes for a more pleasant experience, is easier on your body and can result in faster times.

Using a heart rate monitor you target a specific heart rate zone and stay in it. Over time the body becomes more efficient in its use of oxygen and you speed up while maintaining the target heart rate zone.

I did this kind of work in June and July and use it during my "off" days now. It's a good way to avoid over training, injury, etc.

The other method I've studied is called Chi Running. It uses posture and principles from Tai Chi to build more efficient running form. Working on such problems as over striding, pushing off hard, etc. it re-directs attention to the core muscles as the place where the energy of running is centered. It uses the runner's natural twist of the spine and the pendulum action of the arms and legs to help the body work as a system.

Here are some video demonstrations of Chi Running:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRYio0MmSXU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4Z5cWtVtk

The musicians reading this may recognize some cross-over to postural issues involved in holding and playing an instrument.

Speaking of core muscles, here's the workout I do to strengthen my core. It's devised by Lolo Jones, a world-class hurdler, especially for runners!

Wish me luck on Saturday! It should be fun! You can follow my results on the race website.

Birth of a Piece 4

2011-09-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

I've posted my performance from May of Margi Griebling-Haigh's Sortilège on YouTube. Anyone learning the piece for the Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition can listen to my performance there.

I had posted this a while ago, but the sound level was too low. Today I posted a better version. It should be playable and listenable even on a laptop with poor speakers.

In addition, Randy and I will be performing the piece again on Sunday, Sept. 25 at Cleveland State University in Drinko Hall. The concert is part of the Cleveland Composers' Guild concert series and will begin at 3:00 pm on that Sunday.

This is a very colorful piece and it has been fun to learn and perform. I hope you enjoy it!

Music and 9/11

2011-09-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

Below is the best account I've read of how important music was in America's reaction to the 9/11 attacks. This was written and delivered by a college classmate of mine, Karl Paulnack at the Boston Conservatory in 2004.

If you haven't seen this -- it's made the rounds of the internet for some time now -- it's well-worth reading. Send it to a friend!

Welcome Address to Parents of Incoming Students

The Boston Conservatory

by Dr. Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division

September 1, 2004

One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-- she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for the prisoners and guards of the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around firehouses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

>From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music, which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the Nazi camps and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

Hallucinations

2011-09-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

Hi, everyone,

I've just uploaded my performance of Alain Bernaud's Hallucinations from the IDRS Conference in Arizona. Some of you have asked how my events there went. Here's a sample from my solo recital there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnAo7Ay-7KM

My pianist is Randall Fusco, a college classmate of mine and faculty member at Hiram College. The acoustic is pretty dry, but we were both happy with the performance.

Thanks to my daughter, Grace for uploading this and providing the visuals (no video).

Look for some more YouTube submissions from me in the near future!

Enjoy!

Mooman 150E

2011-08-29T15:53:00.000-07:00

I have had a lot of fun trying a new model of bassoon these past couple of weeks.

It's a Moosman 150E.

Justin Miller has graciously allowed me time to live with the instrument for a while, try it in rehearsal, have students and colleagues play on the 150E.

This model is different from the 150. It is brand new -- just rolled out this summer. It is a moderately priced bassoon (around $16,000) with minimal keywork. Silver plated keys. Has high D, E, rollers on F/Ab, Eb/C# and low D/C, right hand lock, balance hanger bushing on top of boot joint, set screw for adjusting whisper mechanism, 2 bocals. The alternate Bb on the boot joint is absent and the G key is moved up towards the 2nd tone hole on the boot. Hard rubber finger tubes.

I tried different reeds and bocals with it, settling on my favorite pre-war #2CC as the best for making the instrument's tone come alive.

My CIM students and I gave the instrument a thorough trial on the stage of Severance Hall this morning. First the students sat out in the seats and heard me play some excerpts on my bassoon (a 7000 series Heckel) and then the same music on the Moosman.

Then they all came on stage and I went out to listen while they played on it and their bassoons.

The students were impressed with the ease with which I could play this bassoon. I find it to be very similar to a really good old Heckel. Easy response, singing tenor range, very colorful tone quality. In addition, it has a very even scale (no "bad" notes) and a homogenous tone quality. It is easy to change colors on this instrument. It doesn't feel rigid, heavy or stuffy in any way.

It was enlightening to hear my students play on the instrument and compare with their bassoons (a 6000, a 7000 and a 9000 Heckel). I heard some of the same qualities mentioned above. One of the three didn't care for the instrument, but the other two were quite taken with it. "If only I'd had this instrument in high school!"

The instrument reacted differently to the four of us. One student and I sounded more covered on the Moosman than on our Heckels, the other two sounded more brilliant on the Moosman. The tone is certainly flexible, but not unstable. A sensitive instrument.

Some small negatives:

The tone is not as complex (full?) as our Heckels. There wasn't as much "rattle" or "purr" in the sound (squillo?). The wood is brand new, so maybe this will change over time as the bassoon opens up.
The bassoon may have more punch with sterling silver finger tubes. Justin tells me he will receive one with the silver tubes sometime soon.
Why can't anyone make a good bocal besides Heckel?! The bocals with the bassoon (2 "Interpret" series and 2 "Excellent" were just OK. I prefered the "Excellent" series.)
The feel and position of the keywork is a bit different from what I'm used to, but this shouldn't really put anyone off. I would like the pinky keys to be angled up just a bit more. It feels like they are lower to the wood than necessary when depressed.

Two of my TCO section mates, John Clouser and Phil Austin, liked the instrument very much.

While I remain a fan of a good vintage Heckel (6000 to 9000 series), I'm ready to recommend this bassoon over all other brands for the following reasons:

It plays more like a great vintage Heckel than any other brand I've tried.
It responds easily. Not a chore to play.
The tone is focused and beautiful.
It has a good scale.
The sound doesn't spread or get ugly when you open up to "ff".
It's not loaded with keywork you will only use on leap years.
It's got a great price.

If I were in the market for a second instrument, this would be it! However, with one daughter in college and another about to enter, I'll have to put this off for now!