Today's Entry

I'm posting two entries at once - don't be confused, the last entry I wrote yesterday but couldn't post until just now because I didn't have the internet.

Played in my first Baroque orchestra today! Eee! It was...so. cool. I'm a little frustrated with myself because I know I was playing scared - it's hard not to do when everyone sounds so much better than you and the ornaments are coming at you waaaay too fast to read. But I've learned so much from the experience already; just sitting next to the verrrry good bassoonist is extraordinarily enlightening.

F#, I am playing so scared of F#. Least favorite note.

I survived the sonata in master class! I played the first three movements, and all things considered, it wasn't terrible! I'm polishing a little more but also taking on some new music, including music in French violin clef. Yay! The ornaments are surprisingly hard in FVC, I'm not sure why they should be. I'm reading by interval. But somehow the ornament part of my brain is wired to the treble clef, seeing the notes on the page. WWPD? (What would Ploger do?) I'm not visualizing the ornaments probably. Should visualize the ornaments probably.

Mmm, popcorn.

Baroque dance class continues. There was a lot of hopping around today. I was pretty ungainly. Baroque French dance, and subsequently the music, requires a good deal of elegance, poise, and grace, none of which are inherent aspects of my...person. My mother will certainly attest to this.

But tonight, what an excellent surprise! I was practicing, and Gonzalo and company came in to the room I was in because they needed to use the harpsichord to read some Couperin. They invited me to stay and listen, which I did (DUH). It was beyond amazing. I absorbed so much from just listening and following along with the score. Gosh, the ornaments. All in the fingers, not the wind, Lindsey. Remember that. Blarrrrg and the harmony, it was just soooo good.

Also we worked on reeds today. I tied two blanks. I'll keep you updated on how those turn out...this is a very unorganized blog entry. My brain is kind of unorganized but filled with intense French Baroque ornaments right now. Whee.

Geckos and Things

I have returned! From a glorious couple of days in Key West. I have a henna gecko. Henna courage gecko.

I practiced a lot of Baroque oboe today! Not very organized practicing, but just playing through a lot of music. I really want to have a lot of rep under my belt for when I see Gonzalo next, I feel like he will expect me to. I've been plundering IMSLP for pieces, but it is very difficult because there is so much Baroque music and I don't know what is super interesting and fun besides the standards we always play on modern oboe.

So far I've been working on:

Telemann Kleine Kammermusik, Suites 2 and 5

Telemann Sonata in a minor

Vivaldi Sonata in c minor

sort of the 2 Handel sonatas...but they're in Bb and g minor...will work more in the keys of Bb and g minor. Right now, Bb is my least favorite note...

I think I'm going to pull out the Hertel too.

It's been good for me to just be reading through movements, not allowing myself to stop. I think I was sounding pretty good today!

On another note, I finished Tom Jones and sent an epic email to Dr. Rose about it. Writing emails to Dr. Rose is exhausting.

Georgia On My Mind

Hi guys! I finished BPI (Baroque Performance Institute) last Sunday, so I haven't been updating. I had originally intended to just blog for those two weeks, but I think I will keep it up. I've actually heard from some people that they were reading this blog for real, which is really cool! I had no idea anyone would actually check it out, much less follow it! How exciting!

I'll definitely have a lot of interesting things to write about - right now I am at an oboe camp in Georgia for a week, and in a couple of weeks, I'll be attending the International Baroque Institute at Longy. This Baroque thing is kind of addictive. Next year I'll definitely be keeping up with the Baroque oboe, so I'll keep everybody updated on that. And I'll have grad school lessons and auditions, so it might be kind of cool for those a year or more younger than me to see what that process is like. I'm also hoping to put on a big Baroque historical performance recital at Blair next year, so I'll write about what those struggles as well.

So let me go back a little and wrap up BPI! The final concert went really well - I performed in a trio sonata, a piece (supposedly) by Handel. And we opened the concert with our dance class performing the minuet that we had learned. Kanad (my lovely dance partner) and I rocked that minuet. My second lesson also went very well - Gonzalo is really a fantastic teacher.

After that final (again four hour) concert, there was a small get together in this crazy house with crazy cats. Pictures on facebook eventually. Crazy gamba collection.

I've been at Oxford Oboes since Sunday. It's an oboe camp for middle and high schoolers, and each day there are masterclasses, reed class, and chamber music. During the masterclasses, some students split off into smaller assigned groups for different classes (like English horn class) or have individual lessons. I've had so much fun here so far. Most mornings I've been in the masterclasses. When younger kids are playing in the masterclasses, I I only hear a little that I haven't heard before about oboe playing, but it has been such a great educational experience in pedagogy. I find myself really paying attention to how the professors approach different aspects in the music, what kinds of explanations work best for different ages, that sort of thing. Really important stuff for when I'm teaching later. When I was playing in the masterclass, the professors often brought up something I did well and explained/demonstrated it for the kids, a really good tactic, I think.

Love that the professors play the accompaniment (on oboe, often a bass line) along with the kids playing the solos. I can really hear in their sounds a huge increase in confidence, and they take more risks. In my lesson with Dr. O, we ended by playing through an entire Barrett sonata movement together, and I found myself gaining a lot of confidence and taking more risks as well. And just having so much fun! Wish I had recorded that.

Today I coached a sextet of beginning middle school oboists.

Yeah, you try that sometime. You can't even imagine.

But what an interesting experience, trying to figure out what they can relate to, trying to figure out what ideas are most important for them to be exposed to, not wanting to talk way above or below their level, but slightly above it, or at least at the ceiling, to challenge them but to keep them interested...teaching is hard. I've also been working with the students often at reed class, and it's really crazy having to dissect something you've been doing so long that it's permanent muscle memory in order to explain it to an ADHD middle schooler. ie tying reeds. And I didn't really realize how far I have come in reed making until seeing the beginners and intermediates. Reed making is one of those things that is so frustrating because it feels like I'm never making any progress (oboe playing too, for that matter). But to see how awkward it is for the beginners to hold a reed in one hand and a knife in the other reminds me of how natural it is for me to hold a knife or scrape a reed.

What a weird thing to be good at. Life is weird.

Oh yeah, and the other thing. Chamber music. Thirteen oboes in my chamber group, and I am the appointed leader. Why does this keep happening to me? Haha. Not complaining though, I guess somebody has to do it. I was so worried that we weren't even going to be able to stay together for the first rehearsals, but somehow miraculously around Wednesday, things started to really shape up. These rehearsals have been so much work. A very different kind of work than I am used to in rehearsals. First off, keeping everyone focused. Come on guys, every time we stop playing is not an opportunity for you to practice your part on your own or tell your neighbor a story...and I don't wanna be the bad guy or the band director. It's a very difficult balance to find!

But everyone has simmered down a lot since the first day, and there's a lot less chatter and a lot more focus. It's weird to go from group discussion of purely musical elements and subtleties like in college to directing people on how to play rhythms and things like that. There were a lot of transitions and things that we had to work through together, and a lot of spot work that took up a lot of time. The first two rehearsals, we had a professor come in for part of it, which was really helpful. I was particularly thankful not to have to be the bad guy for the entire rehearsal and to have someone with authority backing up what I was saying. I mean, I technically have authority officially, but it is an odd thing to only be a few years older than the oldest of the group. Particularly since I how I look could still pass for 17 or 18 if one didn't know I was actually old.

Gosh I feel really old here. There's an incoming college freshman here who was born in 1994. What's up with that? Sooo old.

But anyway, I suppose I'm doing an all right job organizing and waving my arms around a lot. The piece is coming together nicely, and we are even playing dynamics now! And sometimes we look at each other! Little steps.

So that seems like enough for now. Kind of a long post, but I haven't updated in a while. But I will continue to update from now on, expect a new blog every 1-3 days! Good to hear a few of you out there are reading it! :)

Keep Going

Hooray! Just came back from a beautiful performance of the St. Matthew. Three hours long. I'd really like to get to know this Passion better - so much music all at once for the first time is difficult to digest.

Why did they remove the non-functional microwave in the kitchen and replace it with a different non-functional microwave? I want popcorn.

Had a lesson with Marc today. It was so helpful to work on my ensemble piece with him. The piece is really coming together I think, but it is a little rough that I haven't really practiced it outside of ensembles. But with a little TLC before the concert tomorrow...it should be fine. It's really just those dang trills and ornaments. (You know, only like one of the most important aspects of Baroque music, so annoying :P)

I also need to practice my choreography for tomorrow's show. Yes, that's right, I am dancing the minuet in front of people. Haha! This week of dance class has really been a lot of fun. Somehow everything is a lot easier when we have choreography to learn, instead of just learning steps. Then, learning the different steps in context reinforces them a lot. New teacher this week - she pushed us a lot harder.

Baroque reeds! I have made three of them! Two of which were pieces of cane that I hand shaped! At lunch yesterday, I shaped three pieces, but only two of them came out okay. Which is fine really, because I don't have very many staples...anyway, I made them into reeds this morning, and one of them turned out really well! The other one that I made that turned out really well was from a piece that Gonzalo shaped. I'm not sure about the third one, I think it was too short (my shaping caused me to have to tie it on a lot shorter than is desirable), and perhaps I scraped too much out of it. But I'm getting better at getting a thinner tip - that goes for modern and Baroque reeds. Hope the Arkansas stone waiting at home for me will help.

Oh, home. I can't wait to go home. I really need some time for my brain to recuperate. I can't quite comprehend that I still have another week in Georgia to go.

Uh, I feel like I had a lot more to say, but I am kind of brain dead right now.

What do I have tomorrow?

dress rehearsal 10:45

lesson 10:45

Yeah, I have to figure that one out.

dance rehearsal 1:00

concert 2:00 (but I probably won't be playing until around 5:00...)

So before 10:30 am, I need to practice new stuff for my lesson.

Need to practice dance before 1.

Other things to remember:

turn in your dang lesson cards

transfer the recordings/change recorder batteries

Do Re Mi

Part of me really wants to practice modern oboe. I don't know if I should. Professor Hauser recommended not. I think my poor battered ego wants a boost. I'm listening to a recording of myself playing principal in the Beethoven octet. That's pretty bad. I NEVER listen to myself playing oboe. My ego must be desperate.

Well, I think things are coming along very well, all of that aside! Today I took a nice long practice session (about an hour) without my instrument. I really need to get on this style train. A lot of the stuff we talk about is stuff I've worked on with Smith, both in class and in our Hertel chamber music coachings. One of the most basic ideas in the Baroque style is that of rhetoric. Music should be natural, like talking, and have the same sorts of natural inflections and emphases that talking does. So I took that idea and spent an hour talking through my music. (Solfeging, of course). At first I was solfeging and singing, but still not exactly getting the results I wanted. I reverted back to just talking the syllables, but concentrating on attaining a beautiful, lilting, well-phrased speech, with the grammar just so and the rhetoric right on target. It was a heck of a lot harder than I had anticipated. And of course this was the right step, because if I couldn't even say the phrases exactly how I wanted consistently, how would I possibly expect to be able to play them on an instrument I have only been playing for two days? Silly. So in that time I worked on all four of the movements in the French duos I will be performing in the chamber concert on Saturday.

Just now, I got back from practicing these movements about an hour and a half on the actual oboe. I have to say, I definitely achieved a lot in a relatively short amount of time. The most difficult part about getting the style is getting the style consistently - getting all of the inegalite just right all the time, not forgetting myself at a phrase. But having a much better idea of how the speech of the piece went, I could really think much more clearly. Sometimes I really had to remind myself by speaking the phrase of how I wanted it to go, but then it would be fixed when I played it after speaking it. Didn't entirely help the squeaks and whatnot...I'm still looking for a reed I really like. The second teacher coming next week plays on the same type of oboe that I do, so that should be pretty helpful.

We learned to play a scale in gamba class this morning! Definitely...the two hands at once bit is a little difficult. It's funny though. I notice that I want to stop the bow when I change notes. It's exactly the same problem with oboe! A common oboe problem is stopping the air (our "bow") between notes instead of speeding it up, which is what we really need to do in order to make a seamless connection, particularly over large intervals.

We had another oboist join us today! She's been playing Baroque oboe for about 4-5 years. She started after her kids left, etc, but she had played modern oboe before she had kids.

Gee, I sound pretty good in this Beethoven recording. But anyway, another reason I kinda want to practice modern oboe is so I can brush up on the Vivaldi enough to maybe have twenty minutes of my lesson on style, even though I'd be playing modern oboe. But I think it would be well worth it.

Oh my gosh, the sleep really did the trick. After that three and a half hour nap yesterday, I also slept from 10pm-7am. I was awake all day! And could focus! Yay! Now I just have to remember to bring snacks with me in the morning, since we typically have oboe class from 10-1:30 with no breaks for lunch. I get a little eeeee if I don't have lunch.

In Baroque dance, we've learned the German/English and French minuets. And some other fancy step, I think we danced it to a Gavotte and maybe something else too. So much fun!

Bach in a Minuet

Just got back from my first ever Baroque dance class. So hilarious, so much fun. It's amazing how difficult the simplest small, graceful movements prove so difficult. It just goes to show for me how unaware we really are in general. I mean, as adults, we have full motor coordination, and we do things every day that are totally amazing feats of balance and coordination, but we aren't aware of our own capacities, in such a way that prevents us from trusting our own bodies. The dance teacher is also an Alexander teacher! We did some fancy ballet type warm up things, then learned the basic minuet step. So helpful for playing minuets - I feel like I have a much better idea now of the phrase motion and groupings. The step occurs over the course of six beats, not three: two bar phrases. The heel goes down on three and the plié is on six. Three four five six one two three... Etc. I mean you do learn these things in lessons or in music history class, but the kinesthetic comprehension is so enormously valuable. Can't wait to go practice my minuet movement later tonight with this new understanding!

Had a great masterclass/lesson/reed time thing today. There's only two of us oboists, and the other student has had more experience than me, but not a lot, and she hasn't worked with a professional before. So in many ways, we are on a similar plane, which is great. I was a little concerned I might be holding someone back, but I think we will both have a lot to learn from each other.

My room has no air conditioning. Eurgh.

Finally got a reed designed for my type of instrument (or rather, Hauser's type of instrument, I'm borrowing it). That is, Saxon Baroque oboe. It's so much easier to play in tune now, I have to do much less manipulation, and the cross fingerings are about a thousand times easier. My teacher seems impressed about some things I seem to be able to do right away but sometimes people can't do after years, for example, play notes a half step down without changing the fingering. (Thank you Caldwell Ab-Bb-C-Db exercise.) It's encouraging to know I have a somewhat natural affinity for the instrument and that I really can hear intonation. Really, really well, actually. As long as I listen and don't try to control, it's there, and it's correct. Somehow Baroque oboe allows me to let go and trust myself in that way. I think it is partly because there is such a wild range of possible intonations that the only solution is to observe - because I don't know the instrument at all, I can't predict whether I will need to lip up or down like I can on my modern oboe, whose tendencies I know so well. And surprise surprise, when I simply allow myself to observe the pitch rather than try to guess at where it is, I place it correctly, right on target.

We started playing music today, some Boismortier duets. Talked about some basic performance practice concepts - breathing and phrasing, rhetoric, and inégalité. For those of you who aren't familiar with inégalité, I'll include here a short paragraph from an essay I wrote in Smith's class on it.

In French Baroque tradition, a group of two notes that is notated equally may be played in a number of different unequal rhythms, a custom known as inégalité. The performance practice was understated enough so that composers did not indicate it with standard notation, and one contemporary authority recommends the notes “should be dotted with such restraint that it is not obvious.” The degree of inequality varied from “mild and lilting to sharp and vigorous,” but by no means the ratio of long to short a strictly geometric relationship; the proportion was left to the discretion of the performer and was a means for expressive, musical effect. Primarily, the principles of inequality or equality were determined by the style of the piece, styles with which contemporary performers were quite familiar and comfortable.

So basically, a slight dotting of notes that appear equal on the page. It's tricky to get just right in performance, but when it's right, it's SO right. It sounds as if that is what it should sound like. Natural, like speech.

All right, maybe getting a little too technical here.

Gamba class this morning was excellent. I simply could not believe the amount of improvement that happened overnight. I practiced for about twenty minutes last night, and this morning, I wasn't hitting extra strings (every once in a while, of course). Holding the viol and holding the bow felt natural. I would have predicted that it would have taken me at least a month to feel natural holding a bow. And today when the teacher came around the room to check in on us individually while everyone was scratching away at the fourth string, practicing continuous bow strokes, she had no corrections to make for me! She said, "Excellent! And you're not a string player?" GO ME!

One more general thing I'd like to mention about my time here - recording. I've decided to record all of the lessons, masterclasses, and lectures that I attend instead of taking notes. That way, I'll have everything. But even more importantly, I am really going for an implicit sense of trusting in myself and my brain's capacity to remember and record. Taking notes takes energy away from the present moment and the experience of learning in the now. As long as we are truly dedicating our full awareness to a teacher, I believe we have the ability to remember what he or she is saying. So I am concentrating on attaining a very full, intense focus during these critical days of learning new skills (and of course, ideally, all the time).

I think I am getting much better at not using vibrato and not driving through notes. Ahhh.