Some growth

Over the past two weeks I have been BUSY, which has been nice. Though, it did send the Stockhausen towards the back burner for the present moment. Before I did get swamped learning new music (Falstaff, Concordanza, etc) I did get that lesson on the Stockhausen which was very insightful As well gave me some indirect feedback on my preparation to this point. There is an update to my performance plan for this (though I will be open to venues ;) )

First the lesson.

When we undertake works like this I think it is very important to find people who are involved in the traditions that surround this music. Be it through their mentors, a life time of performance and conducting, and so on. I am fortunate enough to get to access to these people on a daily basis and have really taken advantage of it and plan to continue. One thing that came up in the lesson was in regards to this tradition that is being established right now around modern music and music of the 20^th century. It is not hard to imagine back to Viennese court days and with our modern understanding of the performance traditions of those times to imagine how things could have been in the performance world. Well, right now we are in our own period of traditions in regards to notation, and performance.

“NOTHING is as obvious as it may seem.”

It could be something as simple as a slash through a note, the use of IRR, time scale, etc. all of these markings have been around long enough to have had a tradition established for the most part. Or at least a general consensus among performers on how these gestures are executed. I can tell you that after this lesson and discussing what has become the consensus, and why has changed how I play things. It also makes me feel rather silly for not asking more questions before.

In regards to this development of tradition, or musical language I think it is so very important to have all avenues of communication open, and critical thinking turned on. Since the availability to information is so present now with the internet and its ability to disseminate this information to most everywhere there is no excuse to not be asking all the questions.

In the end I learned a lot more than I have written here, that will come later.

My plan is to perform the Stockhausen in May, on a program with works by Messiaen, Reynolds, and one other word TBD.

Getting it right the first time, and every time

Over the past year one thing I have been working on in all aspects of my horn playing is getting it right the first time, and every subsequent time. It is something then when I write it out it seems like common sense, but more often than not it seems that the process of “learning” invites in the possibility to make lazy mistakes. Expanding on what I wrote about last week in regards to interpreting the music into digestible and accessible fragments, this week when I took what I had learned and placed it back into the context of Nebadon I had to be very active in making sure I only allowed good habits and thoughtful actions into my playing.

What I mean by the above statement is that when I have a piece of music under control I will shift my focus to be more on musical elements, allowing the technical things to be driven more by the work that has been done to establish them. As I am still early on in the process of learning this work I have to be mindful to make sure that though I am pursuing musical things I cannot let mistakes happen, I have to remain in control and in anticipation of what could go wrong.

This is a concept I have worked on a great deal in my etude work this year that is having a great carry over to repertoire. To repeat, it is the process of being aware of my playing in a way that allows me to anticipate something coming up so I can act before the mistake happens. An example of this could be as such: My mid-low register is not responding as quickly as usual, so in my approach I need to take this into account so I can adjust the equation of air/attack/volume/etc. to make sure that the notes come out.

There could be an argument made (as I have heard it made in the past) that we should always be striving for musicality. I agree with this 100% but, that can’t be an excuse to allow mistakes to happen, if you have a great phrase and you chip a couple notes and are out of tune I do not believe that your musical line will come across. All things in balance.