Breathe

Today I rode my bike for the first time in several months. I actually made it to the third trimester with biking, but then it just became too tiring. Some people seem to get through pregnancy and birth smoothly, without much of a hitch. This was not the case with me. I managed to play until 3 weeks before birth, but it was a fight, both mentally and physically. I am happy that I begin to feel a little more normal, but it has not been easy.

Breathing was a real difficulty the entire time. Not so good for an individual who makes their living breathing in a controlled manner. However it forced me to think again about how I breathe, in part because I couldn't physically play the way that I had in the past. I have to say that in the past several years I became lazy about how I breathed while playing. I felt that I had figured things out mostly, and that it worked for me. Sure, one can always improve, but I felt like I had the basics down.

Boy was I wrong. Since I was having such a hard time with breathing, my baroque bassoon teacher and I had a long conversation on the subject, and I have to say she blew my former concept of breathing out of the water. My breathing had previously been something of an on off switch, either I was blowing air through the instrument at a certain speed, lower abdominals engaged, or I was not. Of course I varied the speed depending on which register I was playing, but the general concept throughout the bassoon's range was basically the same.

This concept of breathing seems to work pretty well with modern bassoon, but I was working too hard on the baroque bassoon. She showed me that one could have a big sound while keeping the abdominals relaxed. With the the modern airstream I ended up working against the instrument. I didn't need that much air. In fact, with less air it is easier to phrase appropriately. The difference is a little bit like the difference between a baroque and modern string bow, as far as I understand it. A modern bow one can keep the sound "stream" the same at all points ad nausium. With a baroque bow one cannot create huge phrases, but there is a flexibity within the phrase that is impossible to get on a modern instrument. This difference, big long phrases vs small phrases is one of the key
differences between baroque and modern playing. The more relaxed breathing allows for that
flexibility that is required for baroque music to be interesting.

This new concept helped me to not try to kill myself when playing, since I simply was not able to use as much air as before. Now that I have my lungs back, I am trying to incorporate this new concept perminantly into my baroque and classical instruments. I am also trying to see how I can incorporate some of the relaxed way of playing into my modern instrument. This is more difficult, as you do need a certain amount of pressure on the modern that you don't need on the baroque. I plan to play around with it on modern, and see what type of airstream I can discover. Breathing is oddly such a complicated subject, considering, or maybe because, we do it so easily without thinking most of our lives.

Polarities

A few weeks ago, my life changed forever. I am very used to my life changing drastically, it has happened very dramatically several times in my life, but this one might be the biggest. I became a parent. Nothing could have prepared me for the conflict between the pain of labor and the joy of the child it can bring forth. In a way, it mirrors the rest of life. Points of joy with points of pain, spattered together so that the colors sometimes run together, an abstract painting of many layers and lots of unclear borders. A line of music so beautiful it hurts.

Life and death, the words put forth onto the page seem so small, so inconsequential. Nothing one can write can describe the brevity of these two small words. The beginning and the end. These exist side by side, because they cannot exist alone. This theme has been the cornerstone of my own life, the life of the people around me, and also it seems, in the greater world.

I was up last night around two A.M and I noticed that my phone was reporting to me that twitter was very active with news about a Paris attack. Concerned, I unlocked my phone to see what terrors had developed. I was horrified to learn the details of what had transpired. I was also selfishly happy that I was safe in bed with my husband and newborn son, in a city that was unlikely to ever suffer such a terror attack.

We musicians try to counter the horrors of such an event with music. We fight death with the weapons that we have honed through years of practice and study: the clear counterpoint of Bach, the majesty of Elgar, the beauty of Barber. It is what we are called to do in life, wash away the grime, dirt, blood, of this life, gather it all together, mix it with time and space, and create something out of the cesspool of life that transcends this life.

Instrument Zoo: Cornetto

One of my favorite instruments in the world is the cornetto. The duck-billed platypus of the early music world, the cornetto is half woodwind, half brass. Fingerings of a woodwind with the mouthpiece like a brass instrument. Click here to check out the wiki page. The cornetto player can create the most hauntingly beautiful sounds imaginable. However, the path to this beauty is a steep one, up a mountain and through the woods without a trail kind of steep. The sounds I created during my brief stint with the cornetto resembled more a beginning trumpet player, on a bad day.

When I first heard the sounds of a cornetto, I was immediately intrigued. What kind of instrument sounds like buttery brass? At that point in my early music career, I had only played bass double reeds, and I was just venturing out into the world of higher double reeds, recorders, bagpipes, etc. I was totally game to try everything, I was hooked, trying to find my next early music fix. However, the cornetto with the embouchure of a brass instrument, made me nervous. However, the beauty of the sound still beckoned to me. So several years later, I was a little more comfortable with sounding like crap on any given instrument, and I was able to borrow a cornetto. So I made the leap.

Well, this time, it looked like I bit off more than I can chew. I started out on a few minutes a day, buzzing the mouthpiece, trying to figure out for the first time in my life what a brass embouchure was exactly. The mouthpiece of the cornetto is particularly tiny, making the sound production even more tenuous than a modern brass instrument. I started to slowly figure out how to make a proper sound, but it was slow going. Two steps forward, one step back. I started to realize how much practice it was going to take to make even a decent sound. I already double on many different instruments, and adding yet another embouchure to practice I realized was more than what I could do. Sadly, I admitted defeat.

So, now I leave the cornetto playing to the pros, and try to be happy with just be an appreciator of the cornetto. Recently I had the pleasure of playing in a gig where the cornetto players, three of them, were standing right behind me in our performance. What an amazing sound, and I was able to enjoy bathing in their buttery sound. Here in Europe, cornetto is also a certain kind of ice cream cone, and one of the players had managed to find a tiny cornetto ice cream cone pin, and had attached it to the lapel of his suit. Perfect. I will leave you now with one of my favorite pieces of all time, which of course features the dulcet tones of a great cornetto player.

It's all about the Bass

A single musical voice, the most simple of concepts. A single voice can carry the weight of the world, lull a child to sleep, pierce the soul. There is something about one musical voice that draws us inward, transports us to a different place, a different era, a different level of existence. Composers who choose to write for one voice have their work cut out for them. In my lifetime I have heard the most subliminal and the most banal sounds from this genre.

I was talking to a friend recently and we discussed Bach’s solo violin music. I realized that it had been a long time since I had heard any of the 6 solo sonatas and partitas. This was an error that I quickly remedied, finding an excellent and complete recording by the baroque violinist John Holloway. Deciding on a single recording of the violin sonatas and partitas can be a daunting task, as there is a wealth of treasures within the Bach recording scene. I prefer Bach on baroque strings and baroque mentality, so that cuts through the clatter a little bit and makes the choice slightly less daunting. I am happy with my choice, it is an interesting, introspective recording. Do not listen to this recording if you prefer the overdoness and excessive vibrato that some modern players prescribe to when playing Bach, you will not find this style here. 

In writing for solo violin, Bach likely drew inspiration from several composers. Westhof, Biber, and later Vilsmar and Pisendel all wrote significant pieces of work for solo violin around the time Bach was composing his music. Recently I rediscovered Biber’s (the original Biber, not the current pop star) solo passacaglia ca. 1676, definitely worth several listens. Solo music was not regulated to violin alone, many other baroque composers wrote solo music for other instruments, including Telemann.

When I was a freshman at Indiana University, one of the first things my teacher and I worked on were the Telemann fantasies for solo flute. This work was on modern bassoon, but that did not stop my amazing teacher, Kim Walker, from giving me what I consider my first baroque lessons. Part of my work was to separate the bass line from the solo line. This work was not only interesting musically, but also intellectually. This work also laid a wonderful foundation for my later work in baroque music.

If one wants to study a piece of baroque music, whether you have an old or new instrument in hand, one must always begin with the base line. Whether it is a solo piece, or there is accompaniment, the bass is always the place to begin, even when the bass line is not a bass line. The play between solo and bass is where the magic happens. Composers during this era spent countless hours working out exercises between these two voices, the best composers displaying the greatest ability to think creatively between these two pillars, and usually the most work. The next time a piece of music by one of the great Dead White European Males (of the powered wig variety) shows up on your music stand, make sure you have all the parts in front of you, start taking note, and then you can begin to truly appreciate the masters.

The Early Music Red Pill

For the last several years, the vast majority of my work has been in the early music field. I spent many years playing only modern bassoon, but my gigs and most of my work conversations for the last handful of years have been in and around early music. Moving to Cologne has changed that a bit, as I have quite a few modern connections from Indiana University here, where I studied modern bassoon. Apparently there is an IU ex-pat black hole situated somewhere in Cologne. So I am again surrounded by modern players, wonderful musicians, but with little or no early music training. So I find myself between two worlds. The thing is, I have swallowed the red pill of historical performance, and there is no going back to the same world in which I once lived.

One cannot not forget the magic that is hearing an ensemble of early double reeds play an F# major chord, the magic gut strings and an understanding of counterpoint can bring to a performance of Bach’s music, or the magic of playing Telemann on baroque bassoon. One would not want to play the Rite of Spring on baroque bassoon, but it is many times easier to play a continuo line on baroque bassoon than it is modern. It all depends on the goal of a particular performance. To travel two miles, one would not use a plane, one would walk or use a car. To travel 1000 miles, one would use a plane. Does this make the plane or the car a superior mode of travel? Certainly not. Studying early music, I believe, should be part of every musician’s curriculum. By absolutely no means do I think every musician should only play early music, but to understand the language of the past, or at least to be able to translate this language, is priceless knowledge.

Historical performance is not about recreating exact replicas of past performances, but rather learning the language of a particular time in history. The primary concern voiced among my modern music friends, is that historical performance practice is too constraining. That allowing for historical context means that the music is somehow less current. I thought the same thing before I was pulled into the early music rabbit hole, but actually have found the opposite to be true. I remember working on music from Baroque and Classical masters and being at a complete loss. What to do with music that has little to no dynamic markings? One can only rely on intuition to a certain point, and then one needs the grammar. 

I find it interesting to listen to a piece of baroque music performed on a modern instrument with a performer who hasn’t studied any early music. The performance can sound strange to me, like listening to poetry with the accents on the wrong syllables, or listening to a speech where everything is just one run on sentence. This is not to say early music should never be performed on modern instruments, but a little bit of historical performance practice study would go a long way. For me, playing anything pre 1800 on modern bassoon feels like a translation. Translations themselves are not bad, it allows for people to enjoy great works who would otherwise not have access, but there is always going to be something lost in that translation.

 What about all the rules? Classical music as a whole is full of rules, we just don’t think about them as rules if they are on the page. We are musicians who, in most cases, take other people’s compositions and interpret them to the best of our abilities. Accents, crescendos, slurs, dynamic markings, these are all rules that one follows at the composers request. However, one would be hard pressed to find someone complaining about the confines of accents. It would be sacrilege to change Beethoven’s accent markings, yet the phrasings that Bach considered self-evident are ignored, because these rules were documented in outside treatises, rather then on the page.

It all boils down to whether you believe that historical context belongs in classical music. It is my opinion that we cannot play Bach the same way we play Beethoven, the same way we play Mahler, or Berg. Historical performance is realizing that tastes change, styles change, and that we do not perform music in a vacuum. Musicality can be highly subjective, what is considered a good performance changes over time, and this makes people uncomfortable. While yes, musicality at the end of the day or the end of last century is the same, but we do not just deal just in emoting. Music, particularly classical music is not just about expression. It is also about craft and style. It is a blend of intellect and heart, and to take the intellect out of the pictures I believe is to do classical music a big disfavor.

That is what we do in early music, we put the craft back in. We should not project romantic expression onto the rhetorically driven music pre-1800. Expression was an important part of a musician and composers life, but the thought process was different. In my musical life, I became frustrated in modern settings when I was told to be more musical. Great, that is very useful. In baroque and classical era music, there are more tools to reach this elusive “musicality” goal. The treatises ask you to decide whether the music is lively, melancholy, delicate, coy, pleading, etc.  There is a much more concrete path that has been laid down for musicians to reach their goals, and I have found these guidelines work in any setting, in any time period. We work in a field that is based, for better or worse, mostly in the past. Isn’t it time to study this past?

Again with the Moving

So, remember when I said I hate moving. Well, apparently I wasn't quite done. My husband and I decided to vacate former east Germany in favor of a more centrally located city, namely Cologne, Germany. If you wish to read a post about the challenges the city endures, you can read my post here. We have both been very happy with the move, and while I did have to give up most of my work connections in Dresden and Leipzig, Berlin is still only a four hour train ride away. So, hopefully this will be the last move for a long time, as there are ample work opportunities for both my husband and me in Cologne. We have been here for two months, and work for me is already starting to roll in.

I have spent the last several months distilling my dissertation into 2500 words for a Dutch bassoon journal. This was quite the challenge, particularly since I changed my opinion on one of my main points. I wrote my dissertation in 2012, and with the publication of Jim Kopp's book on the Bassoon (an excellent book, even if I do disagree with him on a few points) he started me thinking about a few points, which eventually led me in a different direction. My dissertation topic remains the same, the development and use of the bassoon in 17th century France. If any of you readers are interested in reading my article, send me a twitter message or a message through my website.

Historical Pitch: 101

Several musicians who are not in the early music field have recently asked me about pitch. So I thought I would write a blog post with a broad overview of historical pitch. Disclaimer, I am going to over generalize, but I just want to give people who are not in the early music world a basic primer about what we are doing in the early music world.  If one wants a much more in-depth look into historical pitch, look into Bruce Haynes book, "The History of Performance Pitch: The Story of 'A'". This will give the you all the answers to everything you are yearning for. It's a really dense book, the amount of research he did is admirable. This is just a blog post. :)

Pitch is not something modern players have to think about too much. Before an ensemble plays, there is always the question of where is everyone's individual A.  At 440, at 442, or even higher. There needs to be some kind of consensus.  However, that is as far as anyone had to think about it. However, there is a whole other world of pitch possibilities.  You might know about baroque instruments playing at a lower pitch, A = 415. This was all that I knew until I fell through the early music rabbit hole now quite a few years ago. Well, this is only the beginning of our little tale.

Throughout most of Western Music history, there has not been a standard pitch. The pitch of instruments depended highly on the pitch of the organ. In many different parts of Europe during the Renaissance and baroque periods (except apparently France) organ builders sometimes saved a little bit on money by making the pipes a little smaller, so they would be a little higher. So for a long time, pitch in a particular city was regulated to the pitch of the organ, which could get quite high.

Mimicking this would be a logistical nightmare, so we have simplified things a bit. Renaissance music tends to be played at either A = 440 or A +/- 465. In the Midwest, most people played at 440, here in Dresden, most people play at 465. The pitch around 465 is considered historically more accurate. I have a G alto shawm at 465, and it just feels and sounds right. Not that I have any idea in reality, but the instrument just makes a lot of sense at that pitch. I am definitely a fan of high pitch for Renaissance music.

Lets move onto the baroque period, easy right? 415 all the way? Well... It depends on where and when the music you are playing comes from. In my mind, the Baroque party didn't fully start until the  second half of the 17th century. Which is a little later then what the history books give you as the beginning of the baroque period. In my mind, all that lovely early baroque music originating mostly from Italy I consider a separate time period. I call it.... 17th century music. I know, mind blown. So, the fun really starts in France, where the pitch around 1680 should be  A = +/- 392. Wanna know why, read Haynes' book. Basically it has to do with organs again and church singers, and Lully's turf war. Everything else in the Baroque period (into the 18th century) can easily be played at 415 without anyone yelling at you. One can even get away with playing early French baroque music at 415.

Then pitch become a little more standardized, comparatively. Classical era music we tend to play at A= 430. My classical bassoon is at 430, more or less, depending on how much coffee I have had that day. I have been known to dip back down to 415 on cloudy days.

So essentially it is all relative. Which is a good point. The objective of having different pitch centers is not to replicate exactly how the concert would have sounded. I think this is a myth that is pervasive in the modern world about early music players. In my mind, since we can make an instrument close to its original pitch, we should. At the end of the day it doesn't really make a whole lot of difference. Why make a baroque instrument at 415 rather than at 440? One could definitely.  A baroque bassoon at any pitch is a totally different beast than the modern bassoon. In my experience, baroque music makes much more sense on my baroque instruments than it does on my modern. But that, that is a another blog topic.