Author Archives: flutietoot

Day 68 – December 7th – Mr Bean

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Only a short one, as we’ve just got back from dinner at Trevor’s (walking). It was to celebrate Yi-Yin’s birthday, and we had a type of Asian fondue which became mushroom, noodle and veggie fondue for the vegetarians. It was a nice dinner and we ended up watching quite a few episodes of Mr Bean and Fawlty Towers, I think because Trevor has realised that TV shows are easier than trying to start conversation!

Overnight there will be a transformation: the friendly, jovial Trevor of tonight, plying us with food and wine, will turn into a dragon who will find holes in all my studies tomorrow no matter how much work I’ve put in. Oh well, c’est la vie…

Day 67 – December 6th – Productive procrastination?

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Today I alternated being really productive and really unproductive, both with flute practice itself and with writing my assignment. My practice sessions were generally good, though I’m not doing a great job of memorising the pattern for Taffanel and Gaubert-style minor scales. Reichert No. 2 is sounding quite good now though, I just need to trust myself and not start questioning what the next note is!

This afternoon I went for a run, which was definitely procrastinating about writing. The day was stunning though still cold. At 2pm, the sun hung low and glaring in the sky, casting long shadows but rendering other objects lush and green. Some fields had not seen the sun at all, and still sat under a layer of thick glistening frost. By the roadside, some of the puddles had a thin coating of ice, and the little English child in me took great pleasure in the crack of my foot on the surface. The winter air at once caught in my throat and tasted delicious.

As for studies later in the afternoon, I’m becoming better at learning things at speed. The prospect of playing almost eight pages of music on Monday is no longer scary, and I’m not able to zone in on the bits that need work without feeling the need to repeat the easy parts just to feel more comfortable.

Tonight is supposed to be the coldest so far – I’m hoping for a lovely thick frost tomorrow morning!

Day 66 – December 5th – Short day/long day

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Today was a funny one – I had grand plans for all that I was going to get done, have achieved some of it, but am now absolutely exhausted at 10pm! My morning practice sessions were ok, though not stellar, but by the afternoon everything felt sluggish and heavy. I managed to get some good work done on the CPE Bach (attributed to JS Bach) Sonata in Eb major for our masterclass with Rachel Brown on Thursday, but didn’t feel like I was achieving much with my studies.

So I spent quite a bit of the afternoon working on my flute history assignment, writing about the ocarina and flutes of China, Japan and Korea. It’s really interesting to see all the links between instruments of different countries, and I’m at once enjoying the research and increasingly conscious of the due date!

Hopefully an early night will revitalise me for more practice and writing tomorrow.

Day 65 – December 4th – Mei

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After gearing myself up for a tough day playing contemporary music for Trevor, I was pleasantly surprised how things turned out. I still didn’t fare too well in morning warm-ups – though my Reichert exercises were actually quite good, I wasn’t able to pick up on the pattern of a new scales exercise very well, nor play it at the speed Trevor was already setting! Looks like I’ll be adding that one to my practice list for the weekend.

To my surprise, Mei went quite well; Trevor could see that I mostly understood the music and had worked on it, and as a result I ended up having a really productive and rewarding lesson. There was one fundamental thing with the piece that I hadn’t thought about, and that’s the use of vibrato. We’ve been playing ‘standard’ repertoire for so long now that it didn’t even cross my mind to think about playing senza vibrato (and I had deliberately not listened to any recordings), which was a silly mistake. The piece mimics shakuhachi playing, and so “of course” should be played without vibrato, as in the Japanese musical culture it’s an ornament. Lesson duly learned.

From there, however, Trevor kept pushing me to play the music with sharper grace notes, more convincing pitch bends and a greater intensity of direction and dynamics. I enjoyed myself, and when his final comment was “some very good things happening there, but you need to do a lot of work playing without vibrato” I had to stop myself leaping for joy. His praise is so rare that it really means something when it does come!

We went to a nearby pub for dinner, and have just got back. It was a nice place – The Five Bells – and the food was yummy. Everything is starting to feel very Christmassy, especially since we head out into ‘civilisation’ so infrequently.

Day 64 – December 3rd – Doing it at speed

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It continues to be rather cold in a very wintry sort of way. I put off my morning run because of the rain, but even when I did finally head out at 2:30pm it was brisk and chilly. Overall I quite like the cold – properly rugged up, I really enjoyed our walk this evening – but am not sure how much longer my morning runs are going to last!

One of the thing that Trevor has pointed out a few times now is that I need to relax and trust myself with the warm-up exercises. I think part of the problem is a fear of letting my fingers go onto autopilot, which applies equally to pieces where I have to play things at speed. Today there were moments where I surprised myself with the Reichert exercises – I could genuinely get through two or three keys at speed without dropping any notes. Then suddenly I would be back to thinking about what comes next, and so would fall apart. The only way I can see of resolving it is to keep pushing the threshold. If I can get through three keys without a slip today, then maybe tomorrow I can do four, and I can do them a bit faster. I’ve definitely improved at this since being here, and I can do things now that I couldn’t have two months ago, but it’s still an area that I’d like to feel better about.

Also on the topic of speed, I did my Moyse finger exercises at crotchet = 124 today, which is getting pretty brisk! Interestingly, it actually felt easier than crotchet =122 yesterday, and I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m nearing the end of a two week cycle, or whether I was a bit more focused today.

Tomorrow we’re playing Fukushima’s Mei in class, or at least I’m playing it. Some of the others haven’t practised it, and all seem to be assuming that I’ll go first, Trevor will talk about the piece, and then they won’t actually have to play. I’m rather dubious about this plan, as I have a feeling that no matter how well I play, Trevor will dig into me about my penchant for new music and declare that I’m no better at it than anything else. I have, however, taken the time to practise the piece, and really like it. Hopefully I’ve done enough work to have a constructive lesson, and will be able to return to it at some point in the future.