Author Archives: flutietoot

Day 26 – October 26th – Dark evenings

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The clocks changed today, and I was reminded of just how dark it gets in English winters when the sun set at 5:30pm. Looking on the bright side: it’s now lighter for my morning run, and as yet nowhere near as cold or dark as the year I spent in Helsinki!

I wonder whether my scales might be suffering from happening the hour after Practice Book 6 exercises? These last two days, with the exercises at a faster tempo, the hour of scales has felt sluggish and below par. The exercises, though, have felt good. Tomorrow we switch back to the Moyse interval exercises.

I spent a lot of time today on Andersen Op. 15 No. 4 – it’s hard! There are three things I’ve been trying to focus on:

– A really clear staccato, but always expressivo as Trevor says it should be.

– Internal dynamics, so making sure that the low notes are equally as loud (and resonant) as the higher ones. As a result, the lower ones have a bit more oomph in the staccato, while the higher ones are shorted with a bit more ping.

– Large-scale dynamics, played fully and as if it were my last ever performance (c.f. Davies book from yesterday). Fitting this in with the other two points is tricky.

Despite my work, I’m quite prepared to be asked to present this study next week as well, and in some ways would quite like another week to really get working properly.

Day 25 – October 25th – Diverse inspiration

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Mostly a quiet practice day today, and with a good sleep last night things were better than yesterday.

I upped the tempo for the Practice Book 6 exercises to crotchet = 120 because Roya said she had and I didn’t want to be left behind. 116 would probably have been a safer bet, but I got through them. Major scales and all my arpeggios felt really good, but the melodic minors are still driving me up the wall. I think some of it’s that I worry about the turn around at the top, then of course I chicken out! Andersen No. 4 is tricky with all the leaps – at the moment I feel like it’s all the notes, a clear staccato or speed. If I can get two working together by Monday I’ll be happy!

Two little pieces of inspiration I found today:
1. My running circuit, which is still three miles long, but which I accomplished in 25min. We live at the top of a hill, and so my circuit involves going both up and down a hill. At the start of the month, I turned right out of the dairy, going round anticlockwise, and dying every time I reached the hill to come back up because it’s really steep. By the end of the first week I was making no progress, so started turning left out of the dairy and running clockwise round. There is still exactly the same amount of hill to go up, but it’s spread over a longer distance, and I can now run all the way without stopping (or feeling like I’m going to die!). Lesson: looking at things a different way can often make a huge difference!

2. I picked up a book at Trevor’s on Thursday, Becoming an Orchestral Musician by Richard Davis. I mentioned a while ago that Trevor had given me a book called The Handbook to Higher Consciousness in the hope that it might help me to play more expressively, and while I have been reading it, I certainly haven’t been enjoying it. The Davies has a chapter on performance philosophy, which talks about a number of points, specifically giving music that je ne sais quoi. Three ideas were given: playing as if it’s the last day of your life, playing as if it’s the first time you’re experiencing the music, and finally the importance of always taking your audience on a musical journey. Nothing I haven’t heard or read before, but refreshing to read again. And tonight on our walk, I plucked up the courage to tell Trevor I’m not getting along with his choice of reading material!

For dinner, I made a yummy aubergine and courgette soup with plenty of garlic to stave off any looming colds. Final lesson of the day: cooking is relaxing.

Day 24 – October 24th – Canterbury

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Trevor being a great tour guide.

Trevor being a great tour guide.

This morning we had a group excursion to Canterbury to visit the cathedral, do a bit of shopping and re-acquaint ourselves with a bit of civilisation. The cathedral is stunning, a great sprawling building that just seems to keep going and going. As with most large English churches, the ‘choir’ cuts the interior in half, and so it’s hard to appreciate the sheer size when walking around inside. However, the space behind the choir was enormous, as was the crypt underneath, and we spent a good two hours looking round. Trevor proved to be a good guide, telling us bits and pieces of history mixed in with stories of his musical work with the cathedral and choir.

Afterwards, we were let loose for a while to amuse ourselves. I took the opportunity to buy some jeans (the two pairs that traveled round Europe with

me are starting to look a little sad) and heels (so that I’m not going to see the London Symphony Orchestra next week wearing hiking boots!), and to wander longingly round the food department of M&S.

Back to practice in the afternoon. I was rather tired today after a couple of late nights, and it was really interesting to see what did and didn’t go well considering that:

– First hour, playing tunes, Taffanel and Gaubert No. 4 and Reichert No. 2 was good in terms of memory, though my lips didn’t feel terribly responsive.

View of the cathedral from a little back-street.

View of the cathedral from a little back-street.

– Second hour, playing the advanced technical exercises on page 12 of Trevor’s Practice Book 6 was great – I playing A, B, C and D at crotchet = 112, and just about survived Q! Other exercises that followed were ok.

Then my Grandma rang for a chat, which was a lovely surprise!

– Third hour, playing scales, was rather hit-and-miss. At the tempos I outlined on Wednesday, some went really well (arpeggios felt fantastic) and some were awful. My lips were not at all happy with high notes.

– Fourth hour, working on Andersen Op. 15 No. 4 was a bit of a fight against fatigue. I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do musically, and so spent a lot of the time playing everything really slowly, with beautifully clear staccatos and (hopefully) good dynamic relationships between all the notes despite horrendous leaps!

I also took the time this afternoon to read an article by Alex Ross on the opening night of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met, and it’s definitely worth a look. I’m totally for this opera being performed – it’s really important to engage with relevant material through such a powerful medium. It would seem that some people want opera to stay firmly in the realm of fantasy, but I don’t understand why. As with theatre and film, music and opera that gets people talking and thinking is exactly what we need.

Now time for an early night!

Day 23 – October 23rd – A bit of fantasy

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The last 24 hours has been interesting. As I said in yesterday’s blog, we were about to head over to Trevor and Dot’s for dinner, and the evening turned out to be quite an eye-opener. Away from the studio room, and after a few glasses of wine, Trevor was an incredibly jovial host. There was a stunning and very fancy dinner: an entrée of crab paté followed by mini pancakes with salmon, quail eggs, ginger, caviar and sour cream (of the make-your-own variety). Then came an amuse-bouche of lettuce with walnut oil, fresh walnuts and a pinch of salt (messy but oh so yummy) and a cooked banana dessert. All washed down with plenty of wine and liqueurs to finish off. After dinner we watched Jean de Florette, an old but stunningly-shot French film set in Provence. The whole thing was a bit surreal, especially when it came time to walk home along the little footpaths!

This morning, thought, it was back to Trevor the teacher. My rendition of the Aus liebe obbligato from Bach’s St Matthew Passions was pronounced un-expressive, though by the end of my time out the front I think it had improved somewhat. I did better in the afternoon with Dopploer’s Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy, which I knew well enough to really go for in terms of expression and style. The problem is that I need to be confident enough to do this with every piece, even if I’m not totally on top of the notes! I ended up getting through quite a bit of the Doppler and having a really constructive lesson, and we were able to talk about a variety of things in my playing rather than just the one, so I left class much happier. I like Trevor’s approach to the piece: play the written rhythms because Doppler took an awful lot of time to write them all out! Yes, there is some flexibility of tempo, but never at the expense of what’s actually written on the page. Compared to some of the recordings I’ve heard, I find this stoic logic very appealing.

Our other activity in class today was taking a pitch perception test. Melodic transcription have never been my forte, and so I was relieved to find that it was a simple case of comparing pairs of pitches and identifying which ones were higher or lower. There were 50 tests, in sets of 10, and as we progressed the pitches got closer and closer together. Starting at a quartertone, by the end there were only one or two cents difference. I surprised myself by doing quite well, with only two wrong (and let’s face it, I’m sure the last one was actually just the same pitch twice), which according to Trevor puts me in the 96th percentile. He then went on to tell us that he believes the ability to perceive pitch in this way is fixed from the age of seven, giving the proof that conservatoire students will test almost exactly the same at both ends of their degree. Interesting food for thought, though I hope that my ability to perceive the pitch of my flute continues to improve!

We’re off to explore Canterbury tomorrow morning, which I’m rather looking forward to. Hopefully my sudden late-night desire to practise will carry over to the morning with similar vigor!

Day 22 – October 22nd – Flapjack!

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Flapjack with glacé ginger!

Flapjack with glacé ginger!

It would appear that the worst of the Hurricane winds are past, and I managed to go for a nice but rather cold run this morning. At 7am it was 7 degrees and still rather dark – I’m looking forward to the clocks changing this weekend so as to keep my schedule going for a little bit longer at least! When it did happen, the sunrise was beautiful: long swathes of pink and orange woven through light blue, all hazy and a little surreal. Still not quite cold enough for frost, but I’m sure it will come.

I noticed a distinct improvement in playing the Reichert exercises from memory today. Still not perfect, but I getting somewhere. I got all the way round the circle of 5ths playing a Taffanel and Gaubert-style one-octave scale, followed by a short version of the Reichert No. 2 (first bar and a half). Then I managed to play through quite a few keys in both Reichert Nos. 2 and 4 without peeking at the music.

Following on from my scales yesterday, I now have a list of tempos that everything sounds good at, so that I can gradually push them faster. For each set, I’m starting from B and working up by semitones (rather than round the circle of 5ths), the range is low B to top D, and I’m using the long fingering for Bb.

– Majors followed by broken chord: crotchet = 96

– Minors (melodic and harmonic) followed by broken chord: crotchet = 76

In practice, the harmonics can go quite a bit quicker, but I’m really focusing on trying to get the melodics at a better speed!

– Arpeggios: crotchet = 96

– Dominant and diminished 7ths: crotchet = 84

– Augmented and diminished arpeggios: crotchet = 84

– Whole tone scales: crotchet = 88

That’s all Trevor has asked for so far, though I’m sure that scales in thirds, fourths and fifths are next round the corner.

We’re all heading over to Trevor and Dot’s for a fish-themed dinner tonight. Though we are under strict instructions not to bring anything, I thought it would be nice to say thank you in some way, and so made some flapjack that I’ll take for class morning tea tomorrow. I used this recipe with glacé ginger to give it a little bit of spice. All went well, though I should probably have left them to cool a little longer in the baking tray before trying to lift them out, as a couple of corners crumbled. They still taste good though!