Category Archives: Wye the flute?

Day 20 – October 20th – Yay!!

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Early days to be bouncing around with glee, but I’m going to allow myself just a little bounce tonight!

Though some elements of today’s class were still rather painful, my Moyse Nos. 2 and 4, and Andersen No. 3 before lunch were finally deemed ‘expressive’ and got a smile out of Trevor. Yay!

In terms of what I did to play expressively – from my point of view I was overdoing everything. The crescendos and diminuendos were enormous, and all I was thinking about was the phrasing and musical direction. The Andersen study, as a result, was utterly exhausting. I put absolutely everything (or what felt like it) into my fortes, and when Trevor finally stopped me halfway through the second page to say that it sounded ‘quite good’, I was almost panting. Of course, there were still things that needed work – articulation, evenness of notes, not slowing down before I took a breath – but I was genuinely happy to have got the meaning of that particular study. As I said in yesterday’s post, the interrelationship between the different layers of phrasing is tricky, and several others in the class were asked to work on it for another week.

So some things to learn from this:

– I’m clearly still thinking about how things sound from my point of view as the performer and not from the point of view of the audience. I need to keep working (with all I’ve got it seems) to project my feelings about the music to the audience, even though it feels over-the-top for me.

– I can definitely feel the effects of my lesson with Carla! Yesterday’s new-found forte is definitely a result of our work on alto flute and breathing.

– Dynamic range is incredibly important, as is using it fully to communicate ideas.

– Knowing that Trevor is a harsh teacher makes it all the better when I do finally get a complement.

So…the work continues tomorrow, as there is still plenty of it to do. We’ve got Doppler’s Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy and the Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben aria from Bach’s St Matthew Passions to contend with on Thursday, as well as a looming sonata class with Juliet Edwards, for which I’m playing the first movement of the Poulenc Sonata. Then, of course, there’s all the various scales and finger exercises.

For now though, I’m going to give myself a little reward and catch up on some Dr Who!

Day 19 – October 19th – Andersen No. 3

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I feel like I’ve had two major breakthroughs today. The first is easy to explain – I finally managed a full-range Eb melodic minor scale at a decent speed! As the sixth and seventh degrees of the scale (the ones that sharpen in an ascending melodic minor and then return to their original pitches on the descent) are on the top C and D in this particular example, I was really struggling to stay in the same key on my descent. Don’t ask me why, but I kept wandering off into B major! Anyway, some good periods of concentration have paid off and it’s now happening, it just needs to be faster.

My second breakthrough will be tested in class tomorrow, but I think I’ve finally figured out the relationship between all the different layers of phrasing in Andersen’s Op. 15 No. 3 study. Considering that I’ve previously played it for three different teachers and an undergraduate technical exam, it’s about time! The study’s in G major, and on first glances consists of a steady stream of undulating triplets with more-or-less regular slurring. When I first worked on it with my undergrad teacher Andrew Macloed (who did Trevor’s course himself while a student), we’d talked about the idea of a melody flowing through these triplets, essentially the first note of each slurred group. So the goal of the study became to bring out the melody by slightly elongating the first of each slur, but without overdoing it. Then, since a slur is always (or almost always) a decrescendo, there needed to be a coming-away over the course of each one. However, when I played the study for Trevor a few weeks ago, I was still accused of being unmusical.

What was I missing? I think I’ve worked out that the interrelationship between the overriding melody and the flow of the music is a bit more complex and subtle than that. I was elongating the start of each slur by more-or-less the same amount, and definitely at the same dynamic, delineating the melody but not really showing an understanding of it. Andrew also told me that Moyse added words to the melody: “I love you, yes I love you” with ‘love’ and ‘you’ being two beats and the other words being one beat only. I had practised the melody this way, thinking about the direction of the phrase, the focus on the word ‘love’ and then coming away on ‘you’. Yet what I had failed to do was allow this bigger plan to shape the way I played once I added the triplets back in, which now seems so silly!

So, not only does each slur need to be well-shaped, the direction in the musical line is always towards the ‘love’, the downbeat of the phrase. Here, the first note of the slur does need to be quite elongated, but those preceding and following it not nearly as much. Hopefully the result is a sense of musical ebb and flow rather than a more mathematical rendition, and I still need to remember to play the marked dynamics as well. We’ll see tomorrow, but tonight at least, I can allow myself a small sense of accomplishment.

Day 18 – October 18th – Escape!

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Walking along the river to Carla's.

Walking along the river to Carla’s.

Today I was naughty. With the help of the lovely Paul and Sue, I escaped Elmsted and disappeared off up to Windsor and London. A friend at the SoundSCAPE festival had out me in touch with alto and bass flautist Carla Rees, and I was super keen for a lesson. I’m sure that Trevor would disapprove, but I figured there are some things he just does’t need to know about. Luckily he didn’t drop by the Dairy today, and so my lurking sense of worry through the day was ill-founded anyway.

The trip was definitely worth it, both for my first ever specific instruction on alto flute, and also for the broader career insights and advice that Carla was able to provide. The key points with alto flute are:

– More air!! Put as much air as physically possible through the instrument, and then try for a bit more. But it needs to be slower air than for the C flute, or else the sound will split.

– Lower breathing. Carla noted that I was breathing quite high-up, and said that for really good resonance on the alto our bodies need to become part of the instrument. The way to achieve this is to breathe from lower down, really using the maximal expansion of our rib cage, and keep everything in the upper chest, shoulders and neck really free.

– I need to put the flute much lower on my lip, so covering more of the embouchure hole. Mardi mentioned this about my C flute playing earlier in the year, and with alto it’s even more so. In the lesson it felt a little unnatural, but the resultant sound was much bigger and crunchier.

– Along with that, I need to direct the air further downwards, but without turning the flute in. Easier when I remember the relaxed embouchure, but this concept is going to need some work!

– Finally, the alto is really physical to play. I should feel exhausted and will need to build the stamina and strength to deal with that. Looks like my morning runs are staying then.

A quick glimpse of Windsor castle on the way back to the train.

A quick glimpse of Windsor castle on the way back to the train.

Carla encouraged me to play around with the instrument, to experiment with how I could get it to sounds really fantastic and push my boundaries. The alto (and by extension bass) flute isn’t just a low C flute, it is a very different instrument and behaves differently. We need to practise with that in mind, and not aim to recreate C flute sounds. She also said that the best thing to play on low flutes is Bach, as it encourages us to deal with the real-life musical problems of leaps, tone colour and breathing.

More tomorrow, but today has given me some good thinking material, much of which I can apply to the C flute as well in moderation. After the lesson I had coffee with a lovely Australian friend Brontë who is studying flute at the Royal Academy. Hopefully the escape has given me to energy for a really full day of practice tomorrow!

Day 17 – October 17th – Practise, listen, read, practise

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Today was a practice day, and I managed to get a lot done. After a few weeks here, I’m getting better at pacing myself through the day so that I don’t arrive at 3pm a total train wreck after trying to cram everything in too early. At the moment, an idea practice day seems to be:

– Wake up 6:45am

– Out the door for a run at 7am, running for half an hour (I think that’s about 3 miles). I’m still in love with the sky here, it is vast and stunning no matter what the weather or time of day. The mornings always offer me something beautiful, be it a hazy sunrise, sparkling colours or heavy fog.

– After breakfast and a shower, start practise, alternating an hour’s playing with 15 min rest for a cup of tea. This is definitely my best time of the day, and I relish getting through all the various scales and exercises. I feel great if I can get three hours done before lunch!

Playing with the Quena

Playing with the Quena this evening

– In the afternoon, two or three additional hours of practice, but with longer rest breaks of at least 30 min, but often nearer an hour. This is when I’m doing my various listening and reading projects, as well as having some down-time.

– Our walk with Trevor at 7:42pm (yes, he’s that precise!) is a good way to end the day, especially if it’s not too cold. We walk and talk, sometimes about the flute, sometimes about other things.

This evening I was Trevor’s walking partner, and we talked about a range of things; ethnic flutes, his time in Singapore, his childhood during the War. I borrowed a Quena – a type of Andean flute – for the weekend, and I shared my thoughts on playing that with him. It’s a lovely instrument and I’ve enjoyed having a play, but am finding the airiness in the second octave rather frustrating. Trevor’s advice was to “blow harder”.

And finally, because I’m trying to become a well-organised musician with a ‘sustainable artistic practice’ (according to my ArtStart application), I decided it was time to do battle with my tax return. It’s now done, but I would have taken an extra hour of scales any day!

Day 16 – October 16th – That was better!

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Hopefully today marks a mini-turning point in my time here at the flute studio. I know it’s only been two weeks so far, but I haven’t felt like I’ve fitted in as easily as I would have liked – mostly because Trevor and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a few things.

Anyway, in today’s class I tried to go all out and play in what I would consider a rather over-the-top fashion, and it worked! Apart from the odd comment or two (and that’s really nothing as far as Trevor goes) the whole day of classes went by really positively. My Sicilienne, which was as dynamically contrasting as I felt I could play, with every note beautifully finished, was pronounced “much better than last week”, and despite a “funny Australian G natural” in my rendition of the Brahms 4 flute solo, it was also passed with far fewer painful comments than normal. The most important thing in that solo, according to Trevor, are not the note endings, but playing the high D natural at the beginning (3/4 section) in tune, and then just keeping the whole thing in time.

After having a collective stress-out about the Marais Folies d’Espagne, the whole class breathed a sigh of relief when Trevor pronounced that we just needed to perform the theme and three or four variations. Rather than preaching a set method of interpreting the variations, he wanted instead to hear that we’d worked on them, thought about them, and come to our own musical decisions. Though I was one again projecting my dynamics rather more than felt natural, it seemed that my musical decisions were at least sound ones.

There was a collective feeling among us that we needed a bit of a break this evening, and so we had a bit of a cooking party with wine, pasta and salad. I made crepes and stewed pears for dessert, and was rather happy with the result!