Category Archives: Wye the flute?

Day 15 – October 15th – Wise words from Wibb

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Another short one: today we headed up to London to watch William Bennett’s flute masterclass at the Royal Academy of Music, and with that and the travel time it was a very busy day!

We heard eight flute students across both undergrad and postgrad perform, and it was really interesting to see both the choice of repertoire and the level of playing. In general, I found the repertoire choice quite narrow: Ibert, Hüe, Gaubert and Dutilleux made for a lot of early 20th century French music, and there wasn’t really anything terribly adventurous for the offering. Nor, for that matter, was there anything Baroque or Classical, though I wonder whether, with such a strong Early Music department, the RAM students might be less keen on playing such works?

The standard of playing was overall incredibly high, and several of the students were really impressive. In the afternoon session, nobody said what year level they were in, but there was a stunningly sensitive performance of the third movement of the Widor Suite by a girl that looked pretty new, as well as a student with amazing technical facility performing the Dutilleux Sonatine.

As for Wibb, he is a great teacher, with a very keen sense of the masterclass environment as well. He was humorous, and seemed keen to put students at their ease one stage. That said, he was also very particular about intonation, and how one should phrase! Aesthetically, very similar to Trevor, but with something of a different method of delivery!

More tomorrow, though I’m sure I’ll also have lots to say about our own class, Brahms 4 and Les Folies d’Espagne!

Day 14 – October 14th – Variations

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After yesterday’s rather dismal outlook, I had a much more positive day today. A couple of the reasons were non-flute-related: I Skyped with some lovely friends in Australia this morning, the studio group had our weekly outing to Tesco, and I made a hot and yummy broccoli soup for dinner! All these things gave me the energy to do a fair slog of practice, and now my lips are a bit dead again.

Of particular note was that our repertoire for the week is Marin Marais’s Les Folies d’Espagne. I have a funny relationship with this piece. Despite being a bit of a new music fan in recent years, this is one of my all-time favourite flute pieces, or at least the E minor solo one is! I was a bit shocked to pick up the score for class and find that it was in G minor instead, but have actually found that my fingers got round the new key relatively easily (there are just a few mordants and trills that come a bit more easily in E min0r). There are also a couple of different variations between the E and G minor versions, which I’ve needed to have a think about.

In re-visiting the work, I’ve realised that I love it for precisely the reason that it’s so hard; a really wonderful performance holds my attention through all 31 variations, despite the fact that the harmony doesn’t change. I’ve got a wonderful recording of Jordi Savall and Baroque ensemble playing the whole set (exactly the one I’m now doing, interestingly enough), and the energy that they inject into the music is fantastic. Every variation makes me feel like dancing, yet in a different way each time. While they can achieve a lot more variety of timbre through the different instruments, my challenge is to play with the same energy and vitality across all the variations.

With Roya and Chin Ting also practising the same piece today, there has been an awful lot of G minor!

Tomorrow we’re heading up to London again, this time to hear Wibb give a masterclass. It’ll be a long day, but I’m looking forward to it.

Day 13 – October 13th – More expression please!

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Another full day of classes, and once again I didn’t have a great time of things.

Warm-ups in the morning went ok – I’d manged to fix some of the things that Trevor wanted such as posture (I’ve now got more space between my flute and right shoulder) and expression in the more lyrical warm-up exercises themselves. When it came to the devilish finger exercises I did quite well, and with the scales test I was better off than most. A slight glitch when Trevor got me to sightread No. 1 of Boehm’s Twelve Studies, but I think that my being selected might have been because he thought I might be able to make something of it.

The difficult bit of the lesson came once again with the presentation of Moyse and Andersen studies. I played Moyse No. 1 and 6 (at least an improvement from last week where we got sidetracked onto tone colour exercises and I didn’t play any!) and Andersen No. 2, and it was the Andersen that rather undid my confidence. I was barely allowed to play a bar before the criticism started, and it can be summed up as follows:

– No character or understanding of the musical phrase

– A and B on the first and second beats need to be weighty because they’re the tune, but not legato. Rather, a full, expressive staccato with bounce.

– Then the E pedal staccatos need to be shorter and crisper because at the moment they sound legato

– There needs to be direction towards the downbeat A of the next bar, which I need to show as weight in the music without elongating the notes.

– In general I’m still playing too softly.

– And P.S. he didn’t like my choice to put a decrescendo at the end of the second bar, he prefers maintainig a forte dynamic to convey the drive in the music.

– And P.P.S. the one time that I was allowed to play more than a couple of bars (I got through a page and a half), it was only to convey to everyone that I wasn’t maintaining the staccato consistently.

All totally valid criticisms of my playing, and I know that staccato isn’t my forte (no pun intended). The thing that has left me feeling a bit down is that it after a week and a half Trevor has labeled me as ‘good technique, no expression’, and that that is now all he hears in my playing. It seemed that he was hounding me almost for the sake of it, to make a point that he would stamp out my musical bad habits and focus on them above all else. He could see that I was trying to put all the pieces of the musical line together, but kept driving the point because I was struggling to get everything happening at once.

To cap off the day, I have been given a book called The Handbook to Higher Consciousness to ‘help you think about playing more expressively’. Not wanting to be too pessimistic, but I don’t think this is going to be my cup of tea. The one saving grace of the day was that we went for a lovely meal at a pub called the Black Horse this evening, and the apple and rhubarb crumble was wonderful!

Day 12 – October 12 – Visiting churches

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Two of the little village churches we visited today.

Two of the little village churches we visited today, I can no longer remember the names!

It’s only 9:30pm and I’m exhausted! I think three full days of practising has been a bit more tiring that I’d like to admit, and I’m quite ready for bed. Tomorrow’s lesson will be a good change of pace – less time playing and more listening to everybody else.

My work on the Reichert exercises is beginning to pay off – I got through F major to F minor of No. 2 from memory this morning. Once I get into Db major territory, though, things are still a bit hairy! I’ve also managed to increase the metronome a whole four beats per minute with the horrible Pinke Polka, which I think is driving everyone up the wall. I’m now at crotchet = 54 (playing it really well), and am wondering whether I’ll ever make it up the string of metronome markings I’ve written at the bottom of the page to crotchet = 80?

Trevor’s comments of this week have made me start to be more discerning with rhythm. After being very good and going through all my Moyse finger exercises (minor 2nd to major 3rd, it only took 40 min), I made myself go all the way back to the beginning and sort out my awfully uneven semiquavers in the first little group. Pedantic or what?

This

This church was beside a rather picturesque square with a stately home on the other side. The only problem: the square was full of parked cars!

I have also been trying to sort out playing with more expression, and have been practising both Andersen No. 1 and 2 with a full range of dynamics and lots of feel for the direction of the musical line. Maybe that’s the reason I’m so tired!

This afternoon, Trevor decided that we were going out for ‘a drive round’, which turned out to be a tour of some local churches and farm-come-teas shop. It was rather an odd excursion, and when Trevor sent the email round this morning I was annoyed; I hadn’t planned that into my day! I ended up quite enjoying the churches, and would have liked to spend a bit longer in the churchyards reading some gravestones.

 

Day 11 – October 11th – All the extra bits

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Another full day of practice, and my lips and fingers are slowly getting used to playing for 5+ hours a day. Interestingly, I felt the effects of yesterday’s 5 1/2 hours this morning, when my lips were not at all keen on playing tunes with long notes in them. By the second hour of practice, though, I was feeling great.

Memorising the Reichert exercises is still a work in progress, but the more scalic ones from Complete Daily Exercises are fine. Here are some of the things I’m trying in order to get the Reicherts in:

No. 2 from Seven Daily Exercises:

– Playing only the first two bars in every key, really trying to get the pattern clear

– Thinking of the scale degrees within the pattern

– I’m also considering writing a couple of the more difficult keys out!

No. 4 from Seven Daily Exercises:

– Gradually building up the pattern, so starting off with the basic arpeggio, then adding the second semiquaver in each group of eight, then the third etc.

– The thing that I find difficult to remember with this exercise is by how much the third semiquaver of each group leaps. So I’ve been focusing on the scale degree of this note in the pattern – 6th, 2nd, 4th and 6th again.

– Each set of eight goes towards the arpoggiatura on the fourth semiquaver, so have been isolating the re-do-ti-do figure of this arpoggiatura as well.

I’ve also found that my melodic minor scales across the flute’s full range (low B to top D) are rather pitiful compared with the majors. I haven’t done enough work on them in recent months, and am consistently falling apart at the top turn around, especially when the 6th and 7th scale degrees are around B, C and D. And that’s only at crotchet = 66! My goal for the coming week is to get them up to the same speed as the majors; comfortable at crotchet = 88.

In addition to playing the flute, we have a number of other tasks on Trevor’s course:

– Two 30-page projects on the history of the flute, with the first (due before Christmas) covering ethnic flutes and the development of the flute up to 1700, and the second (due mid-March) covering flute development 1700-present day.

– Listen to three CDs from Trevor’s collection each week and write a short amount on our thoughts. As well as recordings of great players and key works, there are also recordings of ethnic flutes and world music.

– Perform a slow and fast movement of a baroque sonata on treble recorder with appropriate ornamentation.

– Perform a slow and fast movement of a baroque sonata on baroque flute with appropriate ornamentation.

– Borrow out a variety of ethnic flutes from Trevor’s collection and try them, ideally in line with listening to relevant CDs.

– Browse Trevor’s collection of flute literature, books, magazines and paraphernalia to get a ‘good idea of all important developments in the flute world’!

Based on that list, I should probably stop procrastinating and get down to some work!

 

View from the front door this morning, and the reason that I didn't go for a run.

View from the front door this morning, and the reason that I didn’t go for a run!