Tag Archives: Andersen studies

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 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 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.