Tag Archives: cold weather

Day 109 – January 17th – Sleet

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I had rather hoped to wake up this morning with even a little bit of snow on the ground, but it was just icy and rather grey. Instead, we had half an hour of sleet in the afternoon. Great clumps of soggy wetness that turned to water as soon as they hit the ground. At least it was fun to watch – from inside, snuggled up in my over-sized woolly jumper with a cup of tea!

My painstaking efforts with the Bach E minor sonata are definitely starting to pay off – I’m almost there with memorising the first movement! While it in itself doesn’t seem like much, thinking through all the exercises that I’ve committed to memory over the last three and a half months does make me feel like I’ve achieved quite a bit. The Maquarre exercises are also coming from memory, and I made it through to D minor without glancing at the music this morning. After spending quite a bit of time in flat key territory with them (starting at the top of the page, it works through from C major in descending 5ths), I was really excited to find that the tail end of the circle from A major to E minor felt very easy.

Trevor cancelled our walk again this evening, but my proposal of chamber music was finally taken up and I walked over to the Old Dairy to play quartets with the girls there. We read through some lovely Schmitt, an arrangement of Chopin piano preludes (nice melodies, but my 3rd flute part was rather dull), Ravel’s Pièce en forme d’Habanera for four flutes, and then ended up once again with the Furstenau Op. 88 quartet that we read last time.

I love the last movement of this piece, which is variations on Deutschlandlied (the German national anthem). I can’t find any recordings of the flute quartet on youtube, but there are several of the tune in its original and arguably more pleasing form. It was originally written by Haydn as the slow movement of his Op.76, No. 3 string quartet, the ‘Emperor’. This is a recording of the wonderful Takacs quartet, and though the slow movement starts at 9:35, I’ve just very happily listened to the whole thing through twice!

Day 91 – December 30th – Frayed tempers?

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I’m not sure whether it’s the cold or that everyone’s been around each other a bit too long, but things are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable here and there. I was the only one in my dairy that practised today, and for myself was feeling energised and excited to be back into it after the Christmas break. I’m not sure what’s up with the other two, though do wonder whether they might be struggling a bit with the winter weather. Trevor was certainly in a bad mood this evening, giving a stern talk about signing books out properly (one that he wants has gone walk-abouts), and then declaring that he didn’t want to walk and would just drop us home. Decidedly odd.

After a chilly shopping trip this morning, I had quite a productive day. My new goal is really getting to grips with mental practice, as I think it’s the key to improving my memory and confidence for all the technical exercises. The plan is that for every hour of practice that I do with the flute, I now do 15 minutes of slow mental practice – visualising myself playing through a passage or exercise. It’s quite tiring, especially since I haven’t been in the habit of doing it regularly. For now, it’s very slow, but I hope that with a couple of weeks it will really help me to get things going a bit faster and more easily. I managed three lots focused mental practice, but by later in the afternoon was loosing concentration.

On January 11th we have a piccolo masterclass with Patricia Morris, and so today I also started work on some studies and excerpts for that. Trevor has suggested a couple of the Moyse 24 Melodic Studies, a study from Patricia Morris’s book, and a few excerpts from the Piccolo Practice Book. I’ve chosen some good studies, but am still deciding which excerpts to do.

Day 63 – December 2nd – Cold

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With the start of December it has suddenly started to get cold in earnest. I can’t quite believe that on the weekend I was in London and Cambridgeshire walking around in a light jumper, and now I’m snuggled up in my room trying to convince myself that another layer (I’m wearing four, one of them thermal) is not yet necessary. Alas, I think part of the problem is that my room is not as well-insulated as the rest of the dairy. I’m just going to have to develop a thicker winter skin!

Though we had out weekly shopping excursion this morning, I feel like I’ve had a productive day. I tried to shake my practice up a bit in two ways, with the first being more astute with my Complete Daily Exercises routine. I tried not to repeat any of Reichert No. 2 or 4 unnecessarily. Rather, I tried to start out each key in a tempo that I thought was achievable, and play through without scaring myself into mistakes. If it was super easy, I repeated it at a brisker tempo, if it was super hard, I went for a really slow, deliberate version. I’ve still got a bit of a way to go trusting myself with no. 2, but was pleasantly surprised how no. 4 is coming along.

I also spent a bit of time playing exercises in thirds the way Trevor showed us in class yesterday, though just majors for now. The exercises is like Taffanel and Gaubert No. 4, beginning the scale from the tonic, mediant, dominant and finally leading note, though rather than following this pattern back down the final descent is two octaves long. A nice variation is playing little moon the way on the way back down, though I only tried this if I was feeling relatively confident with the rest of the pattern.

As for sequences: I am no longer scared of them, I can play them, they just need to keep getting faster.

With all my various studies, excerpts and pieces (and there are a few) I tried not to work on anything for more than five minutes at a time. Most of this time, this meant that I isolated one element of a study that I felt needed work and focused on it for that time. With things like Andersen No. 9 (single and double tonguing) this worked really well. With others, such as Mei, it didn’t work so well since I was trying to think in bigger chunks. I ended up instead by prompting myself to move on from things if I didn’t get them within one or two tries. As a result, I know very clearly what still I need to work on with it tomorrow, and can hopefully target areas the way I was with my studies.