Tag Archives: melodic minor scales

Day 32 – November 1st – To market, to market

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Our little excursion for the weekend was a trip to the bi-weekly Wye farmers’ market this morning, which was enjoyable but rather short, with Trevor whizzing us round all the stalls at quite a brisk pace. Nevertheless, I got some nice bread and tried a selection of gourmet chutneys which were delicious but would have been rather decadent to buy!

Otherwise, practice was once again the order of the day. I managed to play through all six pages of the Moyse finger exercises at crotchet = 116 (from memory of course) without it feeling like a total disaster. Trevor emphasised on Thursday the importance of the tempo being just at the edge of what was possible, putting the pressure on and making it hard. It certainly felt hard this morning, but there is a wonderful satisfaction having got through it all.

Melodic minor scales are continuing to improve, but my augmented and diminished arpeggios haven’t. They seem stuck at crotchet = 84, and I can’t say that I’m remembering them any better than I was this time last week. Is it because I wasn’t practising them regularly before coming here? In an attempt to improve them, I’m going to try two things tomorrow: starting my scales practice with them, and also doing a couple of exercises from the Complete Daily Exercises in my first two hours of practice. Hopefully this will kick them up a notch or two.

Then it was on to studies, and it feels like everything I’m practising at the moment is to do with articulation! I’m finding it frustrating because Trevor highlighted my articulation as another area for improvement on Monday, and I can feel that it’s not up to scratch. So I’ve been practising the beginning of the articulation section from Trevor’s Practice Book 3 – short notes produced only by the abdominal muscles – and am feeling some improvement. However, preparing all these studies rather feels like I’m trying to run before I can walk. I know the notes in Andersen No. 4 need to be shorter, but am having trouble achieving this with all the leaps! Tricky one.

Lots of lovely people brightened my day today – both by email and post. Mum sent my slightly over-large pair of super-warm mittens that I bought in Helsinki, making sure that I’m wonderfully prepared for winter, Grandma and Grandpa sent a card, and a family friend in Cambridgeshire wrote to say I can go and stay for a weekend of Christmas craft in November. It’s nice to feel so loved.

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!

Day 21 – October 21st – Hurricane!

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Last night the tail end of Hurricane Gonzalo hit the UK, and so I woke up this morning to high winds and generally wet weather. Through the day it alternated wind and rain with lovely sunny patches, which was fascinating to watch from the warm comfort of my bedroom. I hope it clears up soon though – I was really looking forward to my run this morning!

Once again it was Tesco Tuesday. On the way there and back, we have to list composers and flute works, starting at A and continuing through the alphabet at Trevor’s discretion. Last week (still on A), the experience became rather painful, as it was obvious that most of the group hadn’t made much of an effort to do any research. So the ultimatum was delivered that anyone who didn’t participate would have to take a taxi home. With a combination of that and the number of composers beginning with B being a lot bigger, we had a much better discussion this week. In an ideal world my offerings of contemporary composers wouldn’t be met with quite so much disdain, but oh well.

As I mentioned yesterday, our set repertoire piece for this week is Doppler’s Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy, which I spent quite a while today practising. I’m really trying to be expressive without pulling the tempo around too much, especially in the faster sections. Some recordings (in particular Sharon Bezaly’s) seem to play every beat in a different tempo, and while there is a certain charm to that, the piece is still in bars with a time signature! Yes, there are some sections where accels and rits make it very exciting, but too much fluidity and I personally think it sounds a bit of a mess. Instead, I’m really focusing on the dynamics, accents and inherent drama in the rhythms (they’re quite interesting enough!), as well as the marked tempo changes. We’ll see what Trevor says on Thursday – as with last week’s Folies, I feel that there will be a lot of differences in interpretation.

Finally, I have a list of scales that still sound awful, mostly because I fluff up the turn-around at the top:

C#, D, Eb, E and Bb melodic minors

G minor arpeggio, and Bb major and G minor broken chords (playing these with long Bb as well as a high D is absolutely hellish!)

Dominant 7ths on D and Bb, and diminished 7th on B

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 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!