Tag Archives: playing expressively

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 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 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!