Tag Archives: cold

Day 166 – March 15th – Tongue

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I haven’t been feeling the best today, and wonder whether it might be my turn to come down with a cold. Hopefully not, and an early night tonight will certainly help.

I did get a few hours of practice in earlier in the day, and had something of an ah-ha moment with tonguing. I’ve been working quite a bit on articulation of late, and am still finding some things (maintaining a really clear, quick staccato; clear double tonguing) tricky. Often, it’s better when I don’t think about it, and I know that standing up in class I tend to tense up a bit.

The ah-ha moment was with double tonguing. I’ve finally worked out how to turn of the slight twitchy movement in my throat that was accompanying my double tonguing and clearly the source of its muddiness. I think it’s a combination of my work on using only the front part of the tongue, and drawing my tongue in a little bit when I double tongue. Still nowhere near perfect, and I can’t maintain in for very long, but it did feel like a substantial step forward after a few weeks of quite frustrating practice.

This evening I’ve been working on my history project, which is almost done. I’ve been working my way through all the different nineteenth and twentieth century flute designs, and have now arrived at the Kingma system – a relatively recent innovation for playing quartertones. All I’ve got left to do is a couple of section that Trevor has dropped in during class conversations; things like flageolets and mechanism options on modern flutes. If anything, I might have to do a bit of cutting down in the end to get it under 35 pages.

Day 90 – December 29th – Back into it

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We woke this morning to a heavy frost and deeply frozen puddles. On the walk to Trevor’s, the fields and paths lay glistening before us, iced in an ever-so-slightly spiky design. Look closer, and each fallen leaf was individually decorated and embellished, frosted round the edges and along the veins. Here smoky and dark, there crystal clear, the ice warped and cracked under my feet. In some, pockets of air had slipped in under the ice to create an ethereal marbling that foretold the rapid melting to come.

Class itself, and I was starting to feel like I might be getting my aunt’s Christmas cold, which wasn’t great. Trevor was keen to talk about things that we still need to work on over the coming months, and I earned a good list: playing expressively from the beginning, playing loudly, shorter articulation, not waving my flute around and not cutting the ends of notes. Despite these things and my feeling decidedly under-prepared (or maybe because of them?) I ended up playing quite well.

Moyse 25 Melodic Studies no. 1 was too slow, but otherwise make the mark for playing expressively and with good phrasing. Or almost – it took a while for me to play one phrase with the loudest point in the right place!

I then took a bit of a gamble and sight-read no. 2 in the same book. The notes aren’t hard, it’s just a lot of staccato semiquavers, and I did a pretty good job of getting them short. The only problem was that I was unnecessarily accenting the groups of four in the process. Overall, I still need to work on maintaining an even staccato across all dynamics and the entire flute range.

Andersen no. 10 was my low point for the lesson, which I was well and truly prepared for! There are just a few too many notes to cram in a short time. When Alyssa played earlier in the class Trevor asked her to play faster and “make it sound easy”, so I knew I wasn’t going to get too far. The first three lines (relatively accidental-free) were ok, but sure enough I feel apart a bit come the next few. Trevor seemed pretty happy with how the start was sounding though, and my request to spend some more time on it for next week was taken quite well.

Altes no. 12 and 13 were both pronounced fine but too slow, which I was well aware of. No. 12 is double tonguing hell, and to be honest I was happy just to get through it at all. Like Andersen 9b, this is a study for life rather than for just a weeks practice. I also still need to watch C#s here, as they were “horribly sharp” to begin with and I should have pulled the headjoint out before being told rather than after.

As for the impending cold, I’m really hoping that my sinus headache and general grogginess will go away with an early night and keeping warm. Fingers crossed.

Day 64 – December 3rd – Doing it at speed

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It continues to be rather cold in a very wintry sort of way. I put off my morning run because of the rain, but even when I did finally head out at 2:30pm it was brisk and chilly. Overall I quite like the cold – properly rugged up, I really enjoyed our walk this evening – but am not sure how much longer my morning runs are going to last!

One of the thing that Trevor has pointed out a few times now is that I need to relax and trust myself with the warm-up exercises. I think part of the problem is a fear of letting my fingers go onto autopilot, which applies equally to pieces where I have to play things at speed. Today there were moments where I surprised myself with the Reichert exercises – I could genuinely get through two or three keys at speed without dropping any notes. Then suddenly I would be back to thinking about what comes next, and so would fall apart. The only way I can see of resolving it is to keep pushing the threshold. If I can get through three keys without a slip today, then maybe tomorrow I can do four, and I can do them a bit faster. I’ve definitely improved at this since being here, and I can do things now that I couldn’t have two months ago, but it’s still an area that I’d like to feel better about.

Also on the topic of speed, I did my Moyse finger exercises at crotchet = 124 today, which is getting pretty brisk! Interestingly, it actually felt easier than crotchet =122 yesterday, and I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m nearing the end of a two week cycle, or whether I was a bit more focused today.

Tomorrow we’re playing Fukushima’s Mei in class, or at least I’m playing it. Some of the others haven’t practised it, and all seem to be assuming that I’ll go first, Trevor will talk about the piece, and then they won’t actually have to play. I’m rather dubious about this plan, as I have a feeling that no matter how well I play, Trevor will dig into me about my penchant for new music and declare that I’m no better at it than anything else. I have, however, taken the time to practise the piece, and really like it. Hopefully I’ve done enough work to have a constructive lesson, and will be able to return to it at some point in the future.