Tag Archives: Fukushima Mei

Day 65 – December 4th – Mei

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After gearing myself up for a tough day playing contemporary music for Trevor, I was pleasantly surprised how things turned out. I still didn’t fare too well in morning warm-ups – though my Reichert exercises were actually quite good, I wasn’t able to pick up on the pattern of a new scales exercise very well, nor play it at the speed Trevor was already setting! Looks like I’ll be adding that one to my practice list for the weekend.

To my surprise, Mei went quite well; Trevor could see that I mostly understood the music and had worked on it, and as a result I ended up having a really productive and rewarding lesson. There was one fundamental thing with the piece that I hadn’t thought about, and that’s the use of vibrato. We’ve been playing ‘standard’ repertoire for so long now that it didn’t even cross my mind to think about playing senza vibrato (and I had deliberately not listened to any recordings), which was a silly mistake. The piece mimics shakuhachi playing, and so “of course” should be played without vibrato, as in the Japanese musical culture it’s an ornament. Lesson duly learned.

From there, however, Trevor kept pushing me to play the music with sharper grace notes, more convincing pitch bends and a greater intensity of direction and dynamics. I enjoyed myself, and when his final comment was “some very good things happening there, but you need to do a lot of work playing without vibrato” I had to stop myself leaping for joy. His praise is so rare that it really means something when it does come!

We went to a nearby pub for dinner, and have just got back. It was a nice place – The Five Bells – and the food was yummy. Everything is starting to feel very Christmassy, especially since we head out into ‘civilisation’ so infrequently.

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.

Day 57 – November 26th – Bach

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Today’s class went well enough from a repertoire point of view. It seems like I’m generally alright with orchestral excerpts, and managed Strauss’s Salome without too much negative feedback. The main point, as always in Trevor’s excerpt sessions, is an incredible precision of rhythm, along with a knowledge of what’s going on in the orchestral parts beneath.

I also felt that my Minuets I & II from Bach’s C major sonata were well enough prepared and thought through that we could engage in a discussion of the music rather than my failings as a flautist! We discussed duration of notes, placement of slurs, and methods for ornamenting the repeat. Trevor’s advice on the final one was to be a bit cheeky or cunning; plan something out but not necessarily in the way that one would expect. It certainly shouldn’t sound like it’s been practised, and the best way to arrive at good baroque ornamentation is often to improvise to the extreme and then take away the bits that sound too much! This does, of course, mean that one needs to practise improvising though.

The rest of the class on Bach was really interesting, and I genuinely felt much better equipped to tackle a sonata by the end of it. I’ve tended to steer clear of Bach in recent years, as it always seems such a minefield of opinions and musical dos and don’ts. Trevor didn’t talk so much about ‘performance practice’ as what can be gleaned from looking at the facts of the score and using our own musical judgement. He also stressed the importance of a clear tempo relationship between all movements of a sonata – if an allegro movement can’t be played in good relationship with the andante then the andante probably needs to go faster!

Trevor quite likes picking a way of stirring someone (often me) a bit, and today chose the fact that Roya and I have masters degrees as his prodding point. Every other comment was followed by “but the masters will know this already” or a pointed question in our direction. This one though, I didn’t mind too much – he didn’t actually bother to ask until lunchtime about what my masters entailed, and when I went through my recital programs he did listen without any snarky remarks about new music. By the end of the day, the master-ness or lack of (Trevor didn’t go to uni/college at all) had grown into a joke for everyone.

Our repertoire for next week is Fukushima’s Mei, which I’m excited about working on. It’s a lovely piece, and I’ve been wanting to have a look at it for a while. Though performing contemporary music for Trevor will leave me wide open for cutting remarks, I also hope that I can apply some of what I’ve learned over the previous months to music that really inspires me.