Tag Archives: Moyse 24

Day 105 – January 13th – Even more time!

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Though Trevor was kind enough to take us to Tesco this afternoon, he still sounded very croaky and class has been postponed until at least Thursday. Shopping was a good reason to get out of the house, and I’m also glad that we’ve now replenished the stock of fruit and veggies – we’d got to the point of the fridge being rather bare!

On one hand, a break from the relentlessness of classes has been good, and allowed me to spend a little more time on technique without worrying about all the studies to prepare. On the other hand, it means that I’ve ended up working myself really hard now for five days straight, and am rather in need of a bit of down time that doesn’t involve flute playing! On the days that we have class, there’s a bit of a mutual agreement that we don’t practice, and often there’s a bit of a group dinner. I’m not sure what’s happened in the last few days – maybe everyone’s got a bit of the January blues – but nobody was keen to play chamber music yesterday evening and everyone has kept to themselves all of the time. It felt like our little outing today was the first conversation I’d had in a while, and even that was rather subdued!

Looking on the bright side, I have the perfect remedy lined up for tomorrow evening when I’m off to see The Theory of Everything with wonderful Sue from Hastingleigh. I’ll certainly be packing tissues, and am looking forward to it immensely. Beyond that, I need to remember that reading, knitting and even watching TV are perfectly acceptable ways to spend the evening when my lips and/or brain gives out!

I returned to the Eb scales and thirds today, and am pleased to say that they’re maybe 5% better than yesterday. A small improvement, but hopefully if I keep chipping away at it they’ll be flying along in a week or so. The Taffanel and Gaubert-style regular scales certainly are, though majors are still a bit faster than the minors. Another exercise that I’ve been practising a bit lately is the Perpetuum Mobile studies at the back of Trevor’s Complete Daily Exercises book. He’s taken a devilish little orchestral solo from Strauss’s work by the same name and written four studies which transpose the pattern of the excerpt through all the keys. Apparently one year he had two students who memorised the whole thing in a week and played it flawlessly at a really fast speed! I’m not up to that yet, but have been slowly edging the metronome up and the fluency is slowly increasing.

Though our piccolo masterclass with Patricia Morris was cancelled on Sunday, Trevor’s hopeful that it’ll happen in the next week or so. He asked us to prepare a few studies and some excerpts but left it open as to how much we work on – I’m assuming because there will be vary levels of competency with the piccolo in the class group. For studies, I’ve chosen no. 8 from Moyse’s 24 Melodic Studies as it has quite a broad range and requires seamless movement between the registers. I’ve been working on a few studies from Patricia Morris’s Piccolo Study Book, and will certainly be ready to play no. 3 (Furstenau) but am not so sure whether no. 7 will be ready by the time she comes.

In terms of excerpts, I’ve set myself a bit of a challenge. Though my excerpts in regular class are far from perfect, they’re usually quite good, and I seem to have a pretty decent knowledge of the orchestral repertoire. So rather than preparing one or two excerpts, I though I’d have a crack at the audition list for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Piccolo job which was up for audition in December. There were eleven excerpts on piccolo, to which I’ve added the Ravel Ma mère l’oye piccolo excerpts (there were also flute ones listed). Looking down the list, I was pleasantly surprised that I knew most of then, and had played all but two before in various contexts. A couple of them – the dreaded Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 for example – will need a lot of work to get them up to speed, while others seemed to fall back under the fingers very naturally. Perhaps an ambitious goal considering everything else that I need to work on, but it feels like a good one and for the moment I’m quite enjoying it.

Right now, though, it’s time for a cup of chamomile tea, a book and bed!

Day 83 – December 22nd – Christmas break

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Today was our final class before the Christmas break, and I have an hour to finish packing before I’m off on the train to Grimsby to stay with my grandparents. As ever, the class had some ups and downs, though not quite the ones I was expecting!

I fared quite well with warm-ups – it seems that Trevor was being a bit kinder to us because one of his former students was visiting for a few hours. As I’d guessed, he did get us to play scales, and for some reason I’m much better at that than all the exercises we usually play.

Then can feedback on our projects, and Trevor was not happy with mine in the slightest. It turns out that he doesn’t like academic papers, and went on a small rant about how verbose mine was and how tables aren’t accessible to young students. Fine, but maybe if he’d told me beforehand that the project was supposed to be written for fifteen year olds I could have chosen my language more appropriately! He couldn’t find much I was missing in terms of content, though wanted me to talk more about how the instruments sound rather than their construction, and thought my pictures were lovely. So next time I just need to write it in a different style, which I probably should have guessed anyway. Oh well, I learned a lot about flutes and flute history, which is the most important thing in the end.

As for playing, we all agreed that Moyse 24 Melodic Studies were the only things we’d go through today. Mine were “rather good”, I just need to keep remembering to be expressive from the start rather than warming into it after five minutes. And my high Ds are still flat. Anyway, I have ‘finished’ the 24 Melodic Studies and will be starting on the 25 Melodic Studies (more of the same thing, but more notes and look harder) after the break. As I said a few days ago I need to keep revisiting the 24 as well – there is still a lot I can learn from them.

Right now, though, I need to go and finish packing. My flute is coming along with me, but mostly to play Christmas carols. For the next five days I’m officially on holiday, and will not be tempted to go anywhere near a scale!

Day 80 – December 19th – Rehearsals

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This afternoon was taken up with rehearsals for our concert tomorrow. The weather was lovely for our walk to Trevor’s – I can’t believe it’s still up around 10 degrees – and we were introduced to Mr (Robert/Richard?!) Scott who will be playing piano with us. All in all Trevor was rather jovial, and though there were still a few criticisms of our playing he seemed to think the performance would go rather well. I enjoyed the rehearsal, we’ve come to play well together and the jazz pieces are particularly good fun. I just need to remember to be expressive and less strict with rhythm in the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. 

As for the rest of the day, there seems to be a bit of a feeling of Christmas holidays already. I did a few hours of practice this morning, and am finally feeling that Boehm’s No. 1 from Twelve Studies is coming from memory. The lesson here is almost a silly one, but worth reminding myself of. I know that I don’t have as good an aural memory as some, and had been really struggling to memorise this study despite our playing it regularly in warm-ups. However, once I took the time to sit down and write the chord pattern under each bar, it’s all of a sudden coming easier. Though I wouldn’t have struggled to identify the arpeggios verbally at any time, the act of writing them out has made the whole structure so much clearer, and then hey presto I can almost play it from memory. Something important to keep in mind, as Trevor is going to keep pushing us to play increasingly difficult scale and arpeggio exercises after Christmas!

View down our road at 4pm!

View down our road at 4pm!

Though I’m not totally sure we will be asked for studies in class on Monday, I’m now into the final lap of Moyse’s 24 Melodic Studies, and am preparing no. 22, 23 and 24. I’d played all of them for someone at some point before coming to study with Trevor, but really feel that I’ve learned a lot from preparing them for him each week. They really are the studies when it comes to phrasing, melody and fundamental musical skills, and I still don’t feel that I’ve mastered most of them yet! Once these are done, we’ll be moving on to the 25 Melodic Studies, which I’m sure will continue to reinforce many of the same things. However, I need to remember to revisit this book regularly as well. There are still a lot of things I can learn from practising them, and I need to keep remembering to be my own best teacher and listening observantly and critically to my playing.

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 10 – October 10th – Whist

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A short one tonight, as I’ve just got back from a night out at the monthly village whist drive. I did’t expect it to go quite so long, but it’s a full evening’s worth. For two pounds entry, one gets to play 24 hands of whist, against some seriously seasoned village players, as well as supper after the 12th hand. I’m not a total newcomer to the game – my grandad taught me how to play when I was about five – and somehow managed to get enough good hands to come equal fourth. My prize: a massive rhubarb crumble scented candle! My room is going to smell wonderful.

Between whist in the evening and my run (compete with surprise downpour) in the morning, I got in a good solid five hours of practice. Four of them were spent on exercises and scales, they’re endless! I can feel all the muscles in my fingers afterwards though, so hopefully the practice is working. The final hour was mostly spent playing some of the Moyse 24 as expressively as I possibly could in preparation for Monday.

Oh, and I thought I was going to have it easy with repertoire this week, as I’ve played the Marais Folies d’Espagne before. Alas, I’ve played the unaccompanied version, which is in E minor, and we’re doing the other one in G minor. Most of the variations are the same, but my ease of playing the trills has gone out the window. Probably a good job it’s due to rain on the weekend!