Tag Archives: SoundSCAPE

Day 92 – December 31st – Farewell 2014

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I was rather hoping that we have at least some sort of New Year celebration at the flute studio, but Trevor has decided to go for routine instead! So New Year is “cancelled” until Friday, and we instead have class tomorrow with Roussel’s Joueurs de la flûte and the flute solo from Beethovens Overture ‘Leonore No.3’ on the menu. I’ve played the Roussel before, and we’re each only required to prepare two movements, so I’m feeling a bit more relaxed about tomorrow than in some previous weeks. Though I haven’t worked on the Beethoven in years, it’s not too bad as excerpts go, and hopefully I’ve targeted the things that Trevor’s most likely to pick holes in!

That left me freer to practice a lot of technique and studies today, and I feel like I’m making some progress with the notes in my two Altes studies for next week. The main criticism of the two I played on Monday was that they were too slow, and I’m keen for that not to become a theme. I am noticing some big improvements with speed though: my Taffanel and Gaubert-style scales this morning were much quicker and more even than a few weeks ago. When I think about the phrase shape rather than the notes, I tend to make fewer mistakes.

Mental practice today was focused on the dreaded Bohem study no. 1 (from Trevor’s Complete Daily Excercises), which I am trying to memorise. The problem now is that I know the pattern quite clearly, but tend to forget to make the descending half of the second bar diminished, and then fall over myself when it becomes a dominant 7th in the third bar. Once again, it’s about getting it into the fingers and not thinking too much about it. I’ve been trying to really focus on the physical sensation of playing the arpeggios, and am even imagining myself doing it in my usual place in the studio room as an extra barrier against nerves. I’m hoping that slow and steady will get there eventually – I can play it slowly from memory on my own, but it needs to be faster and more secure.

Since it’s the final hours of 2014, I feel like I should take a step back and reflect on the year. I’ve crammed quite a lot in:

Way back at Easter, I competed at the Aussie marathon kayaking championships, winning a bronze medal in the ladies open K1 and coming fourth in the ladies open K2 with my lovely sister…

…submitted the final copy of my thesis to the Melbourne University library…

…finished off my Masters degree with an epic recital in late June. A new commission from my lovely friend Andrew Aronowicz, Jolivet’s crazy flute and four percussion concerto and much more besides. For the music, but most importantly for the people I was honoured to be able to perform with, it’s a concert I won’t forget in a while! …

…packed up my lovely flat and life at St Mary’s College, and headed off to Europe with a very big backpack…

…spent an amazing two weeks at the SoundSCAPE Festival in Maccagno, Italy playing wonderful music with fantastic new friends…

…traveled round Europe for ten weeks, visiting seven countries, attending the wedding of my wonderful friend Lucia, catching up with friends from my year in Helsinki, visiting my grandparents, hiking barefoot up mountains, cycling in the Loire Valley, trying to speak Italian and German, eating wonderful food and sleeping in nineteen different beds in two and a half months! …

…and arrived here in Kent to Trevor and his flute course.

So 2014 has been a busy one. At the beginning of the year I had no idea where I’d be at the end of it, and I still can’t believe just how much I’ve managed to fit in. As 2015 dawns, I’m still not totally sure where I’ll be in three and a half months time, let alone the end of the year. But I have many musical dreams, some of which are becoming clear goals, and wonderful friends and family who believe in me even when I err. Bring it on.

SoundSCAPE Concert 3: Sudbury Guitar Trio

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9pm, Sunday July 7th, Church of San Materno, Maccagno, Italy

Though almost flawless on both a technical and ensemble level, this concert of works for guitar trio failed for the most part to excite me. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the available contemporary repertoire for this ensemble, or rather because of the group’s personal musical preferences, but all the works in the first half sounded rather similar! At no clear point was there any texture other than three guitars playing together, which created a wash of colour where I was keen for a little more definition. Very few of the instrument’s extended techniques were properly explored, and though the musical language was undoubtedly contemporary, there seemed to be nothing about any one work or movement that made it stand out from the others.

Thank goodness, then, for the three SoundSCAPE commissions which concluded the concert! Each of the three composers had contemplated the capabilities of the ensemble, coming to a range of conclusions as to how to make it sparkle. It was here, I felt, that the ensemble was used to its greatest effect, with challenging use of extended techniques in Mutations by Devon Yasamune Toyotomi. However, the stand-out work of the concert was lace/leaf by Lydia Brindamour, using delicate, spacious gestures to great effect. After the deluge of notes and textural wash present in so many of the other works, this care for time and the minute came as a welcome, meditative repose.

SoundSCAPE Concert 2: Resound Duo

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New music, soprano and percussion seem made to go together, and the Resound Duo of Jennifer and Tyson Voigt certainly didn’t disappoint. Then again, they are married!

The relatively short program featured two duos: selections from Alan Smith’s Songs of Wandering and Matthew Shaver’s Songs of Liberation, as well as a performance of the Berio Sequenza III (soprano) and Le Corps a Corps (percussion) by Georges Aperghis. It was a stunning selection, opened with Jennifer Voigt’s captivating rendition of the Sequenza. Bubbling and murmuring, Jennifer’s mark was made by her expressive eyes and thorough commitment to the musical line.

Le Corps a Corps, placed third on the program, was at once intriguing and utterly captivating. The piece calls for a combination of zarb (a small hand-held African drum) and voice to produce highly syntactical percussive lines that finally break into speech (in French) at the work’s climax. As with both the duo works, it was performed from memory, and Tyson Voigt’s engagement with the music and his audience was absolute.

The wonderful thing about this duo was their sense of dramatic persona. Complete musical understanding as much as their performance from memory let nothing get in the way of their communication of ideas to the audience. Both the Smith and the Shaver were executed with complete focus and admirable musical intent. Without the constraints of a score, Jennifer was free to walk around the stage, using this to great dramatic advantage in the narrative arc of Songs of Liberation in particular. Thought the concert was long enough to showcase the duo’s diverse colour palette and incredible energy, I could easily have listened to more!

SoundSCAPE Concert 1: A Liturgy of Hours

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9pm, Friday July 5th, Church of San Materno, Maccagno, Italy

An intriguing start to the SoundSCAPE festival concert series, flautist Lisa Cella presented a single, hour-long solo work, A Liturgy of Hours by American composer Stuart Saunders Smith. It was both curious to hear this work and dubious that it could hold my attention for an entire hour, and found myself surprised. Not only was my attention firmly held, the piece is stunning both on form and content, reducing the hour of performance into what felt like twenty minutes at the most.

Though the transparent opening is not the most promising moment, the piece unfolds into a meditative arc, juxtaposing occasional flurries with generally spacious writing. Towards the half-hour mark, the flautist begins also to sing, an effect that carried beautifully in the resonant church space. Cella’s mastery of this was absolute, allowing the audience to relax into the wash of sound created.

The work concludes with a short recitation:

My life, a mere breath
The first, is breath.
The last is breath.
In between we continue, breath in our moments, in this our moment
While darkness is my companion, I woke the earth of the heart.

This final utterance asked more questions than it answered, forcing us to examine the interplay of simplicity and complexity in the work, as well as our own understanding of exactly what it was all supposed to mean. A stunning piece, and a genuinely sparkling performance!

Improvisation – Part 2

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Finally I return to writing a little about my experiences over the last two weeks. SoundSCAPE was busy and life is short – I decided it was better to enjoy my time in Maccagno (and the occasional few hours of sleep) rather than forcing myself to write every day. E alora, I find myself at the end of it! All went far too fast, but I am still keen to reflect on what I’ve learned…

Improvisation continued to be one of my favourite classes, and I now feel much more confident with ideas of structure, form and timbre in free improv. For the rest of the first week we continued to experiment with some set ways of controlling the piece. As ABA form is quite pleasing, we worked on small group pieces where Tom walked back and forth along the front of the auditorium to indicate transitions from A to B and back. It took us a while to be confident in arriving at a B section that was radically different from the A section, either in terms of texture or motivic material. Not playing all the time is one way of achieving this, and knowing when to sit out is important. For me, wedded to the flute as my mode of expression, it was good to try and get away from the instrument. The range of sounds on stage is so much more interesting if we also make use of vocalisation and any percussive ideas that spring to mind.

In the second week, the aim was to achieve interesting, unified improvisational without clear direction from a conductor or external force. A lot of this comes from listening to others, borrowing ideas and knowing when to lead or follow. I often found that this was a groove that it took a while to get into; the first improv I did in each class would be pretty average on both an individual and sometimes a group level. Once we had done a few, the process began to feel more natural and the pieces were both more unified structurally and more daring.

Our one piece of ‘homework’ for the week involved creating the structure for an improvised duet. I was with Jessie, and with two flutes we needed a plan that would create structure and interest through something other than the fundamental difference of our instrumental timbres. We decided to control structure by our physical placement on the stage: we would start on opposite sides and come together, then return. When far apart, we would toss ideas back and forth, sharing motivic material and elaborating on what the other had played, but waiting for them to finish before we began. As we moved closer together we would aim for increasing density in our texture, still sharing material but interrupting when we felt like it and being more direct with our musical statements. I really enjoyed experimenting with this idea; the duet form made for intense interaction and Jessie is great fun to improvise with. Though we weren’t over the moon about how the performance went in class, a commitment to really ‘go for it’ in the concert on Thursday made for a fun, engaging piece.

Following a game of Cobra, duets and some small ensemble free improvisations, the concert concluded with a piece called Blurred that Tom had brought along. This was once again improvisation with constraints – the piano played a cyclic chord progression from a score and we (in surround sound) played notes that we heard in the chords. We could start playing notes once we heard them, but didn’t have to drop out the moment they stopped, creating a blurring of each chord into the next. In the classes we were mostly playing with long notes, but for the concert changed to more rhythmic statements on a given pitch. While this wasn’t my favourite piece, it was great for ear training and the audience seemed to enjoy the effect!

Now my dilemma is how to continue working on improvisation, as I do think it is a wonderful skill and one that we don’t explore nearly enough as students of western classical music. Playing alone is one thing, and I will try to incorporate it into my practice. But I also need to recruit some friends to practice and explore with, and I think it’s something that needs to happen with relative frequency. Food for thought, and for a musically open mind!