Tag Archives: Chamber Music

Performing

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Last night I nailed my horn part in a quintet performance. I mean really nailed it. It was the best I have ever played anything. I’m at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Academy for my 6th time and last night was our chamber music concert.

So I’m thinking about the factors that contributed to this performance. We played two movements, 1 and 3, and I nailed the 3rd movement. The first movement was more typical of how I usually play. Some strong spots and some weak spots. The third movement was damn near perfect. Scary word, perfect. I know nothing is ever perfect no matter who plays it. There is always room for improvement. But in this case I think it’s the right word to use.

So back to why. I worked on my part for about 6 weeks. I worked on both movements, more on the first than the third because the first was the harder movement. One clue here is that the third movement was technically comfortable for me however the horn part was also much more exposed and had two gorgeous solos.

The little voice in my head that says, ‘I know I can play this but there’s this issue, that problem, and I hope I don’t get lost’ was in my head for the first movement but not the third.

The third movement was slow. Slow doesn’t mean easier. There are plenty of opportunities for screw ups but in my brain, the important part of this paragraph, it usually means easier.  In all of my performances I’ve had both slow and fast phrases and I’ll mess something up in both of them. I think the concern about the fast parts leads to mess ups in the slow parts.

But the crux of the matter is that, unequivocally, I knew I could play this movement which leads to the most important piece of all this – confidence. I’ve walked out on stage feeling pretty confident but never totally confident. I felt rock solid about the third movement and I nailed it. No doubts in my head at all.

This leads to something about performances that I have learned the hard way. For me, not necessarily everyone, it’s important to start performing with pieces that are within my ability. During my recent years in school I had to play music that was too hard for me. Consequently many performances, especially at Post, were train wrecks. Villanelle probably the worst one. Every time I walked out on stage I knew there were parts of the piece I literally couldn’t play. I never walked out with confidence. Since Post I have been choosing pieces that were mostly within my ability and my confidence has been improving. Last night everything meshed into a great performance. The first time will not be the last time now that I know I can do it.

All sorts of stuff

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Wow, I’m actually writing something in my blog. I have made it through school and now have a BS in Music with an emphasis in horn. I don’t have the actual piece of paper yet but that should show up in about a month. It took me 3 and a half years, yet the time has flown by. I am a better horn player but I still have so far to go. Sometimes it seems endless. I have mentioned numerous times in my blog that I’ve finally figured out how to use air. Well, 4 and a half years later, I finally understand what I should do but it isn’t a habit yet. When I use air correctly it makes a huge difference in how I play. I still have a lot of issues with articulation. When I think I am playing nice short notes my teacher says they sound legato. I used to have what I call ‘first note itis’ where I consistently missed the first note of a piece or phrase but that has gone away. Funny how you have to concentrate to play the horn.

My most recent ‘aha’ moment is that I’ve discovered that my mind wanders when I’m playing. I realized this a few weeks ago when I was practicing for my senior recital and I decided to write down what I was thinking. The list was huge. Everything from homework that’s due, to where to get dinner, to making an appointment to get my car serviced, to the ugly pink shorts the jogger running past my house was wearing. Somehow I’ve got to fix this. It’s better now that I’m aware of it, but it’s really got to go away entirely.

I’ve been through quite a bunch of horns since 2009. I started with a Yamaha, the one that was in the closet when I started playing again. Then a Hoyer, an Otto, a Conn 8D, a Schmid, and now an Otto 180K JN. Geesh. I adore the Otto and will probably play it forever. For anyone who thinks a different horn will make them a better player, forget it. Different horns will give you different sound, color, projection, maybe comfort but in my experience, if you can’t articulate (put in your particular poison here) decently on one horn you won’t articulate decently on another horn. I think a lot of amateurs, including me, turn to equipment to solve problems. New equipment, whether horns, mouthpieces, or some other gizmo, may seem great for a week or two but in the end you play the way you play. This is my experience. YMMV.

I’ve been going back and forth about continuing school for a Masters. In the middle of this last semester I was so overwhelmed with everything I had to finish that I decided not to continue. Now that I’m actually done, I’ve changed my mind. I realized that I just can’t give up school entirely and go back to playing 4th horn in two community bands. In school I’m playing all the time – chamber music, band, wind ensemble, orchestra, recitals, etc. – and I love it. I’ll be taking one class each semester and because I’m enrolled in school I get to play in all the ensembles for free. How perfect is that?

This is all for now but watch for more posts about some of the challenges I had in school, what it was like living in a dorm a couple of days a week, dealing with recitals, my dropped horn and a few toys that I actually have found useful.

SummerTrios

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After the BSO Academy was finished I headed straight to SummerTrios. According to their website, Summertrios was formed in 1990 to provide adult amateur musicians an opportunity to play, study, perform and listen to chamber music. During the winter a few people suggested that I attend SummerTrios. I checked their website and I found it confusing and I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to go. However I made some phone calls to learn more about the program and I decided to try it.

I opted to stay in a hotel rather than stay in the dorms and that had positive and negative aspects. I had air conditioning (it was well into the 90s the whole week) and a private bathroom but I was also more isolated from the rest of the people there. The irony of my decision to stay in a hotel was that I prepaid the hotel to get a good rate and then got my music assignment via email the same day. All 20th century music and all really hard music. Unfortunately I couldn’t undo my hotel so I was stuck.

I emailed the music director asking to be assigned easier music. What I didn’t understand was that the music I was assigned was the same music everyone was assigned. So all the quintets were playing the same things. I did get a very nice phone call from the horn professor there and she unassigned the Hindemith quintet and emailed me the music for one of the other quintets. At that point I still thought that I would be given different music to replace it since I now was in only three groups instead of four. I listened to the two other quintets on YouTube and was very concerned about my ability to play the pieces. Still, I figured that I’d get different music when I got there. Alas, that was not the case. I was completely clueless that there wasn’t going to be any other assigned music.

In addition to the assigned music groups, they have reading groups. Whereas the assigned groups were coached, the reading groups were not. On my application I signed up for 5 reading groups. When I got there I was only in one. I never got a good explanation for why I wasn’t included in any more reading groups. So by having only three coached groups and one reading group I had way too much free time. I had expected to be playing close to all day so this was very disappointing. For most days I only had two or three sessions each day and they were spread around so one could be at 8:30 am and the next one at 2:15 pm.

Once we started rehearsals, I discovered that I was in way over my head for a Leo Smit quintet. Fortunately, they took me off that piece but then I was in only two coached groups so my schedule got even lighter. There were several days that I ended up with only one session that day. Talk about frustration.

They had a method for people to get together themselves to read some music which involved looking at a list and seeing who was free during a time slot and then going and asking them if they would like to read something. That meant that I had to find music and 2 to 4 other people if I wanted to try to read something. This might work in theory but it absolutely does not work for people new to SummerTrios. I didn’t know anyone and when I was able to find someone, inevitably they didn’t want to do anything extra because they were already too busy. Fortunately, I found a wonderful pianist who helped organize a reading of the Reinecke Clarinet, Horn and Piano trio for me and also played horn and piano solos with me. But that’s not why I was there. I did complain about how little I had to do and they tried to help me find other people but in the end I didn’t get anywhere near the amount of playing time that I was expecting.

On the positive side, both the attendees and the faculty were wonderful. I made some friends that I’ll have for a long time. The coaching for the two groups I was in was also stellar. I think almost everyone there had a much better time than I did mostly because they had been there before and knew most of the other attendees. That made it much easier to form ad hoc groups and do some reading. I think SummerTrios has a lot to offer and I may go back next year now that I understand how everything there works. I’ll also have another year of horn playing under my belt so I shouldn’t find the music as hard as I did this year.

BSO Academy 2012

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The BSO Academy is a week long summer ‘band camp’ where adult amateur musicians get to play with the members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Their slogan is “side by side with the pros.” I went last year also and this year, amazingly, was even better than last year. Both experiences were awe inspiring. I think the difference was that this year I felt more comfortable with myself as a horn player. Last year was a ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here’ experience but I was much more nervous and I played the music in my part very quietly and with great trepidation.

The music was much harder for me last year than this year. This year I played my parts with confidence. There wasn’t anything that I just couldn’t play. Last year there were passages in the music that were way beyond my capability. Granted, I chose to play 4th horn again because I didn’t feel I was ready to play anything that was exposed. I made a promise to myself to choose at least one part next year that wasn’t a 4th horn part. The really nice thing about the Academy is that we are sitting next to the pros. We are encouraged to play what we can and drop out, if necessary, when the music just gets too hard. This year there were only two measures, low, pp and exposed, where I opted not to play. The intonation had to be flawless and I just wasn’t comfortable doubling it.

There were 104 attendees this year, 56 of us returnees, and we were split up into two orchestras. Sitting on the Meyerhoff stage, seeing Marin Alsop walk out and start the rehearsal, was just as jaw-dropping this year as last year. The orchestra I was in played Tchaikovsky’s Cappricio Italian, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and suite 2 of de Falla’s Three Cornered Hat.  All music that I really enjoyed. The Three Cornered Hat was the hardest for me because it has really tricky rhythms. At the first rehearsal I struggled with it but I had it down pat by the dress rehearsal.

In addition to playing in the orchestra, I also signed up to be in a chamber music group and to participate in the “Solo with a pianist” opportunity. In the chamber music group we performed the 1st and 2nd movements of Beethoven’s Septet for Violin, Viola, Cello, String Bass, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn. We had enough rehearsals to mesh as a group and I think the performance went very well. I had a few solos and I played most of them decently and I completely nailed the most important one in the 2nd movement. I was probably the least experienced member in the septet and I’m glad that I played well enough to not let our group down.

The ‘solo with a pianist’ option offered us an opportunity to perform a short piece with piano accompaniment. I chose to play the 2nd movement of Mozart’s 4th Horn Concerto. We had one short rehearsal and then the performance was the next evening.  I’ve performed that piece 4 times now, first at the Northeast Horn Workshop where I crashed and burned, then at my jury for school where I also crashed and burned (not just this piece but the entire jury), at church where it went ok, and then at the Academy where I think it went quite well. I still don’t perform well, usually playing well below my capability, so I was happy with this performance.

In addition to all the performing, the Academy keeps us busy with numerous seminars and master classes. Only a few were similar to last year and worth hearing a second time. This year I volunteered to play or be a guinea pig right from the start of the week. By the end of the week whenever volunteers were asked for people would shout out ‘Tina will play.” Last year I think I played only at one or two classes. This year I played in every class. Yay.

For more information, there are two interesting articles on BSO Academy written by Dan Wakin, attendee at the Academy and a writer for the NY Times, Band Camp for Grownups (I’m in the cover picture!) and Every Player in this Temporary Orchestra has a Story.