musician, tune thyself

I am more or less convinced that my intonation sucks.

"But," you may be saying, "aren't you convinced that everything about your playing sucks?"

To which I can only reply, "Well, yes, but this one has some interesting specifics."¹

The specifics are thus:

1. I and most of my colleagues have been trained to listen and adjust at all times. I have personally been told several times that if it sounds out of tune, I should simply assume that it is me, and adjust accordingly. Now, I don't actually disagree with this reasoning, but it does mean that I have essentially been trained to always assume that I am out of tune.²

2. There is no excuse for me to be out of tune. Okay, yes, this applies to all instruments (except perhaps piano-like instruments and most percussion). But, I have less excuse than most. My instrument is essentially a bell and a tuning slide.

3. I do not play in groups with great intonation. I'm sorry, but it's true.³ Which means I spend rehearsals frantically fishing around with the slide, trying to find someone or something to match if at all possible. If it's any consolation, I personally own recordings of the world's top orchestras playing out of tune, so apparently it is a problem that doesn't go away.⁴

4. Does the orchestra play at A=440? Maybe they play at 441. Or 442. OH GOD MUST KNOW NOW. I always smile a bit when I get info for an audition and they include the orchestra's tuning, because I have to wonder... if the orchestra tunes to 442 and I walk into the audition playing at 440, what happens? Is there someone back there zealously hovering over a tuner? Is that why I don't advance?⁵ Can someone find me two recordings, of the same piece and the same group, in which one is played at 440 and the other at, say, 444 or something? Because I'd love to listen to both, just to see if I could discern a difference.⁶ To make things more complicated, there are also things like this floating around.⁷

5. The math doesn't help. Yes, it's good to know the tendencies. Major 3rds go down, minor 3rds go up, the F partial is naturally sharp, blah blah blah. But it doesn't help me to know that a major 3rd is exactly 14 cents flatter than equal temperament, because I haven't a clue how to translate that into something of practical use. I play trombone, and intelligence was not in the job description. Are there people out there who can say "oh, of course, 14 cents" and then they are magically in tune? And if so can I meet them?

6. Melodic vs. harmonic intonation. I am so not discussing this. At all.

I've probably missed a few. Intonation is rocky territory, after all. It causes fights, and occasionally bitter, bitter rivalries.⁸

What does this mean for me, then? It means that if the group that I am playing with sounds out of tune, I assume it is me and attempt to change it. It is ultimately futile, and we stay out of tune. And if we sound in tune... then, well, I obviously can't trust my ears, because what are the chances that we actually are in tune? Clearly I am still out of tune, except now I can't tell because my ears aren't developed enough.

I will forever be insecure about my intonation. As far as I can tell, this is encouraged by music teachers in order to avoid complacency. I am wholly sympathetic to their reasoning, and have been known to encourage it myself, but I have yet to figure out how to deal with the side effects.

So what do I do? I listen and adjust as best I can. I practice scales. I have a drone CD. I have a tuner. Occasionally I remember to record myself, even though I have yet to hear anything helpful on my crappy $20 tape recorder.⁹ I try to find recordings that exemplify good intonation, although my inability to trust my own ears makes it hard to identify such.

I am trying to train my ears. I don't know how long it'll take before I believe what they tell me. Perhaps I never really will. Perhaps that's how it ought to be.

1. By 'interesting' I don't actually mean interesting. I actually mean 'something that I can ramble about for a bit,' and so the rest of you get to suffer.[↩]


2. It is a simple fact that if the group is out of tune and someone insists that they are, in fact, in tune, that they assuredly are not. There are no exceptions to this.[↩]


3. I criticize because I love.[↩]


4. Some other time, perhaps, I will talk about my Solti/Chicago recording of Mahler 3 and my Crisis of Faith... but not today.[↩]


5. Answer: no.[↩]


6. Most of this is irrelevant, because as mentioned earlier none of the groups I play with ever stay with the tuning that they start with. Most don't even start at the same place, much to the chagrin of the principal oboist.[↩]


7. People send me these things, I swear. I don't go looking for them.[↩]


8. There are stories I could tell, but they would require me to name names, and so I shan't.[↩]


9. It helps me to spot rhythm and time discrepancies, but it tells me almost nothing about pitch. Or I just suck at listening. Yeah, that's probably it.[↩]

no, still no original content... sorry

Listen when no one is speaking, for something is still being said. Speak when no one is listening, for you will still be heard.

-Anonymous

I really have nothing original to say here, except that if you have ever fancied yourself as being even the slightest bit creative, I recommend you set aside 20 minutes and watch this. She's got some interesting ideas.

i also love the movie, by the way

He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness.

At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays - especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.

So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.

Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.


from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

The blog's been dormant for a while now.

Not for lack of trying, though... I have four or five entries sitting in my drafts folder that will never be posted. While this space has mostly been reserved for bitterness and cynicism, even I have limits on what I'm willing to subject others to. Typically I will start an entry, and then partway through realize that it is way too depressing to post, and so it gets abandoned.

So, instead you get a quote. Without context. If you really want to know where it comes from, go read the book.

Mr. Clarke and I could have had an interesting discussion about music, it seems. I note that there is no mention of any modern music (which is slightly hilarious, since Ligeti shows up all throughout the movie score).

That being said, while I am currently torturing myself with working on the Schumann Romances once again, I have also returned to the Bach cello suites. It was necessary.

I will probably return to my excerpts soon, and once again devote my energy to exploring all the ways in which the Romantic composers chose to make my life difficult as a trombonist. The thundering declarations and overexuberant marches; the doom and angst and fire and endless adolescence that mark my repertoire; all these things that make the trombone both fun and exhausting to play.

But not just yet.

why did i not know about this?

Oh my God you guys this is amazing.

This is part 1 of an animated version of Das Rheingold. I shit you not. Parts 2 and 3 are here and here.

Random thoughts while watching:

1. I should probably be offended at the idea of Wagner in English. However, since they've cut the entire opera down to 30 minutes, I don't think it actually matters what the language is.

2. That being said, I am not in the least surprised that the plot can be summed up in half an hour, although I suspect it would be a bit confusing for anyone that didn't already know the story.¹

3. Those familiar with the animated version of Lord of the Rings² will note that the same animation techniques are used here. Because nothing says class like heavy-handed rotoscoping.³

4. "Okay, so is this for the kids then? Wait, no, Alberich just asked the Rhine maidens to make love to him. Never mind."

5. Wotan is... Batman?

6. And Loge is apparently a conehead from Mars. I'm not very well versed in my mythology, but I think I would have remembered details like these. I don't know what the Nibelungen are supposed to be.

7. Pretty skimpy there, Freia. I'm just saying.

8. I do not remember Alberich losing a hand. I do like the way it magically stopped bleeding, though.

9. When one considers the amount of hacking and slashing that must have been done to the score, the music is put together surprisingly well.⁴ I might call it a pale gutted corpse imitation of the original opera, but it's probably not good for me to be so judgmental.

10. There were, however, a few moments in the orchestra that I would dearly like to blame on Youtube's sound quality. Pretend with me, won't you?

I would like to thank the Opera and Classical Music Lovers group on Ravelry for bringing this to my attention. Sadly, it appears that this was the only opera of the Ring Cycle to be brutalized condensed in this manner. It's a shame, since I imagine the other three operas would have been equally as laughable fascinating if not more.

Still, it's hard to beat the classics.

Better?

1. Granted, I suppose one could say the same of the opera.[↩]


2. another tour de force[↩]


3. Yes, I know it's a technique that can be used quite effectively, but... look, have you seen Bakshi's Lord of the Rings?[↩]


4. I imagine it would be like taking a battle-axe to an antique four poster bed and then attempting to make a chair out of the shattered remains.[↩]

as if my insanity needed more documentation

Damn. I was doing so well with the updates, and then I disappeared. I guess it was too much to hope for.

So, I recently performed Brahms 3. The performance was okay... Brahms 3 is probably the least stressful of the Brahms symphonies for the trombone section, but it is some awfully nice music regardless. I do love the way that Brahms wrote for the trombone, even if I'm not always capable of executing it properly.

Now, I know this orchestra has a limited budget, and probably can't afford the best editions. That being said, I really wasn't expecting to get a first trombone part transposed into bass clef. Maybe they thought they were doing me a favor, since I know some people don't like reading alto clef.¹

So what did I do? I brought a personal copy of my own and read the part in alto clef, of course. Yes, I suppose I did make it harder on myself. Theoretically a trombonist should be equally adept at all three clefs, but in my experience this is rarely the case.²

Why, you ask? I'm still thinking about it myself. Maybe it's because I thought I needed to do more reading in alto clef.³ Maybe I was acknowledging that most orchestras don't do this, and that I wouldn't be doing myself any favors if I took the supposedly easy way out this time. Maybe I just like to make a martyr of myself, even when no one else knows I'm doing it. I think if someone had noticed, however, it would have been less martyrdom and more, "Why would you do that? Are you a masochist?"⁴

I don't know. I just... couldn't bring myself to play a Brahms symphony in bass clef. It felt wrong. Yes, the notes are the same, but for some reason I had this idea that it would sound different somehow.

How? I have no idea. Am I actually suggesting that the different clefs sound different in my head in some way? Could be... my head is a pretty strange place. It makes no sense, but that didn't stop me from reading in a less comfortable clef when I didn't have to.⁵

Does anyone else ever get that? The idea that changing the way the music is notated will change the way you play it? Or am I the only crazy one?

Yeah, I thought so. Can I get that straitjacket in black? I think it'll really kick out nicely against those white padded walls.

1. I don't always like it either, but come on, it's part of the job.[↩]


2. My personal exception to this? I have a mental block when it comes to playing alto trombone in any clef other than alto clef. I don't know either.[↩]


3. Oh, do I.[↩]


4. The short answer? Yes, yes I am. The long answer? Pretty much this entire blog to date.[↩]


5. Interesting side note... my biggest problem while reading Brahms 3? I kept overshooting notes. It was weird.[↩]

christ, 2009 already?

Yeah, yeah, New Year, resolutions, whatever.

There are a few I could make. Stuff about eating healthier,¹ exercising more,² taking better care of myself, getting out of the house more, attempting to socialize more...

You know what? Fuck it.

I don't really care about any of that. What I really ought to do is sit here and practice trombone until I either become a successful musician or burn out in the attempt. To hell with everything else.

Everything I do should be preceded with the question, "How will this make me a better musician?" And if I can't come up with a concrete, cause-and-effect answer, then maybe it needs to go... or at least be put off until after 10:00 PM, when I can't practice any more for the day.³

There's a New Year's resolution for you.

"But," you may ask, "what would you be changing then?"

Isn't it obvious?

I need to practice more. Clearly I have been slacking off.

Seriously, though... can anyone definitively prove that mental health is necessary to being a good musician?

I want to see charts. And graphs.

1. which probably involves more than one meal a day[↩]


2. actually doing okay on this, but only because I need the extra lung capacity[↩]


3. And I should be listening to recordings as I do it, which means I need headphones.[↩]

so, how did it go?

So, first an update on the last post:

It was the best of all possible outcomes... he hired a sub. Words cannot express how relieved I was.

As for the rest of the concert?

Well.

This particular gig had two performances: Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. We were playing a few movements from a ballet suite, a piano concerto and a symphony, with an utterly forgettable Christmas medley for an encore. Two rehearsals, only one of which had low brass, resulted in a slightly frustrated section.¹

The Saturday performance was about what I expected it to be. We all ended at the same time, which is about all one can really hope for.² And then there was the Sunday performance...

We walked in and were met at the door by one of the other musicians. She may have been the orchestra librarian; I’m not really sure.

“Oh, hey, you guys have some new music on your stand.”

?

“Yeah, the soloist can’t be here today, so we’re playing some other stuff instead. You, uh, might want to warm up on stage and take a look at it.”

!

You know, I have sight-read at a performance before, but having a soloist not show was a first for me.³

I sat down on stage and the first words out of my mouth were, “This is going to be the greatest concert ever.” This was quickly followed by, “Why haven’t I invested in a hip flask yet?” The level of sarcasm in the back row only went up from there.

We rehearsed a few spots before the concert, in a slap-dash sort of way.⁴ The music wasn’t that hard... at least, not for the trombone section, and considering the circumstances, it went better than expected.⁵ I especially liked the part at the beginning of the concert where the conductor told the audience what had happened, and essentially apologized on behalf of the orchestra for any fuck-ups. Now that’s classy.

Sadly, that also appears to be the last of my gigs for the holiday season. If I were a real musician I’d have a few more, but alas, I am not. So, back to my hole practice room I go until after the New Year. Here’s hoping I survive the holidays.⁶

1. Oh, we’re not taking repeats in this piece? Good to know. Would have been better to know before we started the piece, of course.[↩]


2. I don’t really think Dvorak intended his 6th symphony to be quite that atonal, but whatever.[↩]


3. Incidentally, we never did find out what happened to the pianist. He seemed fine Saturday night, and while I don’t know what could possibly take someone down that quickly, it’s probably something pretty serious. So, I hope he’s okay.[↩]


4. All this while the audience members were milling around in the lobby, probably wondering what the hell was going on.[↩]


5. In other words, we didn’t train wreck.[↩]


6. Alcohol will probably be involved.[↩]