Don't sweat the small notes....

I attended a singer's singing lesson yesterday, and a particular phrase the teacher said stuck in my mind. I thought I'd make a note about it here, in order not to forget it. 

It's wisdom, and yet it's simple enough. 

During the course of the lesson the singer, whom I'll call B, was getting frazzled by a particular note in a phrase. The teacher, J, gave her a technical way of approaching it, and that helped immensely. She did more: she pointed out that a strong physical gesture at the time of the note being sung would help B to have a sense of pushing the note out to the listeners. 

And then when B was still feeling somewhat unconfident, the teacher said - 'Make friends with it!’ That is, (and these are my words) be comfortable with this particular bar in the music and don't let it become a kind of bugbear that jumps out and frightens you in advance each time you approach it. 

Almost every piece of music, even the simplest, has at least one spot where you have to work much harder in order to play or sing it as easily as the rest of the piece. I've found this over and over in learning pieces. Even recently, in playing a relatively simple Mozart accompaniment for a clarinettist, I found a bar where the left hand had to go running down an awkward phrase. It wasn't an ordinary scale, and it wasn't something that you'd come across normally: it was just one of those phrases that ran oddly across black and white notes. 

My left hand has never been as adept as my right, and as soon as it comes across anything tricky, it insists on hours of practice or else it won't play it at all. Well, I did practice this piece, made sure I knew what the fingering was and got it running smoothly without qualms. In fact, the left hand felt quite good about itself for being able to play it evenly and without hesitation. 

Some of the time. Each time I came back to the piece, up until the day of the performance, the left hand would find itself approaching that phrase and the tension would appear. It was like going into a dark bedroom and not being quite sure what might jump out and frighten you. 

I reassured the left hand that it knew exactly how to play this phrase, and all it had to do was relax and play it. But as the singing teacher had pointed out, we get nervous about a difficult moment in a piece of music and it becomes our whole focus, and unsettles our brain. If the brain is unsettled, the fingers become unsettled, and before you know it, you've stumbled over the phrase, much to your annoyance. 

I've known what to do about this for a long time, so I was already doing my own form of J's 'Make friends with it'. I told the left hand that it knew exactly how to play this phrase and that it was very clever for doing so, and would be exceptionally pleased with itself when it performed it without concern on the day, or even the next time we ran through the piece. And on the day of the performance it breezed up to the phrase, ran down it without blinking an eyelid, and carried on, congratulating itself for being so clever. 

At the end of the day, however, flubs in performance are essentially unimportant. I once saw a professional musician stop completely in the middle of Debussy's La Cathedrale Engloutie; I think she must have had a memory lapse. The audience stopped breathing for a moment, and then the pianist carried as if nothing had happened. I only remember it because I knew the piece quite well. Most of the audience will have long forgotten the incident. And I read somewhere recently that in a professional orchestra the musicians make, on average, seven mistakes a minute. (I don't know how anyone would have calculated this, but...) Do we notice? Probably not. 

I often say to other singers and musicians: just enjoy it. If we don't enjoy what we're singing or playing, then all our time is spent worrying about technique and correctness and, worst of all, perfection. Few musicians achieve perfection, and if they allow themselves to be upset by the odd wrong note or underperformed phrase, they'll only make things worse for the next difficult phrase. You just have to keep moving ahead in music, or else you destroy the whole thing. 

It concerns me when a child (or even an adult) comes off stage after a good performance in a competition or concert and immediately fusses about a wrong note or two. Why do it? The notes are long gone, and wrong ones can be fixed for next time. Focusing on them and not on the overall good performance undermines confidence in your ability. Better to say: I did well with that. Sure, some things might have gone better, but I enjoyed doing it, and the audience enjoyed hearing it. 

We can get too precious about performance, too concerned about perfection. Far better to be keen to show the audience how much you love the piece by performing it to the best of your ability. 

99.99% of them won't notice the errors anyway. 

Disappointed

I've had some great albums from Rattle Records, and I think they do a great job of promoting NZ music, both contemporary classical and jazz.   So one of the things I put on my Christmas present suggestion list was a relatively new album called Flight on Light, with a clarinettist called Manos Achalinotopoulos. You can read a biography of him on clarinet.gr.

Achalinotopoulos is a fantastic clarinettist, and a marvellous musician - there's no doubt about this.  He can get the clarinet to make sounds you couldn't imagine a clarinet making.  And on the album he produces some fantastic improvisatory music.  Achalinotopoulos is backed on the album by a number of NZ musicians, most notably John Psathas.

So what's the problem?  My wife and I listened to the album on the way back from Christchurch in January, and I've played it a couple of times since then.  Hearing it in the car we had ample space to listen more carefully than we might here at home where there are always other things going on.   But we were disappointed: Achalinotopoulos is given free range to play in any mood.  Unfortunately, he's chosen, or perhaps is mostly inclined to play, very moody, melancholy, reflective, often quite abstract music. There's little change in mood from one track to the next.  The only one that has a bit more life to it is actually given that life by the backing musicians, who set some pace and rhythm behind Achalinotopoulos.  He, in effect, plays as he does on all the other tracks.  This is not to say that he never plays at speed - he certainly does, but it's all within a fairly monochrome colour palette.  It's like being in a house that's painted in a variety of greys, and everything else - furniture and furnishings - fits into that grey colour scheme.  As some readers will know, we've just painted our house grey, with white tonings, and I realised the other day that our kitchen is grey - with white tonings.  And our bathrooms are both grey.  But the difference is there are plenty of other colours as well, so that the grey doesn't take over. 

For me, the grey takes over on this album, and after three or four tracks you want some red, or green, or yellow. 

Accompanying at the Comps

I used to accompany young singers (from beginners right up to seniors) in the local singing Competitions.  I did this for quite a number of years until I just couldn't take it anymore.  It's hard work: you have to keep the tempi of dozens of songs in your head, and have to remember any changes that have been made to what's on the page, and often you'd go straight from accompanying one child to accompanying another without any time to think about what the piece was that you were playing.  And in some cases you'd have the singing teacher hissing at you from the wings if the tempo wasn't quite up to scratch, or if you didn't seem to be doing quite what they wanted...

Of course you had a rehearsal with all these kids.  One rehearsal for each child and for each piece.   You'd  also have the music in hand a week or two before so you could practice it.  And truth to be told, most of the pieces were a doddle to play, since they were geared at little kids.

The seniors' music was a different kettle of fish, though usually things weren't quite so pressurised with their competitions. You didn't feel constantly rushed.  On the other hand the music could be quite complicated, and required you to actually practise the stuff.  That was no problem, and enjoyable, and often very satisfying.   I accompanied some very fine young singers over the years, a number of whom have gone on to much bigger things.

Anyway, I haven't done the singing comps for some time, apart from maybe playing for one or two singers who happened to come my way for some particular reason.  I'm due to accompany a young fellow next week, for instance, at the senior comps.  Just one person.

I've very rarely accompanied instrumentalists in the instrumental comps.  This is a different kettle of fish again.  (That's three kettles so far.)  I think the last time I did I accompanied an instrumentalist (apart from the Brass Band competitions, which are a fourth kettle of fish) was more than twenty years ago.  I can't even remember now who I accompanied, or what instrument they played.

However, I got asked recently if I'd accompany a young clarinettist (she's in Year 13 at school) for this year's comps.  The connection was that she'd been in the orchestra for Grimhilda! (as had her mother).  Only in that orchestra this talented young lady had played the violin while her mother played the clarinet!  (Confused?)

I was happy to do this.  And then I saw the music.   One of the pieces was fairly straightforward: a movement from a Weber clarinet concerto with an orchestral reduction.  The reduction was, overall, readable and manageable.  I just needed to do some work on the scales that ran helter-skelter down the keyboard in a couple of places, and do a bit of jiggling with a bar which would be fine if you were a string player, but which doesn't fit under pianistic hands at all.  So I rewrote it in a way that I could actually manage without falling over.

But then there were two of the Gershwin Preludes for Piano transcribed as pieces for Clarinet and Piano.  Do they let the pianist off the hook?  Not at all.  Perhaps there are fewer notes, but there are some real 'moments' when you're leaping about the place or trying to fit a tricky rhythm into what seems to be an inordinately short space of time.  I have really, really had to practice these.  And they last less than a couple of minutes each.

Then there was the Jazz Variations on a theme of Paganini by Michael Garson.  This is easy, overall - for the pianist - the clarinettist has notes going off in every direction. Check out these two youngsters playing it with insouciance.  The jazz rhythms aren't anything to get your hair in a frizz about.  But one stretch of about eight bars when the clarinet and the pianist's right hand play exactly the same thing is a bit of a killer: sixteen semiquavers to the bar, at speed, involving some really interesting turns and twists. (I have practised this five thousand times. I'm sure I have.) This actually came off very well in our performance.  We stayed together beautifully - although I don't know when the clarinettist breathed.  I'm not sure that I breathed either.

Finally there was another Weber: the first movement of his Grand Duo Concertant.  When I first looked at this I thought, this is (sort of) okay.  It probably doesn't go very fast.  And then I watched a video on You Tube and discovered that it does go very fast. [Here's one example of several.] And keeps on going fast except for a few bars when either the clarinettist or the pianist take a slight breather.  (There are more of these moments for the clarinettist than the pianist.)

I had to work.  My fingers felt as though they'd gone back to the 50s or 60s when they were practising for a major exam.  The only difference was that they're no longer as flexible as they were, and the brain doesn't fire as fast as it once did, and what, in the past, would happen almost without me thinking about it, doesn't happen any more.  I have to think.  I have to tell the fingers what to do (they seem to have lost their ability to just get on with it.)  I have to say, Yes, we will practise this bit until you get it right.  And even then, having got it right, they forget what they did yesterday and we have to start all over again.

They respond (a little sarcastically) that it's good for me.  I haven't been impressed with anyone telling me this since I was a youth, when my best friend used to say it regularly.  But they're right; it has been good for me to do some real solid practise, as I haven't been playing anything that stretched me since we finished the Grimhilda! rehearsals, apart from four piano pieces I wrote after the production was over that have sections in them that require me to do some work.

Besides the young artist I was playing for, there were a number of other talented musicians: one violinist was the sister of the young man who conducted Grimhilda!; deservedly, she won both the sections I saw her perform in.  Another violinist was the young man who played the Parrot in Grimhilda! - connections all over.  (And this morning the young man who did the lighting for the show turned up at the competitions, even though he was supposed to be in Australia.)

There was a pianist who played one of his own compositions - a theme and variations from his piano sonata.  It a very good piece, full of intricacies, fun, jazz, noise, crashes and bangs and such huge chords towards the end that I didn't think there'd be anything left of the piano for me to play when it came to my turn.  And he played it with enormous verve and confidence.  I'd be happy to have half the confidence he's got, but sadly my confidence just has to gird its loins these days and do its utmost.  It isn't there like it was in the old days.

There were also a couple of boys of Asian parentage (both brought up in New Zealand by the sound of it) who played the piano.  One played a piece called Cat and Mouse, by Aaron Copland.  This was a delight, though I'm not sure if the mouse survived or not.  The other boy played a piece by a Japanese composer (I think - I didn't have a programme).  This was a seemingly simple piece, halting and emotional, and wonderfully played.

The worst thing about the competitions is how few people attend.  The audiences while I was there consisted mostly of parents, some relatives, and a few teachers.  At one point there were no more than ten people in the audience.  This is a crying shame, because not only are the ticket prices very reasonable, you get to hear some excellent performances by young people on their way up in the music world.  And you get to hear some music that's unfamiliar.  Even if I'm not playing for anyone next year, I think I'll go along just to hear what the local kids are doing.  It's well worth it.

The Band's Visit

I caught up with the charming movie, The Band's Visit, the other day.   It's an Israeli-made film, but its focus is on a number of Egyptian characters, the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, who find themselves lost, and somewhat at sea, in a little Israeli town they've arrived at by mistake.   A confusion over the sounds, P and B, hasn't helped.   The Orchestra, with its odd combination of instruments, seems unlikely to make much of an impact on anyone or anything, since it consists of so few people - eight or nine in all.  And during the course of the movie, when we hear one or two of them playing (the clarinettist, for instance, who presents the page or so of his unfinished concerto, and the trumpet player - who also doubles on the violin) we think they're not going to impress anyone.   But at the end of the movie, they come together for their concert (in the right town) and are superb.  They need each other to perform their best.

Sasson Gabai

The film, while it's about music and its effect on people, is more focused on relationships.  It doesn't primarily set out to tell us we should all love one another, and that Israelis and Arabs should just get along, though it does achieve this as a by-product.  It's about resolving things from your past, and being honest and open.  In other words, it's a film about real - and delightful - people.  The 'messages' come naturally with the content of the story.

The casting is superb.  The orchestra's conductor is played by Sasson Gabai, who was born in Baghdad of Israeli-Iraqi parents.   He's a withdrawn person who finds it difficult to communicate directly with anyone - though he does come alive when conducting, which is perhaps why he never lets his next-in-charge take over the role.   In the little town he meets Dina, the owner of a small cafe.  She's played with wonderful fire and life by Ronit Elkabetz.  Dina seldom minces matters and her up-front honesty eventually breaks through to the conductor and allows him to tell her what little we need to know about him to understand him.

The youngest member of the band, the trumpet/violin player, Khaled, is played by Saleh Bakri, a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa, and now lives in Haifa.   He seems to be out of place in this group of middle-aged and older men, and certainly he gets under the skin of the conductor more than a little.  However, he's the one who is prepared to make the most of life, and who can encourage others to do so.  In one of the film's most delightful scenes he shows an unconfident and scruffy young Israeli how to court the woman he's been landed with in a blind date.  The interplay between the three actors has to be seen to appreciate the subtleties and humour.

The film doesn't just show everyone as being happy about the situation.  One of the unemployed young men who hangs out at Rena's cafe takes three of the bandsmen home with him, much to the annoyance of his wife and her mother.  They remain intransigently opposed to these visitors, undercutting the Jewish ideals of hospitality in no small measure.  Only the young man and his father-in-law respond positively to the three bandsmen.  In a later scene we discover that the young man is the father of a baby, who's sleeping in a cot in his room.  We don't know whether this is why his wife is at such odds with him, or whether it's because he can't find a job, or whether it's because they're stuck in this awful town  - and it is awful: Rena shows the conductor the 'park.'  It has no grass, no children's play equipment, nothing.  The streets are bare, and the landscape barer.  The roller-skating rink is half-empty, and even those who are there seem lacking in much energy.

But this gloomier section of the movie can't undermine the joy that's apparent in much of the rest of it.

Apropos of my comment about the mix-up over P and B in Arabic and Israeli, in the last two or three weeks my wife and I have been learning Arabic.  (There's a reason, but I won't go into that at the moment.)  Pizza is bizza in Arabic, and potatoes are bitatis, so we were already aware of this confusion when we saw the movie.  In fact we got the movie out of the Library in part because it was in Arabic and we wanted to hear people speaking the language.  As it turned out, of course, it's only partly in Arabic.  The Jews speak Israeli, and when the Arabs and Jews speak to each other they mostly use English!

I was thinking about this because of the brand name, Vater Drums, which I came across today.  Vater is the German word for Father, and in German/English there are a number of corresponding words that are virtually identical apart from the F/V substitution.  Years ago I did a course in England that showed how many words had connections between the two languages.  Unfortunately someone borrowed the notes I'd been sent by the person who wrote the course, and I never saw them again.  And so far I haven't found anything similar on the Net.

Vater percussion accessories are big time, apparently, though not to me.  Although I've been around percussion players and drummers a good deal over the years, I've never paid much attention to the brand names on their instruments, although I know that these instrumentalists are very aware of the better brands.  Vater produce accessories for drums: the sticks, the mallets, brushes, etc, rather than the drums themselves.  And they make the holders as well, along with holders for the all-important drink bottle!