Vintage Instruments

Today I stumbled on the following blog entry by Sir James Galway in response to a question about a vintage flute a friend of his had been given. Galway says:

I have always bought modern flutes and enjoyed playing them. ... I am afraid I cannot tell when one is playing on a Lot [a vintage flute] or and Muramatsu [a modern brand]. When everyone is talking about the colors, strength and so on of a particular flute I still fail to hear the difference...  When Trevor Wye changed to a modern flute I still could not hear the difference. Flutes sound mostly the same to me. ...
I guess there is something to the old saying “Seeing is believing”.

I thought this was interesting because I have a vintage Conn tenor saxophone, which I have spent a lot of money on, to recondition it. Even after having it overhauled twice (!), it still played very sharp, so, in desperation, I bought a Lien Chang Taiwanese tenor over the Internet from the factory. It cost me less than I invested in reconditioning the old Conn that was given to me, and it plays better.  The intonation is not problematic, the keywork is smooth, and the sound is fine. But it definitely doesn't look as cool.

In a similar vein, years ago I heard an intimate performance by the fine Israeli tenor player, Jess Koren. He brought two instruments to the gig, a vintage Selmer tenor and a new Selmer horn. He asked the audience which sounded better to us, and most of the people agreed that the vintage horn sounded deeper and fuller. I disagreed, and Jess agreed with my disagreement, saying he has recorded himself on both horns, mixed up the recordings purposely, and he can't tell which one he's playing. So much for the prestige of vintage horns.

I will never sell the Conn, because it was a gift from someone close and important to me, but I doubt that I'll play it very much. Anyway, I've been playing flute more than saxophone in the past few months.

Bach as an Exercise

As I write this I am listening on Youtube to a flautist playing the partita for solo flute, which I have been struggling with for a while, not because I think I'll be able to play it convincingly within the next year or more, but because chipping away at it appears to me to be a great way of improving.
When I was in high school and studying clarinet, I spent a lot of time playing the classic exercises by Klose. While I'm sure they did a lot for my technique, they aren't terribly musical. As an adult, learning saxophone and now flute, instead of playing exercises, I have been trying to play real music.
What's the gain? Not only do you improve your technique by working on passages by Bach or Telemann that are meant to be played fast, but you also are exposed to great music. When I play Bach, I know that I am in the hands of a genius who understood music as well as anyone has ever understood it, and by slowly working on these passages, I gain some of Bach's understanding.

Noticing Your Feelings

At the end of his recital, Benny Grenimann thanked two of his teachers, Stephen Horenstein, whom I've mentioned before. Steve was also one of my teachers, and I have enormous respect for him as a versatile and creative musician, and Eli Digibri, a superb saxophonist, whom I have heard several times and who has consistently bowled me over.
Benny thanked Eli specifically for emphasizing emotion in his playing, which is so obvious that most teachers overlook it, and most musicians ignore it. Playing an instrument is fantastically difficult - as you can tell when you try to play a new instrument (like me on flute). The things you have to pay attention to are innumerable, from your posture and breathing through you fingering and embouchure. It's psychologically impossible to devote your attention to all of those things at once. You have to work on a few of them until they are more or less automatic, and then move on to others, until they, too, are easy to do, and each time you move forward, you encounter new things that demand your full attention.
My flute teacher, Raanan Eylon, has gone to Europe for the summer, so I'm trying to practice and improve without his close guidance, by remembering the things he's told me and applying them. It's not a bad thing to be on your own for a while. It gives you a chance to internalize the things you've been working on without having to include new demands upon your playing. Mainly I'm trying to find the center of the notes immediately and to produce a robust tone (not necessarily a loud one). This means paying very close attention to the very groundwork of playing.
This morning, when I was practicing, I noticed a puzzling flash of fear, puzzling because it wasn't fear of not hitting a note (am I going to get that high F# when I need it?) but, actually, fear of playing a note too well. What was that about?
As I continued playing, I tried consciously to play fearlessly, and, surprisingly, I found myself more aware of my emotions while I played, aware of both the way the music made me feel while I played, and also of the emotions I wanted to express.
This is a very exciting development!
To a degree it is connected to the specific moment in Israeli life, a difficult time of sadness, anger, and frustration, while Israeli soldiers are dying in action, and Gazans are also dying. This crisis has made me emotionally very vulnerable, and I guess it's showing in my attitude toward music, too. I hope this crisis will pass, and that my country will find a way to make peace, and I also hope that I can maintain some of the gains I've been making as a musician by noticing my feelings as I play.

The Appeal of Jazz

Last night I went to hear Benny Grenimann's final recital at the Rubin Academy here in Jerusalem. Benny is a saxophone player, and he performed some of his own pieces and some standards with a rhythm section. The audience was small but very friendly, mainly Benny's fellow students in the jazz program the Academy. I went because I have known Benny's parents forever, and because I'd heard him play before and wanted to hear him again.
He was naturally a little tense. After all, faculty members were listening and would be grading the performance. But he played with aplomb, a nice, rich sound, and good solos.
It's a bit odd that young people should devote four years of intense study to mastering jazz, when there's almost no mass audience for the music. But, following the opinion of Charles Rosen in a piece I once read, I believe that what makes music survive is the interest of musicians, not necessary public interest. If musicians don't want to play some kind of music, they simply won't, and if they do like it, they'll play it and create a public for it.

Practice - Perfect

The New York Times published an article today on the question of whether practice is as important as talent in attaining a high level of performance. The article wasn't all that interesting, because, being an example of responsible journalism, it balanced the conflicting claims and concluded that people really don't know. But it impelled me to write about practicing, something I've been thinking of doing for a while.
I've been practicing the flute regularly for the past couple of years and have been making slower progress than I had hoped. Since I began playing clarinet about sixty years ago and have been playing saxophone for thirty years or more, I thought flute would be a cinch. I even thought at first that I wouldn't need a teacher at all. But I wasn't getting very far on my own, watching Youtube clips for pointers. So I found a fine teacher, Raanan Eylon, maybe one of the best flute teachers in the world.
Raanan has required me to work on the very basic elements of sound production, and our lessons have been almost exclusively focused on exercises with little intrinsic musical appeal. He is extraordinarily patient in listening to me, and he calls forth extraordinary patience in me. I am convinced that working on the very basics of music on the flute has helped my sax playing as well.
So how do I practice?
Some time ago I went to an informal concert by Yakov Hoter, an Israeli Gypsy guitar player, whose virtuosity was astonishing. Somebody asked him about practicing, and he said: The best way of practicing is to do the same thing every day.
Wait a minute! If you practice the same thing every day, how will you ever expand your repertoire?
Obviously he didn't mean to do exactly the same things every day, but he did mean - I assume, and that's how I've been working - to practice a core routine every day, before going on to try new things.
I've developed a core routine for flute, based mainly on exercises Raanan has prescribed, but also on my own long experience as a wind player.
First I do a long tone exercise given to me by Raanan (one that I also did on saxophone - apparently Marcel Moyse was the master teacher who devised it): You start on a note at the top of the register, middle C#, and you descend a half step to C, trying to keep the quality of the notes uniform. Then you go down to B natural, etc., till you get to the bottom of the instrument. I do this exercise at least twice, trying to get a focused sound, without blowing too hard.
Then I play a chromatic scale from low B up to high C. Sometimes I play the scale straight, and sometimes I go up from B to F#, then down from G to C, then up again from G#, etc. etc. That's an exercise I learned on the saxophone with my teacher, Stephen Horenstein.
After that I do a vibrato exercise that Raanan gave me. I start on the B in the middle register of the flute, play it for four counts with a four count vibrato, and then move up to C. Then I go up from C to C#, as high as I can go on the flute. I haven't yet managed to get to high C without a struggle. After going up, I go down chromatically, with the same vibrato, from B to D in the middle register.
I have three more exercises in my daily warmup: an articulation exercise, alternating a throat attack and tonguing (ku-tu-ku-tu); another vibrato exercise prescribed by Raanan involving the major and minor scales; and an exercise of my own based on the Tadd Dameron tune, Good Bait.
I play the tune starting on the low B of the flute, in E major. It ends on E, so I play it in A major, starting on E, going all the way up the flute till I reach the key of C major on the top of the instrument. Then I start the process on the low C of the flute and move up by fourths to Db major and then start again on low C# till I get to B again. I've been doing that for three months or so, and I still can't play the tune fluently in all twelve keys, but I'm getting there!
After doing all that, which takes me about 35 minutes, I play real music. I've been working on Mozart, Telemann, Handel, and Bach - but I also play some standards like "Stella by Starlight" or "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."
Raanan insists on the importance of vibrato, because, he argues, it makes your playing communicate on a subliminal level (listen to Miles Davis' sustained notes in Stella). The vibrato comes from your diaphragm, which is the seat of your emotions, so it tells the listener what you're feeling.
An earlier teacher of mine, the late Arnie Lawrence, also kept urging me to play with vibrato, and it didn't come naturally to me, partly because my early training as a classical clarinetist, and partly because my playing is inhibited. But when I remind myself to employ vibrato, it does communicate more.
At this point all of this practice is more of an end in itself for me, a form of meditation. Listen to Raanan's sound in the link to the Schumann romances. I'll never even be halfway there!