Patient Practice

There's so much music to learn, I want to tear through each piece and get on to the next.
The warm-up exercises I do take so long. When will I ever get through them and reach the music?
My flute playing is still inconsistent.
How long can I work on boring long tones, vibrato, scales and arpeggios?
When will I be able to play sixteenth notes with sufficient speed?
How long will it take for the exercises in musical theory that I do (playing chord progressions, etc.) to sink in and become second nature?
I'm already an old man. It's a race against time. My chances of improving as a musician are probably lower than my chances of declining into decrepitude.
What's the solution?
Only patience.
If it takes me a month to learn a piece, and, even after that month, I can't play it well, I have to understand that the month wasn't wasted.  I have to derive satisfaction from the process, from the effort, from slight improvement. And I have to avoid frustration and disappointment when the improvement doesn't happen.

Communication in and through Music

The level of communication between Hillel Zori and Zvi Plesser, when they played the duets they composed based on Bach's solo cello suites, was extraordinary. In the discussion after the concert, Plesser noted that they had spent hundreds of hours working on the project over the past eight years, and you could tell. Not only was their playing seamless - though their tones are slightly different, if you listened with your eyes closed, you could probably not tell who was playing or whether it was one or two instruments playing - but it was also clear that they had worked out together just how to perform the pieces.
The communication between Marina Solodovna and Polina Semenihina was also excellent. The two women have been working together for quite a while, developing a repertoire and deciding how to play it. Without good communication between the musicians of an ensemble, communication between the musicians the the listeners, which is the point, after all, is impossible.
Lack of that communication was what made it difficult for our saxophone quartet to play for the patients in the nursing home. The communication among ourselves was excellent, because we had to concentrate very hard to ignore the occasional shouts of a demented patient and even the time when an old women drove her wheelchair into us. Most of the patients were somnolent and unresponsive, however, making us wonder whether anything got across.

Three Performances

Because we are fortunate enough to own an apartment with a large living room and a baby grand piano, we have been hosting recitals in our home every month or two. On a recent Saturday night two fine Russian-born musicians, the pianist Marina Solodovna and the cellist, Polina Semenihina, played a demanding program by Franck, Schnittke, and Prokofiev. I asked them to play romantic and modern music and suggested that because of their Russian background, they would be offering something unique by playing Russian music.
The Franck violin sonata in A major, transcribed for cello, was the most familiar piece. One piece by Schnittke, who wrote mainly atonal music, was the Suite in the Old Style, which sounded almost like a baroque composition. Then, at my suggestion, Polina played his Improvisation for Cello Solo, a short, extremely atonal piece. Finally they played two movements of the Prokofiev cello sonata. Their performance was intense. They communicated well with each other. Everyone I spoke to after the recital raved about it.
Our house was packed. Not a chair was vacant. Because of the vaulted ceilings of our living room and the adjoining dining room, where the overflow audience had to sit, the acoustics are very live (too live without the bodies of the audience to absorb the sound). Usually when you hear a recital, the musicians are up on a stage. When you hear a recital in our house, you're sitting right next to the musicians. The experience is powerful.
The second performance was my own. On the following Tuesday morning, I played with a saxophone quartet in the nursing facility of an old age home to an audience of demented people and others who require constant care. We played ten pieces with as much seriousness as if we were playing for a discerning audience. We chose music that we know very well, not particularly difficult, but pleasant to hear. We only rehearse once a week, and we're not professional musicians, so we're limited in what we can play.
This version of our quartet (we lost our leader and soprano saxophone player, when he had to move to Haifa and begin a residency in family medicine) has been playing together for a year or so, and we're improving. Playing in a quartet is valuable for developing musicianship, as it requires concentration and coordination. Our next performance will be for a more alert audience, but it doesn't matter to us.
The third performance, by two Israeli cellists, Hillel Zori and Zvi Plesser, eclipsed the concert that was in our living room by a light-year and trivializes, musically speaking, our saxophone quartet. Zori and Plesser are in the midst of a long-term project of rewriting the Bach cello suites for two celli rather than for cello solo. They have taken the suites apart, divided them up between their two instruments, added music from elsewhere in Bach's works, brought out the inner voices, the implied counterpoint in the original work, and produced something absolutely sublime.
Everything about the performance was extraordinary. Zori and Plesser demonstrated their deep understanding of the Bach suites, their virtuosity, and their intimate personal communication. They have no intention of superseding the original, but, unquestionably, no one who has heard their reworking will hear a solo performance of the suites with the same ears.