Practice Makes

A good friend and fellow musician aims at practicing for four hours on the day off that he's given himself by cutting down on his work load. He has a series of books of exercises based on scales, and he is trying to increase the speed at which he can play them. What is his aim? To get as good as he can, as close as possible to a professional level on his instrument. He doesn't practice four hours straight, but he tries to accumulate that time over the hours of his day off from work.

I try to practice for an hour every day, and that tires me out. I guess I could put my instrument aside, do something else, and then come back to it, but I don't. Would I gain anything by practicing more? Aspiring professional musicians - I'm thinking of the documentary I saw with Alfred Brendel mentoring a young Asian-American pianist, Kit Armstrong, and advising him to increase his practice time to four hours - practice all day long, but I imagine that they're learning new pieces all the time, and that takes a huge amount of work. I feel that, after an hour, I've reached the point of diminishing returns.

I do play scales and other exercises, and I also work on new pieces, but not a lot of them, and not with the idea of performing them. I work on them to appreciate them. And my purpose in practicing is to play more and more musically.

Playing music is like acting a part in a play. You express emotions that you wouldn't feel if you weren't playing the part. You aren't faking the emotions. They're somewhere inside you. You're giving yourself the opportunity of expressing something you might ordinarily keep to yourself or be unaware of.

Isn't that what all art does for us?

What is an Instrument? The Definition and Invention of Musical Instruments

This morning as I was putting my flute away, after working on a Locatelli flute sonata, I found myself thinking that the baroque period defined the flute in a certain way, meaning that baroque composers understand what the flute could do and asked performers to do it. Nineteenth and century composers like Doppler redefined the flute, demanding virtuosity and exploiting the capacity of the newly invented metal flute, and things have gone farther and farther (listen to Claire Chase).

Throughout the history of music, composers have redefined instruments, using them in new ways, and forcing players to go beyond what was expected of them. The makers of instruments keep improving them, in response to these demands, enabling musicians to do more easily what was close to impossible.

My insight, though, had less to do with the changes in the design of the flute, from the wooden baroque flute, with only one key, requiring the performer to use complex fingerings to produce sharps and flats, to the silver, gold, or platinum flutes of today, than it did with the conceptual invention of an instrument, the changes in its use by musicians.

This is easily seen in the history of jazz and the development of the saxophone as a major vehicle of jazz performance. Players grasped the expressive capacity of the instrument and kept pushing, getting more and more out of it. The physical invention of the saxophone in the mid-nineteenth century produced the tool that, in the hands of creative musicians, made music undreamed of by the makers of the instrument.

You'll Never Get Rich Doing This

My friend and fellow saxophone gear-head (a more acute case than mine) has a handmade baritone saxophone mouthpiece that doesn't play well for him. Mouthpieces are quirky. What works for one player is a disaster for another. So I thought I'd give his MP a try and buy it from him if it was good.

The maker is Francois-Louis, who makes some very serious claims for the engineering behind his handiwork. In fact I have one of his tenor mouthpieces, and I like it. However, I tried the bari MP and right away saw that it didn't play as well as the one I'm using. So, with a heavy heart, I'm returning it.

That's too bad, in way. Wind players are always hoping that one bit of new gear - a new kind of reed, a new kind of ligature, a new MP, a new flute head-joint, a new trumpet mouthpiece - will make the crucial difference between the way we are actually playing and the way we would like to play.

If you search for mouthpieces on the Internet, you'll find tons of them, for all the sizes of saxophones and clarinets, for brass, etc. Why are there so many people putting masses of effort into designing and manufacturing what are at best niche products? How many mouthpieces can Francois Louis sell in a year? His company will never make the Fortune Five Hundred.

The mouthpiece manufacturers are fanatics, as are the flute makers and lutanists.

I am immensely grateful to these people who are more interested in making a fine instrument (or accessory) than in making a lot of money. When I was in Boston a couple of years ago, I went to Flutistry to see whether a new head joint would improve my playing. I spent a few hours in a room by myself, trying one head joint after another, until I finally bought one made by Emanuel, and I'm still pleased with it. The head joint I bought was used, so it just cost an arm and not an arm and a leg, but it's very hard to make a head joint, and I'm sure Emanuel makes a lot less than people with less skill and devotion to their profession. Though, for that matter, if he (or Francois Louis) has gotten as rich as Croesus doing what he does, I wouldn't resent it.

Bach, Mozart, Charlie Parker, my Baritone Saxophone

For a change I played my heavy, awkward baritone saxophone this morning (this is a picture of the kind I have). I often joke that owning a baritone saxophone is a lot like owning the ball was, when I was a kid. If you owned the ball, and they were choosing up sides, they had to let you play. I play the bari in a community orchestra and in a sax quartet. However, because of the Corona Virus, both the orchestra and the quartet have suspended rehearsals, giving me less of an incentive to concentrate on the bari and more incentive to try out my other saxophones, and even my clarinet. This morning, however, I lugged my baritone out and played it. Every time I pick up one of my instruments (except the clarinet), I remember how much I love it.

Years ago I bought (yes, bought, didn't download or copy from someone else) two of the Bach cello suites, arranged for baritone saxophone, and I have worked on them sporadically. This morning I played through the first one on the baritone - not very well, but that's not the point. Playing the suite as an exercise is more valuable musically than playing any exercise I can think of.

Similarly, I have been playing some Mozart duets on the flute, knowing I'd never learn them well enough, but using them to improve my tone and to deepen my understanding of music. When you play Mozart, there are frequently moments when you say to yourself, "How did he ever think of that?" Suddenly he inserts a new theme or does something that makes his endless musical creativity clear. I don't get exactly the same feeling when I play Bach, though playing his music always makes me admire it more. The music develops essentially out of itself, evolving and going where you might not expect it to go, but doing it the way an evenly flowing river becomes a rapids for a while and then flows along calmly again.

After I played through the Bach suite, I picked up the Charlie Parker Omnibook (which I also bought and paid for) and played four or five of his songs. They are astonishingly compressed, impatient, jagged, refreshing after Bach's long developments.