Music as Language (2)

Clearly music is only a language by analogy, because it doesn't mean anything the way words in a language mean things. There is no way music could convey the meaning of the following sentence: When I was a child I took piano lessons from my aunt Ethel.
Whereas people do convey specific messages by beating drums and whistling, those drumbeats and whistles are no longer music, just as spoken sentences have pitch, tempo, and rhythm - but they are not music either.
In any event, "music" is a huge category, like "language," and within the field of music there are innumerable musical idioms, some related to each other and others extremely distant.
Recently I began to work on Bach's E Minor sonata for flute and continuo, as I would rather improve my playing by struggling with Bach's sixteenth note runs than work on exercises.The phrases that Bach wrote are more interesting than the patterns written by the authors of flute methods. They are also challenging, because the sequences of notes were composed by a musical genius. As I slowly played the first movement, I encountered sequences of notes that did not fall into place naturally as phrases - at least for me. Figuring out how to phrase a piece while you play it, which notes should be emphasized, when the piece should get louder or softer, and so on, are aspects of understanding music. Sometimes this understanding is intuitive, but often it is conscious and planned. The musician studies the score and marks it so she will remember how to play it with understanding.
To understand Bach in that way requires familiarity with many works of his, with the music of his age, with the rules of harmony and counterpoint that he obeyed, and so on. The same applies to playing any kind of music. That's what I mean by a using musical language.
Not everyone uses a musical language in the same way: composers, conductors, performers, and listeners all respond to different demands and have different abilities within the use of musical languages. In my estimation, composers, arrangers, conductors, and performers who memorize long and complex pieces are masters of musical language, as are jazz improvisers. By those high standards, I merely stammer in music, though I'm a decent amateur musician.
I play baritone saxophone in a community orchestra, whose repertoire ranges from arrangements of classical music through jazz and Latin pieces. This requires us, without thinking about it very much, to shift abruptly from one musical idiom to another, and it also requires the audience to listen to, say, the soundtrack of Star Wars, followed by an arrangement of the 1812 Overture.
Years ago I took musicology courses at the Hebrew University. The third year of the cycle of courses in harmony was a form of analysis developed by the nineteenth century musicologist, Heinrich Schenker, which I found stiff, reductive, and uncongenial - though it also provides deep insights into the classical pieces are constructed. As presented in that class, the laws that Schenker discovered are meant to be universally applicable, based on the acoustic properties of notes. But I kept thinking that those laws were only a kind of grammar of classical music, not universal at all.
Is there a Chomsky in musicology who has worked out a universal generative grammar of music?

Music as a Language (1)

Years ago I attended a concert in a small auditorium at which the works of ten contemporary composers were performed. I must have enjoyed it and found it interesting, because I stayed to the end, though the music made no concessions either to the listeners or to the performers. I came away with the feeling that each composer was writing in a musical language of his or her own, a language that the composer invented along with the piece that was played. I didn't feel that the works were in conversation with one another, which is not the case when a program contains works from the standard Western classical repertoire.
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart built on and rebelled against the baroque composers who preceded them. Beethoven and Schubert looked back at their classical predecessors and opened new possibilities for the romantic composers who followed them - and so on. These composers didn't try to invent a new musical language. They were writing in idioms shared by their contemporaries. True, their compositions stretched the conventions of the norms they inherited, but by and large they remained within them.
I'm tempted to say that using an existing musical language made it easier for them to compose, but obviously it isn't easy to compose like any of these great composers. We all speak a language, but not everything we write in it is immortal poetry.
On my only trip to Japan  (so far, one can always hope) my wife and I went to one act of a kabuki performance. The music and chanting sounded entirely random to me, interesting, not exactly pleasant, but full of energy and surprises. I couldn't understand it any more than I can understand the Japanese language when I hear it spoken. Other non-Western music, such as classical Indian music, is far less off-putting, and I can listen to it with enjoyment, if not real understanding.
So what do I mean by understanding music?
To be continued.

Flute Chronology - Past and Future

I just returned home from a two week trip to Bulgaria. We flew by a low-cost airline, and our baggage allowance was tiny, so, instead of bringing my copper traveling flute, which was cheap enough so that, if it were lost or stolen, I wouldn't suffer a huge loss, I brought my plastic copy of a baroque flute, an excellent instrument that costs as much as a good recorder, since I don't like being separated from a musical instrument for a long time. I bought the baroque flute a few years ago, because I love the sound of the instrument, and I (stupidly) thought it would be easy to play. It isn't. It's harder to produce a full, rich sound on my baroque flute than on a modern metal flute, and the chromatic fingerings are cumbersome, at best.
While we were in Bulgaria I managed to play for twenty minutes or so for two out of every three days, so I didn't lose my embouchure entirely. The instrument is naturally in the key of D major, so you have to learn at least the fingerings for C natural, F natural, and B flat to play almost anything at all. I worked on that a little and thought of a strategy for actually learning to play it freely, but I doubt that I'll get around to it.
When we got back home, and I took out my silver flute, I found that the effort I had put into getting a good sound out of the baroque flute carried over onto the modern flute -- a pleasant surprise. In fact, I am close than ever to producing a sound that pleases me. It has taken time and patience.
I never even tried to play flute until 2012, when I was in my late sixties, against the actuarial odds, because I didn't think I could do it. But when we took a trip to Vietnam, I bought a Chinese style flute there as a souvenir, and, after a while, I managed to play it a little bit. That encouraged me, so I bought the first of my five metal flutes (trading up to my silver Sankyo, which is a better flute than I am a flutist).
At first I tried to learn to play on my own. After a few months, looking for free lessons on the Internet, I realized I needed a teacher, and that's when my true flute odyssey began. At this stage I still consider myself a saxophone player who also plays flute, but I've been working so obsessively on flute, that before I reach the age of eighty, I might think of myself as a flutist who doubles on sax.

You Know What It Sounds Like, Play Great!

When I brought my clarinet to  one of Arnie Lawrence's sessions, he said, "Play like Barney Bigard," the clarinet player in Duke Ellington's band. Obviously, and Arnie knew it, there was no way I could play remotely like Barney Bigard. If I could, I would be giving Arnie's music workshops. So what did he mean?
This morning, after practicing flute for nearly an hour, I noodled around on the instrument, following the advice of a wise and inspiring musician, Raul Juarena, under whose direction I got to play a few years ago. Suddenly, I found myself blowing freely into the flute the way I ordinarily don't do, and the sound was thrilling. I couldn't believe I was producing that sound. I was, in Arnie's words, for a minute or two, playing great.
So why don't I play that way all the time?
Partly it's because I'm trying to learn difficult music, and I have to concentrate on getting everything right, the notes, the dynamics, the phrasing, the articulation....
But mostly, it's because I inhibit myself. I know I can't play great, so I don't try, because, if I try, I'll fail and be disappointed. Better to play cautiously.
Playing great means playing riskily. It means accepting the risk of reaching the end of your abilities and smashing up against that brick wall.

Diminishing Returns: Practice Doesn't Have to Make Perfect

Last night the saxophone quartet I play in managed to rehearse again. We've been playing together for two years or so, but in the past six months, for one reason or another, we haven't been able to meet regularly. Now, for example, it will be more than a month before we can get together again.
Last night we played a couple of pieces we hadn't been working on regularly and were surprised at how well they went. Sometimes it's a good idea to put things aside for a while.
You can only work on something for so long, before you get bored with it and start making new mistakes. When you get to that point, you have to stop and let the work you've invested gradually sink in. The more you go over something, the less spontaneous your playing becomes. You don't sound fresh. You stop discovering new things in the music.
There's always a fine line between mastering a piece of music, so you're confident you can play it in public, and playing with too much control.
The other group I play with is a wind orchestra. Our conductor chooses difficult, challenging music for us and makes us responsible for learning how to play it. We're going to play two concerts in a couple of weeks, and the performance will be far from polished. Does it matter? We're amateurs, and everyone knows it, so no one expects the Israel Philharmonic. We'll have fun playing, and, most probably, the excitement of performing in public will raise the level of our playing.
I like the conductor's attitude. You don't improve unless you play challenging pieces that are a bit beyond your ability - but not so hard as to be frustrating.

Brilliant Young Musical Talents

On Saturday night we went to the concluding concert of the masterclass under the guidance of maestro Murray Perahia at a the Jerusalem Music Center. Eight pianists between the ages of fourteen and eighteen played extremely demanding works with a wonderful mixture of youthful enthusiasm and maturity. Each one was better than the last, and I'm sure that most of them could become successful performers if they continue in that path and are fortunate.
They all played with great skill, and clearly they have invested hours and hours of practice to attain the high level of musicianship they displayed that evening. Obviously they haven't had the time to develop the repertoire expected of a top concert pianist, and their performances might have been lacking the depth of mature musicians, but they have acquired the foundations they can build on.
I found myself thinking that if you aren't great when you're a teenager, you probably will never be great.
And also that the potential of gifted young people, if they are motivated, guided, given the opportunity, and placed in a supportive environment, is almost magical, and not only in music.
I'm not in favor of musical education aimed solely at picking out the most gifted kids and training them to be professionals, and I'm not in favor of pushing kids, but of giving students a chance to blossom, to explore and develop their abilities, to find their own field of excellence. Obviously I don't know the young people who played at the concert, and I couldn't have been more impressed by their performances, but, on the other hand, it might not be terribly disastrous for them if they didn't perform till they were in their twenties, for example, unless they are totally drawn to performance. Not every gifted fifteen-year-old is capable of performing before a demanding audience - or interested in doing that. Also, not every fine musician is built for the rigors of an international career, with constant travel and enormous pressure, the sense that you're only as good as your last performance. If that's the only kind of career they're being trained for, and if they think that any other outcome would be tantamount to failure, that would be sad.
I hope that these young pianists are receiving wise and empathetic guidance along with their fine and rigorous musical training.

Musics

In the past few days, I've run through a varied range of musical experiences, and I'm wondering what they tell me.
On Tuesday afternoon my wife and I attended the last in a series of lecture/concerts on Chopin and Liszt, given by the brilliant pianist-composer-conductor-lecturer Gil Shohat. This session was devoted to the "demonic" Liszt, and the major guest performer was the brilliant Israeli pianist Dorel Golan, who, as usual, played magnificently. In the end, however, I decided that I'm not a big fan of Liszt. His pieces seem to me to wander all over and to depend too much on fantastic piano technique. See if you can play this! At a recital, I'd be happy to hear one piece by Liszt, but not a whole program.
Later that evening I has a flute lesson. I played 2 duets with my teacher. One is by Kaspar Kummer hardly a household name among music lovers. The duet is kind of vapid when you only play one of the parts. Together it sounds fine. But there's a lot of pointless running around in it. I worked on it for a month or more, and I learned a lot by doing that, but I was glad to get it behind me. Then we played the first part of a sonata by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, which is a much more interesting piece of music (too interesting, my teacher said). He was surprised that we managed to stay together from beginning to end, because the rhythms are complicated, and the parts seldom come together. But I played it too slowly. So that's a summer project.
Since I'm a grownup, my teacher more or less lets me call the shots, and I've been playing duets with him, because I love it. Also, he's so good, that he pushes me upward. His tone is enviable, and hearing him while I play helps me improve my own sound.
Then, on Wednesday night, I went to the Yellow Submarine, a venue known to Jerusalem pop and jazz fans, to hear my friend and teacher, Stephen Horenstein lead a group of musicians he calls the Lab Orchestra in an intense new piece called Tabular Rasa. The piece ranges from slow, melodic, tonal passages to cacophonous noise, from tranquility to intense anxiety, from clean solo passsages through discordant ensemble passages. I don't know whether the performance was recorded, but I can't imagine enjoying a CD of it as much as I enjoyed seeing it develop with a mixture of spontaneity and planning.
Finally, last night, we went to a screening at the Cinematheque of two short films about Oriental Jewish musicians, from Egypt and Iraq, who, against all odds, maintained their traditions here in Israel, during the 1950s, when it was almost suppressed by lack of government support and indifference and hostility on the part of the Ashkenazi public. One of the featured musicians was the Egyptian-born Felix Mizrahi, and among the most moving scenes was his visit to an oud-maker in Cairo, where he plays on a lousy Chinese violin with a wonderful young oud player. The communication and mutual appreciation of the two musicians was inspiring.
How fortunate one is to be able to hear and play so many different kinds of music.

Espressivo, Cantabile, with Feeling

Four of my relatives got together and gave me a tape recorder for my Bar-Mitzvah. I used to attach wires with clips to the input of the loudspeaker on my parents' high fidelity system (I don't remember whether it was even stereo back then) and record broadcasts from WQXR. Once I happened to record Stravinsky's ballet, The Soldier's Tale, which I am listening to now, as I write, a version without the narrative. I was enthralled and listened to it again and again, while my contemporaries were listening to Elvis Presley. (I was proudly out of it as a teenager.)
I remember reading that Stravinksy didn't mark his scores with emotional directives like "espressivo." Actually, what I remember is that he argued against using them, but, in fact, he did put them in his scores. But I agree with his argument, whether or not he practiced what he preached. Why would anyone play any way except expressively? Why would anyone play in a non-singing way? Why would anyone want to play any other way except with feeling?
I recently joined a wind orchestra with a dynamic, young conductor, and the rehearsals are fun and challenging. Last week he had us rehearse a piece with complicated rhythms (less complicated than Stravinsky's) and told us not to try to play it musically. "Just play the notes."
He's definitely right, because if we can't play the notes right, in the right rhythms, we'll never be able to play it musically. I wonder whether, once we do get the notes right, we'll play it musically in spite of ourselves. I expect so.
Now and then I have written music on notation programs. Unless you write in crescendos and diminuendos, ritardandos and fermatas, the computer plays the music back entirely without expression at the same dynamic level, with absolute rhythmical regularity and perfect pitch, without responding emotionally to the notes it's sounding. Nevertheless, it's often hard to hear the music that way. Our ears - my ears, at any rate - supply a lot of the emotion that's lacking in the electronic monotony.
I couldn't play like a computer if I tried (which isn't to say that my playing is as musical as it should be), and when I'm learning a piece, and a third of the way in, the composer writes, "espressivo," I think to myself: Was I supposed to be playing without expression up to now?

He Don't Got Rhythm, and I Think I Know Why

Last night I heard Roberto Tarenzi an Italian jazz pianist play in a private home, a wonderful house concert. Parenthetically and surprisingly, this being Jerusalem, which sometimes seems like a city of five hundred. I barely knew anyone there, a pleasant change. The pianist was a thoroughgoing professional, knowledgeable about jazz and an imaginative improviser. His main influences were Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, two giants of jazz piano.

Everything was there except swing.
If you listen to Bill Evans (this is a picture of him), you'll hear him play a lot of dreamy stuff, but he can also play with swing, and I don't think Tyner can play without swing. However, to my ear, at any rate, Tarenzi doesn't swing.
I think the reason for that is that his native language is Italian. Unlike English, and many other languages, including Hebrew, which have very strong stresses, Italian flows melodiously, as does French, for that matter. Listen to this bombastic clip of Vittorio Gassman talking and then reciting Dante.
There are plenty of stresses in Italian, but they aren't the regular, constant stresses of English. It doesn't quite have a beat.
Rhythm is always an issue in music.
One of my problems in playing flute is failing to get the sixteenth notes up to speed, and, when I play them slowly at a tempo I can manage, I tend to rush and trip over my fingers. My teacher, at my most recent lesson, told me that music is not an extreme sport, that if I feel the adrenaline in my veins, I should snooze. Better yet, I tell myself, I should feel the beat.
Yet, part of the drama of listening to music is feeling that the performer is playing at the upper limits of her ability, that adrenaline is pumping through her. The ultimate goal is to be totally relaxed and confident that the notes will fall into place, and totally intense about making them fall into place. Trying as hard as you can and making it sound as if you don't have to try.
That, as I understand it, is swing, as demonstrated by Fats Waller, who rushes a lot in this clip, but whose swing is fantastic.

Stars and Mediocrities

Continuing with thoughts about Eric Clapton, what percentage of people who play guitar reach his level of virtuosity and stardom? One in a million? Then there's the level just below the stars, the people who play in their bands but who aren't famous. They're also sterling musicians. Then there are the people who play in the kind of band that never gets to make a record, but plays in clubs and bars and at parties - and many of them are excellent.
And so on, down the line.
When I go to hear a violin concerto, I often wonder how much separates the soloist from the musicians in the violin section, who have to be superb to get a job with an orchestra. Is it a matter of raw talent, of the willingness to work harder than anyone else, or of personality (not everybody wants to go into the risky business of solo performance)? I can only speculate.
We have often held concerts in our home. Sometimes the musicians who perform are on an international level, and we are flattered that they're willing to play for a small audience on a piano that could be better. But sometimes they are just very good. For me, the privilege of hearing live music, in an intimate setting, compensates for the less than supreme quality of the musicians. If we could get Andras Schiff to play our piano for our friends we would be in heaven, but once a student at the Rubin Academy asked to practice his final recital for some friends in our living room, and that was memorable.
I am not good enough to play a solo recital in our living room either on flute or on saxophone, though I have played jazz with a pianist friend for his family and mine, and I have played here in a sax quartet for friends, and that was a huge success. I play baritone sax, a low, kind of clumsy instrument, that usually doesn't have much of a chance to play the melody, and I enjoy putting down the floor of a piece, so that higher instruments and build on it.
Last night, for the first time I played in the rehearsal of a small concert band and had a great time. I'd been thinking of joining it for a while, but the time and place were a bit too inconvenient for me. I'm glad I went. It was fun, even though I was sight-reading, making a lot of mistakes, and getting lost now and then. For me, playing in a group, even a group of two playing duets, is what it's all about.
It would be nice if every musician were great, and they could all put their egos on hold and collaborate, but it's okay if you're just good enough to get by.

I Admit there's Something Wrong with Me

I am indifferent to most popular music.
On Saturday night, in Tel Aviv, we saw the documentary about Eric Clapton, "A Life in 12 Bars," and before seeing the film, I wasn't completely sure who Clapton was - remembered he is a virtuoso blues guitar player, but I couldn't specifically recall listening to any track of his. Now, at least, I know who he is.
A troubled English teenager, he discovered the blues of Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and other great American black musicians, learned how to play by listening to records and copying what he heard, and brought it to England. The popularity of English groups like the Cream, where Clapton played lead guitar, opened up white American ears to the musicians they had ignored.
No one who talked about him in the film failed to say that Clapton is obsessive, and, musically, it paid off. I would never be one of the tens of thousands of fans who cram stadiums to hear him, but I wouldn't deny his genius for a minute.
The movie followed three directions: Clapton's musical development and career; his troubled relationships with women; and his struggles with drugs and alcohol. A lot of people have trouble with intimate relations, and a lot of people fall prey to cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. But the number of musicians who achieve what Clapton has done is quite small.
Early in the film Clapton describes what it was like to be the warm up band for the Beatles, whom he admires. In fact, when the Beatles played, despite all the amplification, you couldn't actually hear them, because the audience was screaming so loudly.
Clapton listened hard to everyone, and learned. I was impressed by how generous his admiration was for other musicians - and by the generosity of their admiration for him. (Of course, the filmmaker wouldn't have put in the words of a detractor).
I've played in orchestras and groups to pretty big audiences, but never as a soloist. I can't imagine what it would be like to stand up with a few other musicians and turn on a crowd of thousands. Clapton didn't talk about that, but he did say that he would just as soon sit at home and jam with friends as play to a vast audience, if he didn't need the money.
After I got home, I tried listening to some Clapton, but I like jazz and classical music better. Nothing rivals the high intensity of a great rock 'n roll concert. The energy is cosmic. I'm susceptible to it. No question. But all my life I've resisted what's popular.

High Culture in Troubled Times

On the evening after Jerusalem Day, we attended a wonderful free concert at the First Station in Jerusalem: songs about Jerusalem from many Oriental Jewish traditions. I have misgivings about Jerusalem Day, because it brings out highly chauvinistic behavior - marching through Arab neighborhoods with Israeli flags, for example. On the other hand, I am very glad to be living in a unified city, with many Palestinian citizens, and only wish that it could be run inclusively so that the Palestinians would have a stake in it.
But what does politics have to do with music? What does a concert have to do with the killing that went on on the border between Gaza and Israel? How can a country that sends thugs and demagogues to the Knesset also produce fine musicians? How does high culture coexist with a brutal occupation?
And there are other discrepancies. What does Neta Barzilai (I might be the only holdout in Israel, who has never heard her song) have to do with what I regard as music?
Of course, these questions aren't relevant only to Israel. Almost all the fine art we admire in museums was produced in abhorrent, oppressive regimes.
One of the most enjoyable things I do is playing music with other people. I'm a member of a fairly decent saxophone quartet. We try to play together regularly, and we have performed in public several times. Last night only three of us could make the rehearsal, but we decided to go practice together anyway, and it was a productive, enjoyable rehearsal. Should we be playing music when our country is in crisis? If we didn't play, would the crisis be less acute? Getting back to an earlier entry, should Louis Armstrong and his fellow musicians have refused to play until black Americans got full civil rights?

Musical Labels

Arnie Lawrence once told me he didn't like playing "I Can't Get Started," a great standard by Vernon Duke (whose real name was Vladimir Dukelsky), because the lyrics (by Ira Gershwin), were self-defeating (and Arnie was not a man who had trouble getting started with women).
I myself strongly dislike "Love for Sale," by Cole Porter, a song I just heard on a streaming site for big band music because it romanticizes prostitution. Though objectively, as it were, I have to concede that it's a great song, a classic jazz standard (and it can also be performed straight, as the show tune that it originally was).
This morning I was in the mood for big band music, which has evolved from strictly dance music to a serious composer's idiom without losing it's drive. Old classical music would never be labelled "jazz," but a lot of contemporary classical music is influenced by jazz, and some of the great jazz musicians and composers, like the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin collaboration, have definitely produced music that is classical, meaning long-lasting, complex, original, influential, and of perennial interest. Does it help to call it jazz?
Last night we went to a classical concert of the Carmel Quartet, entitled "The Magic Flute" (kind of a cliche, but who cares?), featuring three of the members of the quartet (Yona Zur and Rachel Ringelstein playing violin, and Tami Waterman playing cello) and a fabulous flute player: Roy Amotz, who was the reason why I was so anxious to hear the concert.
One of the themes of Yona Zur's explanations (the Carmel Quartet's concerts feature commentary by the musicians) was that the classical composers who rebelled against late baroque, didn't think of themselves as "classical," but as "galant." I wonder when we started calling them classical?
Classical music can be a narrow or a broad term. Narrowly, it means European art music between the baroque and romantic periods, broadly, everybody more or less knows what it means, but most people would find it difficult to provide a watertight definition of it. I guess we need labels, so that when we log onto a streaming website and have to chose what music to listen to, we can get what we want. But that doesn't always work.
Once I made the tactless error of asking a young pianist what kind of musician he was, and he said, simply, that he wanted to be a musician, unrestricted by a definition. But obviously, musicians do get to be better at playing one kind of music rather than another, and listeners have legitimate generic preferences, for which they need labels.

Not So Dead Black Musicians

Sometimes, when I feel depressed - and who can fail to be depressed at the current state of the world? - I remember to listen to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. That music is so lively, it has to pick a person up. Of course, all the musicians who played on those early records are dead by now, though their vitality lives after them in their music.

The other night I was thinking about other dead black men while I was ironing a pile of long-sleeved shirts, in preparation for taking my summer clothing up from our cellar. (I let my shirts pile up until there are more than an hour's worth of ironing to do, to make it worthwhile to takeout the ironing board.) I set myself up in our living room and put a CD on our stereo. Ironing is a perfect task for listening to music. The music puts the ironing in the background of my mind.
This time I listened to a disk I am quite familiar with, though I haven't listened to it for a long time: "Mingus Ah Um," one of the greatest jazz albums I know of. As I listened, I started thinking about the feminist, post-colonial, etc. objection to filling the humanities curriculum with works by "dead white men," and about that disk, which, like the Louis Armstrong recordings, immortalized dead black men. I have always wondered how people as oppressed as Negroes were in the 1920s could put so much joy in their art.
As to "Mingus Ah Um," I knew that Charles Mingus himself died of ALS, and I imagined that all the other people who played on that disk were also black and dead. But when I checked, to my joy, I discovered that John Handy, who plays alto sax, clarinet, and tenor sax on the disk was born in 1933 and, unless Wikipedia is misinformed, is still alive, as is Shafi Hadi, born even earlier, who plays tenor and alto. I hope they are both lucid and in good health, with happy memories of their contribution to music.
Moreover, not all the musicians were black - so much for that stereotype.

Pessimistic Reflections on Practicing

I have been fairly obsessive about practicing flute every since I took up the instrument with a teacher, about six years ago, and, while I keep improving, compared to the kind of progress a young person makes, I am hopeless, despite decades of playing musical instruments.
When I was a high school student, I took clarinet lessons with Irving Neidich, the father of Charles Neidich, one of the top classical clarinetists in the world, and I never practiced with the kind of seriousness I am applying to the flute. Still, I got to be pretty good. I attended the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan for two years, and I played in our high school orchestra.
Mr. Neidich made me play a lot of the classic exercises written by Klose, and I did so more or less dutifully. But I don't play through exercises on the flute. I have memorized a warm-up routine that I learned when I was taking saxophone lessons from Stephen Horenstein: scales, arpeggios, long tones, etc. Every day I spend about twenty minutes with that, and then I go on to the pieces I'm working on with my flute teacher, Michael Lukin, who was born and brought up in Moscow and, here at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, studied with Moshe Aron Epstein, who later had a career in Europe.
Right now I'm working a sonata attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, but probably written by one of his sons. At my lessons, Michael plays the piano accompaniment to the Bach, and we also play duets together. Hearing his tone helps me improve my own.
Right now I'm working on the last movement of a duet by Telemann and the first movement of one by a romantic composer, Kummer.
Instead of playing exercises, when I practice, I play the fast passages of these pieces quite slowly, concentrating as much as possible on maintaining as good a sound as I can. If I can play notes written by one of the Bachs  or by Telemann, why should I play notes written by a flute virtuoso who is virtually unknown as a composer? However, I will probably never be able to play these passages as fast as they are supposed to be played.
So why am I playing flute at all? I'll never be good enough at it to please myself. There are two good reasons: first, I enjoy it, and, second, by working at these pieces, I am improving my appreciation of music. Indeed, the more I play, the more I marvel at the brilliance of the composers I am playing, and, the more I listen to great musicians play, the more I admire them.