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!

Inhabiting the Notes

My flute practice, ever since I began taking lessons from Raanan Eylon, has been akin to wrestling with a Zen koan: How does a musician get inside the notes he plays?
What does it mean to get inside the notes?
How can you tell whether someone else, who is playing, is inside the notes?
Can you feel as if you're inside the notes and not be there?
There is something deeply frustrating about this pursuit, because "being in the notes" is a metaphor for something that's undefinable.
Maybe "notes" is entirely the wrong term.
It's the sound, not the notes. My musical guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, said that you have to find a sound that you love, that getting a sound that you love is the beginning and the end of music-making.
Raanan talks about seeking the center of the sound. That's a metaphor, too, but it's easier for me to grasp. I think about focusing the sound, another metaphor, but more accessible to me.
What will happen once I manage to get into the notes?
The truth is: what's the point of playing at all, if you're not trying to get into the notes?
Raanan contends that most musicians do not get into the notes they play.
Recently I read that some musicians enter a kind of hypnotic state when they perform solos. That would be getting so far into the notes, that you aren't anywhere else. I think that would also apply to playing in an ensemble, when you're involved, when you're listening to what everyone else is playing and the way what you play fits into it.

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Extinctions

I have just read a two part article by Elizabeth Kolbert that appeared in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_kolbert. Her point is that we are now living in an age of mass extinctions, caused by ourselves, and, most likely, we will also cause our own extinction.
My first response was predictable, and what she was aiming at, I assume: Let's do everything we can to prevent this catastrophe from happening! But since then, I've been wondering whether it makes any difference.
After all, the mass extinction of humanity is inevitable. Does anyone seriously believe that in, say, a million years, there will still be human beings anywhere in the universe? Kolbert mentions the five mass extinctions known to paleontologists, and states, as the following link also does, that we have entered a sixth extinction event (http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html), and that we are its cause.
The last such event took place 65 million years ago, and the enormous biodiversity of the world, which existed before humans started killing off other species, shows that, from the earth's point of view, from the point of view of the life force, not only was there a recovery from that event, but the extinction of certain species (such as large and hungry reptiles) created an opportunity for us warm-blooded creatures to proliferate. So when we all go, something else will thrive, multiply, diversify, and fill the earth up again. And after another fifty million years or so, something bad will happen to them, and they, too, will become extinct. The whole process will start over again, repeatedly, until the sun flares up and engulfs the earth.
Obviously I want my grandchildren to grow up in a safe world, where they can live fulfilling lives, and I am very sad to think that this is rather unlikely, if present trends continue. But I'm not convinced that, in any metaphysical sense, it matters.
We individuals only matter to ourselves, the people we love, and the people who love us. We are not all that important in the universe.
We are all going to die, some painfully, some young, some gently, some violently, and in a hundred years, no living memory of us will remain. Some of us might have produced something that will still be valued after we die, but most of us won't.
We have a clear selfish interest, as a species, in preventing the destruction of the natural world around us, which sustains us, and maybe we will manage to get our act together and do it. We also might manage to poison the biosphere so thoroughly that life will face a setback so serious that it will take it a billion years to recover. But, unlike us, the world has time.

Mind, Body, and Flute #1

I bought a Chinese flute in Vietnam about a year ago, and after I started to be able to get a sound out of it, I decided to buy a secondhand flute, and for about six months I worked on it by myself. Finally I decided I needed a teacher, and a flautist friend of mine recommended one.
I've now had two lessons, about a month apart, and they have made a huge difference in my playing. My teacher is very knowledgeable about the bodily mechanics of playing the instrument, and he also uses visualizations to help put the body in tune with the instrument.
It's kind of ridiculous for a man of my age to take up a new musical instrument, when I already play saxophone and clarinet nowhere near well enough to satisfy myself. But every instrument is a way of expressing something different, producing a different voice.
Anyway, I've found that practicing the flute hasn't detracted from my saxophone playing at all. In fact, the concentration I need to apply to the sound of the flute when I work on it, the awareness of what comes out of the instrument, is helpful for the saxophone as well.

Garden Concert

For the past six months or more, I have been meeting regularly with three other musicians, a pianist, a drummer, and a bassist, working up a program.  Through the bassist's connections, we were offered a chance to appear at a museum in Jerusalem on Sept. 13, and we decided to have a concert party in our garden last night to try out the program: sixteen jazz standards and three Israeli songs.
About twenty of our friends showed up to hear us, and we put on a creditable show, which gives me confidence that we won't make fools out of ourselves when we play next week.
We played for about an hour an a half.  At the end I was wiped out.  While I was playing, the adrenaline was at work, but once we were finished, I collapsed.  I was playing tenor sax and working hard at it.  But the main work isn't the physical work of filling the horn with air.  It's the mental work of concentrating on the music and trying to play interesting improvisations.
Every time I play, I remember not so many years ago, when I couldn't have imagined improvising, and I'm pleased that I've been able to grow that way.
I wonder whether people who aren't musicians, when they hear a group like ours play, four amateurs who have taken a lot of time out of our lives and devoted a lot of effort to prepare, understand how much we have had to invest of ourselves in the music.  The hour and a half of our performance represents countless hours of practice as individuals and as a group.  We do it because we love doing it, not because we have any hopes of getting rich or famous from it - not even of making enough money from it to pay for our instruments!
That's why I think economists - or anyone who reduces our lives to a single dimension - will never understand why humans behave the way we do.
I was listening to Sonny Rollins a lot during the few days before last night's concert.  His playing inspired me. I'm sure that he played better when he was fourteen than I'll ever play, and his music only grew and deepened  over the years.  I wish I had a tiny fraction of the greatness of the musicians I admire, but I'm not sorry that I didn't become a professional.  I probably have enough skill to have been a mediocre professional, a high school band director, or something like that.  But it could be that I enjoy music more than professional musicians do.  And what's the point of an art if you don't get pleasure and give pleasure?

A Change

I've decided to transfer all my Vietnam postings from this blog to another one: http//:http://vntripgreens.blogspot.com/, so please look there.

Moved to Tears

Hot tears welled up behind my glasses when I heard Helene Grimaud play Mozart's 23rd piano concerto with the Israel Philharmonic on Friday morning at the Jerusalem theater.  We had read an article about Grimaud in the New Yorker last month, and then we saw ads for a series of concerts here in Israel.  We had never heard of her before reading the article, because we don't follow current performers of classical music so closely, but, because of the article about a fascinating and astonishingly gifted person, we decided to treat ourselves to the concert.

Friday morning at 11 is not a time we usually go to concerts.  Judith cooks meals for Shabbat on Fridays, and I try to squeeze in a few more hours of work.  Last Friday it was raining very hard.  I am always put off balance by the rain here.  Even after nearly 40 years in Israel, the country means sun, not rain to me. Friday's rain was cold and torrential, and streams ran in the streets that sloped downhill.

It was a relief to reach the lobby, and, to our astonishment, we found that it was full of round tables with yellow cloths, and middle-aged people who certainly could have lived without another piece of cake were avidly gobbling down pastries.  We saw where they were giving out the food and went over to find out what was what.  After all, we're also adequately fed Ashkenazis.  It turned out there was a deal: 35 sheqels for coffee, cake, and the weekend newspaper.  We hadn't signed up.  Just as well.

We had unknowlingly entered an unfamiliar world of devotees who have been going to Friday morning concerts of the Philharmonic for years: Intermezzo.  When we entered the hall, we misread the row of our seats and trespassed on the territory of a couple of regulars.  Of course we moved after acknowledging out mistake.  We were outsiders in a secret society.

All that background has little to do with the point.  We had seats in the 2nd row, to the right of the piano, so we could see Grimaud's face but not her hands.  She's a good-looking woman with an expressive face, and it was a pleasure to see the pleasure she found in the music.  The tears came to my eyes because of the beauty of the sound of the orchestra and because at one moment in the first movement the soloist swept the orchestra along with her.  I felt that the music had gripped them all.  They were more than a group of highly trained, skilled, professional musicians.  They were lovers of Mozart's music.

Recently I have been listening to more classical music after years of listening mainly to jazz.  There's no point in comparing.  Great music is great music, whether it's Ellington or Brahms, and I still have no patience for a lot of bombastic classical symphonies.  However, I do believe that no other kind of music has yet attained the sublime heights of the greatest Western classical works.

I suspect that many people in Friday's audience, comfortable, middle-aged, affluent professionals and business people, attend concerts so that can feel good about themselves, not because they know and care a lot about the music.   But who am I to judge or pretend to know who those people are?  I should be glad they're willing to shell out money to keep the orchestra going.  There was barely an empty seat in the hall.  Collectively we had paid a great deal to hear two relatively familiar pieces.

Sometimes I wonder what Mozart would think if he could attend a concert today.  He wrote the pieces we heard about 230 years ago.   Could he have imagined that in Jerusalem, an Ottoman backwater in his day, a symphony orchestra based in Tel Aviv, a city that didn't exist, conducted by a visiting conductor from an Austria bereft of its empire, would perform music for complacent Jewish bourgeois?  It makes me think of the Midrash about Moses who is brought forward in history to see Rabbi Akiva teach his Torah, and he can't understand a thing.

Perhaps there's a glimmer of hope here.  Maybe mankind will survive for another 230 years, and people will still be playing Mozart, perhaps on instruments we cannot imagine, but there will still be an audience that attends concerts as much as an act of self-affirmation as to hear and understand the music.  Even for those listeners, a moment might come when they are moved to tears by the playing of a Helene Grimaud in the year 2252, because she is playing Mozart's 23rd piano concerto as if her own fingers were writing the work, and her own years were hearing it for the first time, and a whole orchestra will be borne aloft  by her playing.