Fluency - Musical and Linguistic

 For as long as I remember thinking about it at all, I have been interested in comparing music to language. For me, they are competing areas, though I realize that for most people they go together easily: people sing words to music and feel that the music adds to the words and vice versa. I find that when I am deeply involved with words, which is most of the time, as I'm a translator, music suffers. I hear music while I work. It plays in the background. But I don't pay it proper attention. Mea culpa.

Learning a second language was particularly deleterious to my musical progress. In high school, when I started to study French, I was enthralled by the language and put great effort into learning it well, because it was important to me - importance that I can't entirely explain to myself, and playing clarinet became less important to me. A moment comes when you're acquiring a new language when you begin to be fluent in it, when you stop translating from it into your native language, when you can read it with increasing ease, and when you can speak it without getting tangled up in it. That moment doesn't mean that you've mastered the language, but that you're dealing with it in new terms: fluency. You can be fluent in a language and speak it badly, with a poor accent, making a lot of grammatical errors, but at least you're able to use the language.

Learning to play a musical instrument is very similar. For a long time you're learning the fingering and other aspects of technique, and suddenly you can simply play the instrument without thinking about how you're doing it. For a long time I have been at that stage in the instruments I first studied, clarinet and saxophone, but flute wasn't easy for me, probably because I started playing it late in life. Now, and I'm not sure exactly when it happened, I play flute with fluency similar to my sax playing (I don't play clarinet often), which also means that it's more fun to play, less stumbling, less groping.

Playing fluently doesn't necessarily mean playing well, certainly not playing perfectly, but it's a necessary step toward those higher goals. Of course, when I am learning a new piece, I always come upon passages that are difficult for me, and I have to slow down and work on them. This also happens to me when I'm translating. Sometimes I run into a passage with difficult syntax or unfamiliar vocabulary, and I have to move through it slowly and attentively. But the basic fluency is there, the connection between what I hear in my mind and what I play. Working on a difficult passage teaches me how to hear it.

For most music teachers playing fluently is second nature and probably not in their minds as they work with pupils. That's regrettable. I've never taught music and wouldn't be comfortable doing it, but, were I a music teacher, I would work on fluency, so that playing one's instrument is like speaking one's native language.

Chega de Saudade

 Recently I've been practicing Chega de Saudade, a famous bossa nova song by Jobim. The English title of the song is "No More Blues," but the Portuguese means Enough (chega) of Missing (saudade). I am not very good at playing bossa nova rhythms. When I listen to to bossa nova, I'm constantly impressed by the musicians' relaxation as they play complicated syncopations without audible effort, while I have to count carefully and think about alternating from notes that are off the beat to notes that are on it. Incidentally, until the very moment when I read the article about bossa nova, I thought that "bossa" meant bass, that it was a new kind of bass. That was wrong.

When I was in high school, I had a radio on a shelf in the headboard of my bed. Almost every night, when my parents thought I had gone to sleep, I used to listen to an all-night jazz program on WEVD, hosted by Mort Fega. I didn't understand what was going on in the music, but I loved the sound. I vividly remember the night that I first heard bossa nova. Fega played Stan Getz's performance of the Girl from Ipanema three or four times, because he was so bowled over by the novelty of it.

I never thought I'd be able to play jazz or bossa nova. At the time, I was learning how to play classical music on the clarinet. Secretly listening to late-night radio was about as close as I could get to following a musical passion, being the uptight kid I was.

Happy Tunes

The late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, once said that he didn't like playing "I Can't Get Started," because the title and the lyrics are pessimistic. Arnie was definitely a man who found it easy to get started, which I'm not. But I don't share Arnie's aversion to that song, because it's also full of self-aggrandizement. Another song about having the world stacked up against you is "Everything Happens to Me," here sung with convincing self-pity by Chet Baker (his improvisation on the trumpet doesn't sound sad at all, by the way). I bet Arnie never played it once. Another song that seems to court disaster is "Comes Love," which is too cute to inspire sadness. This is Artie Shaw's version, a man to whom love came often enough.

The repertoire of standards also contains a bunch of optimistic songs, like "Happy Talk" from South Pacific, "I'm just a Lucky So and So," "What a Wonderful World" (which is played so often, it's beyond a cliche), and "Oh What a Beautiful Morning (a particularly corny version)." In general I'm fairly indifferent to the lyrics of the standards I play, aside from the title, which, I know, is an error. But in this historical moment, in the midst of a pandemic and a failing economy, it's not such a bad idea to sing something hopeful. When a song is happy, beyond its title, it carries you along.

A lot of Schubert's Lieder are pretty maudlin. Maybe you're supposed to feel good when you hear them: at least I'm not as miserable as him! And a lot of blues songs are also full of self-pity. But I've always been drawn to the peppy songs, like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. It's inspiring that those oppressed black people were able to find and communicate so much joy in music.

Recently I've been working in several musical directions. With a pianist friend, I've been playing Piazzola pieces on the flute, and I've also been working on a pretty difficult set of flute sonatas by Locatelli. Piazzola tends to be a bit over the top, but it's great to be called upon to express so much emotion. Locatelli is inventive and decorative, fun to play (or it would be fun, if I could play up to speed). But the most fun for me is to sit down with the Realbook or something similar and play a bunch of standards. Just this morning I played "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" on the baritone sax and couldn't get over how brilliant Richard Rodgers was. Where the lyrics go, "and it looks like it's climbing clear up to the sky," the melody stays on the same note!

The other thing I do is play whatever I remember by heart, or just phrases, and then noodle around on the instrument. Sometimes I do something sort of technical, like playing all the pentatonic scales, but mainly I keep trying to connect my mind, my ears, and my instrument more and more closely. That makes me happy.

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.