A Talk about Woodwinds

 A few years ago the Jerusalem Municipality organized a short course for retired people (whom they called people in "the third age," a euphemism I'm not fond of) to train them to give lectures to other retired people, the assumption being that people of our age have wisdom to impart. There were about forty people in the course, and most of the subjects of the talks they offered were full of self-help advice. I decided, seeing that I've had a long career, as it were, as a serious amateur musician, to talk about the way music has enriched my life. I eventually gave up on that idea, because it struck me as too boastful: look at me, I play in a wind orchestra! But I found a different way of framing the talk: How and why was the saxophone invented?

I've given the talk twice so far, and I'm slated to give it again in a week or two. Each time I give it, I see ways of improving it. This time I intend to start by telling them about playing clarinet in high school, and why I stopped playing when I went off to college. The main reason was that I knew I wasn't talented and dedicated enough to become a professional musician. Nevertheless, I can still play clarinet with a good tone, and I'll play something on my clarinet to demonstrate.

The first time I tried out the talk, I brought some instruments with me, but I didn't play them enough. My audience expected to hear music. This time I'll prepare songs to play. I still haven't decided just what I'll play. I should probably play something classical on the clarinet first, and then something klezmerish.

After I've demonstrated the clarinet and spoken about it a little, I'll take out my soprano saxophone and talk about the differences between the clarinet and the saxophone and why Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone. The first times I gave the talk, I brought bigger saxes with me, but they're heavy and cumbersome, and the soprano is a more unusual instrument, straight (at least mine is) and not curved like the other instruments in the family. I'll also talk about the family of saxophones.

Then I'll take out the pan pipe that my daughter brought from Peru and talk a little about the ancient history of wind instruments and how they work. Archaeologists have found a bone flute 60,000 years old!

Photograph by Petar Milošević 

Until the 17th century, woodwinds were essentially the same: tubes with holes in them. I'll take out my plastic baroque flute and my Indian bansuri to show that. I'll compare my modern silver flute to the simpler, earlier flutes. I will also make it clear that I'm not saying the modern Western music is better than earlier music or the music of other cultures.Then I'll talk about why instrument builders started adding keys to the flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons they were making. 

First, composers began to write music with accidentals and changes in key. Second, the Industrial Revolution made it possible to build complicated instruments. Third, the manufacture of musical instruments became industrialized. Fourth, larger and larger concert halls were built, along with military parades led by bands - all of which necessitated louder instruments.

There's more to say and more to play. Let's see how the talk goes.

Voices

The other day I saw a great documentary narrated by Branford Marsalis about great tenor saxophonists, but for some reason I can't find it on Youtube again. Never mind. Marsalis spoke about the way Coleman Hawkins essentially invented the tenor as a jazz instrument and played clips of many of great tenor players from Hawkins up to David Murray (it was made in 1992, so maybe other impressive contemporary players would have been included if he'd made it last year).

In the past few years I've mainly been playing baritone sax, partly because if you play the baritone, you can always find an ensemble to play in. I also enjoy playing baritone. I'm not suffering, though sometimes the parts are boring. You hear music differently when you play the bottom notes. 

I do own the other common sizes of saxes, soprano, alto, and tenor, and every now and then I play one of them, to get back in touch with the other horns, but my tenor was giving me trouble. There was a leak in one of the pads, and I couldn't play the low notes at all. I asked a friend of mine, who knows how to repair horns and has a lot of tools, to take a look at my tenor (a well-made Taiwanese Lien-Cheng instrument), and, sure enough, he found and easily fixed the leak, which wasn't where I thought it was. So in the past few days I've been playing tenor for a change. The sound is quite different from the sound of the baritone. Also the transposition to concert pitch is different, so it forces me to make an adjustment.

There are two approaches. Some musicians stick to a single instrument and get deeper and deeper into it. Once, for example, I asked a young tuba player whether he played other brass instruments, and he said there was so much to explore with the tuba, that he saw no need to play any other horn. Other musicians play a lot of different instruments, like, for example, Yusuf Lateef and Eric Dolphy. It's far from uncommon. Many violinists also play viola, classical clarinetists in orchestras also play bass clarinet, and some folk musicians can play guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle. I recently heard a singer who sang with a fine, strong baritone voice and then switched to counter-tenor. Hard to believe the same person was singing.

Every voice expresses a different part of the musician's self.

Like Riding a Bicycle?

 I just spent a bit more than a month abroad and couldn't take a heavy instrument with me, so I took my flute, which meant neglecting saxophone, and I play baritone saxophone in a big band and in a quartet. So it's important to me to be able to play at a decent level.

Upon returning from abroad, I tried playing sax and was relieved that I could still do it. I have rehearsals next week, and I want to be ready for them.

A friend of mine, a fellow amateur multi-instrumentalist reassured me that playing sax, after all the years that I've been doing it, was like riding a bicycle. This was only mildly encouraging, because at my age, nearly 81, I'm not about to ride a bicycle. Nevertheless, he's right. I can still even play clarinet, though I haven't played much clarinet since I was in high school. But, if you haven't ridden on a bicycle for a long time, your legs get tired quickly, and your balance won't be what it once was.

I keep wondering how long I will be able to play at all. One of my music teachers told me not to worry about wrong notes. His brother-in-law is a neurosurgeon, he said, and if he makes a mistake, his patient might die. But if a musician plays a wrong note, it's not a matter of life and death. I'll probably never play as well as I did when I was in my teens. But as long as I enjoy it.... Playing badly is less dangerous than falling off a bicycle.

An Astonishing Cellist

 Last night my family and I attended a fantastic performance, the world premier of Gaia, by the French cellist, Gautier Capucon, at the San Francisco symphony hall. He commissioned works by sixteen composers on the theme of nature and the earth. He performed with an excellent pianist, Jerome Ducros, the composers of two of the pieces he played, and six cellists from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

The music was excellent. I especially enjoyed two pieces by Bryce Dessner.

All of us were impressed on every score: Capucon's brilliant musicianship, his openness to new music, his generosity toward the composers he commissioned, and his appearing with young musicians, who will certainly remember this performance as one of the high moments in their lives.

Young Musicians

In the summer of 2025, our California grandson, then thirteen years old, attended the Alameda It where he played viola and trombone in ensembles. He came home determined to play in an orchestra better than the one at his otherwise excellent middle school. On his own he found out about the Berkeley Youth Orchestra, made an audition video, and was accepted in the viola section. On a visit to his family in Alameda, I attended a rehearsal of the orchestra and was impressed by the way it was run. In addition to the conductor, Sam Wilde, a number of instructors sat in during the rehearsal and helped the musicians. Their comments were helpful and supportive.

Luckily for us, the orchestra gave a performance while we were visiting our family. They played well and sounded good. What pleased me, in addition to the music, was the seriousness of the young musicians. They clearly conveyed their conviction that they were doing something consequential that demanded concentration, preparation, and skill. How many opportunities do young people for that kind of seriousness?

Even if they give up music later in life, the experience of rehearsing regularly, of practicing in order to play decently, and performing is character building and offers a sense of accomplishment. It also introduces them to classical music. In general I was impressed by the music program at our grandchildren's elementary school in Alameda. How else would our grandson have ever begun to play viola?

Some Practicing Practices

Sorry, this entry is kind of technical. 

I don't like to read the exercises written by other people, so I make up my own or play scale and arpeggio patterns that I have memorized.

One of the exercises I made up is based on a run that appears in flute duets based on the Magic Flute, which Mozart himself wrote. In the duet, the run starts on an F in the middle register, goes down to a C, goes back up to the C an octave above that, comes down to G, moves up to A, and goes back down to E and then up to F. It then repeats that movement and after that it goes up in the major scale to high F. Taking that pattern, I start on low E on the flute and play through the pattern in the key of E. Then I move up chromatically, playing the pattern in key after key. To vary things I articulate the runs in different ways.

Another exercise helps me master the modes. I start on C and play the Lydian mode (sharp F). I then add flats in the order of the circle of fifths, each time playing a mode of C: F natural (Ionian) - Bb (Mixolydian) - Eb (Dorian) - Ab (Aeolian)- Db (Phrygian) - Gb (Locrian). As I lower the notes of the scale, I go through all the modes and notice how they are related to each other. After playing the Locrian mode, I lower the C to a B and I'm in the B Lydian mode. So on until I get back to C. Playing this exercise keeps me thinking. It gets tricky when you start in a mode with a lot of sharps or flats.

Another thing I often do is play a melody that I know pretty well, like "Pennies from Heaven," and play it in all 12 keys.

These exercises haven't turned me into a great musician, but they help my musical cognition while they make me move my fingers. It's a little like saying the same thing in different languages.

Going for Baroque

 I don't always listen to the baroque music that plays on my computer while I do something else, like writing an entry in this occasional blog. I enjoy the sound of baroque music, maybe because it doesn't always impose itself on the listener. 

I wonder how attentively it was listened to back in the times it was written. Did the courtiers who congregated where music was played, in salons, listen carefully, or did they converse, scheme, and flirt? A lot of baroque music is dance music, and dancers listen to music differently from the way an audience listens to music. And a lot of baroque music is church music. Today that music is performed in secular settings, and the audience listens to it differently from the way the congregation of a cathedral listened to it originally. They were expected to believe in the religious message of the music and to be inspired spiritually. We are also expected to be inspired spiritually, I supposes, but aesthetically, not theologically.

I play in a saxophone quartet. We have several arrangements of Bach. Often when we have played something by him, I have the feeling that my soul has been cleansed by the music.

Recently we hosted a dinner in our garden for friends of ours who recently got married. I played flute duets with a friend of mine while the guests were arriving. No one stood near us and listened attentively, which was fortunate, because I was making a lot of mistakes, and we had to stop here and there when we lost our way. The music was written by Devienne, a secondary classical composer, and after a while we got bored with it. Each of the six duets was pretty much more of the same - pleasant, but not terribly interesting. Recently we've been working on more challenging duets by Kuhlau, a generation later than Devienne, whose music is sometimes too interesting.

I prefer baroque and classical music to romantic music, in general, and I've discussed this preference with my fellow flurtist, who shares it. We both think there's too much ego in romantic music, not that we don't love Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert. Baroque and classical music is essentially about the music itself, not about the composer's angst.