Monthly Archives: April 2010

Bow hand advances and scroll hand failures

So I think I have down how to keep from getting that awful rusty-gate noise near the frog on an up bow. There are two ways to “hold up” the bow to keep it from pushing down on the string too hard. One can either lift the bow and hold it up with the hand (bad) or else just push down with the pinky and allow the bow to see-saw around the fulcrum of the center two fingers and thumb (good). For some reason, the mental image of carefully and smoothly skimming the skin off of a cup of pudding comes in handy.

Well, at least it seems that way to me. I can get a much more consistent sound (still a bit of a pitch waver, but far less than before, and no scrape) out of the bow clear up to the frog now, to the point where the edge of the frog catches on the string. It also feels less precarious and more precise to control the “weight” of the bow in that situation with the pinky than with the entire hand.

Switching directions still involves an unpleasant creak, though. I expect a bit of a “catch” when the bow switches direction, but I want to minimize it as much as possible. Perhaps being a pianist has spoiled me; I expect only musical sounds out of any instrument, and only the sounds I anticipate, and nothing else. I want that creak gone.

However, the scroll hand is still presenting me with challenges. Namely, my pinky refuses to get in on the game. While at my last lesson, my teacher did something to my scroll hand thumb to make it relax, and suddenly, my fingers just fell in line like baby ducks. Of course, I spent all night last night failing to reproduce this state of affairs, which has me a bit irked since I’m not up to wasting a week that I expected to use on scales doing CM over and over until I’m ready to scream because my pinky isn’t playing ball anymore. I’m going to have to do the scales with my teacher there, enough times to get it engrained into my head and hand a bit, so that I can reproduce the movements at home reliably. It’s either that, or else I waste another week, which isn’t acceptable.

I suspect that a lot of tomorrow will be taken up with me bullheadedly sawing away while trying to get my scroll hand to cooperate.

I should stop using the same post title for anything viola-related.

But I probably won’t.

I seem to have a teacher. I’m also rather pleased about this since he appears to be sensible, logical, talented, and good at explaining things.

What I suspect I will not have for the foreseeable future is free time.

I’m also surprised at just how large a viola is. Well, my viola, specifically. It’s a good size for me, but it’s a 16.5″ instrument, and when held up next to my instructor’s violin … the violin looked like a toy. It would be nice to play up near the edge of the fingerboard, but the notes must be on top of one another at that point. I’m happy to have them delineated a bit more on my viola. He also recommended a BAM Hightech viola case as one that was small enough to avoid being barred from boarding an airplane without consigning one’s instrument to the tender mercies of the airline baggage handlers. Someday in the future, it will be nice. For now, my larger dart case will do me fine.

From now on, it’s scales until I die, with special attention paid to the various different means of drawing sound out of the instrument, synchronization between fingers and bow, releasing tension in the scroll hand, and of course intonation intonation intonation.

It’s amazing how much a squeaky damper pedal can annoy you.

I recall that from my youth. When I press on any of the controls on a piano, I want only the sound I anticipate getting, and no more. If complete silence is a 1, and a mosquito buzzing in your ear in a dark bedroom is a 10, then a persistent, predictable *squeak!* or *thop!* coming out of a piano’s damper pedal is probably around a 9 or so. If the piece is legato, it’s more like a 16.

And of course, everything I play has “cantabile” written in it at least once. *sigh*

“Time for 3” — Riverside Municipal Auditorium, April 25, 2010

Short impressions first — Nick Kendall plays like Aretha Franklin sings, and Zach DePue sparkles like a glass of champagne.

However, it was Ranaan Meyer who stunned me. I have never been so affected by a double bass before. If a humpback whale learned to sing gospel, it would sound like Ranaan Meyer’s bass. It was absolutely amazing, just the most piercing, haunting sound I’ve ever heard. I truly hope that he decides to perform the Bach cello suites someday. He was marvelous.

They really are as amazing and wonderful as people say they are — energy, charm, wit, incredible talent and virtuosity.

They were backed by the Riverside County Phil, who were wonderful. The conductor is Adam Flatt, who was also excellent; the music consisted of Aaron Copland and Bartok, neither of which I am amazingly familiar with but both of which I like well enough. They also surprised me; the bits of “Appalachian Spring” that they played were incredibly evocative, and the Bartok was wonderful. I’m not a major fan of 20th century classical; my favorite 20th century music tends to be by people like Dennis DeYoung and Jeff Lynne. I’m not crazy about what I’ve heard called “bubble and squeak” music. But a familiarity with movie scores makes the Bartok much more accessible and much more beautiful.

The orchestra and conductor were also wonderful with this music; it impressed me how well they could play quietly, and with a very full sound. Quiet was not the same as sparse for them. Kudos to Flatt for using precisely what was needed and no more. It’s nice when everyone is necessary and no one is either added in who doesn’t need to be playing or worse, sawing, blowing, or tapping away without being heard. The balance of sound was very good. That’s a tough thing for a conductor to understand. It’s bit like artists doing impressionist paintings. Your arms are only so long, but you are making something that is meant to have its biggest impact about fifteen feet away. Flatt designed a very complete and full sound with a not-terribly-huge orchestra in a big hall, not to mention putting together just generally a great version of both pieces. I’d like to compare them to other conductors’ ideas.

I think this may also have been my first time seeing a bass trombone. Good Heavens. If the man playing it had held it up to his mouth and inhaled, the entire cello section would have been gone in an eyeblink.

Excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

What a strange instrument (5).

It occurs to me that, while I’ve found several violists that I admire and love to listen to, all of my inspirations for picking up the viola are singers. All of them. Even the two violists I’ve attached myself to were people that I only found after I decided to study it.

Given the preponderance of voice articles on this blog, that’s not a surprise, but it just struck me recently how thoroughly true it is. When I was vacillating between viola and violin briefly, I went to Wikipedia to look up the ranges for both instruments and saw that the viola encompassed the tenor, contralto, and alto ranges (as well as mezzo-soprano although that’s how it’s identified). That decided me. If the violin is a soprano and the cello a baritone, then the viola is where my favorite voice types lie: low female voices and high male ones. Marian Anderson, Russell Oberlin, and Andreas Scholl are on the viola, as are Aretha Franklin and Steve Perry. The instrument can go low but, like a contralto, always has a light shimmer that keeps it from being muddy. And it can go high but, like a natural male alto, always has a stripe of darkness beneath it that keeps it from being shrill.

All of my inspirations for studying viola are singers. Every last one.

What does a conductor DO, anyway?

I’ve always been a bit mystified … not by what a conductor does, but by the confusion surrounding what a conductor does. He’s responsible for the music somehow, but he doesn’t even play an instrument. (And it’s almost always a “he,” although I’m happy to point out that one of the best conductors in North America, and the most eager to embrace the new 21st century ethos of becoming a part of the community is Baltimore’s Marin Alsop.)

Well, actually the conductor does play an instrument. He or she plays the orchestra.

When I sit in front of a piano, I am in charge of a large machine made of maple, spruce, iron, steel, some other metals and woods, felt, etc. (Or I’m in charge of an instrument made of some of these things along with a goodly amount of electronics and a few speakers.) It’s my job to get that machine to sound like the noise I’m imagining in my head. I know how I want it to sound, or I can fiddle around a bit and get an idea of how I want it to sound, and it’s my job to make that sound come out of the piano. If someone else sits down with a different idea of how to arrange “Boat on the River” for a piano, the instrument will sound very different, of course.

Similarly, the conductor has the idea in their head of how they’d like Beethoven’s Eroica to sound. They stand before an instrument made of wood, gut, brass, steel … and humans. And it’s their job to get the sound in their head to come out of their “instrument.” Some conductors seem intimidated by the “human” part of their instrument and don’t have a natural gift for communicating what they want those components to do; they tend to lose patience more often. Others are good at getting their ideas across and can give the orchestra the information and motivation they need to believe in the conductor’s idea for the piece and realize it. And there is an agreed-upon gestural language for the conductor to use to give cues and directions to the musicians, cues to playing the piece that they have rehearsed and discussed and picked apart for months before.

But in essence, the conductor plays the instrument of the orchestra, getting that machine made of thousands of tiny components and about a hundred or so human-sized ones, to make the sound they hear in their head. And different conductors will get very different sounds out of an orchestra. Pianos can be balky and hard to manage, but they aren’t a patch on a hundred humans, so the job of conducting is a more difficult one and often stressful for the types of people who gravitate to imagining perfectly realized music in their heads — innate introverts. This can make the job stressful for them and often for the musicians as well, although the “newer” types of conductors seem more outgoing than the grand tyrants of yesteryear thankfully.

Anyway, that’s what a conductor does. :-) I play a piano. Joshua Bell plays a violin. Ann Wilson plays her throat. Conductors play an orchestra.

(I also just bought several practice mutes for my viola. I have no idea which one or ones I will prefer, but people’s opinions are all over the map, so buying several and taste-testing seemed the best thing to do. They are generally pretty cheap — several are only 75 cents apiece! — and I was able to get five different kinds for $20 plus $7 shipping: one Tourte, one pseudo-Tourte, one ebony mute that I hope works out since it’s very pretty, one hard rubber mute, and one bombproof mute made of chromed brass. We’ll see how they work.)

“Viola Sonata in Dm, 1st Mvt” by Mikhail Glinka (3)

Hm.

The Deathly Runs are still … well, deathly … but perhaps not as awful as I thought. I’ll never be much as a Baroque or highly ornamental pianist, but I think with enough effort, I can be passably okay. I think frilly runs will always be the first technique to decay if I spend too much time away from the piano.

I also continue to be pleased at the enormous help the headphones are to practicing. In order to get difficult bits right, one truly does have to just play them over and over, mindfully, every single time a million times over. Headphones make that trivially easy. 35 times in a row for one turn or inconvenient cross? No problem!

I may find the viola more of a challenge than I’d like given that it’s acoustic and cannot be silenced for everyone but me. (Until recently, I never had a piano that behaved that way, either.) I may find myself attracted to electrics for that reason alone, provided that the feel of the instruments isn’t vastly different from an acoustic. I will also have to investigate mutes, again providing they don’t change the feel of the instrument.

What a strange instrument (4).

Well, I have two teacher interviews coming up. I hope one or the other of them works out.

The first got on my good side immediately after I told him that I was going to learn left-handed, and his response was, “It makes no difference conceptually. The only thing you have to be careful about is not hitting the person sitting next to you with your scroll.” He’s an engineer so parity reversals make sense to him, and that indicates a good amount of common sense and an ability to adapt and think things through. We may have a common vocabulary because of that.

The second was referred to me by an online acquaintance, and was less up-front about finding the left-handedness problematic, but otherwise seems excellent although has a more unpredictable schedule due to his own performances. Not a problem as long as I have enough advance notice.

The first prospect seemed to think that I could play Haendel after one year, which is a concern for me since I don’t know whether he is being overly optimistic. I suspect he is. He may be calibrating his expectations by violinists who have swapped to viola as opposed to rank beginners in bowed instruments. This may be a problem, but there is no way of knowing ahead of time.

Both are quite accomplished musicians.

We’ll see what happens. A (good) teacher (who doesn’t balk at teaching a lefty) would be nice, certainly. I think the most important thing is what their own attitude toward their students is. I want a partner in my own musical development more than a mentor.