The Big Bassoon

Recently I renewed acquaintance with an instrument I used to own, a Moenig low-A contra-bassoon. Why is the “low-A” important? Well for one thing it adds 18-20 inches of pipe to the conventional contra, in search of that extra semitone so that you can say “I can play the lowest note on the piano”!

Actually I was borrowing it back from the consortium of three friends who bought it so that I could play the contra part in Elgar’s 1st Symphony, with Bushey Symphony Orchestra. And splendid fun it was too, although there aren’t many places during the piece where the contra “stars”. Mind you, the contra rarely stars, but it DOES bring an added solidity to the woodwind sound, and the tall instrument I was playing gives you a certain prominence in the orchestra.

The concert itself was really good, it’s one of the best orchestras I’ve played in. It also featured Marianne Cotterill singing the gorgeously moving swan-song of Richard Strauss’ career, the Four Last Songs, and a piece from the neglected composer William Alwyn. The Elizabethan Dances, while reminiscent of the film music for which he is probably best known, were a jolly antidote to the seriousness of the rest of the concert!

Now on to Schubert’s Great C-Monster…

Anticipation…

Orchestral rehearsals start again this week! The programmes for the two orchestras I play in regularly look really good this year – perhaps they always do early in September. At Aylesbury we start with the “New World” symphony by Dvorak, with Vaughan Williams’ “London” Symphony and Sibelius’ 1st later in the season. Full details here.

At Bushey Symphony Orchestra the season includes some really interesting things such as the Saxophone Concert by Michael Torke, Elgar’s 1st Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and the Elizabethan Suite by William Alwyn.

With by bassoon having had a late summer overhaul, I’m nearly ready. One day I’ll have practised enough

Struggling with neither software nor music

I have some of the key characteristics of a procrastinator, and indeed this blog entry is a prime example. For over a year I’ve failed to make any entries. Now just at the point when I’m under a strong time pressure to finish some legal forms I’m finding ANYTHING to do other than complete it. Even writing blog entries.

So, what can I do about it? Answers on a postcard or blog comment please.

On the (french) horns of a dilemma

As a musician there’s nothing I like better than playing with other musicians. In fact I would almost go so far as to say I HATE playing on my own (well, a plausible excuse for not practising, anyway). So it’s been an interesting experience recently playing with other musicians and really not enjoying it. I realised once again also how powerless you are as a single player in a larger ensemble to actually control what’s going on or at least influence it. Particularly when you have 37 bars rest.

So, picture the scene (and I have purposely changed the instruments to anonymise my comments and avoid any awkwardness), containing the following elements:

• A flute player who taps his feet, inevitably at a different time to the conductor.
• An aged clarinet player who can’t hear the conductor is always asking “where are we going from”
• A leader who gets lost
• A solo pianist who is young and hasn’t played with a less-than top rate orchestra (ahem) and thinks that they can change speed on a sixpence
• A conductor (bit hard to anonymise) who not only has difficulty following the pianist, but also has a habit of beating two beat bars as two down beats
• A viola section who only appeared on the evening of the concert
• A brass section light of three trombones and a horn
• An orchestra over-reaching itself with the repertoire

I could go on, but I expect you’re getting the picture. Now at this point I should probably confess myself. I’d only been to two rehearsals, after a previous experience with this orchestra.

On mature reflection of course I could ask questions such as: “Who am I to make these judgments on the orchestra?”, “Where to I get off saying that the orchestra is over-reaching itself?”, “If they only picked easier pieces to play, how would they learn anything?”. Plus many others in a similar vein. So my dilemma is this – do I cast myself adrift from this orchestra to avoid the uncomfortable times (yes I could never really be a teacher, could I?), or do I continue to add some experience (and a needed extra bassoon) to the orchestra and learn something myself from the experience. A real dilemma since neither answer is ideal. I’d love some thoughts.

Another year has slipped by – where did it go?

So what happened to 2007? Well I’m not too sure. I DID go to the Judie Tzuke concert, it was fabulous. It was the promotional tour for her new “Songs” album of more acoustically-styled tracks, but none the worse for that. And yes, she DID sing “Stay With Me ‘Til Dawn”!

So while I’ll forget 2007, 2008 has started very well on the music front. I’ve used my own cooking and sent emails to some nearby orchestras as linked from the amateurorchestras website. Luckily some wrote back and within a couple of weeks I found myself playing 1st bassoon in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with the Aylesbury Orchestra at a Sunday afternoon children’s concert. It’s great to be playing again, and it’s already kicked off a number of other playing opportunities. I’ll talk about them here.

The other exciting musical event has been the splendid birthday gift of an AKAI EWI4000S. I’m SURE I’ll talk more about that too. It’s a midi wind synthesizer, but that really only hints at the capability and ease-of-use of this piece of technological wizardry. I’m just beginning to understand how to make it work and get the best out of it.

Footnote: I was just writing a new post and discovered this unposted-post – seems still relevant, although Judie has now released the second of her “Songs” albums.

Happy New 2007

As always, I’m a bit of a slow starter here, or it could be I’ve just not thought of many things to say. This week, however, I’ve stumbled on something to do with both software and music. Finding reliable music lyrics seems to be a bit more of an art than a science. For one thing performers rarely stick faithfully to the original lyrics anyway, and for another there is the slightly murky world of the copyright on lyrics which means you get “mangled” versions to attempt to avoid that. Into this has come (some months ago, it is true) LyricWiki which is fashioned in a style similar to WikiPedia, but with some special, easy to use, templates that allow consistency of presentation. Of course it’s not perfect (I’ll muse on that later), but with an API and a SOAP interface (and some code that can use it) it does look as if it might do for lyrics what CDDB did for album contents (just don’t ask about Classical music…).

Oh, and Judie Tzuke starts a UK tour next month – I’ve finally managed to get a ticket and plan to go!

Back from holiday

As a snapper cum semi-serious picture taker the advent of the digital camera and associated software to manipulate the results has fundamentally changed the way I take pictures. While I’ve been away I’ve been able to take many more pictures than with film – and discard the ones I don’t want before they get to the developing lab. So far so normal. But I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software called Autostitch which is “the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher”. What I CAN say is that my first results from using it, even with hand-held shots, are really exciting. Here’s one to show you:

OK, so it cuts across my elegant blog design, but I just couldn’t make it any smaller and still give the effect!

Softmusic

I wasn’t sure when I started how much I would talk about music, and how much about software. Serendipitously they have been conjoining, although of course not always in a good way.

The other week, for example, I bought and downloaded my first album from the web. (For the record it was Sportscar, by Judie Tzuke). Now the transaction itself was fine, and within minutes I was listening to this currently out-of-stock recording. However I’ve now had my first experience with Digital Rights Management as dictated by Microsoft and I’m not sure I like it. I was hoping to be able to make a copy of the music primarily for backup purposes, and at the point of purchase the license indicated that this would be possible. Needless to say when I came to do that the ever wonderful Microsoft Media Player refused to let me. So is the fault with the media provider, or the software? Will I ever get around to complaining to someone? Or will I just chalk it up to experience and make sure I get REAL CD copies of music that I really want to keep? No need to answer on a postcard.

Pandora’s box

That’s all I’m going to say. You find it. This is a musical blog after all.

An avid viewer

Last week I had the fateful email. A company that I had known for some years has been swallowed by a larger one, never to be seen again. Actually that might be a bit dramatic since I’m talking about Sibelius, which has been successfully selling a superb music notation suite for some years, and it has been bought by Avid, a big player in the commercial “digital media” arena.

I’ve been an admittedly occasional user of the Sibelius music notation program, but every time I come to it I’m impressed. My main worry in the takeover is that the Sibelius product will be submerged in Avid’s attempt to reach the educational market. Sibelius has always felt like a musician’s tool, not just a computer program. The people who wrote it clearly understood music, and not just 1’s and 0’s. I will of course attempt to suspend judgement until I see version 5 and ultimately version 6 of Sibelius…