This one is straightforward: do  everything you did in Tech Project 2A: Major Power Scales again, this time changing one note. Instead of 1 2 3 4 5, use 1 2 b3 4 5, i.e. make it minor.

We will bounce back and forth between valveless and valve tech projects. Thus, this time we will look at some valve work. Anybody play piano? We are always interested in stealing, uh, learning from other instruments and genres outside of the classical, and for this project we are going to borrow from the piano and alloy a basic bit of piano technique with a basic bit from educational psychology/physiology on efficient learning.

How do you eat a head of broccoli (assuming you wanted to)? Take the head and mash it into your face and start working your jaws? Or break off a sprig, chew it, swallow, and repeat until the head is gone? The first choice might be tempting because you are attacking the whole thing, and isn’t bigger (longer, higher, deeper, louder, more more more!) always better? OK, that was mostly rhetorical. Although you take on only a little when you go sprig by sprig, the small bit approach is indeed more efficient and thorough.

What a puzzle, then, when we apply this principle to instrumental technique. What do we do? We put the octave on a pedestal as the most important unit to work on, or better yet, two octaves. Or better: three!! The more octaves we do, the more virtuous we feel.

There’s just one problem.

Much of music doesn’t look like that. OK, there are stretches of composers like Vivaldi that use up  a year’s supply of octave runs pretty fast, but in general, look at any composition and you’ll see occasional octave runs, but mostly shorter bits. So practicing scales in a form shorter than an octave has the upfront advantage of being more like actual music.

There are more benefits: you can learn and excel at shorter units much quicker than longer units. Which would take you more time to learn: the Golden Rule or the Gettysburg Address? Another thing: when we practice octaves – especially multiple octaves – we tend to play them at fairly moderate tempos. If we practice subsets of octaves, we can work them up to be much, much faster.

It’s not that you don’t get to practice octaves. You just work on shorter units first and then use them to build longer scales, the same way you start with short words and then build sentences with them rather than just memorizing long sentences.

There are several ways to do this. The one we will look at here is the approach borrowed from the piano. A hand has five fingers, and they can be neatly arranged in a row on the  keyboard in, say, a five note selection from a scale (e.g. C: C D E F G). Also note that within this selection is the major triad (C E G). This five note unit is what we call the Power Scale, and we commonly refer to the notes with by scale degree number. Major Power Scale: 1 2 3 4 5.

For this Tech Project, your task is to become highly fluent in getting up and back (1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 through the Power Scale in all keys (don’t write them out; be able to spell them and then learn each by heart in the fingers).

Learn them in this order:

C F Bb Eb Ab Db F# B E A D G

Memorize the order as soon as you can and always play this and other exercises to come without looking at the order. There is, in fact no paper or ink used at all in doing this exercise. You don’t need it: the learning is in you.

Articulation: start tongued, one or two notes per pitch. When you have reached your maximum in tempo, switch articulation to 2 tongued and 2 slurred. When you have reached your maximum this way, switch to all slurred. Your speed should increase using this order.

Tempo: start at a relatively slow tempo. Pile on the reps and gradually work up the tempo (use a metronome). Record your tempos. Pay great attention to a very precise synchronization of tongue, air, and finger movement. If you miss anything, slow down and repeat. If you nail it repeatedly, move up one click. Don’t be in a rush to increase speed. Accurate quantity is what you’re after. Speed is a natural by-product slowly acquired fluency and will come with quality + quantity.

You can and should play each Power Scale in each key a number of times. More is merrier. When you can play each one consistently very well, then cut the number of reps down to two, then one. One rep is review mode. You can also adjust the time between keys. At first, take a few seconds. Later, be able to go from key to key with no break at all – one long string of notes.

If you can zip through all your major Power Scales by this time, you can go on to make it a little more challenging: play ascending only. Then descending only (it’s harder – or rather less familiar) to start on the fifth and to descend, which is a good reason to do it.

An alternate challenge at this point would be to change the order of the keys: try good old chromatic: C Db D Eb E and so on. You could also make up a completely random order and see how you do with that.

Since you already know your major scales, learning Power Scales should go fairly quickly. But short scale practice will be different, like the difference between a sports car and a semi truck-trailer. The semi is big, but you can go really fast in a sports car.

Enjoy the ride!

The operating system of the horn is the overtone series. [OS = OS!]. We will henceforth use the abbreviation OTS for overtone series, partly to avoid any confusion with the common use of OS meaning (computer) operating system (isn’t the alphabetical coincidence fascinating…), but mostly as a shorthand way of conveying information (which is what abbreviations are). More such shortcuts are to follow. I know, it’s sometimes annoying to have to learn new stuff, but think of how much faster you were able to work at the computer when you learned the basic keyboard commands like (on a Mac) Command-P for print, Command-C for copy, Command-X for cut, Command-V for paste, Command-S for save and so on – instead of having to reach for the mouse each time. Although new ways always have a learning curve, once you get used to working in a more efficient way, it’s hard to go back to the old way. Bear with me and learn some (possibly) new conventions (some outlined in the last post) and you will enjoy having both the understanding of the processes and the efficiency of the procedures. You will be able to apply them to your own playing and introduce them to your students right away.

The Overtone Series

Although we were all raised from Day One on the horn on playing with valves, control of the horn in fact is first and foremost the acquiring of control over movement around the overtone series, that is, all those notes that you can play with any one fingering. That’s what makes horn so challenging. Piano: one fingering, one note. Clarinet, one fingering, one note. Guitar: one fingering, one note. Horn: one fingering, 16 notes! Sounds like musical mission impossible, which may be why method books try to skirt the issue by going to valves right away. But, as the saying goes, the obstacle is the path. Horn players (and all brass players) need to confront this music elephant in the room right away and every day to start acquiring real control of this beautiful beast from the get-go. Putting valve work ahead of OTS work dulls the sense of where the center of the notes are and what you have to do to get there.

Most warm-up routines include some work with the overtone series (sometimes called flexibility studies), but – incomprehensibly – they just give you the fingering and say, “Do this,” without mentioning the overtone series, what “horn” each fingering corresponds to (F:0 = F horn, F:2 = E horn, F:1 = Eb horn, etc.) or what the overtone numbers are. The overtone series is how the horn works and there is simply no good reason to be deprived of knowledge about it. Valveless work is heart and soul of horn study; it’s how the horn was played for, oh, three hundred years. Valves are really just quick switchers between overtone series, but they help less than we think they do. Valve work helps us deal with how music works, but we all need to spend a good amount of time on how the horn works – the overtone series – before we overlay valve technique.

Since a knowledge and understanding of the overtone series is essential to better horn playing, we ask that if you don’t know your OTS numbers, start now, because we will be calling out OTS numbers and will expect you to know what notes we are referring to. The good news is that learning them will be quick and easy and will pay considerable dividends now and later in all sorts of ways. Also, using overtone numbers and ‘horns’ makes my job of communicating to you ideas and procedures about technique much easier and quicker. I can use these terms as shorthand to give you examples and exercises very quickly, not even needing music notation once you know how it goes.

Example: Say I give you the instruction: “4-5-6-5.” The numbers tell you which overtones to use, and a system of default settings (i.e. we don’t need to say what they are unless something different is desired) tell you how to play the notes. Settings include which horn (i.e. fingering), tempo, articulation, and progression (what’s next).

Thus, for the instruction “4565″, you know to start playing C E G E (OTS 456 is our central major triad – check the chart) F:0, go up and back, slurred, starting quite slow, accelerating gradually to the edge of control on your fastest tempo. Then repeat through the fingering series (F:0, F:2, F:1, etc.) down to C horn (F:13); begin again with Gb horn (Bb:23), going up through the horns until you reach the highest one, Bb alto (Bb:0).  You will have repeated the same exercise through 11 horns (pitch levels/fingerings). [These are the default settings I prefer. You are free to tweak or make up your own, and you can change them day to day. But it's nice to start with something.]

All this from the simple instruction of the 4 digits. You didn’t need to write it out because the knowledge is in you and not on the page. Any deviation from the defaults would have been announced, such as “4-5-6-5, 2 & 2, 3 speeds.” 2&2 refers to articulation: two tongued and two slurred. 3 speeds: slow – moderate – fast. Or: “4-5-6-5, move the shape up one and repeat, then down one and repeat.” This clearly indicates that you play the defaults the first time through, then repeat using overtones 5-6-7-6 (starting with the next OTS note up), then again using 3-4-5-3. It would take pages to write out, but doing this way, all it takes is one sentence and you know exactly what to do. Knowledge of a few basic principles and procedures gives you great power and flexibility in your practicing, not to mention efficiency.

An analog to this would be how they call plays in football. The quarterback does not tell each player what to do for each play – imagine how long that would take. Or he doesn’t pass out sheets of paper detailing what everyone is supposed to do. The players know the language of football, so that all the QB has to say is “Ace Right z-Dig x-Shallow” and everyone knows what to do. We can do the same.

So let’s play!

Tech Project #1: Running the OTS

Enough background for now. Our first project will be to hone our control of the horn by getting under the hood and forcing our embouchure/aperture/air to do all the work by staying moving around one overtone series. A lot of our problems in horn playing would disappear if we worked this way before involving valves. Valves do a lot less than we think they do. We have been bamboozled from Day One by band methods that treat us as big curled trumpets and have us work with valves instead of the actual way the horn works, the OTS. Football players and other athletes do a lot of drills of all sorts for strength, speed, flexibility, etc. before they run plays in scrimmage. As novice horn players our band directors and band methods threw us into scrimmages right away. So let’s go back and fill in what gaps there are in our technical upbringing by doing these OTS exercises (or, mostly likely, adding them to what we already have). When you add valves, horn playing will seem a lot easier.

For Project #1, we are simply going to run the OTS up and back, using different horns, different speeds, different lengths. The articulation will be mostly slurred. Think of these exercises as wind sprints, except that we will start off strolling and gradually end up sprinting.

Reminder the defaults: Articulation: slurred. Tempo: start slow, gradually speed up until you reach your limit of control.

Part I

1. Start with C horn (F:13) on OTS #8 (=G4). Your assignment is to “grow” the overtone “scale” above OTS 8, i.e. start with the narrowest interval (OTS 8 to 9, i.e. C to D) and successively add one more adjacent overtone until you reach the octave, OTS 16 (G5). Thus, your first “scale” will be 2 notes: OTS 8 to 9 (G4-G5). Yes, I can’t fool you: that is, in fact, a trill. Start off with a very slow trill, and gradually find your limit. Play with your eyes closed so that you can be in close touch with the kinesthetic sense of what is happening.

2. Take a short break, then go on to add another note. Now you are going up and back playing the pattern OTS 8-9-10-9 (G4-A4-B4-A4).

Don’t be in a hurry to go too fast too soon. Go for both quality and quantity. Speed will take care of itself if you are 1) using proper technique, which comes from oodles of correct repetitions and 2) relaxed (speed comes through relaxation of as many muscles as possible, using on the ones that accomplish the desired motion.

Then: 8 to 11. 8 to 12. And so on, up to 8 to 16.

If you’ve put in the time (and there is no rush, but there is a need to show up regularly and consistently), you can play through any length of this 8 to 16 overtone scale at any speed.

Great! Now start over (after a break) with a slightly shorter horn: the Db horn (F:23). Now you are up a half step, which makes it a little more strenuous. Repeat all.

Continue until you reach F horn (F:0). Advanced players may continue the exercise, continuing with Gb horn (Bb:23) and finishing (if chops allow) with Bb alto horn (Bb:0).

There is enough material here that you can do something a bit different every day. Examples: Do one length, but go through all horns (from C horn to as high to the edge of what’s comfortable), say 8-9-10-9 or 8-9-10-11-12 and back. Or the whole octave. You could also do different speeds: Day 1: 1 speed: slow. Day 2: 2 speeds: Slow – Fast. Day 3: Slow to as fast as you can. Articulation: we do mostly slurred, but you could also do the exercises all tongued or mixed tongued and slurred.

Part II

In Part I we spent time working on single lengths: 3 notes, 4 notes, 5 notes. When that kind of movement is fluent, you don’t need to spend so much time on each and can review all lengths quickly, one after the other: 8 9 8 9 10 9 8 9 10 11 10 9 8 etc.

Do first all slurred, then all tongued. Do at least 3 speeds (slow, moderate, fast as you can control it); doing it very slowly is more of a challenge than you might think. Repeat in Db horn, and on up as high as is comfortable. Take short breaks in between each horn.

Part III

What do you do when you get really good at jumping rope? You add another jump rope. It’s very attractive once you have mastered something just to sit there and repeat your triumph over and over. While it’s a good idea to review what you already can do and thus keep the rust off, what is healthier and more interesting (if harder on our adult egos) is to add another musical jump rope, i.e. challenge.

If you can do Parts I and II, great. But there are always more jump ropes we can add.

Now go back and repeat PI and PII but change some things:

1. Rhythm. Who says everything has to be the same note value? Try the following:

•Add accents: duple, triple, 2+3, 3+2. 2+2+3. 3+2+2, 3+3+2.

•Add a repeating rhythm: Long Short Short (LSS), SSL, or SLS.

•Syncopate the line against a steady metronome (or other rhythm source).

•Move up and down the OTS scale using spontaneous rhythms – make it into music!

2. Add other stuff: Dyamics. Varied articulation.

3. Do any or all of this with a playing partner: turn it all into duet! You can play in unison, or canon, or in thirds (or any other interval), or just have an improv free-for-all up and down the OTS.

Overtone Trivia

It’s not really trivia (i.e. unimportant facts), but sometimes we call fascinating bits of information trivia (it’s fascinating to me, anyway. I’m also very interested in flossing).

•Numbers double at the octave, e.g. all C overtones are a multiple of 2 (4, 8, 16…).

•Multiples have the same characteristics. 5′s and 10′s are a bit flat; 3, 6, and 12 are very slightly sharp.

•We usually write 7 as Bb, but the pitch is halfway between Bb and A. We write 11 as F#, but the pitch is halfway between F and F#. We write 13 as A, but it sounds more like Ab.

HORN – I don’t mean that thing in your lap, exactly. The definition of a horn that is useful in our tech study is: A horn is a length of tubing. Thus, the concatenation of metal in your lap is not one, not two, but fourteen horns. Each fingering combination gives you instant access to a different length of tubing. The lowest horn is a B Basso horn (F:123). The highest horn on the F side is the F horn, naturally. The lowest horn using the trigger is the E horn (T123), but we never use that fingering or the next one up, the F horn fingered T13. T23 gives us the Gb horn, a half step above our open F horn. The highest horn is the Bb alto horn: T:0.

OVERTONE SERIES (OTS) – Each length of tubing (i.e. each horn or different fingering) can produce a fundamental tone and a series of overtones. The lowest tones of the lowest horns are pretty impossible to get, and overtones above 12 are pretty tough to get on the highest horns. In general, the useable overtones are from 2 to 16. Note numbers double at the octave, e.g. low C is 2, middle C is 4, 3rd space C is 8, high C is 16. You should memorize the OTS – notes and corresponding numbers – so that if I call out some numbers, you know exactly what notes I am referring to. For some reason, nearly all horn method books choose to omit the OTS, which is baffling to me because it is so useful in understanding how the horn works and in constructing exercises. Probably the biggest reason they didn’t or don’t is that horn players are used to just playing what’s on the page without necessarily understanding what it is or how it got there. I think it’s very useful to play with understanding; this may become a lot clearer as we get into the projects.

FINGERING SERIES – the ‘other’ way to describe a tour through all horns. It starts in the middle with F horn and descends by half step to C horn (I don’t usually use B horn [F:123] because the fingering is stuffy and out of tune), then recommences in the middle again on Gb horn (Bb:23) and ascends to Bb alto horn (Bb:0). Sometimes there is reason to start on the either the highest or the lowest horn. Thus: regular fingering series: Descending: 0, 2, 1, 12, 23, 13 [123]  Ascending: 13, 23, 12, 1, 2, 0

ADJACENT AND NONADJACENT OVERTONES – The most basic unit of horn technique is moving back and forth between two overtones that are next to each other. A good way to warm up is to do 5 to 6, which is E4 to G4 (C4 = middle C), slow to fast – for instance. The standard lip trill is usually from 8 to 9 (on any/all horns).  After doing some adjacent OTS movement, the next challenge is to be able to move cleanly over one or more notes, especially slurring, e.g. 6 to 8 (G4 to C5).

SHAPES - Most OTS (and other) exercises can be generally described in terms of a shape: Up. Down. Up and Down. Up Down UP Down. Example: OTS 4 5 6 5 could be repeated as OTS 3 4 5 4. Same shape, still using adjecent overtones, but lower.

SCALE DEGREES – For valvesless playing (so handy for warm-ups and exercises), we need to be familiar with the numbers of the overtone series. For valve work, we need to know another set of numbers: scale degrees, i.e. the numbers of the diatonic scale: C D E F G A B (C) = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8). With the use of inflections (flats or sharps), this system makes it quick and easy to describe any scale. Examples:

Natural minor: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7

Harmonic minor: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 7

Same with arpeggios:

Major: 1 3 5

Minor: 1 b3 5

Dominant 7: 1 3 5 b7

It’s also very handy to describe patterns (diatonically sequential repetitions of melodic fragments, e.g. 1231). More on this later.

KEY ORDER - We try to play exercises in all keys whenever possible. There theoretically a very large number of possible orders of keys; our default order is the Circle of 5ths (descending; each is the dominant of the following key), a.k.a. the Cycle:

C F Bb Eb Ab Db F# B E A D G

Memorize this as soon as you can.

The other order is chromatically, C Db, D, etc., either ascending or descending.

CORE SCALES – a subset of the entire diatonic scale: 1 2 3 – only three notes. We will learn 4 versions of this: Major: 1 2 3, Minor: 1 2 b3, Phrygian: 1 b2 b3, and Klezmer 1 b2 3.

POWER SCALES – a subset of the entire diatonic scale – five notes: 1 2 3 4 5. We will learn 4 versions (maybe a couple more later) of the Power Scale: Major: 1 2 3 4 5. Minor: 1 2 b3 4 5; Phrygian: 1 b2 b3 4 5; and Klezmer: 1 b2 3 4 5.

SPEEDS – TWO TYPES. We common work on any technical exercise in one of several ways concerning tempo.

1. ACCELERANDO: Slow to fast. Start at a slow and deliberate speed where you can be perfectly accurate. Gradually speed it up until you reach the limit where you start making mistakes or struggling.

2. CONSTANT TEMPO. When first learning something challenging, chances are that you should just stick to one slow tempo to be able to give every detail of it deep attention. When you acquire more skill, you may either do the ACCELERANDO approach above or repeat using several constant (steady) tempos, each one faster than the last. Examples:

2 speeds: Slow. Fast.

3 speeds: Slow. Moderate. Fast.

4 speeds: Slow. Moderate. Faster. Really Fast.

=======================

PS: One thing that occurred to me after I announced this series: the material for it comes from a book in progress: A Systematic Approach to Horn Technique. I’m not sure whether including the material here will help or hurt future sales, but I’m guessing (and hoping) that when all is said and done you may rather the whole story in one neat volume rather than all these separate parts in no particular order, condensed, and somewhat rewritten for the blog.

My idea was Tech [technique] Projects. It’s easy to set up a daily routine that goes over all the basics… and then sit on it for the next forty years. Once you get it down, it’s easy to breeze through it every day as well as getting a sense of personal virtue for doing it. Nothing wrong with a quick brush-up on what we already can do, but life is more interesting and personally enriching if it has some obstacles in it, so to speak, i.e. stuff we can’t quite do yet.

Enter our New Year’s Tech Projects. You are free to make up your own, but I have decided to throw out some ideas as the weeks and months scrolls by. Tech Projects will be focused work on some limited aspect of technique.

Technique for all musicians breaks down in general to scales and arpeggios. How these are practiced could be called Patterns – i.e. the specific forms of playing the material. The most common pattern is to play a scale up and then down one octave (or more). Ditto arpeggios. Patterns don’t have to cover a whole octave or go through all notes in a scale – they can be fairly short, parts of an octave. Patterns could also be sequential (decorating a scale step and then repeating it successively diatonically, first up and then down) or chromatic (repeat a single pattern through all keys). A pattern may be either a scale (or scale part) or an arpeggio or a combination of both.

Technique for brass players has additional dimensions: without valves or with valves. We need to do both. Both scales and arpeggios and their patterns can and should be done with and without valves.

I will try to bring you a new Tech Project about every week or so. The actual time you spend on a particular project (should you decide to do it) may be much longer. No matter. Work on one as long (or as short) as you like, until it’s comfortable and familiar and you’re ready for the next one. There will be more of them waiting for you; there will be enough to keep you busy for a long time.

I will also leaven the discourse with the yin to the technique yang: musicality, playing musically. You need technique to realize your performance dreams, but technique should be the servant of musical playing. It’s easy to get caught up in technique and forget that our most important goal is to deliver beautiful music to our audiences. So expect the sandwiching of posts on this subject as well.

Stay tuned. Tech Project #1 will be coming up soon.

•French Horn Custom Snap Stamp ($39). Decorate your holiday envelopes, stationery, gift tags and greeting cards with this custom horn stamp.

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Filed under: Information on horn ]]> http://horninsights.com/2012/01/01/new-years-horn-treats/feed/ 0 horninsights horn stamp hn poster Flares tshirthn hnlamps RussHn hnfig mousehn hntat wallhn dcHntHn http://horninsights.com/2011/12/29/new-blog-improv-insights/ http://horninsights.com/2011/12/29/new-blog-improv-insights/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:00:21 +0000 Jeffrey Agrell http://horninsights.com/?p=1051 Continue reading »

What are holidays for but to do stuff that you couldn’t get to during the semester?

Horn Insights has cast a fairly wide net (check out the Category Cloud) because I am interested in all kinds of things, starting with horn, but expanding outward into all things music, education, creativity, and so on.

One larger chunk of thought and activity for me in music is what might be called my hobby, but let’s be charitable and call it my research interest (one of them, anyway) – for want of a handier name, that rara avis, that oxymoron, contemporary classical improvisation. I’ve sprinkled occasional posts here on that subject, but the time has come (vacation time) to give this subject its own space, although I won’t rule out including future posts on it here when they have more directly to do with horn playing. I may also either copy or transfer some improv posts here to the new improv blog.

The blog is: Improv Insights (http://improvinsights.com).

I am taking on a partner: Evan Mazunik, my long-time collaborator (2 CDs, many concerts and workshops). Evan is a superb improvising pianist who has lived in NYC for about the past 5 years, and he also happens to be one of the top Soundpainting conductors in the world, with his own ensemble, Zaha.

We are just getting started, just starting to generate content, but have a look, or better, have a regular look.

We also want to make this new blog more than just a blog; we want to make it a gathering place for those interested in the subject, and, to that end, we will be seeking contributions from various experts on the subject.

We also LOVE questions. If any of this intrigues you but you haven’t had much experience in it yet and would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to send us a question. If you have a topic that you would like to see developed more, let us know.

One feature that we hope will draw your regular attention is our Game of the Day. We will post (probably not every day, but fairly often) an improv game that you can use in your own playing, probably immediately.

A good bit of the focus of this blog will also be on pedagogy. Improvisation is tremendously useful in all kinds of teaching, so we want to discuss and feature this prominently.

New things in the New Year. All the best to you!

Filed under: Improvisation Tagged: improv insights, improvisation blog ]]>

Christmas time is the only holiday that brings with it its own soundtrack: all those songs from the Renaissance tunes like What Child Is This to the pop/kitschy songs like Rudolph… Other holidays can have evocative music (romantic for Valentine’s Day, patriotic for 4th of July, scary for Halloween, and so on), but only Christmas has its own library of songs. The bad news is that it’s pretty much the same tunes every year and they get played to death in any/every public venue. The good news is that they are almost all really good tunes and that, even after endless overexposure, they are still fun to play or sing and nice to listen to.

We classical musician types are, however, missing out on one terrific experience that these songs could provide if only we would do it: playing them from the ear and the heart rather than from the printed page. The tunes have been ground into our chromosomes since our earliest goo-goo gah gah time – it’s pretty impossible to live in this culture and not know them extremely well. So they are prime material for figuring them out on our instruments by ear. So here’s a pre-New Year’s resolution: every day figure out a new carol of your choice on your instrument. Start with your most familiar key (usually C, for major). Figure out what scale step the first note is. And begin! You may miss a note here and there, but you can fix that on subsequent times through.

I know, I know, it can be scary at first. After all you might (gasp!) miss a note! But try it anyway, bypass your fear of mistakes and instead enjoy the sweet challenge of finding the tune by alloying your sense of pitch with your knowledge of the song’s intervals and thus develop your ear a bit further as well as your ability to find your way around (i.e. know what you’re doing) in a given key. After you find the notes in Key #1 (C?), go on to find them in Key #2 (F? Bb? B? Db?). Repeat until you’ve gone through all (reasonable) major keys. Kind of fun and empowering, isn’t it?

Start over. This time, decorate the tune like you decorated your tree – add some sparkle here, embellishment there. Grace notes. Syncopations. Start notes earlier or later (see the previous post Time to Be Frank for more ideas). Change articulations. Add or tweak the dynamic phrasing, and make it a little different every time through. Repeat in all keys.

For the underchallenged, repeat all the above in minor (or, if the tune was in minor, in major).

You’re not done. You’re just getting started. Now find another player (of any instrument) and the whole process over, this time with one of you on melody and the other accompanying in some way. Some ways:

•Parallel line in harmony (i.e. same rhythms)

•Countermelody (they move, you hold, and vice-versa)

•Drone (one note down low)

•Pulsed drone (one note with rhythm)

•Ostinato (a short idea, probably one that outlines the harmony and the rhythm)

•A mix of the above

It’s not yet New Year’s Eve and you’re still looking for additional fun? OK. Try this:

Pick a tune. Pick a prominent motif from it. Start improvising freely using that motif plus any others from tune. Twist it and tweak it. Add another player and make up a duet using that material (also as accompaniment material). Listen carefully to the other player as you invent. Steal a lot from them (giving is nice, but stealing is great when it comes to creating music together).

Don’t forget to record your adventures. Select the best later on. Send copies to your friends. Or transcribe and arrange it and make an ink copy. And send samples to me!

Ho ho ho

PS #1: Some more ways to carol on your horn: 1) While your spouse gives you a couple minutes off from being a sous-chef, grab your horn and play along with the Christmas music CDs that you have been playing in the living room. There is some chance that your teenage daughter will appear and bark some coal-in-stocking level critiques, but she will probably be absorbed in texting in her room, so you’re probably ok there. Anyway, you know the tunes, which are mostly simple and diatonic, so join in the melody. When the spirit moves you, start adding decorations, countermelodies, long tone backgrounds, fills at the end of phrases, etc. Total fun. 2) Ask someone in your family (or neighbor, passer-by, etc.) to play at the piano some carols from one of your carol books. Don’t look at or ask about the key. Just have them play the tune and then you join in in the same way you did (or would) with a CD of carols. 3) Have your pianist play one of the carol collections for horn and piano. You play the horn part, but since your part is mostly simple and diatonic (an accurate description of most carol melodies), add your own decorations, rhythmic tweaks, etc.

PS #2: One place you should consider playing carols aurally is in lessons with your students. It’s always a good idea to make an aural adventure like this one a regular part of a bit of warming up in the first part of a lesson (with, say, scales and arpeggios or non-holiday familiar tunes), but since students (even young ones) all know many of these holiday tunes, it’s the best time of the year to develop ears along with familiarity with keys, and have a lot of fun at the same time. Tell them that they have to play at least one new carol every day in at least two keys at home during the week. I have a 7th grade student who surprises me with what he comes up with every week. We play a carol in unison at the beginning of the lesson, then I go to harmony the second time through. Then I go to melody and tell him to make up an accompaniment and he does so with gusto. Sometimes he started ornamenting right away. I usually don’t tell him the key, just the first note (“Jingle Bells – chorus. Start on E”) and ask him afterwards what key we were in. I don’t critique his choices afterward. We just pick and new tune and do some more, and it stays fun and gets easier and easier pretty quickly. He enjoys the “game” and finds it normal to move to Db or B after C (it’s just another key, and it’s close by so it’s in a comfortable range). What’s happened lately is that when we finish the lesson playing duets from a book, and he is starting to add (now and then) his own decorations and interpretations to the written material, especially with endings, where he likes to go to a different chord tone or make it minor or add the b7. And he gives me this look: cool, huh?! He is just having fun; he doesn’t really realize that he is “thinking in music,” playing with understanding and imagination, not just reciting.

Why miss this golden opportunity for technique, musical understanding, aural training, and fun? Tis the season to play carols!

Thinking about master jazz vocalists like Steve Lippia or his source, Frank Sinatra – what they do and and how they do it. While I was sous-chef-ing for a splendid Thanksgiving repast yesterday, I used the laptop to tune in to Pandora to a newly-created Frank Sinatra channel (as I am doing at this moment). As I’m sure you already know, a Pandora channel takes your general selection for a theme and then, like a radio station that your wealthy parents own and dedicate to your personal whims and tastes, plays only pieces in that genre (more or less; it occasionally explores the outer limits of what might reasonably be included in that style). So as I chopped, diced, sliced, stirred, and cleaned-up, I got to listen to another assorted stream of that style. Most of it was Frank, but there were appearances of others, including Ella, Mel, Tony, Louis, Dino, Bobby, Nat, Bing, Ray (even), Michael (B.), and more.

Singing jazz or swing standards is not like anything us classical sorts do. At all. Ever. I also moonlight as a (classical) improviser, and I don’t really do it there either. What is “it”? “It” is jazz phrasing. It’s all kind of stuff that we are trained from the first day not to do. It’s stuff that, as a list of actions, almost all comes up in the “wrong” category. For instance:

•Starting a long note under pitch and slowly climbing up to correct pitch by the end of it.

•Portamento (sliding/gliss) between notes

•Starting a phrase before the accompaniment does. Or after.

•Ending a phrase before the accompaniment does. Or after.

•Dragging out some notes so that they take up more time, than, say what the notes would take in a written-out version in, say, a fakebook.

•Hurrying up some notes to squeeze them in in the little time left in the measure because of those aforementioned dragged-out notes.

•Syncopating prodigiously so a lot of notes land “in the crack.”

•Starting a long tone with “straight tone” and ending it with vibrato (that may vary in length or intensity and may be different from other vibrato-ed notes later/earlier).

•Shading/inflecting the pitch of some notes quickly or slowly, such as starting with the major third of the chord and flirting with the minor third.

•Changing the melody when it repeats – changing some of the intervals, adding ornaments, connecting some intervals, leaving out notes, adding notes, changing words.

It’s pretty easy to do any of these and fall flat on your musical face, i.e. sound bad, tone deaf to the style, or just garden variety unmusical or incompetent. The vocalists make it sound easy, effortless, smooth, suave, silky, expressive, and just plain fun. They don’t use those techniques on every note; they use them judiciously – in the right places at the right times. They “speak swing” without an accent. Masters of any sort are who they are because they can make it sound easy. I think, except for the fact that I don’t have a voice, that it feels easier to emulate/imitate Frank & Co. vocally, i.e. when I sing along with the recording. Singing along gives you that same supreme seductive exercise in self-deception as when you sing “Nessun Dorma” in the shower and think, watch out, Pavarotti…. It’s the same feeling karaoke singers get in the bar, that enjoyable but false feeling of mastery and grandeur that the mike and backup tracks impart. It’s much harder to achieve that kind of shower-deception on the horn. Voices slide around much easier; playing the horn, it feels so strange trying to start the pitch low and come up, starting the note earlier, alternately hurrying and dragging, and so on.

That’s a list of what the jazz vocalists do. So why do they do it, i.e. do it like that? Answering ‘that’s the style’ is too glib, too superficial. Why do they do all that “wrong” stuff? Why not just hold out that whole note as we do in classical? Why bend the pitch? Why speed up/slow down? Why start flat on purpose? Why all that syncopation? Why sing complex when you can sing simple?

I came up with two reasons.

1) Variety. The success of every composition depends on the proper balance of unity (what you can predict) and variety (what you can’t). Too much unity and the listener is bored. Too much variety and the listener is frustrated. A 50/50 balance is just right, where the listener can guess what’s coming next about half the time. The melodies of these jazz songs are memorable and fairly simple, both of which ratchet up the predictable factor. So how to keep them from getting boring? Variety comes from the performer’s personal interpretative choices – stretch it here, hurry it there, vibrato, syncopation, little stabs of dynamic, varying note lengths, and so on. Go to Pandora. Start your own Frank Sinatra channel. Listen closely and see what I mean. The tunes and the voices that sing them are mesmerzingly beautiful – they go down easy and seem simple. But listen to the detail on every single note and how the phrases are built out of those notes: very, very complex (if you’re skeptical – try to notate the line in fine detail – a very, very difficult task that will require you to invent many new symbols and signs to account for the many small inflections not available in stanard notation)! The nuances of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, wordplay, and vocal timbre are astonishingly richly textured, and add up to superb expressive music.

2) Expression. None of the tracks were unaccompanied. All vocal lines have a band supporting them, contrasting with them, providing solid beat (predictable) plus phrase end fills, occasional bridge choruses, and rhythmic punctuation along the way (variety) against which the vocal lines can create their magic. Starting a pitch low creates a lot of tension against what the backup band is doing on pitch. Rushing/dragging or syncopation creates tension against that solid beat. When the note finally gets up to pitch or the rhythm finally sorts itself out, the transition from tension to resolution is very satisfying on several levels. It’s exactly the same reason that Mozart and Beethoven gave us (hornplayers) those sharp, nasal, sfz on-the-beat “wrong” [stopped] notes that resolved a quarter note later to the “right” note. Tension – release: the basis of all art, at least the source of attraction and interest in art. Tofu is healthy, but it needs soy (or other) sauce as counterpoint to be interesting. Having only tension is crazy-making; being completely tension-free is brain-death boring. A balance of sweet and sour makes life and art interesting. Discovering that exact balance – there’s the artistic rub.

Singing swing is irresistibly fun. But improvising jazz phrasing goes against years of training to be right… on… the… beat, training to always follow orders and play the ink and nothing but the ink. It feels… disobedient, wrong, or possibly illegal, but the feeling is also alloyed with joy and a kind of sensual/aural pleasure. Guilty pleasure! Most horn players acquired their first acquaintance with swing playing Spike Shaw’s Fripperies. But reading a written rendition of the style (or any style) is not the same as making up your own stuff. Re-creating can be wonderful, but it’s not and never can be the same as creating. Speaking Spanish is not the same as reading phrases out of a Berlitz tourist language book. But – especially if you do some listening to the vocalists and then try it out on your own, the process develops relatively quickly, and you experience – if not any sort of perfection – that satisfying feeling of DNA-deep delight in trying to solve the puzzle, deal with challenge instrumentally. Humans were made to create, which is to say made to solve problems. The swing singers in one sense are doing the same thing that we (classical players) do – they are performing a set (written) melody. But where we dare not stray very much from the Inked Path, their style and ability allows them to take the melody out for a spin, and a little different spin every time. We try to play it the same every time (consistency is the grand virtue of classicists); their challenge is to tweak it a bit different every time.

Listen to Frank & Co. enough and certain thoughts will finally bubble up: What would happen if I tried doing what they do? What would happen if I tried those techniques on my classical material? Would I go straight to hell, or just purgatory? Or would I learn something new about expression? And how would I go about it, anyway?

The first step would be to listen with new (or renewed) ears to jazz vocalists. How they create phrasing magic with their countless micro-choices at every step along the way. This kind of listening will transfer easily and well to other styles of music.

Then get out your horn and try to play along with them (don’t use a fakebook – figure out the tune by repeated listening plus trial and error). Do it again and again, adding interludes of listening to go back and pick up more detail. See how close you can come to the fine details of expression these folks do so well and (seemingly) easily.

Then go to your computer and input the chords to one of Frank’s standards in the accompaniment program Band-in-a-Box (it has an interface that only a mother could love, but is superb at creating a jazz rhythm section accompaniment). Now: play like they sing it, with all the rich detail. Repeat many times. And make every time a little different.

Then see what happens when you apply this phrasing to something like a Mozart Concerto or the Beethoven Sonata. Draw the blinds, close the doors – don’t get caught by the classical police. You may not ever play the results of your experiments in public, but you just might take your ability to play expressively to new levels (since most of the time we just concern ourselves with pitch and don’t think a whole lot beyond a basic level of expression).

It’s all great fun in any case, and I apologize for that. I know, music is supposed to be serious.

But go ahead, I won’t tell anyone. Time to be Frank for a while.

The education of musicians (maybe other arts as well, but I only know about musicians) has a number of Mount Rushmore-sized gaps in it that are neither easy to see (tradition and habit blind us) nor easy to fix (Ocean Liner Curricula, i.e. tradition, habit, vested interest, etc).

One gap is the lack of sufficient and useful training (especially early on) in the aural side of musicianship: sound before sign (or symbol) learning, improvisation & composition (thinking in music), and so on, which contain powerful motivators, learning tools, and build adaptability into the musical DNA of the musician to be able to survive and even thrive in this century (instead of being ready for the 19th as our current education prepares us, mostly). This part is a matter of ossification of attitudes and the status quo – just try to squeeze a new course into the curriculum no matter what the merits – no time, no room(s), it’s not what we’ve done before, the excuses go on and on. The climate is getting colder, but the dinosaurs see no reason to change anything, we’ll have a committee study the matter and then forget about it.

The other grievous gap is training in the business side of the arts. If it’s all scales and no Entrepreneurship, we are house cats thrown into the jungle without claws, puppy dogs thrown into the wilds without teeth. We should all learn how to start and run a business along with scales and arpeggios; at least be taught the basics, the vocabulary and outline of business (including marketing, building effective web sites, applying for grants, and so on) practices, and so on. We could use this to help survive in this era of Cut Everything Even (or Especially) the Good Stuff.

A smidgeon of this kind of training might enable us to better Talk to Squirrels. While we were all working on scales and arpeggios, some other folks were using the time to get ahead in the business world. Or go to law school. Those are the kind of folks most likely to end up writing laws and making big salaries in business. Money talks, and big companies spend millions every year on lobbyists to influence what and how laws are written. We can’t compete in that area – we have some organizations and some wonderful people in them working to get the message out, but somehow it seems that that message is not getting across. We have some basic marketing problems: in spite of overwhelming evidence of the manifold positive benefits of arts education for the individual and for society, it’s hard to weigh it, count it, or point to any instantaneous results. We live in a culture whose credo seems to be “If at first you don’t succeed – brilliantly – quit! But let us sell you something in that area.” We have a culture that would rather spend $50 on more prisons than $1 on communities, youth programs, etc. We would rather wait until a bridge collapses than keep it in repair – think of all the money we save before it collapses! Balance sheets have to show profit every single quarter. Investment in the future is pejoratively labeled ‘spending!’ and cancelled or gutted. How do we promote a long-term investment like arts education in a culture that values the ultra-short term?

It’s not easy, but I think that Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) is on to something. Maybe our Acorn Parley needs to shift from talk about the clear and obvious human benefits of arts education to something else. (Remember that famous Gary Larsen cartoon? The man is scolding the dog: “Ginger! If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t pee on the carpet! Ginger! What’s the matter with you? If I ever catch you…” And so on. It shows what the dog actually hears: “Ginger. Blah blah blah blah Ginger. Blah blah blah Ginger. Blah blah…”. I think that is what lawmakers and others in power hear when they hear us talk about the benefits of arts education. “Blah blah blah Arts. Blah blah blah blah arts education. Blah blah….”).

Acorn time. Maybe we should cut out the blah blah about the vital necessity of the arts as a part of any healthy society and talk about the shortest term things we can find. And talk about the direct financial benefits for businesses and for fiscal health. Pink’s Conceptual Age needs people who can not only draw straight lines, but who can come up with solutions that involve curlicues and folding the paper over to write on the back. The bloom of the former boom of the Information Age is past. While we will always need computer specialists, businesses have not been slow to discover that they can hire an extremely competent computer specialist in Mumbai to write software or do customer support for 1/7th the cost of hiring someone in this country. Where we have the potential to do great things is in promoting L-directed thinking. And this is where arts education comes in. At all levels, starting from the beginning. Get everyone making music, drawing pictures, dancing. Open community centers with arts training programs and offer space for practice. Educate everyone in the arts all the way along, and give them tools and permission to express themselves freely, not just in big groups or ensembles. You never know who is going to have the next great idea to redesign the future, so you educate everyone. Arts study lights up the brain – literally – have a look at brain scan research. Arts connect people. Arts open people’s hearts and minds, make them adaptable, flexible, ready for the future, and enable them to help invent the future. Here’s the acorn, in a (ahem) nutshell: arts education is good for business.

Some countries have figured this out and are pursuing it with gusto. I think it’s time to start talking some serious acorns to selected squirrels. If we can do this, if we can get this nutshell across, the whole society will be much the better for it, and into the future.

If we don’t learn to talk acorns…. or if the squirrels don’t listen…. then maybe the next language we learn should be Mandarin.