Milton_Elementary_School_Newsletter — this one is the RTF

Milton_Elementary_School_Newsletter — and this is the MS Word

This post will be deleted after you’re all set!

Local Wall prior to rampage.

In a statement released late this afternoon, investigators indicate the altercation began several days ago when Burke’s foot went through a portion of the porch floor attached to the wall. Evidence on the scene indicates that during attempts to negotiate with the wall, Burke discovered that the wall had been secretly harboring significant quantities of mold, spiders and slugs, mostly embedded in the water-logged insulation place against the OSB used by a prior homeowner as a temporary repair. Upon discovering this information,  Burke appears to have undergone some form of psychotic break and is reported to have attacked the wall with wrecking bars, a sledge hammer, and multiple power saws.

Aftermath

Officials on the scene indicate that that the wall’s remains are currently piled on the scene pending availability of appropriate disposal vehicles and have requested that local residents remain clear of the demolition zone pending conclusion of the investigation and disposal of the remains. Although the wall was a total loss, Burke suffered only minor scrapes, although it appears that a ruptured wallet may be a possibility. Burke was not available for comment at the time of publication.

In addition to the devastation to the wall, countless numbers of insects, spiders and slugs were left homeless as the result of this senseless tragedy. In an interview earlier today, former resident Slimy Sluggo stated “It just doesn’t seem fair. We all were just innocently living our lives in this wonderful damp, unventilated spot. I mean, is it our fault someone used wood that is such good food for us or forgot to put any vents in to let things dry out?” Authorities on the scene indicate that many of the former residents are refusing to leave on there own. Plans are currently underway to encourage them to move on later today.

Slimy Sluggo

In related news, shares in Home Depot increased 10% in anticipation of a likely spike in sales.

Plans for reconstruction of the wall have not been announced pending notification of Burke’s wife and family. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested memorial contributions be made directly to the Porch Wall Reconstruction fund.

March 18, 2009 Taize Service

Just a word of warning – it’s a large file so be prepared.

So, the Rousseau Celebration has now come and gone. It was an incredible event, great to see so many great saxophonists and old friends and spend a weekend playing, listening, and talking about saxophone! I’m very happy to be able to say that my performance of the Heiden Solo went quite well. The performance itself, however, is not all that important. What is important are the final steps I took to be fully ready to perform.

First and foremost, know that what I do and how I practice the last week or so prior to a performance really is not all that different than what I do the first few weeks. The reality is that, if good practice techniques are being used from the start of preparation, there doesn’t need to be a major change in strategy in the last week. One of the best parts of practicing smart throughout the entire process is that, usually, there isn’t much of a need to panic at the end. That panicked feeling that can set in a week or so prior to a performance — you know the one where you don’t feel you’re going to be ready in time — often comes from using poor practice techniques early in the process of learning a piece. That’s not to say that poor practice is always the problem — issues such as misjudging the difficulty of a piece or simply not having enough time available can be a significant part of the problem. But, if the assessment of the difficulty was close and something like oh, the composer not getting the piece finished until the 11th hour don’t interfere, practicing correctly from the start also means no cramming, no desperate avoidance of everything except the literature, and a week of being able to fall asleep.

For this piece and this performance, if anything, I allowed more time than was necessary, so I was able to continue my normal practice routine, with a few exceptions. During the last few days of practice, I did not stop doing things like scales, long-tones, and other literature. For the most part, I also continued to practice the Heiden as I described earlier.

Some things that I did do differently, though. First of all, I spent more time playing from beginning to end, without stopping to correct mistakes. These practice performances were also done at my desired performance tempo. The goal of doing this is to practice maintaining concentration for the duration of the piece, and to get better at recovering from mistakes that invariably happen during a live performance.  The ideal way to do this would be to be able to work with your accompanist, but that rarely works out. When this isn’t possible (translation … until I win the Powerball….) I find other ways to model playing with the accompaniment. Using Smart Music is sometimes an option (if your piece happens to be one that has a Smart Music accompaniment). Another option is to play along with a good recording, or to have your accompanist record just the accompaniment for you.

The one other thing I find helpful during final preparation is to record myself practicing, and the practice performances are especially insightful. When I go back and listen to myself, I then have a realistic idea of any passages that are muddy, or any fundamentals that could use some work. It’s also really helpful in evaluating the musical content … basics like the pacing of dynamics, articulations that need attention, accents … all those details. Recordings never lie…

The last steps I take have little to do with actually playing. During the last 24 hours, I make sure I know exactly what the hall looks, and if possible, I go stand on stage so that I can visualize myself in the space. I try to get a good night’s sleep the night before, and on the day of the performance, I make sure to eat no matter how I may feel, but I keep it light.

Themes of the last couple of weeks: consistency, memorization, hitting a wall, fighting boredom!

Consistency

At this point, I know all the notes, all the trouble spots, all the frustrations; I don’t need to work specifically on learning the notes. What I do need on any piece after the first couple of weeks is to work towards getting all the notes right all the time. There’s a saying that I’ve seen quoted several times… the difference between an amateur and a professional is the amateur practices until he can play something right, the pro practices until he can’t play it wrong. That’s exactly where I am by this point … I can play it right and now I’m working on not being able to play it wrong. Some of the strategies I’m using for this:

1. repeating the difficult passages
2. putting together longer and longer sections
3. repeating the difficult passages slowly
4. playing from beginning to end without stopping
5. repeating the difficult passages even more slowly
6. altering rhythms
7. repeating the difficult sections — even slower!
8. shifting the downbeat
9. repeating the difficult sections — maybe not quite so slowly, but still slowly
10. isolating the 2-4 note units that still aren’t quite right
11. umm… repeating the difficult sections — slow….err, yeah, you get the idea!

Memorization

Don’t get me wrong … I have no intention of playing this piece from memory in a couple of weeks! I’m allowed to have the music in front of me, so I’m using it. Still, it pays to memorize. Personally, I don’t find it at all necessary to be able to play from beginning to end of a piece without the music. What I do find unbelievably helpful — if not necessary — is to be able to look at a passage and to be able to play that passage without really looking. It is really the same concept as being able to look at a word and instantly know what the word is without having to go through it letter-by-letter, then expanding that to looking at a sentence and knowing the whole sentence rather than having to look at each word. 

Hitting a Wall

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with a remodeling project … or a real wall! During the life of the learning process for any piece, I’ve always experienced a period of time that becomes so frustrating that I start thinking of literally hitting a wall. There is always a period (at least for me) during the learning process during which I feel like I’m making absolutely no progress no matter what I do. Intellectually, I realize that it is extremely unlike that I’m not making any progress, but it sure feels like it! Reality — there is a point at which just about everything in a piece is learned — most of the fingerings are down, most of the musical content — there are just those pesky details — a measure here, a connection there, maybe an altissimo note in another spot — that just seem to refuse to quit being  a problem. My best solution isn’t one I’m comfortable with in this situation. This is normally a good time to put the piece aside for a few days or weeks and come back to it. But when there is an immanent performance looming, I don’t consider that to be the best choice.

My second choice is actually something I started a couple of weeks ago. I set up a microphone and recorded a couple of the problem passages back when I wasn’t doing so great with it, so now I can go back and listen to where I was 2 or 3 weeks ago and realize that I really am making progress — even if it is slow!

Fighting boredom…

AKA the Glazunov Syndrome! When I first heard and played the Glazunov Concerto, I loved it. Then, there was a point in my undergraduate days that I could have sworn every single saxophonist in the studio was performing “that stupid Glazunov Concerto” and I got to a point that I was so bored with it, I had a hard time tolerating sitting through a performance. A couple of years later, I still heard the Glazunov at least as much, if not more, but there was no longer an issue with being bored. What had happened was that I had gone from it being a new and exciting piece to thinking I knew it pretty well and then finally, to really learn all of the little nuances of the piece and loving it all over again. I’m hoping the learning curve I’m on with this piece is similar — but much faster! I haven’t come up with a really good strategy for this one, other than to just work through it and try to practice without thinking about whether I love the piece or hate it. We’ll see!

So, down to 2 weeks until D-Day! More to come…

Heiden is coming along nicely, maybe even a bit ahead of my schedule. At any rate, I was looking over what I wrote last week, and I realized I failed to mention why I started this piece. That’s sort of central to my point in journaling my progress on this one!

When I was at IU, I was one of Eugene Rousseau’s students, and believe it or not, he turned 76 this year. In honor of Dr. Rousseau’s 76th birthday, there is going to be a “Rousseau Celebration” hosted at the University of North Carolina – Greensville. As one of Rousseau’s former students, I have the opportunity to perform a piece either recorded by or dedicated to Dr. Rousseau. The Heiden “Solo” was dedicated to Rousseau back in 1969  — AND he recorded it. It also happens to be reasonably approachable, which is really important to me since I’m still in the “rehab” phase of my performance. Although I perform nearly every week, it’s been about 8 years since I’ve done any sort of high profile/major performance, so I want to be sure that this is successful for me.

So, here’s what I’ve been up to. One of the things I’ve been really focusing on has been identifying and working out what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “nuisance” passages. One of the biggest nuisances in this piece, at least for me, is at the top of the third page:

If you look at this passage at the level of a single beat, there isn’t anything really hard about it. What does present a challenge, at least for me, is that each beat is similar, but enough different to trip me up. One of the strategies that I find especially helpful with sections like this is to work out each beat, then start building the passage by practicing two beat blocks, then three beats, then four … until I’m comfortable with the entire passage. I also prefer to start at the END and work back towards the beginning so I’m always playing to something I know and am comfortable with — really helps to keep me relaxed.

The other things I’ve been really focusing on are pushing tempi and identifying what fingerings I want to use when there are alternates available. Those two things — tempo and fingerings — are not only important, but they are also related.  Tempo first….

Now, I know, the common wisdom about tempo is to practice as slowly as you need to to play without making a mistake. I’ve repeated that mantra to students and to myself over and over and over and over again — and it is extremely important. Don’t think for a minute that I’m not spending a lot of time working out the kinks slowly and methodically. The other piece of the equation, though, is that you need to spend some time teaching your fingers to move at the performance tempo and, when a piece has technical passages that extend of several beats (or lines or pages!), you really need to get your brain thinking and processing all of that information at the speed you need it to go. I’m not say this very eloquently, and I’m not sure if that was really clear, so if you don’t understand, leave a comment!

The other thing I need to do is to at least get to the point that I can play passages a couple of beats at a time, at or above performance tempo, fairly quickly so I can really hone in on fingering decisions. Take this passage, for example:

If I’m plugging away at a nice, slow tempo, I’m inclined to just use standard fingerings the whole way through this, but as I approach performance tempo (somewhere around quarter note = 120 bpm) the palm key E down to the F and back up to palm key E is a bit of a pain.  The biggest problem for my fingers is in my right hand, moving from right side key 3, getting my first finger down for the F, then shifting back up to get back to RSK3. Simple solution — don’t use the first finger to play the F, just use the middle finger. That simple shift keeps me from having to move my right hand/wrist to get to and from RSK3. If I’d taken my time gradually easing the tempo up, yes, I would have eventually made that decision. In the process, who knows how many times I would have played it using my first finger before I made the decision, which in turn would have meant having to UN-learn before I could LEARN. Plus, when I get nervous, I find that if I haven’t been 100% consistent in my use of specific fingerings, I have a tendency to make mistakes simply because I choose the wrong one, drop a note, then break my concentration and drop a few more notes.

Once I get my bio up (whose idea was it, anyway, that a bio should be a part of a personal web site?), you’ll likely quickly notice a pretty significant “dead spot” in my performance history. The idea for this blog actually grew directly out of that dead spot. This past November, I finally defended my doctoral ‘document’, completing the Doctor of Music in Saxophone at Indiana University-Bloomington. Aside from the degree, one of the things I walked away from that experience with was a fairly intense desire to return to playing and performing. As I started playing actively again, a couple of things happened. First, I was having a great deal of difficulty structuring my practice and really focusing. More central to the existence of this blog was the realization that my experiences as I go through this process might actually be of value to someone else. From those two realizations, the idea for this blog, publicly chronicling my experience, was born.

So, a little bit about what I hope to do here… In the last few weeks, I’ve taken the basic idea of sharing my experience through, oh, maybe 30 variations — all without writing a single word. Depending on the day, I’ve thought I’d do anything from simply writing about what I practiced and journaling the progress I was making on whatever it was I was working on to thinking I’d write these lengthy, in depth insights into playing the saxophone, directing small church choirs, and explaining how to rehab an old house. What I’ve finally settled on (for at least the blog portion of the site) is to keep it simple. What you’ll find here are nothing more than my thoughts about what I’m experiencing as I try to get back to the performance level I was at a few years ago, with some occasional thoughts about directing a small church choir (another part of who I am) and maybe an occasional rant or two about my frustrations with trying to keep up with my 140 year old New England home. I’ll still do some of the in depth “Dr. Burke” saxophone articles, but they will be published separately from the blog itself (but I will link to them as they appear). If I get lucky, eventually there will be at least a few folks dropping by from time to time to add their own comments, although I don’t plan to try and run a saxophone forum within the blog. Which all brings me back to the title of this post… Just Get Started Already!

 When I was actively performing, I never found it to be a problem to get off my rear, get to a practice room, and practice and practice and practice. One of the biggest challenges I’ve been running in to in the last few months has been just getting my horn out and starting. Once I get past that hurdle, the time just seems to disappear — before I know it, I’m up too late and I’ve put in a couple of hours. Same thing as getting this first entry written — once I get past that initial act of simply starting, the rest just happens. If you’ve stumbled on this entry and you’re a professional or advanced player, my guess is this is pretty old news. But if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, before you get too worried about what literature or scales or etudes you “ought” to be studying, what practice techniques are the best ones, what reeds to play on, what horn to use or anything else, just get that horn out and get started! There is no material, no piece of equipment, and no knowledge that is worth anything unless you actually practice. So what are you reading this for? Go Practice!