A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in Joe Kennedy’s pipe workshop hanging out & listening to some friends go on about all things ulliean-related. Quite esoteric for a non-piper, but very cool. While there Joe brought out a massive volume of transcriptions of Seamus Ennis’ playing. The book was huge and to call it “exhaustive” [...]
Archive for the ‘Practice’ Category
Paintings of Ennis
Posted in Creative Process, Folk Art, Practice, Traditional Learning, Transcriptions on April 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Listening & Style-shifting
Posted in Performance, Practice on August 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Not a lot of new and/or extraordinary music stuff this week: spent most of it working on the new festival material and poking through my CD collection for arrangement ideas. (Well, that and spending four very frustrating hours trying to learn Finale to produce a lead-sheet which I could’ve written by hand in 15 minutes. But [...]
A Suzuki View
Posted in Practice, Teaching on July 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been reading Shinichi Suzuki’s Nurtured By Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education. While I don’t agree with the method in all respects, there are a good many gems and brilliant insights to teaching here.
I’ve already posted a few. Here are some more worth considering:
- “The word education implies two concepts: to educe, which [...]
More Alex Grey
Posted in Creative Process, Early Entries, Folk Art, Inspiration, Practice on July 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
ART is communion of one soul to another, offered through the symbolic language of form and content.” (p 19)
“The only way to formal inventiveness and technical ability is to work and work, studying and perfecting the craft.” (p 19)
“Technique is just the way to arrive at a statement. Great art is a concentration of transformative [...]
Tension
Posted in Practice, Technique on July 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
For a long time I’d been struggling with my endurance when playing flute. My breath control craps out at times; or my chops become fatigued and my tone suffers; or my hands cramp and finger-work gets messy. At times it feels like I’m fighting my way through one pass on a tune! These are concerns [...]
Practice Makes Permanent, Not Perfect
Posted in Practice on July 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
This was an adage my first trumpet teacher, Jack Trager, used to throw at us. He was a great player and an even greater teacher. Too bad I didn’t like listening to him at the time; he wasn’t “flashy” enough and so didn’t impress the young horn players much after they got passed 6th grade. [...]
Bowing & Breathing
Posted in Early Entries, Practice, Style on February 4, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
The pressure used in fiddle bowing technique roughly corresponds to the use of the diaphragm in breath control in flute playing. So…just as a fiddle player will use varying amounts of pressure when bowing to put a lift into his/her playing, so a flute player would use his/her diaphragm to this same end.
The important point, [...]
Embouchure & Lung Capacity
Posted in Early Entries, Embouchure, Practice on February 2, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
A discussion between flute players:
“Two questions right off the bat for you:
A) How can I build up my lung capacity? I can’t ever seem to make it through just one phrase without taking a breath in a too obvious spot!
B) I am still have problems with that buzzing sound in the high range. Is that [...]
Embouchure/Tone Experiments
Posted in Early Entries, Embouchure, Practice on December 24, 2005 | Leave a Comment »
Lately I’ve been experimenting with changing my tone. While I’ve developed a nice, full sound, I’ve noticed it lacked a certain “edge”: a sharpness of attack, or a “reediness” that I really enjoy when listening to other players. So I started to fiddle around with things like headjoint orientation, tongue placement, throat shape, etc.
A while [...]
Embouchure in the Flute’s Second Register
Posted in Embouchure, Practice on July 20, 2005 | Leave a Comment »
MET up with a friend this evening after dinner and after traipsing around southern new jersey for a few hours visiting book dealers, wound up sitting around, having a few tunes.
While we were there, she pulled out a tune called “Sky City”(G. Marwick) from an Old Blind Dogs CD entitled Fit. Johnny Hardy plays this [...]
