Black Chin - The Mark of the Flute Player

After a long rehearsal, you put your flute away and catch sight of your face in the mirror and see your chin has a black or grey patch. It washes off easily enough but when you ask about it on-line, you are told it may be an allergy to the metal of the flute. Eek! What to do? Well first relax. Black Chin is well known among flute players and nothing to worry about.

Look Close, Very slight grey mark on chin - Mark can be large and dark or small and unnoticeable.
People with metal allergies (those who actually ITCH or develop a rash) may want to put a lick-and-stick postage stamp (don't use the self adhesive ones) on the lip plate or use a "lip plate patch". Lots of music catalogs carry them.

Black Chin - This is when your chin turns black or grey after playing the flute. It can be a small minor mark (like the photo above) or a large smear that covers your chin. As long as the discoloration rubs or washes off and you don’t itch, it is NOT an allergy. It is a reaction between your skin’s PH balance and the metal of the flute. It is not dangerous, just annoying. It can happen with almost all metals, even sterling silver. Gold and wood head-joints are the main materials that don't cause this but both can be pricey (and a few people still get black chin with these). This is why some people will tell you to get your lip plate plated with gold (although I wouldn't spend the cash on something that may not prevent black chin especially since plating wears off over time).
Everyone’s personal PH is a little different so some people get black chin often and other people never seem to get it at all. Heat, humidity and sweat also impact how your skin and metal interact so some days the whole flute section has black or grey chins and other days only one player does. A common misconception is that only white women get black chin but that just isn't true. What is true is that the darker your skin is, the less visible the mark is and men with beards rarely even notice when their beards turn just a little darker.  Plus, most make-up and some lotions dramatically increase the amount and frequency of black chin. Which means people who wear make-up or lotion (mostly women in this day and age) are much more likely to have noticeable discoloration on their chins. And male and female teenagers alike should keep in mind that some acne treatments may aggravate black chin or even take the finish off your flute so washing your chin before playing is highly recommended!
Finally, if you polish your head-joint, you will almost always get black chin the next time you play (or several times). Since silver polish isn't actually good for flutes (or you; it can cause your skin to break out and getting it in your mouth isn't so great either), skip the polish and just clean the flute with a soft dry cloth.

Possible solutions are;
--spend $1000 or more on a wood or gold head-joint (not recommended for most student and starving musicians and doesn't work for a few people).
--don't wear make-up on the lower half of your face when playing to minimize the issue (lipstick, foundation, moisturizer, lip-balm, acne treatments - all should be washed off before playing).
--keep a rag handy to wipe your chin off (works best when you have frequent rests in the music and can become distracting to the audience if done too frequently).
--put a cheap lick-and-stick postage stamp (don't use the self adhesive ones) or "lip plate patch" on the lip plate.
--just don't worry about it.
The majority of the audience won't notice and those who do usually assume (correctly) that it is an ordinary flute thing. Tell the few who ask that it’s a badge of excellent flute playing. Raise your black chins high with pride!


P.S. I have recently run into the suggestion of painting the lip plate with clear nail polish to avoid black chin. Let me just say, please don't! Removing the polish without damaging the flute can be tricky especially if your flute is plated. I wouldn't want to risk nail polish remover reacting with the metal and obviously scraping it off is a terrible idea. And you will almost certainly want to remove the nail polish someday - when you get a new flute, when the nail polish starts to look bad, when your teacher has a hissy fit over the nail polish etc. A repair person may be able to remove it. Or they may have trouble if your head-joint is not made from a solid precious metal (silver or gold). It is a risk I wouldn't want to take.
And if you got here looking for ways to deal with acne on your chin caused by silver polish, I do feel for you. It can be very painful. The best advice I have is don't use silver polish on your flute. If that ship has sailed, don't despair. The polish will clean off eventually. Just wipe the head-joint and lip plate off with a soft dry cloth, GENTLY, before and after you play for the next week or so. And wash your face before AND after playing to reduce the issue as best you can.
And if you have an allergic reaction (itching or pain), go to a doctor for advice on how to recover! And look into using a lip plate patch.

The 14 Hour Conducting Final

Everyone has a class final disaster story. Mine is from Intro to Conducting. It took over 14 hours to complete a 10 minute assignment, several different pieces of video equipment were broken and it showed me how Aikido relates to conducting. Please note; the names in this story have been changed to protect the embarrassed.

Music majors all had to take Intro to Conducting. This had two basic points. One was to perhaps inspire one or two of us to take up the career or at least let us know the basics if we ever had to be substitute teachers in a high school band class (I've got a story about that too). The other was to help us follow conductors better; you can follow most conductors pretty easily but it does help to know what they THINK they are doing.
Our grade was based on both practical conducting exercises and paper assignments and tests. For our last assignment, we had to record ourselves conducting several different short pieces and turn in the video tape at the in-class final which was at 8 am on the last day of finals. Incomplete assignments would be tossed out and because of how this assignment was weighted, not turning it in meant failing the class.
We worked in groups of at least three, each taking turns conducting the other two. My group was made up of Mike (tuba), Nicole (marimba) and myself (flute), an odd set of instruments but not a problem since only the conducting was being graded. There was a room in the library set up for the class to use (this was before everyone had video recorders on their cell phones) but Mike owned a video camera so we figured we could get together outside of library hours which was good since our schedules kept not matching up. We finally got together in the afternoon the day before the video was due, thinking we had plenty of time since we each just needed to get about 10 minutes of conducting on video. Mike set up his camera and then discovered it wasn’t working. He tried to fix it for a while but eventually borrowed another one from a friend and spent an hour or so making that one work. We finally got the equipment working around 9:30 pm and got started. I count this as the actual start time and the earlier stuff as merely preliminary aggravation.

Nicole went first. She was very picky and redid all her pieces several times trying to get the best one. Understandable since this was for a final but it kept getting later and later. After an hour and a half, she finished. Then I took my turn. I was determined to finish as fast as possible since after all, I wasn't a conducting major and I was still hoping to study for the in-class final (a dream that never was realized). The first take of my first piece went ok (meaning I made no major mistakes and we all got to the end together) so I decided not to redo it. Before I started on the second piece, I put my hair up since it had been getting in the way. (Remember this! It matters a lot later in the story!) After one or two fumbles, I finished all my pieces and we moved on to Mike. He was also picky and took about an hour to finish. It was much later than we expected but we still needed to get our videos onto separate tapes to turn in to the teacher. (I forget why we couldn't simply record directly onto our own tapes but we couldn't.) So we trooped off to Mike’s room since he had the equipment to handle that. But the VCR machine wouldn’t work. He smacked it around for a bit but couldn’t get it to cooperate. We knew we could do this in the library but by this time it was after 2 am, the in-class test was at 8 am and the library wouldn’t open till 9 am. Since we were out of options, we decided to beg the teacher for some extra time to use the library’s equipment to transfer our finished videos onto our own tapes. We all crawled off to sleep for a couple of minutes.

Nicole and I got to the final about 10 minutes early (rather bleary) and threw ourselves on the teacher’s mercy. He said as long as we got the tapes turned in before he left campus at noon, he’d take them. We thanked him profusely, breathed a sigh of relief and waited for Mike to get to class. And waited. And waited. The teacher handed out the test and Mike still wasn’t there. We began plotting how to break into Mike’s room to get the video after the test or something. Just as we were finishing the test around 9, Mike came RUNNING into the room with his hair standing on end and looking like he was about to cry. He had slept through his alarm and had had a rather rude awakening. I think he hurt his knees hitting the floor to beg to take the test but luckily our teacher was a nice guy and technically, there were two hours blocked out for the test anyway. Mike got to take as much of the test as he could in the slightly less than one hour left. Nicole and I got the video tape from him (along with many apologies and variations on "I'm getting a new alarm clock this afternoon") and headed off to the library, thinking the worst was behind us.
We got into the video-audio room and set things up to transfer our recordings to our tapes. And the VCR machines stopped working. This was clearly Nicole's breaking point; she sort of slid out of her chair and collapsed under the desk, softly mumbling "we're all gonna fail" over and over. Now, I am one of those people who walks into a room and all the electronics stop working right. This means I was very familiar with all the ways the equipment in the audio-visual center broke. I could even fix quite a few of the most common break downs and knew who could fix the others. This particular issue could only be fixed by one person; the head of the audio-visual department. So I made sure Nicole wasn't going to hurl herself out of the window or anything and went hunting for him. He was in a meeting so I waved at him through the window till he came out and got him to fix the machines. Nicole emerged from the depths and started babbling happily in relief to anyone within 3 feet of her which was oddly even less helpful than hiding under the desk had been. But we got her video transferred without further incident.

Then we set up for mine. Now remember what I said about putting my hair up AFTER finishing the first piece while we were recording this? First I appeared on camera with my hair down. Then there was a blip in the film and I was standing there with my hair up. Mike had recorded over the first piece by mistake. (I should mention that normally, Mike was a pretty responsible person-this final just did him in.) After some initial panic, I realized the teacher had given us some time and we were in the library thus making it possible to re-record that piece. The trick was that these pieces had to be in the specified order meaning I couldn’t transfer the other pieces and tack the missing one on at the end. I had to re-record first. And just to complicate things, we realized Nicole’s marimba couldn’t be transported to the library, so she couldn’t play the music for me. My one hope was to find another student from our conducting class who had their instrument with them and would help me out. After going up and down all four floors (while courting a fine case of denial), I ran into Louisa, another flute player. I told her a highly abbreviated version of what was happening and she dropped everything and came to my rescue. With Louisa in tow, I planned on grabbing Mike when he finished taking his in-class test and quickly cranking out a fast, sloppy, version of the missing piece.
By now, it was almost time for me to go to work so getting that time restraint out of the way was the next issue. My work-study job was one building over, so I went to talk to them. They asked how my conducting final had gone (they were really nice people) and why I looked so stressed. I told them I'd been working on it for almost 12 hours (at that point) and wasn't done yet and could I have the time off to finish? They commiserated and made me promise to tell them the whole story later. I crossed my fingers and hoped nothing else would go wrong.

Back to the library I went. Mike had gotten there and was getting his video transferred. But then he revealed that he couldn’t stay to re-record my missing piece. He had to go to work. I think I stared at him for about 5 minutes in shock. Nicole and Louisa suggested I go through the whole library floor by floor (for a third time) looking for yet ANOTHER student from our class. On the last day of finals when most students had finished all their classes. At 11 am when most people LEFT the library for lunch. This is when I sat down on the floor and began to cry, thinking “this will be a funny story if I pass. Maybe even if I don't.” Fortunately, Nicole came out of her I’m-so-happy-to-have-finished trance at this point and realized I needed some help. Somehow, she found another student from our class, Guy, at HIS work-study job in the library stacks and dragged him into the video room at baton point. Then she ran to the rehearsal hall next door to get his trumpet so he wouldn’t technically be leaving work. I pulled myself back together, thanked everyone and took over the recording room.
I yanked out my (very battered) music and tried to lead them through the missing piece. And it fell apart. We were all so tired no one could follow me. Or find the beat. Or remember which way was up. We could not get through the piece without stopping and we weren’t allowed to have any “breaks” in the pieces themselves. Out of desperation (and after five or six tries), I decided to use an Aikido technique; extending ki and one-point. The idea is that you send your energy and intent throughout your whole body and out into the space around you. This makes your body move in precise and controlled ways, which works great for throwing people in a martial arts class. I was hoping that I could somehow take control of Guy’s and Louisa’s instruments with my mind and little baton and at least get through the wretched piece once without having them stop. And it worked! To my absolute amazement, we made it through the whole piece in one go. They played with better tone and technique than all the earlier attempts and Louisa even commented that my conducting was suddenly better than anything I’d done in the class up to that point. She then suggested I re-record the other pieces doing "whatever that was" again. I said I didn't think there was time (since who knew how long it would take to drag them through the other pieces) and I just wanted to turn in a complete assignment, never mind what grade I got. So she and Guy wished me luck and left.

First piece done, I went to transfer the other pieces to my tape. And the VCR machine stopped working again. (Yeah, I know, I should have expected THAT!) I whimpered and headed off to drag the head of the audio-visual center out of his meeting again (it really was his job and there really wasn’t anyone else capable of dealing with this glitch), and he fixed it. Again. And FINALLY, completed tape in hand, I bolted off to the faculty mailroom, double checked that the teacher hadn’t left early (which I WAS expecting but my luck had finally changed) and turned it in with 15 minutes to spare.
Then I crawled back up to my room, where my roommate was just getting up. She had last seen me heading off to start the recording the previous afternoon and naturally asked how my final went. I said it would take too long to explain or even sum up and I would tell her about it after I slept. And that I just might, after the end of class, have figured out how to handle a baton effectively.

And yes, I passed. With an A.

Music, Memorization and Dyslexia

I was reading a book with an article by a dyslexic musician the other day. He said he had always been terrible at memorizing music on cello but good at sight-reading. When he took up guitar, he discovered he was good at memorizing but bad a sight-reader on that instrument. After some thought, he concluded that the constant need to look at his hands on the guitar might close a loop between reading music, playing music and remembering music. His theory is that when you look at your hands, you connect the notes you are reading with the actions of your fingers and both with the musical sounds, which may assist in memorizing the music. The trade off was that he couldn’t look ahead in the music as much as is required to sight-read well.
“Sight-reading and memory” by Michael Lea from Music and Dyslexia; A Positive Approach edited by Tim Miles, John Westcombe and Diana Ditchfield 

Reading music can be similar to typing by touch. When you look at the words, you understand them but you are not processing them in a way that is about remembering them. You are just letting your fingers type the letters as you see them. In music, you play the notes as you see them, the information flowing from your eyes to your fingers. You may remember a fair amount, possibly even all, of the music after practicing it for a few weeks but that isn’t the same as memorizing it well enough to perform by memory. Anyone who has prepared for a contest where memorization is required can tell you all about that! And I often feel nervous about my memory unless I have spent intensive time playing without music in front of me. The time spent playing with the music is simply not helpful on that score (sorry about the pun).

I have observed that instrumentalists who are expected to memorize most of their music tend to be ones who can see what their hands are doing easily, without contortions. In fact, piano, guitar and harp players are expected to watch their hands. Meanwhile, wind players are actively discouraged from trying to look at their hands or fingers while playing for the very good reason that it twists you up and it is nearly impossible to play while doing so. They are also allowed to read music in performance more often. Strings tend to be somewhere in-between these two groups both in the memorization expectation and in how easy it is to see their hands while playing.

Now, mirrors are often used by wind players to check embouchure and hand position. It occurred to me that we flute players should try setting up our music stand right in front of a mirror so that we can look from the music to our fingers in the mirror with minimal movement. I have, unintentionally and unconsciously, used this trick to memorize music in the past but only after learning the music fairly well. Next time, I’ll try it when just starting to learn the piece and see how my twisted brain reacts.

Artemis Who Loves Song and Dance

The Wild Wood

We are familiar with Artemis as the huntress of wild things, the independent Goddess of the Moon who refused to marry and guards young children. But she is also a Goddess closely linked to singing and dancing. 

The Dancing Hunter

In myths and poems, Artemis is described as loving to sing and leading her nymphs in song as often as they hunted. Artemis led the Muses in circle dances and directed their choir singing (before Apollo became their manager). Young girls dressed in saffron tunics and danced a bear dance in honor of Artemis before they were allowed to marry. In myths, Helen, Ariadne and girl after girl were abducted while dancing or singing for Artemis. Aphrodite once disguised herself as a mortal and claimed the same thing had happened to her to make her story convincing. Many dances were considered sacred to Artemis: circle dances, winding chain dances, lively jigs with wild leaps into the air and dances where the dancers dressed as plants, deer (or other animals) and the opposite sex. Karyatis, Kordax and Korythalia are all titles or names linked to Artemis and the dances that were done in her honor.

The Moon and Deer are Symbols of Artemis

A few of Artemis's musical (or at least noisy) titles include; 
-Hegemone “leader of dance" or "choir leader.” 
-Hymnia “of the hymns” or "lover of songs." 
-Celadeinus/Celadeine “strong voiced" or "lady of clamors.”

And a final observation of my own; Erato the Muse of erotic and love poetry, wedding music and sometimes dance, is sometimes shown holding a bow and arrows, like Eros the God of love. And Artemis the leader of the songs and dances of nymphs, Muses and Graces, is most often pictured with bow and arrows today.

When the Moon shines, Artemis dances with the plants and animals

Artemis is the untamed singer beside the forest stream who leads us into the harmonic wilderness. She is the conductor hiding within the ensemble, the dancer in costume, the disguised side of ourselves who sings duets with those she loves.

Flautist, Flutist, Fluter or Flute Player

Nearly everyone who plays flute will, at some point, be asked "What is the correct term for a flute player, Flutist or Flautist?" The answer is; either one. Yes really. Flutist is the older English word with the Oxford dictionary dating it to 1603. Flautist is a much more recent term in spite of the persistent rumor to the contrary. Nathanial Hawthorne seems to have been the first writer to use Flautist ("The flautist poured his breath in quick puffs of jollity" from The Marble Faun) in 1860. Hawthorne may have been trying to sound European (a popular fad in his day) by inventing a word based on the Italian flauto (from old Occitan flaut) to get the word Flautist. Older English writers (like Chaucer) use floute/Floutour, flowte/Flowtour and my favorite, floyte/floytynge (playing the flute) with no connection to the Italian term. Floute/Floutour, flowte/Flowtour and floyte all developed into flute/Flutist in English. Dictionaries currently list both Flutist and Flautist as correct terms for flute players.

Many people think Flutist is more common in the USA but in my experience, both get used about equally. Common musicians' gossip says that Flautist is more common in England (or Europe) but again, that doesn't seem to be true in practice; in fact, in my (highly limited) experience, Flautist is used more often in the USA than in England. Some people feel Flautist is stuffy or even somewhat insulting; they claim its too similar to "flaunting" or "flouting" in spite of not being based on, or related to, either word. On the other side of the debate, some people feel Flutist is an Americanization or less technically correct; both ideas are also completely untrue. It strikes me that the objections to both words are more based on emotional reactions to (and personal associations with) the words themselves rather than on dictionary meanings of the words or their true history.

The reality is words change over time and usage shifts back and forth for mysterious reasons (take a linguistics class if you want to really hurt your head with this phenomenon.) The great Flutist vs. Flautist debate has been going on almost since the word Flautist was tossed into English and it hasn't changed much in all that time. I prefer to skip the whole issue and say "I am a Flute Player" or "I play the Flute". But I answer to Flutist, Flautist and even Fluter without complaint or regret.
Just make sure you know me before you call me a Flutter brain.

Athena and Hermes Musical Invention

Athena and Hermes. Aulos and lyre. Pipes and strings. And the much neglected trumpet and shepherd's pipe. These are Gods of innovation, new uses and thoughts. These are also the Gods who gave away their creations without hesitation. To pay for a theft or because of a glance in the mirror, they tossed their instruments aside for others to play. They could always make more.

Hermes’s story is always good for a laugh so let’s begin there. Three days after he was born, Hermes had already gotten bored with behaving himself. So off he went to his brother’s pastures and stole Apollo’s cows. He cooked them up and settled down to some inventing. He caught and killed a tortoise and used it’s shell and the guts of the sun God’s cows to build the first lyre in the world (well, so he said.) When Apollo finally found the little thief, the chords that poured out of the lyre stopped him in his tracks. Singing with the Muses and playing reed pipes suddenly seemed like ancient history compared to the thought of playing this new instrument. And Hermes, clever little trickster that he is, offered not only to give Apollo the lyre but to teach him how to play it. In exchange for the cows that he had already stolen.
After Apollo left to write up he’s newly created rules of harmony, Hermes skipped off and gathered reeds to build a syrinx (though some say he stole that instrument from Pan and who’s to say which one of these two is more trustworthy) and continued to fill his after dinner hours with new music.
Once, Zeus asked Hermes for help getting past Argos, the hundred eyed monster who never slept. Hermes took his syrinx and played lullabies to Argos until all of his eyes finally closed. Some say that Apollo traded his golden staff and lessons in prophecy for Hermes’ shepherd's pipe.

Athena’s music by contrast seems to be tied to sorrow and pain. She had given Perseus the tools he needed to kill Medusa of course but when Medusa died, her sisters wept. And keened. And sang. Athena, the war Goddess, promptly dropped her spear and began shaping a pair of reeds into a double-reed instrument, the aulos (aulos is often mistakenly translated as flute). Athena could use this hollow tube to transform all the sorrow and grief of the world into laments and dirges that broke and healed the hearts that heard them
And then, as suddenly as she started, Athena stopped playing. Some say she didn’t like how she looked in the mirror, others that Hermes made fun of how her cheeks puffed out. But maybe she knew others would need some way to release their deepest, musical voice and that is why she dropped her reed pipes to the ground. But even after she stopped playing, the Goddess’s breath still lived in the aulos. They hummed in the forest until a satyr named Marsyas found them and brought their melodies back to the world.
She guarded and supported the musicians of Olympus, the Muses. She caught and tamed Pegasus, the winged horse child of Medusa, and gave him to the Muses for their pleasure and delight.
She was called Athena Salpinx (war trumpet) in Argos and she is credited with inventing all forms of art that require time and study.

These two Gods are the inventors of their pantheon. Each new object they create draws gasps of amazement and becomes sacred in an eye blink. But these two beings barely seem to notice how precious their inventions are. They hand their creations off to others without a second thought, knowing that the most valuable gift they are giving us is the ability to imagine new ways to use the objects they leave scattered around us.

Daily Musings

A while back, I decided to work on memorizing more music. I've always kind of slacked in that department (Classical flute training allows this) and I've also always wished I didn't. So I've started keeping a musical journal where I record things I'm trying to play by memory along with some of the daily improvisations I create. Not sure where this will take me but I intend to share bits and pieces as I go.


Improv based on O'Carolan's "Farewell to Music"



"Carolan's Dream"



I'm mixing up the "simpler" folk tunes (some of which aren't that simple!) with Telemann and Troubadour music. The idea is that there will be some songs I learn more easily (which will hopefully encourage me) while I'm struggling with the longer pieces. In time, I hope to share a wider variety of tunes.

Ephemeral Life

Music is ephemeral. It is never the same twice. Even listening to a recording is never quite the same because the listener brings a different awareness each time they listen. They can’t help it. This is what makes music so tricky to explain and so wonderful to experience.
Many Classical musicians focus on learning to play the notes they see with as much accuracy as possible. The goal becomes to play the piece exactly as written every time. This is a good skill to have, never think otherwise, but there is more to music than that. Music is not the written notation but the moment of playing or performing including all the mistakes or even deliberate changes to what we see on the page. Music is the act of creating sound and listening to it. Improvisation is part of this and always has been. Even when improvisation isn't taught, performers end up making little tiny changes every time they play (there is no way not to). Perhaps instead of striving for note-by-note repetition, we should spend time trying to understand WHY these changes felt good or bad, what in the moment caused the music to transform and how we can make these different "interpretations" work for performers and audiences. This is the beginning of improvisation and part of what makes music an experience that is treasured.

A Couple of Examples
The Medieval troubadours are well known for setting their poetry to music but their music was not “complete” as we would understand it; they rarely included any rhythms and even wrote multiple melodies for the same poem. In other words, they improvised and used written music as a chance to expand their possible musical ideas instead of writing out a perfect version of the music. They adapted the music to their instruments and voices, they changed tones to fit the mood of the moment and treated the music like the living creature it is. There are a large number of period performers who carefully use only musical ideas from the age of the troubadours, going so far as to exclude all modern instruments and most period wind instruments since they weren’t “commonly used” at the time. Their goal is to recreate the troubadour sound as exactly as they can. This is wonderful and shows us a whole different kind of music than we are used to but I can not help feeling that the spirit of this music is in some ways being ignored. This was music that was meant to change, to adapt. If a performer didn’t play the instrument a composer had in mind, they still played the music even if they had to change the melody to do so. If only certain keys or modes worked for a specific instrument or voice, the performer could even CHANGE the scale of the piece and play the piece with different harmonies. If the audience wanted a different mood than the original piece, the music could be changed. A lament could become a dance in next to no time.
Baroque music incorporated improvisation into opera and bass lines as a matter of course. But the melody instruments were expected to change their more completely written lines too. A straight performance was often considered dull and not worth the audience's time. Today, students often spend hours researching how musicians might have improvised a piece in that day and age. But why stop there? Why limit ourselves to imitating someone else’s improvisation? Don’t mistake me, imitating is a great way to learn but then we can add our own ideas. Radical, I know, because this may well result in older pieces being made modern. But why is that always seen as a bad thing? We are modern musicians and we bring that sound with us. As beautiful as I find the Baroque style, I see no reason to rigidly make everyone follow it in every performance.

I admit, creating new music can be frightening. Some changes don’t work and some improvisations fall flat. It takes time and practice to get reliably good at improvising. But why should that stop us? We spend hours, even years, learning to reliably recreate written music after all. There is no reason to assume improvising will just come naturally without any effort. But the seed of improvisation is there, in anyone who has played one note and then another without any direction from someone else.
Improvisation and written music are not exclusive to each other and I love playing written music just as much as improvising. I find it beautiful and inspiring to play and hear music others were trying to share. But I know that I will never create a carbon-copy performance of any piece and I wouldn't want to even if I could. New sounds, new ideas and new music leap out of performances of old music. Some are sweetly similar to the sounds that created them, some are radically different. The musical possibilities and knowledge that this music will never be exactly the same again is what makes the experience so rewarding.
We are, after all, as ephemeral as the music we love.

Music and Meditation

Today, I'm going to share one of the methods I have developed for working music into my meditation practice. Music isn’t required for meditation of course and I don't always use it (how repetitive that would be!) but I tend to incorporate music into most things I do at least in some small way.
Meditation is about calming the mind. Some people do this by “emptying” their minds of all thoughts, sometimes by counting breaths. Others do it by focusing on a single simple thought or image. For the record, I prefer using simple pretty images but feeling them rather than seeing them. I tend to get bored when thinking of “nothing,” and counting breaths is too much like work (all that counting explains why musicians get kind of focused and spacey at the same time while playing) for me to really settle into it.

Music can be added to either the mind-emptying or the focusing approach to meditation. The idea is to allow the music to fill your mind and let the flow of notes become your thoughts. I’m not talking about imagining a story to fit the music (although that is a useful trick too) but experiencing the music on its own terms. Now there are several books out there that try to pin down exactly what impact different types of music have on people. They often go so far as to say you should listen to music in certain keys for certain issues (completely ignoring the fact that most Classical pieces modulate quite a bit and some are almost never in the key that is listed in their name). The trouble with this approach is that no two people respond exactly alike to the same music. A piece I think is happy may sound aggressive to someone else. A piece can be thoughtful and calming or sad and depressing depending on who listens to it. What this means is you will have to test out these pieces for yourself. Keep in mind that different instruments and performers can change a piece wildly. I typically prefer music with overlapping lines and repeating arpeggios that aren’t too fast but some single line or fast pieces work wonderfully. The key is that the music is enthralling in some fashion.

I haven’t yet figured out how to fully describe the music I like using for meditation so I’m going to periodically share short lists of pieces and recordings that I find to work well. I've been using a lot of Classical music but other genres work just as well. I find it easier to use instrumental pieces than vocal but some vocal pieces are wonderful (I'll share some of those in later posts). My friends/guinea pigs who tried these pieces out were generally surprised when the music ended, even the longer Classical songs, saying they didn't think that much time had gone by. This is one reason I think these pieces are effective as meditation support.

-Dunmore Lassies from “The Long Black Veil” performed by the Chieftains and Ry Cooder. This is one of my favorite pieces of music in general. It starts with a beautiful guitar and flute duo then builds and grows in absolutely amazing ways. It is about 5 minutes long.
-J. S. Bach’s Sonata in G Major for Two Flutes and Continuo BWV 1039. The flutes and continuo parts weave around each other in wonderful ways. The third movement is especially hypnotic but the entire piece works. This piece is about 12 minutes long.
-Telemann’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe d'amore, Viola d'amore, Strings and Continuo in E Major. The second movement may be a bit lively for some but I find its energy fits just fine after the first movement. This piece is about 15 minutes long.

Have fun with this idea. Don't get stuck on my recommended pieces though. If they don't work for you, try something else.

When looking up Classical pieces, be aware many on-line sites don't bother listing composers. In pop music, the performer is the more important information for finding the music so they got into the habit of skipping the composer. But in Classical music, if you don't know the composer, you won't find the piece (the names are just too similar). They are getting better on this issue but you may need to hunt a bit. Some sites DO include the composer's name as part of the name of the song or album so that can help you find what you are looking for.

What Do You Hear?

I teach a music history class for non-music majors. One of the first things I make my students do is talk about music. I play musical examples for them and say "tell me what you thought". And silence falls.
After about five minutes of gentle encouragement someone finally gets up the courage to say "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" and I breathe a sigh of relief. If I can get them to admit they have an opinion, there is a chance they will develop some ability to talk about the music. This works even better when one student says they like a piece and another says they don't like the same one. With a little careful assistance in finding the words to describe what they heard, the class often realizes that the exact same musical moments caused both opinions. That is when they realize this class is not about right and wrong answers but about experiencing new music and learning to express their own thoughts.
Quite a few students drop at this point. The idea that their grade is at least partly based on their own opinions and observations seems to be overwhelming for them. They can't just read the book and parrot it back to me or express the same thing another student does because I ask them "why didn't you like this, because of the choppy rhythm or the dissonance?" or "what made you like this piece, the instrument sound or the melody?" The fact that there is no wrong answer to these questions doesn't help them much at first. They may have spent years in school but they have almost never had to express their own opinions. The realization that opinions are exactly what I am after startles most of them and the lack of absolute right answers appears to be terrifying to many.
 Once they get this far, they nervously ask for tips and ways to start talking about music "right". I tell them to start with the obvious, all the things that seem too blinding clear to bother describing; is the piece fast or slow, smooth or choppy, loud or quiet, consistent or changeable, name the instruments you hear and when they change to other instruments. Because when you are talking about music, you aren't actually listening to it anymore. All those musical sounds that are obvious in the sounding music aren't obvious at all once the music stops.
Words and music are two different languages and learning to translate one to the other can be tricky. Music says some things with such ease and grace that the complexity of what they are saying vanishes into simple sound. Those same ideas can take an entire paragraph to describe properly in words and even then, we often have only described the bare surface of the musical sound, not the depth of meaning (for lack of a better term) within the music.
The secret, I think, is that the meaning of the music is at least partly created by our own minds and therefore changes subtly (or less subtly at times) from moment to moment, hearing to hearing and even in retrospect. It is entirely possible to experience a piece one way while listening to it and while writing about it, experience it differently in our own memories. This can make writing about a piece seem like a fantasy or a made up answer. Which it is, of course, since we are talking about what we think about music. We are the ones creating those thoughts and therefore we are making it up as we go. And there is no wrong answer.

I Don't Know That Song

"I know that one but I can't do it". This quote from a book about improvisation got me thinking; What is the difference between knowing and being able to perform something? And how does that difference shift based on if the performer reads music or plays by ear?

I was trained to read music so for me, knowing a piece means I can play it reliably well when the music is in front of me. But take that music away and I am suddenly at sea even with simple tunes that can turn into ear-worms. I can often fake a harmony line or even stumble through the tune (after a few false tries) if it is a simple song but I won't really retain it based on that alone. The interesting thing is that I clearly "know" the tune because I recognize whenever I hit a wrong note, flub a rhythm or miss an entrance. For that matter, I also recognize when I get it right! 
I find that learning a piece by ear, even a short repetitive folk tune, can take a startlingly long time compared to reading the sheet music. Having to recognize when a note is right or wrong AND work out the technical details of playing it AND commit the song to memory all at the same time doubles or quadruples the time required to learn the piece. I often get wildly frustrated and say, "just find me some sheet music, it will be faster". But the tunes I have learned by ear I KNOW. They are in my head, my fingers and sometimes simply spring out of the flute without any conscious plan to play them. Even the music I have memorized after learning to play them from sheet music don't take up quite the same space in my mind.

So here are some of the conclusions I have come to; 
Those who habitually play by ear can recognize a tune without knowing it well enough to play by themselves. This doesn't mean they can't play along with a group since they often can come up with something reasonably close based on knowing similar tunes or simply having absorbed the style of music (much easier to do when you spend such intensive amounts of time on every single song). 
Those who usually read music can play a tune with the notation in front of them but may have trouble jumping in with a group that is playing from memory. On the other hand, they can play a wide range of tunes using the sheet music with relatively little prep time. They can even switch styles with reasonable accuracy based on having studied so many different styles (much easier to do if you aren't spending quite as much time learning every single song). 
Additionally, musicians in both groups may develop the ability to fake a tune or a harmony line based on what others are doing. Oddly, this skill is not generally taught in spite of how useful it is in almost all musical situations. Maybe because it feels like cheating to so many musicians, hence the term "fake". What we are actually doing is improvising, often at a very skilled level.

It seems to me that there is a wide range of "knowing" music, ranging from simply recognizing a familiar melody to having each turn and twist committed to soul deep memory. And somewhere in-between, each musician comes up with a sweet spot that let's them know, perform, teach or ornament a tune to the audience's (and their own) satisfaction.

Playing a piece I have halfway memorized and the odd faces I make in the process.

Colorful Music

Some, but by no means all, dyslexics have trouble reading music since dyslexia messes with how symbols are processed in the brain. I am one of the dyslexics who finds music notation easier to read than written English (the fact that the notes stay at the same height makes a huge difference for me) but I see no reason why dyslexics who have trouble with music shouldn't get the same amount of help learning notation as I got with spelling. In an earlier post, I talked about techniques to help dyslexics read music. (Inside Out, Back to Front and Upside Down) I have since encountered a couple of new ideas and wanted to share them too. As I have said before, and will again, each dyslexic is different so any technique may or may not work for each specific dyslexic musician. I will also point out any flaws or potential difficulties each strategy may have. This helps make it much easier to AVOID those problems and make the techniques as effective as possible.

Multi-Colored Staff
A youtube video introduced me to this first one. A young dyslexic musician created a musical staff with a different color for each line to keep the musical notes from jumping around on the page. This person still had to spend hours writing notes on the staff to commit the written musical language to memory but getting the notes to hold still is an important, possibly critical, first step. Others have mentioned highlighting a line or two of the staff but I have never run into the idea of using different colors for all the lines before.

Multi-colored staff

Multi-colored staff. Different colors and wider or narrower lines can be used.

Flaws
The order and choice of colors would be very important. As would how thick the lines are. You would have to spend quite a bit of time working that out for yourself. And then you still wouldn't be able to buy staff paper like this. You simply must create and print it yourself. Not impossible with most computers but still an extra step that must be considered.
Second issue; published music is not printed on this kind of staff. Which means if you want all your music laid out this way, you will have to transfer the music to your own staff paper. This will likely be a long and tedious process.
Now if you just use this colored staff to LEARN to read music and then use other techniques to read published music, that may well work. Certainly worth trying if you have trouble processing written music at all.
A friend with very mild dyslexia says the colors actually make the lines move more for him so clearly this won't work for everyone. But that doesn't mean you can't give it a try.

Highlight the Staff
This idea is inspired by the previous one. Use different colored highlighters (on a copy of the music, not the original!) to "fill in" the spaces of the staff. Again, others have suggested highlighting the top or bottom spaces but I have not heard of using multiple colors to mark out each space before.
Flaws
NEVER use highlighters on music you don't own. It can cost a fortune to replace damaged orchestral parts and yes, most directors would consider highlighting a form of damage. Copy the music and THEN highlight away.
Copying all your music can get pricey which is another down side to this idea (though not as pricey as replacement fees.) Sometimes, you can get the director or ensemble librarian to copy music for you if you explain your situation and ask nicely. But many music groups are suffering from lack of cash too so don't be surprised if they say no.
Again, this idea seems like it might not work for some dyslexics. For me at least, it increases the tendency for the lines to bend and merge because the colors "shrink" the space between the lines. But that doesn't mean it won't work for someone else.

When I discuss these techniques, I typically look at them from a Classical musician's perspective because that is the field where I see the most possibilities of expensive issues. Many folk and Jazz groups either use public domain pieces or more replaceable copies and so making permanent marks on the music is less of a problem. But no matter what style of music you play, if you are given a copy of the music, always check if it is ok to mark it up beforehand. It will save a lot of trouble.

I love how creatively dyslexics deal with the odd things our brains do. Our biggest strength is that we don't think normally and so we can come up with new ideas, new approaches and new methods. And that lets us do and learn whatever we put our minds to.

Blending and Shining in Performance

I was a shy musician as a youngster. When I first started playing flute, it was quite a challenge for me to "play out" in ensembles. Don't get me wrong, I was a reasonably good player but being heard by others made me edgy and uncertain. I had to spend a great deal of time learning to see the audience as my friends instead of a bunch of strangers and even more time learning to "shine" when others could hear me. But that is not actually what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the ability I developed as a result of being a shy musician; blending and matching tone.

Blending into the section or ensemble is one tried and true method for shy musicians to disguise themselves. It makes it easier for players with stage-fright to keep playing when they feel that their personal sound won't be associated with them but instead will merge with the overall sound. Focusing on matching another player's timbre can create the illusion of being hidden within the overall sound. This means that I spent years unconsciously developing not only the ability to play with others but also the ability to transform my tone and blend with almost any instrument.
Not that I realized this at first. In high school, when people commented on how well I matched sounds with the oboe in duets, I barely even understood what they meant. Of course I had blended with the oboe; it was how I made myself feel confident enough to keep playing even when I missed a note. It seemed so natural to me that it didn't occur to me that others weren't doing it too.
By college, I began to understand that blending was a skill in its own right and well worth praising. However, I still didn't grasp the full extent of what I had been teaching myself to do with tone qualities until I took a Jazz improvisation class in Grad school.
The assignment that opened my ears to my own knack came along about halfway through the class. We were required to find a good improvised solo, learn it and then play it with the recording. Most people did well with this as far as learning the solo went. But when my turn came round, the overwhelming comment I got back was "how did you make yourself SOUND like that Jazz flute player?!" A couple of students said that at first they thought I wasn't playing at all because I matched the tone so well. Thinking it through, I realized most of the other students had indeed sounded distinctly different than their chosen soloist; the notes and rhythms were fine but the tone and attitude remained their own which usually made the solo sound slightly "off" no matter how accurately they played. Unfortunately, I was still matching sounds mostly unconsciously and had trouble offering any tips on how to transform yourself from a Classical player to a Jazz player with your tone alone. After struggling for a bit I came up with the explanation of "It was easier to hear if I matched the solo that way" which wasn't the most helpful answer for those trying to figure out how to do this trick.

For some time now, I've been trying to use this skill more consciously and deliberately. Instead of using it to hide within the ensemble, I try to use it to support the group. Rather than worrying that a wrong note will mark me out, I let the blending of tones smooth over the small mistakes and carry me along. Even in solos, when I am supposed to stand out, I find it helpful to remember the sound of the group and match (or contrast!) my "shining out" sound with what came before and what will be along after in a way that will help hold the whole piece together.

Matching tone is mostly about two things; learning as many different ways to change your sound as possible and listening to another musician's sound with the intent of making it PART of your own. You can't be focused on stealing the spotlight for this; your attention must be on the overall result. This also isn't about finding the "best" tone quality, but about exploring the different kinds of tone. Sometimes a rough gritty tone is breathtakingly beautiful and other times the traditional crystal clear flute sound is just right.

I still don't have a lot to offer to those trying to learn to do this. But perhaps with some more time spent being aware of this talent and how I use it, I will also learn how to explain and teach it. And in any case, approaching music from my strengths and focusing on what is working well adds to the joy I feel every time I hold my flute in my hands.

Acoustic Revolution

I don't like amplified music. At least not as much as acoustic music. Generally speaking, instruments sound fuller and richer and meld with other instruments better when they are not amplified. Voices likewise sound more human and individual when there is no mic in-between the singer and the audience.
Now there are times when amplification is an absolute necessity; the audience can be so large there is no other way to make the show work or an instrument just may not be able to play loud enough to fill the space being used for the concert. Outdoor concerts can be especially problematic for guitars and singers. And since most of our favorite music today is centered around guitars and singers, it is no wonder we assume that music must be amplified. But this is not always the case.
I have played shows in small art galleries that a single singer could easily have filled that still used massive sound systems. The result tends to be a tinny sound, lots of feed back and volume so high that the audience leaves after two songs just to give their ears a rest. Many instruments actually carry an extremely long way when played well. Flutes are famous for this and have been used historically for long distance communication. Brass instruments are so loud that when I see them amplified, I often flee the location before they can even begin to play and damage my hearing.
It startles me how often people assume I will need amps and mics when I am playing an indoor show. Walls in my experience are more than enough amplification on their own. Even (or sometimes especially) in big rooms. This is why cathedrals were used for music so often. Everyone could hear the music no matter how quiet the instruments or how far from the musicians you were. And the reverb in large halls is an entirely different sound than the sound engineered reverb done in audio labs. It holds onto the tiny nuances of sound while echoing out into silence. Some of my favorite places to play with no mics are simple rooms with high ceilings where the flute can take off and fly from corner to corner without any fetters.
Then of course there is playing outdoors without electrical support. This frightens many musicians because their sound seems to be swallowed up or vanish into the horizon. All the little "flaws" in their playing become more noticeable, especially any tone issues, when there are no walls to throw the echos around. One of my teachers actually encouraged me to play outside for exactly this reason; to hear precisely what I sounded like with no interference or distortion. It is something of a humbling experience at first if you have only played in rooms with generous acoustics. But the more you play in settings that allow you to hear your true sound, the easier it is to both improve your sound and to MATCH your sound to your environment.

Music in the Green

I suspect one reason people overuse amplification is they don't take the time to hear and work with the sounds of the space they are playing in. If you sit and listen to the sounds in the place for 5 or 10 minutes and THEN play, you actually will sound different than if you just start playing the moment you have your instrument put together. The changes are subtle but highly informative. Can this be done with amps and mics? Of course! But if you depend on amplification all the time, it is much harder to learn this listening skill. And if you use the amps primarily to be "loud enough," you likely will have a terrible time hearing the natural sounds. And worse, so will your audience. So if you are going to use amps, I'd suggest setting them as low as you can at first and listening to how the amped sound interacts with the world's sounds. Only once you have a feel for that mixing and cooperation of sounds should you increase the volume. And be careful about how loud you go! Loud doesn't equal good and in fact can make something that once was good, very unpleasant and painful.
The trick is maintaining that level of listening to the sounds of the world around you while you are playing your show. It does take practice to stay aware of the many layers of auditory reality at once. It's a little like listening to three different conversations at a long lunch table at once; you won't always catch everything but with patience, you can stay in touch with each one with relative ease.
Taking the time to understand how your sound will interact with other sounds is what creates a performance that works in the space. This, rather than volume, is what makes a show worth attending for me; a musical sound that doesn't destroy other sounds but instead works with what is available and adapts to changes. This creates a live show that will be different and personal for every audience which is, to my mind, the magic of live music.

The Perfect Embouchure Myth

"I wanted to play flute but my band director told me I couldn't. There's a dip in my top lip that would get in the way so I gave up on music."
I wanted to cry when I heard this from a someone in my audience. Then track down that fool-in-band-director-clothing and make him promise never to try to teach music again. Because while yes, some people have a bit of extra flesh in the middle of the upper lip and yes, it can create a challenge for flute playing if it is large enough, it in no way makes it impossible to play. All that you have to do is play with the flute off-center. And many talented flute players have an embouchure that is off-center. AND not everyone who has a droplet in their upper lip will have any trouble at all. I know a flute player who has a large droplet that flattens out all on its own to a "picture perfect" embouchure when she plays. She didn't even realize she had a droplet for the first year she played. (For the curious, I have a very small droplet and play slightly off-center but you have to look close to tell.)
What's more, everyone has a slightly different embouchure. We have to. We aren't all built the same so a shape and placement that creates a clear tone for one player, will create a fuzzy sound for another. It is well worth trying out different ideas, shapes and placements for embouchures to find out what works for you but the real test is if you like your tone. It is quite common to try to develop a more relaxed embouchure because most folks play with too much tension at first. We feel like it takes strength and muscle to improve tone and that makes us tighten up. Of course, it does take muscles and strength but not tension. Learning how to balance that is tricky but well worth it if only so you don't get too tired while playing. The extra advantage of working with different embouchures is that you learn how to use different tones at will. Looking at the embouchure of someone whose tone you like is a good start but never forget that you may not sound the same as them. Listen to your sound, be aware of how your embouchure feels and then change something to see what happens.
This link has a series of pictures of flute embouchures and there is a wide range there! It is a great place to go if you like visual cues.
http://www.larrykrantz.com/embpic.htm