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More practising notes

I’m still sticking to my practice schedule:

  • 20 minutes of a scale, though now I’m playing with a metronome, which is really helping a lot with my rhythm, even when I’m playing other stuff without the metronome (many thanks to my teacher for that advice!).  How To Practise has posted a great list of reasons to play scales, BTW.
  • 20 minutes of my current study piece, which is currently the sarabande from Bach’s G Major suite — a serious stretch at the moment, but it feels like it’s getting somewhere. The rhythm is the tricky bit (see: sudden interest in using the metronome all the time).
  • 20 minutes on a new piece that varies at least week-by-week, and now sometimes from day to day, to try to improve my sight-reading.  This really seems to have helped!  Yesterday I looked at the bass part for #6 from Purcell’s Sonatas in IV Parts for the first time.  It’s really simple, just five bars long, repeated, in B-flat major (though the facsimile edition confused me by using three flat symbols — one for each of the B-flats! — though actually it’s presumably G minor anyway), but would have taken a while for me to piece together even back in March.  This time, I played it through passably on the first pass and was entirely comfortable with rhythm, phrasing, and intonation after 15 minutes.  A small achievement, but it felt great!

Now if only I could find a way to play more than one hour a day…

Posted 02 June 2009 † Giles § Cello practice ‡ Comments (1) °

Linn Records - high quality music downloads

We were looking at the website of the Retrospect Ensemble (previously known as the King’s Consort) and noticed that their recordings are to be published by Linn Records, a Glasgow-based record label.

It looks like Linn publish some great artists as well as Retrospect, but what’s particularly exciting is that they offer much higher-quality downloadable music than any other label I’ve seen.  If you’re like me, you’ve been resistant to buying downloadable music because of the low sound quality.  It’s always stored in MP3 format, which is lower quality than CDs, so it makes more sense to buy CDs — and then if you want the convenience of keeping the music on a computer, you can copy them over using a CD-quality “lossless” format like FLAC.

Linn make this messing around with bits of plastic unnecessary.  They offer not only MP3s, but (for a small premium) downloads of FLAC or lossless WMA recordings.  But the icing on the cake is that for a bit more — quite a bit more, to be honest — they sell what they call “studio master” quality downloads (24 bit, 88kHz), which are even higher quality than normal CDs (about the same as SACD, maybe slightly higher).

We’ve bought Retrospect’s recording of Purcell’s Sonatas in IV parts in full Studio Master FLAC quality, and it’s gorgeous, worth every penny.  So now the only thing limiting our record collection is our internet connection and our bank balance…

Posted 02 June 2009 † Giles § Publishers § Recorded music ‡ Comments (0) °

The 2009 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music (London)

The 2009 London Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music is about to start; it runs May 14-23, and the venues are St. John’s, Smith Square and Westminster Abbey. Information and booking here. We’ll definitely be attending some of the concerts!

Posted 13 May 2009 † Lola § Events ‡ Comments (0) °

Jordi Savall

Breathtaking Jordi Savall at the Wigmore Hall this evening. We (all - the entire hall) left speechless and with red hands from clapping so much. Full stop.

Posted 09 May 2009 † Lola § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Wedding ceremony music

This is a “timed” post: if all goes well, it will automatically appear shortly after we get married. 

I thought it would be nice to share the programme of music we’re using for our wedding — all Baroque, of course!

Arrival of the Bride

Bach: Cantata, BWV 207a, 1st Movement, March

A Welcome from the Registrar

Purcell: “Welcome to all the Pleasures”, Excerpt I

The Declaration; “I will”

Corelli: Opus 2, No. 12: Ciacona

“I take thee” – “You may kiss the Bride”

Handel: Violin Sonata in D Major, 2nd Movement, Allegro

Next comes the signing of the register, which will take between 5 and 10 minutes. Some of the following pieces will play during this time:

Couperin: “Les Baricades Misterieuses”
Lully: Passacaglia (from “Armide”)
Purcell: “Welcome to all the Pleasures”, Excerpt II
Vivaldi: Concerto in G Major, 1st Movement, Allegro

The Exit of the Bride and Groom

Corelli: Concerto Grosso, op. 6 No. 4

Posted 02 May 2009 † Giles § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (3) °

We’re coming back soon, honest!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently!  It’s because the two authors of this blog will be becoming Mr and Mrs Baroque Project this coming Saturday, and planning/organising the whole thing has sapped valuable blogging energy.

We have lots of ideas for posts, and should be back up and running late next week.

Posted 30 April 2009 † Giles § Admin ‡ Comments (1) °

The Epigonion

Something (very) pre-Baroque: 

Powerful grid computing has revived a stringed musical instrument that was last played in ancient Greece,  Italian researchers announced at a recent conference in Catania, Sicily.

Called an epigonion after the 6th century B.C. musician Epigonus of Ambracia, the instrument was somewhat similar to a modern harp.

The researchers’ website has a page with samples of various pieces of music played both on their computer models of the instrument and on reconstructions.  It has a really beautiful sound.

(Thanks to @stuartweber, who twittered about the article, and to @baryla for finding the sample page!)

Posted 25 March 2009 † Giles § Musical instruments ‡ Comments (0) °

Things I learned from Twitter search

If you search for something on Twitter, you get the option to subscribe to an RSS feed for that search term — which means that you can get alerted every time someone mentions something on Twitter.  This can be fun; here’s what I’ve learned:

  • Lots of people Twitter every piece of music they listen to.  I’m surprised anyone reads  to their Twitter streams…
  • Welsh people really do call each other “boy bach”.
  • Vivaldi is even more popular than you’d think, and a lot of people regard his music as relaxing.  Sigh.
  • There is a place in Oklahoma called Purcell, and people go on about it quite a lot.
  • There is an athlete called Susan Kuijken.  I don’t know if she’s related to Sigiswald.
  • Bach’s Cello Suites are probably his most popular works.  Good, they should be :-)
  • There’s a large number of people who think that “lully” is a cute abbreviation for “lovely”…
  • American people often pronounce “baroque” as “ba-roak” — which sounds odd to me, but makes just as much sense as the English “ba-rock” (especially given that the root is in Portuguese, where I imagine the sound of the “o” in barocco would have been halfway between our long and short “o” sounds).  On the other hand, if I read the phrase “if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it” one more time I will start screaming…
Posted 23 March 2009 † Giles § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (6) °

Handel’s operas

Nicholas Kenyon has a great article in last Friday’s Guardian about the slow revival of Handel’s operas since the 1920s, after their near abandonment just before his death:

They were thought impractical, trapped in the outdated form of the opera seria. Only in the 20th century did the German Handel revival crank into gear with versions that transposed voices, made cuts and alterations. Rather like Raymond Leppard’s much-edited versions of Monteverdi, they began to demonstrate the power and impact of the drama. Even so, when we celebrated the last joint anniversary of Handel and Purcell half a century ago, their music-dramas weren’t a feature of any major opera company’s repertory.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

Posted 12 March 2009 † Giles § Heard around the Net ‡ Comments (0) °

Learning to practise

This post is a bit off-topic and non-Baroque, and is doubtless old hat for experienced muscians, but might be interesting for fellow adult learners of the cello, especially anyone who’s found themselves stuck after a year or so.

I’ve been learning the cello for 16 months now, and had recently reached one of those irritating blocking points, where I seemed to have stopped improving — and sometimes felt I was getting worse!  It was obviously time to do something about the way I was practising.

Last Christmas, Lola got me a copy of Maurice Gendron’s The Art of Playing the Cello.  It’s a slim book, but quite forbidding for less-experienced players.  However,  it looked like a good resource for ideas, and on delving in I found a section on daily practice.  Specifically, it explains how to divide up your five hours of daily practice.

Gulp.

Did I mention it was a forbidding book?  Five hours a day is doubtless a good target if you’re studying full time, but it’s not something I could manage as a hobbyist, however much I might want to.

But after ignoring the total time he was talking about, I realised there was something there I could borrow and build into my own 60-90 minute dailyish practice sessions.  He suggests dividing up the five hours into four 75-minute sections:

  1. Scales
  2. A study
  3. A movement from a concerto
  4. Recapitulation of whatever what giving trouble in the first three.

Structuring the practice like that, but with smaller time-slices, sounded emininently doable.  So over the last week, I’ve switched to:

  1. 20 minutes working on one scale/arpeggio pair from the ABRSM Grade 3/4 exams, changing which one daily.
  2. 20 minutes on one of the study pieces that my teacher has asked me to look at.  We normally have two or three underway, so I spend one or two sessions a week on each.  These shorter, focused sessions seem to help me learn considerably more than the unstructured studying I was doing before; perhaps the warmup playing the scales is helping too.
  3. 20 minutes on a piece that I plan to change each week, to (a) work on my sight-reading and (b) to play things that I want to play rather than just studies.  To keep things easy, I kicked this off with a decidedly non-Baroque piece; the vocal line to the Beatles’ Yesterday, taken from this book.  It’s easy to read, and it was fun working out the fingering — some bits were easiest with fifth position, which I rarely use even in studies.
  4. Whatever time I have left recapitulating or (sometimes) just improvising a bit.

I don’t know whether it’s just me, or just chance, or just where I am in my learning process, but this has turbo-charged things; it feels like I’ve learned more in the last week than in the previous ten.  Let’s see how it stands up over the next few months!

Posted 12 March 2009 † Giles § Cello practice ‡ Comments (11) °