Diversions Manifold

This has been an interesting semester of music with the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchesta . When I first came across the programme, my heart sank a little: we were in for a crowd-pleasing semester of cheesy dancy Latin American stuff with minimal musical merit. Well, it certainly pleased the crowds - and, I am glad to say, it won me over, too.  We played seven pieces in all, ranging from Ravel's contemplative Pavane pour un enfant défunt (a Pavane being a dance), through to the highlight of the evening, Danzon 2 by Arthuro Marquéz, all kicked off by Gershwin's inimitable Cuban Overture. As you might guess, there was a lot of rhythm to play, with all the precision and control that that implies. It's very easy to think too much about rhythm, but I certainly had to clarify things in my own mind about how long to play a note, how loudly and with which accents - along, of course, with the basic question of when to play each note. There was a section in Danz

Another semester of orchestral music has drawn to a close with Saturday night's concert of the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra in the Stadthalle. The hall was packed, we played with passion and precision (though not always both at the same time), and the audience was by all accounts happy. It was an unexpectedly relaxed end to an otherwise hectic term - for me, at least. It was presumably much less relaxing for our principal conductor, who was ill over the last few weeks leading up to the main concert and is still reuperating. He had to limit himself to the concerts (in Gernsbach and Leutershausen as well as the Stadhalle itself), so a couple of final rehearsals were cancelled. With those "pre-concerts" being two weeks before the main one, the final weeks were much less packed than usual. Given that the final result was so good,  perhaps the timing was just right to "depressurise" things, keeping us keen and fresh rather than jaded and exhausted

The "Albums of the Year" articles are trickling in, including this one from the Guardian on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. In it, there's a wonderful quote that really hits the mark on how I feel about the album - originally from  Sasha Frere-Jones in the NYT :  "The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of Random Access Memories repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I've ever heard … This record raises a radical question: does good music need to be good?" This hits home on the interplay between composition and production / performance, a wonderfully delicate balance. Of course, a terrible performance can wreck even the best composition - but for me, it's better to find nuggets of a great composition in the rubble of a poor performance than to be able to appreciate an amazing performance of dross. André Rieu and Daft Punk on the same side of the spectrum? Harsh, but one to think abou

Timing in music, comedy and writing is of the essence, so it is ironic that I should appear to be posting this in such a timely fashion after the announcement that a team has managed to reconstruct the sound from the wax disc that recorded Alexander Graham Bell's voice from 1885 . All of a sudden, I have a relevant segué to present my old news in a new, refreshed light. Over the Easter holidays, oh so long ago now, but at least this year still, we managed to park the children with the Großeltern for a happy few hours and to drive to the wholly unremarkable Black Forest town of St. Georgen near Villingen. The town is, sorry to say, not much to look at. But it was the centre of two key industries as they rose and fell in waves; clock making, and record players. I'm not that much of a watch connoisseur, but I have always enjoyed audio and hifi, so when I saw the signs for the Deutsches Phonographisches Museum in St. Georgen , it was always going to be a place to visit.

In the spirit of catching up on some drafts , I felt I had to get this one out sooner rather than even later. The impressions left upon me by Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, though very much attenuated by time, still resonate, amplified a little by completing this post - which is, of course, one of the key points of a blog. It was on the 22nd May 2012 that we left our daughters in the capable hands of Oma and Opa and cycled down to the Stadthalle in the warm evening sunshine to (watch? Hear?) experience the symphony played by the Heidelberg Philharmoniker under the baton (and hair) of  Cornelius Meister  in his final series of concerts before leaving for the richer delights of Vienna. The symphony is an enormous, programme-filling late romantic beast of a piece, very much on the cusp of a new era. Written between 1884 and 1887, when Mahler was hitting his stride and starting to redefine symphonic performance, with Stockhausen and his ilk were not far behind, it feels like th

It's the end of another series of concerts with the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra; one I was very close to skipping entirely. At the end of the previous concert, I'd had enough of orchestra for a while, and overall I was feeling uncomfortably stretched. Orchestra had become another stress raiser rather than reliever and I needed to give myself some breathing space for other things in life (like composing, biking and "just" family, for example). In the end (of the beginning of term), a lack of alternative trombonists meant that I stuck with MFH for this programme, too. Through house searches, potential job offers, overloaded drudgery at work and general family life, I managed to attend most rehearsals - and the three concerts this semester made it all worthwhile. We played in the Neubausaal in Schwäbisch Hall, then at a school concert in the Gymnasium in Neckargemünd and finally in our standard main venue, the Stadthalle in Heidelberg. There was someth

There was an article in the Economist this week that strongly resonated with me. It concerned the "condition" of synaethsesia , whereby the signal from one sense is interpreted by another. The most famous example is that of seeing sound in colours. The Economist article reported a study into how people link taste with sound. This is something that I have long experienced. Whilst I could never claim to be a good taster, whenever I try to describe a taste, it is usually in terms of a graphic equaliser or in the choir voices - soprano, alto, tenor, bass. The research described in the Economist article ascribes particular taste sensations to types of musical sound - bitterness with the higher strings (I can agree with that on so many levels!), vanilla was most associated with the woodwinds - and brass? Well, they got musk, which I don't fully understand. Photo from  Thara M Flickr  page, Creative commons license Not only that, it worked the other way around to

There is an intriguing little phrase I came across in a trombone technique book that hovers in a limbo between right and wrong: "It's not what you play but how you play it" There is a lot to be said for giving your best at all times, no matter what music you have been asked to play. It is a matter of pride, of professionalism, of maturity - of character, too. I can certainly say that I gave my best to (and received a lot back from) playing in a Shropshire brass band, even though I really do not like much of the music we played. However, one cannot really be expected to be able to find one's best when playing the wrong sort of music for you. The talent isn't there, the fluency goes, the "Selbstverständlichkeit" is lost. Asking a striker to play in defence can work, but, if it goes on for too long, his motivation will drop to the extent that he becomes a liability, or he will ask to leave the team. And so I come to PPAPs. PPAPs are the scourge of th

Music purists will tell you that electronic notation in general, and copy-paste in particular, is the scourge of music. Hit the Cntrl-C / Cntrl-V combinations (or their Mac equivalents) and you've increased the length of your piece at no extra cost. Most people would probably want to hear that riff again, anyway. Composers of old didn't have software to facilitate it, so perhaps they had to invest more thought into repetition; but they could equally well pencil in the double bar lines with bracketed ends, likewise at little cost and to the same effect: play that bit again (I think it's cool). Everybody has done it, from Bach (whatever his variant of 'cool' was) to Burt Bacharach. Used by master and novice alike, repetition is not necessarily a reflection of competence; indeed, repetition is a nearly inescapable component of music. Like most of music, though, it is incredibly difficult to do right and at the right time. Context is a key component in any decisio

I play trombone with the Musikfreunde Symphony orchestra in Heidelberg. We rehearse and perform along the university semester cycle, which leads to some intense periods of music; a welcome insight into the world of the musician, without having to be one. This semester we have been working on Dvorak's 9th Symphony, "From the New World", alongside Mussorgsky's "Night on Bare Mountain" and Bruch's Violin Concerto (no use putting any numbers there; he doesn't seem to have written anything else worth performing). We recently had a rehearsal weekend, immersing ourselves in music, and our first two concerts, successfully dispatched in Langenselbold (no, I had no idea, either) and Freiburg. Tomorrow night is our final, crowning concert in the Heidelberg Stadthalle. I want to write a little bit about the Dvorak. For me, it's easy to dismiss - it's popular, for a start, which always makes me suspicious - and even as I tried to disregard its popula

I wish... somebody had taught me how to breath much earlier; how important the body is to playing; that the lips are the gateway to the trombone, but that the work is done much earlier; how important the mind is to playing; how important relaxation is to playing; that the instrument should be brought up to my posture, not the other way around. These things I now realise and know intellectually, but they are not innate. Does it matter? Well, I am where I am with orchestra, and I don't necessarily need to be at a higher level... But I do dream of it sometimes. We can all dream.