Chicago Bass Ensemble

22 November 2015

A few minutes blog, pre-practice. 8:30 am

I’m stalling. I’m avoiding. I’m wishing I didn’t have to devote most of the day to these 25 little bits of music.

What I need to do is practice, again. Go through these 25 things again. Be able to play them as if I were reciting my address, but with more feeling.

What I want to do is sit down and watch the Brazilian Grand Prix race that I have TiVO’d.

What I end up doing is puttering around: filling the humidifiers, helping my wife take in the now-frozen window boxes, cleaning up in the kitchen. I’m being useful, helpful, right? So it can’t be a bad thing that I’m not practicing, because I’m doing stuff that needs doing. Instead of just wasting time watching the TV.

But it’s a full day, and if I don’t get to practicing now–this Sunday morning not even 9 am yet–I will not get to each and every one of those 25 little bastards. And if that doesn’t happen, my guilt will mount. No matter how many frozen-shut car doors I help with, or freshly-made scones (yes, my wife made scones) I properly package and put in the freezer. Or minutes of blogging I do. See ya later today (below).

 A mostly pre-practice minute. 12:30 pm

Haven’t practiced much yet. WHAT?! Went to the church service my daughter is singing in. That’s familial duty, and it’s important. But in the car ride to get there, I looked over the excerpts and prioritized what I’m going to work on. And work starts now.

Post (or mid-) practice. 5 pm

I say “or mid” because, heck, it’s 5 pm. I’ve got at least 3 more hours in the day. Why not keep going? I have gotten through all of the 25, plus the solo piece. I prioritized, I varied, I (sort of) interleaved (see the earlier post); I’m doing the right things, I think. And generally, my playing is showing it. I am making progress.

One of the things I’m doing, more successfully now than I was even two weeks ago, is practicing slowly. I always think of my friend Marcus “Pops” Barron (guitar) when I do this. You have to practice slowly. Under tempo. And gradually get up to tempo. One metronome click at a time.

This is devastatingly concentration- and willpower-intensive. Especially if you have a metronome capable of incrementing in 1 bpm increments (unlike the varying 2 to 6 bpm increments on the old-fashioned metronomes). It takes tremendous will to NOT just barrel ahead to the performance tempo.

But as my daughter has reminded me, “practice makes permanent.” So better to make permanent the right fingering, the accurate shift, the correct subdivision of the beat, rather than the emotional and “but it’s more fun” method of just ripping ahead and saying that you’ll fix problems later. When is later?

Well, that’s my five minutes. Plus a minute, plus five minutes, all earlier in the day. What looked like a squandered opportunity, well, I didn’t completely recover it (what if I had starting practicing in earnest at 8:45 am), but I didn’t completely waste the day. (I admit that it helped that we as a family decided not to go to a friend’s party 90 minutes ago.)

So, if I do some more practice tonight, I may write a supplemental post at the very end of the day. Meanwhile, this is it.

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21 November 2015 #2

For some reason, while I was practicing this late afternoon, I got the idea that it would be fun to share recordings of my playing with you, my loyal reader. So I give you two of the excerpts which are consuming so much of my time and energy lately. From Wagner’s Die Walkure and Verdi’s Falstaff. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do!

Now, how it’s going today: fine. Making progress. Not a lot to report that’s new in the way of emotional upheaval or fantastic progress, nor is there lack of progress. Just pluggin’ along. Over the course of the day, I made it through every excerpt at least once. Usually played through each several times before moving on; and often worked on some trouble spots.

I did have a dream last night that I had been hired to play one opera with Lyric. And then in the same dream I was going to play with another orchestra–maybe it was the CSO, but after arriving at the hall, I went back to my car to find it had been towed for parking in a no parking during rush hour zone.

Mild stress nightmare stuff. Maybe there will be more to come in the next week. Tomorrow marks one week to the audition.

21 November 2015 #1

Those of you who are very astute, extremely interested, or bored beyond belief and have ended up here will notice that there was no daily post yesterday.

I started in on the routine — tune up, warm up with some scales, play the required solo piece, go through the excerpts — and pretty promptly got frustrated and tired. So I gave myself the night off.

I continue to be amused that my post on searching for a car continues to be among the most popular on this blog. I guess that’s what people are actually interested in.

Just a moment of pre-practice angst. What do I do to make practicing fun again? Hey, even as I ask the question, my mood is brightening . . .

19 November 2015

The answer to the above question turned out be “have some dinner.”

Probably about 90 minutes practice tonight, broken into two segments by some errands. I’m very tired–as you know from last night’s blog post, I was up too late wrestling with an android phone. No matter. I realized the problem and decided on a very low-key practice routine today.

I have half-sheets of paper for each excerpt on which I make notes: the tempo I can play it at, which shift I need to work on the next time I’m practicing, that sort of thing. Tonight I shuffled up these note papers, and then went through them. The represented excerpt I played just a few times (or once only for the longer ones) with maybe a little ‘refreshing’ of a section or a shift before playing or after, or both.

This practice routine simulates the actual audition (especially if one commits to playing the excerpt before working on anything). Of course, I’m not at tempo on many of these. On other nights, I would have tried to bump up the tempo on a second run-through of each excerpt, but tonight was not the night for that.

I’m feeling mellow. Not overly confident and aggressive, but also at peace and not un-confident. I don’t have a lot of time left to prepare, and I’ll reach whatever level I reach. I need to be steady and constant. I also need to be careful that the twinges in my thumb and forearm (esp. left side) don’t develop into something nasty. So tonight (it’s now 10 pm central) will NOT be a late night like last night.

There. That’s my five (actually six, plus the three sentences I wrote before practicing) minutes.