Posts Tagged ‘audition’

Audition Daily Blog 12

Friday, November 27th, 2015

A little blogging twist today – I’m going to add short notes to this post throughout the day, and publish near the end of the day.

26 November 2015

8:12 am, Central Daylight Time

The day is starting off a little differently than I hoped. The family is still sleeping (good for them!) so I can’t begin practicing full-bore (or even at all) yet. So instead, I’m going to do a little housekeeping (monitoring finances in Quicken) and then study the audition music. Specifically, I want to make a very few notes for each excerpt about what is happening in the opera at the point the excerpt takes place. It might help my playing be more expressive. More angles of familiarity with the music can’t hurt. I hope it will prove a good use of otherwise dead time. (Okay, to be honest, if I were the kind of person who was capable of sleeping in, that might be best for me. But I’m something of a lark; I might lie in bed for a couple hours and just get more anxious.)

10:20 am

Able to get started at 10. Have warmed up. Will now shuffle the excerpts and play through everything while recording.

1:30 pm

It’s working out. I’m up to the part where I “interleave” the excerpts and work on stuff. Have to break to have Thanksgiving meal with family and friends now.

27 November, 9:10 am

Family & friends time made up the rest of the day yesterday. My feeling about yesterday, regarding audition preparation: “not disappointed.”

In the spirit of Thanksgiving (explanation, if you didn’t grow up in this culture*), I will say that, in addition to the blessings of health and family, I am grateful that I have the opportunity to work this hard on music, with such a clear goal and challenge. It’s a good ride.


* I like the idea of, but haven’t researched at all, “wopila,” a celebration of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, precedent to “Thanksgiving” but similar, if what the wikipedia entry linked above suggests is accurate.

 

Audition Daily Blog 11

Wednesday, November 25th, 2015

25 November 2015

It’s as I feared – last night’s late bedtime screwed me today. Forgive my strong-ish language, but I’m pretty frustrated with myself right now. Although it was a short day at my day gig, other events conspired to take up some of the time freed up by the short day.

I took a nap in the afternoon, because I could feel fatigue coming on. But again, other events, and by the time I could cleanly decide to focus on practicing, it was 8:30 pm. And fatigue was returning. I did my best to get through excerpts from Salome, Rosenkavalier, Figaro and the Bach (solo piece), but by the time I tried to work on Falstaff, I could tell that I did not have enough mental energy in me to do anything but frustrate myself.

I figured that if I were to keep going, I would just get angrier and angrier with myself, and so I’ve decided to stop. This basically breaks a streak of “at least” touching each excerpt once per day. I’m sad/angry about that. But better to stop than to make things worse.

The issue this presents is of having enough willpower and determination to put other things aside and focus on the top goal. I won’t go into detail about what all the other things are, but, yes, as my mother-in-law hinted in her comment to last night’s entry, it’s about family and getting my daughter ready for an important trip.

So, family is important. I would be wrong to completely push aside my responsibilities as a parent. But I must learn how to handle and balance all my commitments. I think Mixerman would have some lesson from the guru based on today’s experience.

Well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And there are tons of commitments around Thanksgiving, of course. But I am going to find the right way to balance and manage those. I know that, as a base stance, my wife understands my need to practice, that this audition is important to me, and that she will support a reasonable amount of excusing myself from socializing tomorrow. So it’s going to work out.

Tomorrow’s goals/plan:

  1. warm up (stretching, scales, some bowing)
  2. solo piece – play once. Make notes of what needs attention.
  3. each and every excerpt, random order – play once. Make notes of what needs attention.
  4. Triage the damage: review notes and decide what to work on
  5. break
  6. take all of the pieces in order of “needs most work” and three or four at a time, interleave working on them.
  7. make my way through all the pieces. Or at least work until the rest of the family attempts to force feed me turkey and stuffing.

Audition Daily Blog 10

Tuesday, November 24th, 2015

24 November 2015

A reminder of the ground rules here: I’m allowing myself 5 minutes each day to post something here about my preparation for an audition for the Lyric Opera on November 29. That’s right, these are short, and you only have to suffer through four or maybe five more of them!!

A fun note: comments! I have received a few recently. Bloggers love comments, at least I do. Thank you, commenters!

Today was nearly a disaster. I got home from work and tried to quickly get to practicing. Dinner was called. My daughter’s iCloud account needed attention. I set aside practicing to tend to these things. As computer things are wont to do, they took more time than planned. (Partly that’s me, because I love to solve problems like setting up computer things, so I spend time with them.)

By the time I got back to practicing, it was like 9:30 pm … late … that 10 hours of sleep that the Bulletproof Musician recommends was not looking likely.

I have now wrapped up at 11:18. I did manage to play through– at least once — every excerpt. And some of them got needed attention on various technical bits.

But it’s late, and I’m going to pay for this tomorrow.

My friend Doug Johnson has been doing some tweeting about his preparation. You might enjoy seeing what he has to say as well. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in his practice studio. Not because I want to buzz around and annoy him, but because he’s a really talented player, and I’d like to see how he approaches his practicing. I’ll ask him about it after the auditions are over.

That’s past my five. So I’ll wrap up. Thanks for reading!

Audition Daily Blog 09

Monday, November 23rd, 2015

23 November 2015

A day of very little practicing. An ordinary Monday, true, but for attending MusicNow tonight. That meant that practicing was limited to a few minutes (I think three excerpts, it was a long time ago) in the morning before work, and once through each excerpt tonight, starting at about 9:30 pm.

That late start time meant working with a heavy mute on the entire time, and even with the mute, playing very quietly. There’s a family to be not-kept-up-late after all.

So not the best practice conditions. And I have learned from experience that I tend to take intonation very casually when playing really quietly like I was tonight. So it’s possible that I did myself more harm than good. Or maybe not. It is heartening that I could more or less play each excerpt without doing a dry run first. If I really thought I was doing myself harm, I guess I wouldn’t have done it.

But there’s no control group here, so we will never know with absolute surety.

About that third finger. Some years ago, after doing a week-long course with Dr. Mark Morton, I started using my third finger in place of the fourth finger from about the position of first finger on d on the G string and up. I do think that there are some advantages in terms of hand position. But I have never been diligent about making sure my intonation was up to snuff while doing that. Michael Hovnanian has called me on that a number of times. But this time I’m heeding his advice and I’m going back to a more Simandl-like use of the fourth finger. Habits die hard, but I think my intonation is better for it. When I’m paid to play, I’ll tackle the third finger again.

Time’s up! Off to bed … not that I’m going to get 10 hours, but better 8 than 7.

Audition Daily Blog 08

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015

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 usefulhelpful, 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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Audition Daily Blog 07

Saturday, November 21st, 2015

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.

Audition Daily Blog 06

Saturday, November 21st, 2015

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.

Audition Daily Blog 05

Thursday, November 19th, 2015

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.

Audition Daily Blog 04

Wednesday, November 18th, 2015

18 November 2015

Goals tonight

  • play each excerpt, plus the required solo, at least once
  • try out “interleaved” technique described on Bulletproof Musician
  • don’t stay up late
  • get some laundry started
  • help set up daughter’s new phone

Okay, I typed up those goals before I started practicing (I’m cheating, this will be like oh maybe seven or eight minutes’ worth of writing in total, *gasp*). Who wants to guess what happened?

That’s right, dammit, setting up the phone took WAY too much time. Android. Ick. Although I have decided that my theory about phone operating systems is the same as my theory about Austin Powers movies: whichever one you see first is the one you love, and the others all seem derivative and borderline terrible.

So, since we’re definitely here to keep score:

Play each excerpt: actually accomplished, but at a bare minimum for several

Use the “interleaved” practice schedule: did not do, except by virtue of not working on any one excerpt for more than five minutes or so.

Don’t stay up late: yet to be seen, but it is now 10:23, and once I wrap up this post, off to bed, and all in all that’s not terrible.

Get some laundry started: don’t make me laugh.

Phone: we talked about that already. A grudging victory: I helped, but it cost me.


Bottom line is, tonight actually didn’t suck as a practice session. It could have been much worse, and really given the whole phone thing, it came out okay.

I’m feeling borderline positive. I really do think I’ll do better on the 29th than I did at the CSO audition. There are going to be talented players at this audition, so I am not betting my mortgage on winning, but I know I’ll do better than … okay, enough on that already. Grudge match between me and J.S.B. is on!

I love playing music. Forcing myself to follow through on this audition is bringing back so many skills, I’m really happy about it. Winning the job would be just awesome. So is being able to play at my best, wherever I play.

Time’s up. Good night.


next morning edit: bad news. After publishing this post, I stayed up really late working on the phone. But I was successful. So . . .

 

Audition Daily Blog 03

Tuesday, November 17th, 2015

…in which I quote a tweet by Jeff Gothelf

17 November 2015

It’s just about 9:45 and I’ve finished practicing for the night. I started at about 6 pm when I got home, had a 45-minute break for dinner with the family and now I’m done.

I got through every excerpt and the required solo piece with the following formula (more or less):

  1. play the excerpt note-by-note, watching the electronic tuner for intonation (as well as listening with my ears!), and retrying any shifts that were particularly out-of-tune.
  2. consult my notes from yesterday, and play the excerpt at least once at the same finishing tempo or slightly slower than yesterday.
  3. If all went well in (2), notch the tempo up a beat per minute or maybe two and play it again.
  4. as needed, re-study things that didn’t go well.
  5. repeat 1-4 for all 23 excerpts and the solo piece.

The solo was what really fouled me up at the CSO sub list audition. Look, I’ve been working in a very semi-pro capacity for a lot of years now. I don’t get paid for playing solo pieces, let alone playing solo Bach. They’re pieces written for the cello, an instrument with a much shorter string length and tuned differently. They can be damned hard to play on bass, no matter what Edgar Meyer might make you think. So when it comes time to work on the Bourrees from the third suite, I just plain get frustrated. This animosity I have is getting better, but it is hard to deal with.

Okay, five minutes is up. That went fast. I was gonna totally get into my emotional state, but I guess I won’t.

I promised I would quote a tweet. @jboogie wrote it about writing a book, but I think it’s just perfectly applicable: