Lip Training

As part of my new practice schedule I am playing the bassoon twice a day. This is to strengthen my lip muscles. They need to be stronger if I am to play in an amateur concert in September. The effort feels more like sport than music as as I play my lips become feebler and feebler and feebler until eventually they can no longer clasp the reed. The pressure of my breath forces them apart. I feel much the same sensation when I am in the gymn. On the weight machines I do reps until my muscles just won't take any more. It is the same principle with bassoon practice and all this endeavour has a goal in sight. Until I build up more strength I won't have the ability to loosen and tighten my embouchure at will and, if you want to control your intonation or dynamics, you need that control. My current sound is pretty crude. The intonation is wild and my control of dynamics is slight. My sound has been likened to a fog horn. Until such time as my lips are stronger and more agile and more flexible I am going to sound pretty dreadful. I just have to be patient. With steady practice that strength will return and once again I will be able to express myself musically through my bassoon.

Bank Holiday Weekend

Perhaps Gardener's Question Time had a subliminal effect on me but when I did get up today I went out to the back garden to fight the lawn. I call it a lawn but it looks more like a meadow. I have not mowed it this year and the grass must be about a foot high. After wrestling with the shears I clipped about a third of the lawn before I gave up on the slender pretext that it is better to stop while you are still enjoying yourself. Then you will want to go back. That was my logic for leaving the job part done. I doubt I will be able to get any more done tomorrow as the forecast is for rain. Any excuse. The flower beds look suspiciously full of nettles though there is a flourishing mahonia at the back of the house. That and the crab apple tree are thriving well. I think there is a virbunum hiding behind the nettles. I expect that is well but I am not so sure that the lavender bushes are prospering. Their bed has been overtaken by weeds.

As you may have gathered I am not the most conscientious gardener but my front garden does not look that bad at the moment. True there are low lying weeds but the rhododendron bushes are happy, the pansies are in flower and the box is in vigorous leaf.

Why I love and play the bassoon

The bassoon is a great instrument. It plays solo at the start of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It plays the Grandfather in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. It stars in the Hall of the Mountain King in Grieg's Peer Gynt. The bassoon can play tenor in the woodwind choir but it can also play bass. It is beautiful instrument to look at. Mine, like many, is made of maple wood, the keys are silver-plate but there are reasons why the world is not awash with bassoon players.

The first problem is the price of the instrument. Bassoons are made by hand so they are expensive. They are big. The total length of the tube is eight feet. It is pretty heavy and it is too big to be played by small children. I was fourteen when I took it up and my hands were only just big enough. The instrument in its case weighs 14 pounds. I carry it on my back with rucksack-style straps. The instrument is also demanding to play. It puts a lot of strain on the lips muscles. As I am returning to play my embouchure is weak and I can only play for five to ten minutes at a time. As I don't have much strength in my lips muscles I have very little control over intonation and my notes sounds horribly out of tune.

However if you are able to live with the disadvantages of the instrument you'll find yourself much more popular than you would be say you were a flautist. Flautists and clarinetists are two a penny but bass players are rarer. So, if you want ensemble work, play a bass instrument.

I am going to have to get back into practice as I have committed myself to playing in a concert staged by members of the forum of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. I am glad that I have a goal to aim at. I am planning to start lessons with a new bassoon teacher and it will be nice to tell her that I have to get better because I am going to be performing shortly with an amateur ensemble.

Kodaly and Music Education

Many moons ago I went along to a Kodaly class in musicianship. It took place in a girl's prep school in Kensington. Princess Diana was a former pupil. I can't quite remember why I didn't finish the course. I have started and stopped so many courses I lose track. Illness is the most likely cause. However there I met an elderly Hungarian woman who actually knew Kodaly, composer of the Harry Janos Suite. I loved listening to Harry Janos as a child and to meet someone who knew the composer is really rather special.

Anyhow I now have plans to resume my studies of Kodaly's system of music education. Kodaly placed a lot of emphasis on choral musicianship. You have to sing using sol-fa and there is a lot of emphasis on sight-singing and singing in parts. I am hoping all this will help with my harmony studies.

I got the introduction to the woman running the class via a contact from the forum of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Such is the nature of the internet. So I will be going to this class in Cambridge next month.

Another spin-off from the forum is that I am going to take part in a forum concert. I have committed myself to playing the bassoon so I shall have to start practicing in earnest to get my embouchure back into condition. I have missed out on getting a spot to perform solo though I am number one on the reserve list so I may get the chance to perform on the piano. It is all rather exciting.

I know for a lot of people music is something they make in private but I like playing with other people. And it will be fun playing in the forum concert. All the people there I only know by the monikers and their forum postings. It will be strange to meet them in the flesh. I feel I already know some of them already and they will have formed impressions of me based on my published posts.

New Plans

Following a discussion with a trusted adviser I decided to look for IT exams which I could enter with the same ease as I could enter in the music world. The great thing about music exams is that you can sit them in any one of three periods each year. You choose the time. That is great for me as I am of fitful health. I just don't thrive on academic courses which stick rigidly to terms which start in the autumn and finish in the summer. My illness does not respect academic timetables so either I give up or I find a work around and I think I have found a couple of solutions.

The best one is offered by the British Computer Society. The BCS offers a certificate which is equivalent to half and HND and a diploma which is equivalent to a full HND. The HND was the qualification I was studying for at Anglia. BCS exams happen twice a year so I can defer sitting an exam if I fall ill. I already have some of the set texts. If I want to study the internet I'll have to do the diploma.

The other possibility - and perhaps a complementary option rather than an alternative - is to take the Microsoft option and do a tech support exam. The syllabus doesn't look too onerous.

All this would mean studying at home but I am no stranger to that. At least I'll save on train fares and course fees. I worked it out. If I do 20 hours studying a week I can cover the BCS certificate syllabus in 21 weeks. All that assumes the BCS is realistic when it gives an estimate of how many study hours are required. Twenty hours of study leaves me time to do important things like music and dog walking and, if I am conscientious, going to the gymn.

What were your experiences of school music?

That's the question I posed on the forum of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and the post is now top of the Adult learners Forum. Twenty two people have replied in two days. They have recounted tales of school music - some happy, some had - and 304 people have viewed these stories. This topic is now so hot that it has a red little folder beside it. It has only been up for three days and I think it has more mileage in it yet. I have made other postings before now but none have attracted this kind of attention before. I think people like having the chance to opine about their childhood. They feel deeply about their musical education but rarely get the chance to vent their thoughts and feelings and they rarely find an audience which is actually interested in experiences that occurred many years ago.

It is a bit of a cop out to borrow one posting from one forum to post it onto another but the audiences are slightly different so here goes. Here is my call for reminiscences.

What was your school musical department like? I ask this because the youngsters on the forum are comparing notes on their school musical departments. Their posts make interesting reading, so much so that I thought it might be nice were us adult learners to compare notes on our memories of school music.

I may as well kick off. In infant school I was deeply disappointed not to be selected for my school choir. I moved to a different school in Scotland. We were taught the recorder and a lot of solfa. I was offered the chance to learn the violin with a peripatetic teacher. I didn't like the teacher so instead I opted for the flute. My flute teacher used to do arrangements of musicals for flutes and clarinets but the music-making was not limited to the instrumentalists. Classes and year groups used to put on regular shows. This was all the work of our music teacher Mrs Allen who used to tour the local primary schools. I flunked an audition for a regional music school and was hugely disappointed.

Secondary school brought me into contact with the school orchestra. We played lots of orchestral classics including the 1812 and Pictures for an exhibition. There were lots of choral shows too such as Noyes Fludde and Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat. The academic side of school music was very easy for me as I had a lot of private music lessons. I had passed grade 5 theory by the time I was 12 and I could have easily handled a more advanced curriculum but my school was comprehensive and children were not allowed to skip years. By this point I was being taught at the junior department of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama so O Grade music was a bit of a doss. We certainly did not do any composition in those days and music technology may have existed for Stockhausen but it certainly did not exist in schools in my day. I decided that there were too many good flautists around so I asked if I could play the bassoon and lo and behold a Strathclyde Regional Council bassoon was lent to me.

At the time school music felt very constricting because I could have handled more advanced work but in retrospect I think my teachers did pretty well. They were dedicated and all my peers passed their Music O Grade exam. There was never any discipline problem in my music class. That wasn't the case with all subjects in my school but in music all of us wanted to work.

I am deeply envious of the chances today's young people have to do composition and music tech but I wonder if today's school kids are as well drilled as we were when it came to aural and singing.

What experiences do other people have?

Withdrawing from Anglia Ruskin

I have decided to withdraw from my course at Anglia Ruskin. I found the place too disorganised for me. I didn't know when I was supposed to hand in my assignments and the assignments were so woolly I didn't know what was been assessed. The teaching was uninspired. I have only got so much money and I don't want to spend it on a course in which I don't feel confidence. The maths teaching was fine but I didn't go there to learn maths. I went there to learn web design and the lecturer there stopped teaching half way through the course on the grounds that we should be doing our studies. Quite what I was paying the fees for I don't know. I was offered the chance to move onto an MSc course but I had misgivings about the nature of the course. It was called new media technology and it focused on audio visual material. I thought it looked crashingly dull and I could not see what it would lead to in career terms.

I've decided that I am better off studying at home and doing the odd exam now and then just as I did with music theory. In that I got 98%. Instinct tells me that that is the right way to go.

...And it is cheaper on the pocket. No more £9 return train fares to Cambridge.

Mixed Feelings

I have very mixed feelings about my internet course at Anglia. By far and away the hardest and most time consuming element has been the maths course. I was not expecting to do maths and I found it really hard. It has been like returning to a skilled and vigorous sport, a sport which I never much enjoyed. The web design course has been a real disappointment. It has been taught by a jaded lecturer - his choice of adjective, not mine. I haven't learned anything new from him at all. I am still pondering the wisdom of switching to the MSc course. I have not really decided yet.

I did find out that the maths teacher was approaching 30. I would be practically cradle robbing if I were to pursue him. Still his good figure did provide me with some distractions during the maths class.

Harmonic delights

I have started doing exercises in my new music theory workbook. It is very satisfying. What I have to do is to come up with the chords to accompany a melody. I have a limited set of chords to play with and I am making pains to not fall back on the usual candidates. By selecting the less common chords you get some pleasing sonorities which can work rather well. They do not always work well in sequence but when they do it is most pleasing. I play my harmonised melody again and again proud that the chords were my creation.

Harmony study is of course a big skive. I do not have to do it. I really should be doing my university assignments and I ought to be revising for my maths test but it is so much more pleasing to play around with sound.

Revising the classics

One of the nice things about my degree discipline is that the books do not date. I did English at university and the books I have from that era are as valid now as they were back then. Technical books seem to be out of date even before they are published but there is something timeless about a good classic. From time to time I like to reread the canon. There are things I notice now that I overlooked when I was younger.

Today I picked on a Colombian book, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I did not think I remembered any of it but the moment I read the first line the memories came flooding back. That's me happy for a week or so. I wish my course books at Anglia Ruskin had that same classic value.

Calculus Torture

I did do A level Maths many years ago but I am damned if I can remember any calculus and that was the topic of today's Maths class. I found it difficult to concentrate on the presentation partly because the lecturer is good looking and partly because I don't really see the point of me studying maths. I'm not going to use much of it because much of the maths we are doing is not relevant to computer science. I find it hard to overcome my resistance to the subject. However I tried very hard to follow the logic of this gorgeous teacher. He did do provocative things like pull off a top, thus ruckling up his t shirt and revealing his torso. I mean what is a girl supposed to think?

Going Stale

I began studying my grade 7 piano exam pieces back in the autumn. I was under the impression that I was going to do the exam in June this year only my piano teacher decided that it would be better to do the exam in the autumn. That means I would have had to live with the same pieces for a year and that gets boring. I've noticed that I play my blues improvisation book with much more gusto than I do when I try to play my exam pieces. It is difficult because in technical terms my exam pieces are not performance ready and part of me thinks if only I were to go on polishing them they would come right but the rebellious side of me just wants a break. I WANT NEW MUSIC!!! I shall tell my piano teacher this at my next lesson and I'll see what he has to say.

Sweet Harmony

When I was a kid I used to marvel at the way my class music teachers used to be able to play any tune on the piano. They could play the latest pop hits complete with harmony and I used to marvel at that and wish I could do that some day. I took a longish break from music but I have come back to it now and I have finally reached the stage at which I am required to harmonise simple melodies.

It is a laborious process. The harmony book I am using requires you to go through a whole series of steps. I won't regale you with them all. I guess with practice these steps become internalised but to begin with you have to make each step explicit. I have taken notes on how to write harmony. The next step is to try it out for real. I expect that to be a highly pleasing activity. I just love making sounds.

I'm also having a whale of a time with my new book on improvising piano blues. It is tricky maintaining a left-hand bass pattern while improvising over the top of it with the right-hand but I just imagine myself on Later with Jools Holland and I am away.

Changing direction

I am faced with a decision. I could stick on my HND course in Internet Technology or alternatively I could do a MSc course in New Media Technology. It is a new course so I expect a certain number of teething problems but for me the big advantage is that the MSc course done part-time would last two years. The HND course done part-time would last four years and after four years I would come out with a qualification inferior to my first degree and to an MSc.

These are the options in the MSc:

1. Audio visual classification
2. Applications of MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21
3. Distribution and security
4. Internet infrastructure for commerce
5. High definition technology
6. Encryption techniques for audio visual data
7. Commercial software for Media Technology applications.

Sounds pretty techy, doesn't it? These courses are options. I wouldn't do them all.

There is clearly a certain amount of internal politics within the department. Certain staff members are bad-mouthing this course but I think they have an axe to grind and I am not sure how much weight I should give to their words. Really I have to see beyond the personality issues and decide whether this course is right for me.

First Blow

I did it. I have had a five-minute practice on my bassoon. By the end of the session my lips were exhausted. The bassoon has a double reed - two pieces of cane bound together. You have to blow down this reed and the pressure on the lip muscles is immense. Beginners (and restarters) can only manage to play for a few minutes at a time because their embouchure muscles are so weak and underdeveloped. However with practice my embouchure will gain strength and I will have the stamina to play for longer stretches. My lip muscles may have been weak but my fingers knew where to go to play the notes. I haven't forgotten the fingering in the lower registers. That is good. With persistence I should be able to develop good technique and musicianship. That will open the door to ensemble work, a pleasurable past time indeed.