The Week Ahead

This week is looking pretty typical in terms of what I need to do, at least musically.

I'm teaching tonight and tomorrow night. I've done most of the preparation for that, but need to remember to bring music with me for my students. I'll be leaving home at 2pm each day and spending a lot of time on public transport... I usually use this time to read. Right now the important reading is all to do with psalmody and church music. I had rather hoped to have finished my psalmody-related reading by now and be well into writing workshop outlines, but the last few weeks I've been flagging.

Wednesday night there will be a London Gallery Quire rehearsal. Some of the music is a bit technically challenging on the serpent so I need to take some time to look at it.

Thursday night Brigantia are rehearsing at my place, and I need to practise that music beforehand, too. I also need to spend a significant amount of time on programme notes and organisational aspects of our concert on 11th July. It would be nice to get a gallery up on the website, too, but I don't think that's going to be realistic this week.

Friday night I am taking the choir rehearsal at St Andrew's, and I will need to learn the hymns well enough to accompany. I also want to find recordings of some of the pieces for a joint Evensong on 27th June at which we've been invited sing. We're a small choir and don't usually have all four parts at rehearsals, and it can be disorienting to suddenly have whole sections of tenor and alto rather than one each, and any bass part at all. Since I haven't been taking the choir rehearsals for very long, I don't even know what the facilities are like for listening to a CD. This could be a challenge.

I've been working on a piece for a competition which has a deadline of 30th June. Late last week it became clear that I'd managed to go onto the wrong track and was writing something that wouldn't really be suitable for the terms of the competition, so I went right back to the drawing board, decided to ditch the organ for now and stick to SATB a capella... I found a new text, but alas no English translation that is in the public domain in this country, so ended up commissioning someone else to make a new one for me. I ought to try and have at least a rough draft by the end of this week.

In addition to that, there is a final recital at Trinity College of Music that I'd like to attend, I need to reschedule a dentist appointment (cancelled this morning due to transport difficulties), I have two peer support meetings and one project planning meeting, perhaps some other meetings getting in there as well and a physiotherapy appointment on Friday afternoon. Errands need to get a look-in, too.

I'll try and report back later in the week with how I'm getting on...

Improvable.

Good rehearsal today with the other members of the Brigantia Consort -- we looked at some new repertoire, rehearsed stuff we've been working on for performance probably this summer, and did some improvisation.

We recorded some of the rehearsal, and it was interesting to hear the results. Two things, to my mind, really stood out.

The first is that we do talk rather a lot between playing. Of course this is necessary to an extent and good conversations about the music now can make for much less work later on.

Some of the talking, I think, is because we don't have fixed repertoire, very tight limits on rehearsal time or any concrete engagement to work toward. We have some idea where we're going, but because there isn't a huge amount of urgency in getting there we have the flexibility to take the time to discuss things properly. Another factor is that as our instrumentation is non-standard (various combinations of voice/recorder, violin/recorder, horn/serpent/voice) and our repertoire rather eclectic we do have to approach each work from a few different angles. Baroque bow or modern? Vibrato or not? Should that line be played on the recorder, or sung on a relevant syllable? Do we need to scratch this arrangement and write our own, or can we swap the voices around to make it work better? Are the instruments being faithful to the stresses of the language if there are words? That does take a lot of talking through!

It's a great luxury to have rehearsals that are laid back enough that we can burst out laughing, explain things in detail or go off on the occasional tangent; on the whole I think we are reasonably focused. But listening to a recording, it's amazing just how much chattering we do, and how little playing. Perhaps we would be better off making more notes and fewer words.

The second thing, and one we all noticed, is that the improvisation was superior to playing from sheet music in just about every way. It wasn't just that we had warmed up by then; if anything I was getting tired, mentally if not physically, from lots and lots of C basso transposition. It is partly that improvising freely as we did today gives us the option to play to our strengths and avoid technically challenging passages. The biggest difference, though, is that without the dots in front of us we are forced to listen. Intonation and timing immediately improve, because we're not worried about playing or singing a "wrong" note, but instead listening to one another and really playing together, really creating something that none of us could create on our own.

We are learning what we need to do to rehearse better. As far as focus and use of time are concerned, we've started jotting down a rehearsal plan at the beginning of every session. That sounds like an obvious thing, but most of my chamber rehearsals have had such a limited repertoire that the schedule would sort itself out quite simply, and most larger ensembles have been led and planned by someone other than me. In this group we do need to spend time surveying repertoire together, sight-reading together, and improvising. Each having more than one possible instrument, and having to adapt our repertoire accordingly, also requires a different sort of rehearsal than just going in and learning the music. There are also administrative tasks, and we're still figuring out who is best in which role as far as paperwork is concerned. In order to keep track of all this I think the best thing is going to be to start a notebook, much as I have for each of my music students, and jot down not only a plan for each rehearsal but any comments on pieces and secretarial tasks.

The other thing I think will be useful is to start each rehearsal differently. Today we started by singing a piece we know reasonably well, then launched straight into sight-reading. It was useful, but given how much the improvisation changed our playing, I think it would be good to incorporate that into the beginning of the rehearsal. I know that with choirs and other larger ensembles, some sort of warm-up routine does seem to make a difference not only with the quality of each individual's playing and singing but with people's ability to listen to one another. It would make sense, then, rather than just doing our individual instrumental warm-ups (if any) and having a quick tune, to do some kind of communal warm-up. I think this will need to be fairly flexible but it would make sense for it to include some sort of improvisation.

Final stretch

Over a month since posting, again!

I have my end-of-degree recital on Tuesday next week. That's, er, a week from today.

Right now, it's all about the practising. And the programme notes... sadly I'm not allowed to have a ghost writer for my programme notes!

I'm hoping to get back to writing some more here when I have recovered from the recital.

Monday again...

...and I'm having "one of those days". I woke up with my head full of a bad cold, dithered around far too long before leaving the flat, only to get to Trinity and find no practise rooms until later in the day than I'd planned to stay, and my arranging class cancelled.

I don't want to cancel my teaching, but if my voice continues to get worse and my general feeling of wooziness does not abate, I will have to. It's just a cold and it will run its course, but I'm unlikely to teach well in this state.

I have a meeting here at 2pm, after which I need to get going if I'm teaching this evening. In the meantime I am keeping my fluid intake up and trying to get some deskwork done.

One of the more difficult issues about being a freelancer in any field is managing the huge amount of discretionary time available. As a music student I have about eight and a half hours of actual classes per week. This week I only have six hours of rehearsal with other people planned, and my horn lesson. That still only comes to fifteen and a half contact hours. So, how do I spend my time?

If I'm not careful, the answer to that can be "looking at cat pictures on the internet." Let's re-phrase the question: How would I ideally spend my time?

The first and most important thing is that I practise every day. At the moment, that means 'every weekday': I do not have time to play the horn on Sundays when I am teaching all day long (though I do try to do some mouthpiece work), and I opt to take Saturdays as a rest day. Practising can eat anywhere from two to six hours in a day. In an ideal world I would get in at 8am every weekday to play for two hours, then schedule another session or two later in the day around other appointments. Happily, I do often manage the 8am session... what happens later depends on what else is going on. Ideally I'd be practising 24 hours a week.

I try to spend some time every day composing. This isn't as firm a habit for me as practising, sadly, and it gets dropped a lot. But in an ideal world, I'd spend an hour a day drawing dots on blank manuscript paper. There isn't a way to get better at this without doing it. Call it five hours a week.

For health reasons I have to spend around 45 minutes a day doing physio exercises. If I don't do them, I end up in pain, so they are really non-optional. I consider them part of my workday, partly because playing the horn brings with it certain physical challenges, and partly because of timing issues: there isn't really a sensible way for me to do the physio at home before I leave in the morning if I'm going to make my 8am practise slot, and leaving it for the evening, before I go to bed, also doesn't work well for me. Call that five hours a week, because by the time I've put away whatever else I'm doing it pretty much takes that long.

I do have to spend some time on deskwork: co-ordinating rehearsals and concerts is often easier by e-mail, and there is all the paperwork detritus of each project in which I participate, plus all the normal trappings of any life: banking, medical appointments and the like. I would get a lot less done if I didn't have internet access at home and at Trinity. I try to limit my workday internet time to around an hour a day, but what usually happens is that things pile up and then get done in one or two sessions over the course of the week... call it six hours a week.

Running various errands usually eats up an hour or two on some weekday, as well. I try to blog once a week. Call that three hours a week, which is probably skimpy, but I don't always manage to blog every week.

That's 43 hours a week of work to be done during discretionary time on weekdays, in my imaginary ideal world. It doesn't include meeting with people to discuss projects, ad-hoc conversations in hallways, travel to and from rehearsals, or lunch. It doesn't include cleaning out my locker or replacing the corks on my horn or other regular maintenance tasks. It doesn't include this week's 15.5 hours of contact-with-people non-discretionary classes and rehearsals. It doesn't include keepinp up with what other musicians are writing, finding new repertoire, listening to recordings, or attending concerts. It doesn't include the teaching I do on weekdays, or Aikido on Thursday evenings, or laundry, cooking and other life-maintenance tasks.

Back in reality, I try to get as much done as I can, and what does and doesn't happen is mostly the result of a process of attrition. If I actually did that much work on a regular basis I'd go slowly and quietly bonkers.

That is why I do not have time to look at cat pictures on the internet, and why sometimes, I do it anyway.