Some Random, Very Scattered, Semi-Coherent Thoughts After a Day of Peabody Bass Auditions

- I wish I had eaten more oatmeal in the morning as we didn't have any meal breaks this year.
- One of the applicants had a really nice grey pinstripe suit, which I coveted.
- 2008 was a big Eccles year; 2009 marked the resurgence of Koussevitsky Concerto.
- Everyone started the scherzo from Beethoven 5th upbow this year.
- I would say I didn't start to really lose my mind until the 5th hour. Next year: lunch break for sure.
- One of the applicants had the same name as a student who was in my class when I was a Peabody student; the applicant would have been four years old at the time.
- I was grateful to all auditioners for their hard work and good cheer!

'Twas the Night Before Auditions...

Tomorrow is a big day for myself and my fellow bass faculty - We’ll be hearing bass auditioners all day and into the night. Some of you reading this blog may be among those we hear tomorrow. Or perhaps you once auditioned for Peabody or are planning to to sometime in the future. Even if you never auditioned for Peabody, the odds are good that a large percentage of readers of this blog either have auditioned for a music school or are planning to do so at some point.

There’s tons of advice out there about how to take auditions, especially professional ones. Lots of this advice is very useful, some less so. My own audition process has been helped immeasurably by the advice I’ve received from my own teachers and mentors, as well as from certain books and articles. But unfortunately, one of the things I’ve found most useful in audition prep was something I wasn’t able to experience until I had already won an audition. That thing was actually being on a voting committee for a professional bass audition.



Before I served on an audition committee, I always imagined them as consisting of scowling, bitter pros looking for any excuse to throw me and lots of other hard-working bassists to the curb; they always felt like some cross between the Supreme Court justices and a group of particularly cruel English schoolmarms. When I first was assigned to a National Symphony committee, I had already begun to realize that my impressions weren’t exactly accurate. But I didn’t fully realize how wrong I was until I actually sat through an entire audition. The first thing I learned was that most committee members were taking their jobs seriously, listening closely to applicants. The next thing I learned was how easy it was to tell if someone just didn’t have the technical elements together at a professional level; you could usually tell within a few minutes whether someone had the quality of intonation and command of the bow to be considered for the job. However, the most important thing I learned, at least in terms of how I approached my own auditioning, was this: The committee really, really wanted each candidate to play well, and in particular to play musically. They weren’t waiting for them to fail; they were hoping desperately that they would play well and be successful.


There were several reasons for this. The committee wanted to have excellent players in the orchestra, of course. They also didn’t want their time and energy wasted on inferior playing. But I think the most important reason was more visceral. Simply put, no one becomes a musician in order to hear unmusical playing. We all enjoy hearing great playing, especially playing that is expressive and communicates the meaning of the music. Anyone who could get up on that stage and achieve that feeling for us had our support. I have been on many committees where the members engaged in silent cheers and pumping their fists for the player behind the screen when that player did something particularly good!

Auditions for music schools and conservatories aren’t exactly the same as professional auditions. The goals of the auditioners and the committees are different in an educational setting, and of course there is not the same degree of anonymity. Also, many factors beyond how you play at your audition may be considered in your school applications. Still, when it comes to auditions, the lessons I learned on audition committees still apply. When any applicant comes through the door tomorrow for their Peabody audition, I and my fellow faculty will be rooting for them to play their very best and to make music above all else. If you’re auditioning for us or for any other music school, you can feel confident that the same is true anywhere you go. Hopefully, that knowledge can help you play your best and have a musically fruitful audition experience.

PBDB Book Review Dept.: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) by Ross Duffin
W. W. Norton, paperback

“Don’t even start thinking about this stuff,” said my friend, an excellent musician who does a lot of period performance work. “It’ll ruin your ability to enjoy most music that you hear - anything with piano.” The forbidden topic under discussion: the art and science of temperament and the tuning of the Western 12-note scale. While I can’t say that I’ve had quite the full-on crisis that she warned of, thinking seriously about this topic has led my ear and brain to some unexpected places, and it’s changed a lot about how I hear some music and what I want to do when I’m playing certain music. And the best place for most of us to start to come to grips with this topic is this slim volume by musicologist Ross Duffin. It’s an excellent and highly readable introduction to the (almost) lost history of how we ended up with the scales we have today - scales that we’ve all been conditioned to believe are “correct” but that in fact represent only one of many possible ways to tune the chords and notes that we hear.
I had always been intrigued by the belief, commonly held by composers before 1900, that different keys had “colors” that could be exploited by the composer. Since all the notes in the modern, equally tempered piano scale are the same distance apart, I thought to myself, how they they really sound that different? I figured that this difference must have had something to do with the various systems of tuning that I knew had existed before equal temperament (ET). But I had learned what most music students learned - that these systems also made certain keys sound raw and out-of-tune. I had been told that ET made these problems disappear - that it was the most perfect system and had replaced earlier systems in the way that any superior invention replaced inferior ones.
It turns out that ET was none of these things. It is certainly not perfect, in particular in regards to the intervals of the major and minor third. As a result of forcing the octave into twelve equal semitones, the thirds in an ET scale are pulled far away from where they would be in the harmonic series. The major thirds in particular are stretched far beyond what sounds naturally “in tune” to our ears. Furthermore, ET was not universally loved or adopted by musicians once it was first introduced. Duffin discusses at length the alternate tuning systems used on keyboard instruments, tunings which maintained the purity of most of the major thirds at the expense of the more distant ones. Of even greater interest to myself and other bassists, He points out the many tuning systems that non-keyboard instruments used before the 20th century. The most significant difference in these systems is the true tuning of sharps and flats to make the thirds pure. The result of these systems was that string players and singers were carefully taught to play flat notes HIGHER than their enharmonic sharp equivalents, not lower. Yes, you read that right: flats should be higher than sharps. He reproduces several well-known treatises and manuals of the time showing scale exercises that outline the differences between sharps and flats. Once you begin to wrap your mind around these concepts, and actually hear music played in these temperaments, you start to realize how many varied colors can exist in different harmonies depending on how they are spelled on the page.
An even more intriguing aspect of Duffin’s book is his argument about when and how ET became the dominant system of tuning on keyboard instruments. Most historians allege that ET was the dominant system by around 1850, but he claims that what many at the time claimed was equal temperament was not ET in the way we hear it today, and he demonstrates this by several primary sources and research studies showing that many so-called equally tuned pianos and organs from the late 19th century actually had considerable variation in the sizes of their intervals from note to note - changes that preserved more of the old-style tunings and their purer major and minor thirds.
Duffin is a solid and compelling writer, and he has taken on a challenging task in this book. The book presumes a fairly solid level of musical knowledge, but is not a scholarly work and is clearly aiming for a general audience of musicians and music-lovers. He has a lot of work to do in the book to explain complex principles of overtones and harmony to his audience without boring them or driving them crazy. As a result, he concentrates a lot of information into a very small book. He works hard to keep the tone light and accessible through joking asides, cartoons and illustrations, and biographical sidebars about the various historical figures that he references. He is pretty successful in this effort, a little too much for my taste; I often skipped the biographies and other asides in the book in order to keep my focus on the main arguments of the text.
Yes, my friend wasn’t exactly wrong: reading this book and thinking about these issues can make your brain hurt a bit. As bass players, we are all taught to be constantly worried about “playing in tune.” The idea that the very words “in tune” could in fact have a more complex, and more subjective, meaning than we were first led to believe can feel more than a little scary. But it can also be an incredibly liberating experience to realize that no one has ever had a clear or universally held idea of what being “in tune” is. Western harmony is not some sort of divinely inspired, inerrant system to which we must all surrender. Rather, it is a rickety contraption, full of compromises, tricky adjustments, and just plain wishful thinking - like most human creations. Learning about what those compromises and adjustments are, and what we might be giving up by agreeing to them, is important. Intonation and temperament create the core sound of music, and we all need to try to have some sort of opinion on them.
I recommend this book highly and have been passing it around to many of my colleagues, both in my orchestra and among other teachers and musicians. Take a deep breath and learn the truth about harmony - who knows where it might take you.

Return of the BLOG.....

Hello all - I’m back from the (blogging) dead and ready to finally get some new posts up.
My reasons for not posting recently are varied but center mostly around lots of other activities which kept me busy recently. As some readers know, I did a big recital at Peabody this past week, and rehearsals and prepping for that took a lot of time. In particular, organizing and scheduling two quintets with different members proved to be a Herculean task indeed. Fortunately, once we managed to all be in the same room at the same time the rehearsal process itself was tons of fun and musically rewarding. Another reason was the meetings and organizational efforts involved in our recent new faculty appointment here at Peabody. This is something I’m incredibly excited about and I plan to be blogging about it soon. The final reason for not blogging is simple: I got lazy and didn’t make time for it. Like almost anything, blogging is lots of fun but can also feel like work sometimes; remind anyone of practicing?....
Anyhow, watch for some new posts soon, including some book reviews and thoughts on what’s going on Peabody these days, as well as whatever else may dribble into my brain!

New Peabody Faculty-Artist in Residence Harold Robinson

Here is the official announcement from our Peabody website:

Peabody is pleased to announce the appointment of Harold Hall Robinson, principal bass of the Philadelphia Orchestra and instructor at the Curtis Institute, as Peabody Artist-Faculty in Residence. Beginning in Fall 2009, he will join current Peabody double bass faculty faculty Paul Johnson and Jeffrey Weisner in this newly created position. Mr. Robinson will visit Peabody multiple times over the course of the year for day-long classes, presentations and intensive group lessons with Peabody bass students. Each student will work collaboratively with both their primary teacher and Mr. Robinson to develop their own artistry and musicianship.

We'll have more news on this appointment and what it means for the Peabody bass program soon, both here and on our official website. Feel free to email any of us in the meantime if you have questions.

Does it matter if your teacher doesn’t use the same bowhold as you?

This is a question that is always rattling around out there in Bassland. Many students stress out about the role that the teacher’s bowhold should play in their choice. Many parents of students seem to stress out about it even more than the students!

As with so many questions of this sort, the answer.... depends. However, I will certainly say the following with great certainty: You don’t have to study with a teacher who uses the same bowhold as you. You can learn very effectively from a teacher who uses either bowhold. How do I know? I, who played German bow pretty much exclusively until about four years ago, never studied with a German bow-playing teacher - they’ve all been Frenchies. I know of more than a few successful professional players who can say the same. So it’s certainly possible to develop an effective bow technique from someone who doesn’t use “your” bowhold.

That said, my story is certainly not the norm - most folks play the same bow as their teacher, and most folks keep studying with a teacher who uses the same bowhold even if they go on to study music in college. For their initial teacher this makes perfect sense - of course their teacher will initially train them on the same bowhold that they primarily use if at all possible. For one’s later teachers it is a bit more complex. I suspect that folks gravitate towards later teachers with the same bowhold because they suspect they’ll learn more, plus the teachers tend to more actively recruit students with the same bowhold because they feel they can teach them more effectively. This doesn’t tell us whether these people learned more effectively from these teachers because of the similarity in their bowholds. They might have learned just as much from a teacher with the opposite bowhold. All we know from this is that folks tend to use the same bow as their teachers.

So, which is it? Do bassists tend to study with a “similarly-bowed” teacher because it’s better for learning? Or do they do it out of habit, tradition, or an incorrect belief that it’s better for learning? Or are they one and the same? If you believe a teacher is better for you because they use the same bowhold, won’t you learn more simply because this makes you feel more motivated to learn?

Wow, we’ve gotten deep into the weeds on this! Most of these questions are not really answerable, since to my knowledge no one has done a long-term research study on the topic. I hereby offer it up to any enterprising education major who wants a dissertation idea - let me know your results....

Let’s pull back for a minute and focus instead on a more concrete situation that folks often encounter in the real world. You’re a French bow player applying to music school and you got into two schools that you really like. You’ve checked out both programs and you have met with the teachers you might be studying with. You like what they’re both have to say. One of them plays German and the other French - which one should you study with?

First, you should ask the German bow teacher about his or her views on teaching a French bow player! The teacher may have some good information to offer - perhaps they play both bows very proficiently and just prefer German overall, or perhaps they don’t play French at all and don’t seem to have much interest in exploring it. Either way, you’ll get more information to help you out.

Second, you need to think about how you learn - and more specifically, whether learning by visual imitation is a central part of your learning style. If you need to see someone demonstrate a skill in order to effectively understand how to do it yourself, you may be more of a visual learner. For some, visual learning is a key element of their studies; or others, it is much less important. Some learn more by auditory imitation - they try to reproduce the sound they are hearing from their teachers. For others, learning is more cognitive - they need to understand intellectually what they are trying to accomplish in order to make the most effective progress. For others, learning can be more related to touch and the kinesthetic sense - the sense of where their bodies are in space. Everyone learns by a combination of all these senses, combined with their own experimentation with what they learn.

If you are a more visual learner, then it may be more important for you to actually see your teacher demonstrating things using the same bowhold as you. Without this element, you might have more difficulty learning bow technique. If you don’t focus as much on what you see when you’re in your lessons, but rather how your teacher sounds or what they are saying to you, then it may be less important that your teacher play the same bow as you.

Having spilled so much (digital) ink on this subject, I’ll leave you with a quick summation: In my opinion, it’s not at all essential that your teacher play the same bow as you! I and many others out there who play the bass studied with folks who played a different bowhold than they do, and I think it’s far wiser to study with an excellent, highly respected teacher who plays a different bow than you than to play with a less qualified teacher who plays the same bow as you. However, if you’re choosing among several good teachers, what bow they use could be a factor in your decision, especially if you’re a more visual learner.

What do you think? Write me a comment - I know there are some strongly-held opinions out there on this subject....

The SAT's of Music continued: Test Prep

Last year, I did some posts about auditioning and how to approach it. You can read them here and here, but to recap the main points:

- Auditions are standardized tests like the SAT.
- Like any standardized test, they don't just test your skills and musicianship, but they also test your skills at taking that particular type of test; just as a very smart person can do poorly at the SAT because it isn't a type of test they excel at, so a good musician can audition poorly because it isn't a type of performance they excel at.
- When we audition, we need to be good at both the material of the test (the music itself) and at the skills that this particular test requires.



Anyone who knows me knows that I'm always happy to beat a dead horse a few times, so I'm going to keep working this SAT analogy a bit farther in this post and see if it yields any helpful ideas for auditioners.

How do we prepare for the SAT? Well, the first way is by being good students in the first place. The SAT tests our general knowledge levels and comprehension abilities, and we all acquire those abilities over many years of schooling and life experience. No matter how many test prep courses you might take, you can't get a good SAT score unless you can read, write, and do math.

The other way we prepare is by prepping for the test itself. We learn what sorts of questions get asked. We take sample tests to get a sense of how to approach answering the questions. We work on the questions with a timer to improve our response times. We drill ourselves over and over on the test questions so that our responses to them become more smooth and automatic. If needed, we can take all sorts of organized test-prep courses in which we can get expert assistance at doing all of these things. This side of test prep can often seem annoying and even a waste of time, especially if you know that you have already taken care of the first part of prep (being a good student with good skills). But it's still needed, since the SAT is a required test for most colleges and there is no real alternative offered.



Hmmm, I think this may have been a good dead horse to beat at - these test prep techniques are pretty analogous to what we need to do for auditions!

The first part of SAT prep is about acquiring and internalizing the basic skills that the SAT is testing for. In our work as musicians, we need to have mastered the basics of good playing to be competitive in auditions. We have to be able to play in tune, in time, and with a good basic sound. We need to have mastered all the core technical elements of our instrument. In the case of strings, this would mean bowstrokes, bow distribution and placement, and various systems of fingering and left hand technique. I would say it also means having an understanding of phrasing concepts, music theory and history, and harmony. In other words, it isn't something you can cram for. It takes years of study and work to acquire these skills for all but the most talented few. And unlike the skills we need for the SAT, we aren't all required to learn them to become successful members of society. We have to decide to put in the work to acquire them on our own at some point.

The second part of SAT prep is about learning the structure of the questions, developing a system to answer them, and drilling ourselves so that we will be efficient test-takers and not be hobbled by anxiety or inefficiency. This matches up with most of the "audition prep" techniques that people use to prepare for auditions. We practice the audition material over and over so that it becomes more automatic. We play for people to reproduce the stress levels of an actual audition and to get comments on how to improve. We record ourselves to evaluate the details of our playing. We do mock auditions to practice the exact type of surroundings and situations that the real audition might offer us. And we consult teachers and coaches for expert advice on how to better do all these things.

If we aren't doing as well as we like in auditions, just as in the SATs, we need to ask ourselves whether our problems lie more in the first part of test prep or in the second part. Do we have our core technical skills in order? Are we using our instruments and bodies efficiently and naturally? If not, we may need to spend some time correcting technical problems before we tackle professional auditions. Or do we feel our playing is solid, but nerves or preparation errors are getting in our way? If so, then we need to focus on part two of our prep - making sure that the format and structure of the audition process isn't getting in our way and keeping us from presenting our best work when we audition.



I have encountered students struggling with this issue many times, and have often found that much of their frustration is that they are focused on the wrong half of their audition prep work. They may have done lots and lots of mock (and real!) auditions without addressing a problem with their underlying technique that is holding them back. Or, they may feel like they aren't good musicians when in fact they are - they just need to look at how to keep the audition process from overwhelming them. Making sure that we are not beating our own dead horses when it comes to audition prep can bring better results, and better musicianship overall.