Musical evolution - from the canzona to the sonata 

in ,

With music, developments usually come through evolution rather than revolution – as in nature, changes happen gradually over time. Musical forms slowly mutate, sometimes changing their names and definitions along the way. Today I’m going to explore two types of music we often encounter as recorder players - the canzona and sonata - looking at the connections between them. In previous blogs where I’ve delved into dance forms we’ve stuck with one period of music, but the canzona and sonata will transport us from the Renaissance right up to the present day.

The Canzona

The Canzona (or Canzon) first emerged in the late 16th century as an instrumental complement to the vocal chanson. Its evolution began in Italy, where Frescobaldi composed lots of them for keyboard instruments and the Gabrielis (Andrea and Giovanni) were writing them for ensembles. Gradually the canzona spread across Europe and ultimately became popular with composers of other nationalities. 

In its simplest form the canzona is a single movement, opening with a musical theme which the composer then varies and develops. This is often achieved by creating imitation between the parts – a technique later used in the fugue in a more precisely structured way. The extract below, from Giovanni Gabrieli’s Canzon Seconda, does exactly this, with the same melodic idea appearing in all four voices in turn, before the composer moves on to other themes. The rhythmic pattern he uses at the beginning is also very typical of canzonas from this period – a long note followed by two short ones.

Play along with Gabrieli Canzon Seconda with my consort video.

As the canzona evolved, composers began to add short sections with different time signatures and tempi to add variety, but these remained interconnected sections rather than separate movements. Most canzonas begin in duple (2) time, with later contrasting sections in triple (3) time. There’s often a mathematical relationship between the tempo of these contrasting sections – something I know many musicians find hard to calculate. I explored this topic in one of my earlier blogs, so if you’ve ever found yourself perplexed by the change from two to three you can find it here!

An extract of a Canzon by Frescobaldi, with linked sections in different time signatures and tempi:

Composers rarely specified the exact instrumentation for their canzonas during this period, opting instead for non-specific part names such as cantus, altus, tenore and bassus. This means they can be freely played on any instruments whose range matches that of the music and we should feel no compunction about playing them on recorders! In 1608 the entrepreneur Alessandro Reverii published a collection in Venice titled Canzoni per sonare con ogni sorte di stromenti, containing music by twelve different composers. The very title of this collection gives carte blanch for them to be played on wind, brass or string instruments and no doubt helped with sales too!

That said, some works do request specific instruments, including some of Giovanni Gabrieli’s later works. His Sonate pian’e forte (1597) specifies it’s to be played by two choirs of instruments – a cornetto and three trombones in one, balanced by a viola and three trombones in the second. This particular piece is notable for other reasons too. One is his use of dynamic markings (as you can see in the extract below) - a real rarity at this time. The second is title - Sonate. In spite of the name, it’s still fundamentally a canzona, rather than a sonata as we would understand it today, but it shows the direction in which music was moving. It’s worth remembering too that the word sonata derives from the Latin word sonare (to sound), implying it’s a work to be played on an instrument rather than sung.

Gabrieli Sonate pian’ e forte

Evolution of the sonata

The title page of Castello’s Sonate concertate in stil moderno per sonar

Gradually, in the middle of the 17th century composers began to separate the canzona's interlinked sections into distinct movements to create the sonata, and this became the dominant form of chamber music during the Baroque period. This change didn’t happen overnight, as you can hear from the recording of Dario Castello’s Sonata Prima below. Despite the name, the contrasting musical sections are still linked to each other in a single movement. This particular work comes from a collection titled Sonate concertate in stil moderno per sonar - Castello’s way of showing that he was exploring newer styles of writing. As a listener it definitely feels modern compared to the music of Gabrieli, but it’s still more closely related to the canzona than the sonatas of Handel and Telemann.

As the contrasting sections broke apart to form distinct movements, some of them would still retain the canzona’s imitative style. This is particularly true of faster movements, where you’ll often hear melodic material shared between the solo and continuo parts.

This little known Sonata in G by Andrew Parcham shows the further evolution of the form. Again, some of the contrasting musical sections run from one to another seamlessly, but there are also places when you sense the transition towards something with clearly separate movements.

Download the music for Andrew Parcham’s Sonata in G here.

When we finally arrive at the high Baroque the sonata emerges in two distinct forms - the Sonata da camera (chamber sonata) and the Sonata da chiesa (church sonata).

The Sonata da Camera has four movements: Slow-Fast-Slow-Fast - a format Telemann uses in many of his recorder sonatas. His Sonata in C from Der Getreue Musikmeister is a good example of the da Camera sonata:

The Sonata da Chiesa on the other hand, has just three movements: Fast-Slow-Fast. In this Bach Sonata for organ the da Chiesa format seems particularly appropriate, given it’s most likely to be played in a church. However, Bach also composed plenty of four movement da Camera sonatas too.

Ultimately the da Camera/da Chiesa concept is something of an academic distinction because a sonata can have any number of movements. Here are two more examples, starting with a Vivaldi flute sonata which has three movements but completely ignores the Fast-Slow-Fast rule!

And then there are sonatas like Handel’s Recorder Sonata in C major, which has five movements. These almost adheres to the da Camera, Slow-Fast-Slow-Fast principle, but then he sneaks in a Gavotte just before the final movement to show that rules are intended to be broken! Technically a piece made up of dance movements is a Suite rather than a Sonata, but it wasn’t uncommon for composers to blur the lines between the two.

Once the Baroque sonata had arrived, rules began to form regarding how it was composed. Usually a Sonata featured one or more solo instruments (as we saw in my recent blog post about trio and quartet sonatas) accompanied by a basso continuo team. This team often comprised of cello or viola da gamba plus harpsichord, but could be varied to use the organ as well as other plucked instruments, such as a lute or theorbo.

The form of the individual movements tends to fall into two categories. Many are through-composed, meaning they have just one continuous section, often using a musical theme which evolves through the movement. The other common format is Binary form which, as the name suggests, is made up of two sections (A and B), each of which is repeated - as you can hear in the first movement of Telemann’s Recorder Sonata in F:

Later sonatas

The sonata continued to evolve through the Classical and Romantic periods - a time when the recorder was sadly all but dormant. The first movement of the Classical sonata evolved from the simplicity of Baroque binary movements into the more complex Sonata Form, which followed an expanded ternary (ABA) structural pattern.

The two sections of the earlier binary form are now combined into one opening section as two contrasting musical themes, each in a different key. This opening section of a sonata form movement is called the Exposition. This is a followed by the Development, where the themes are added to and expanded upon, followed by a Recapitulation, which returns to some of the earlier musical ideas to round off the movement. Sonata form also became the dominant form for the opening movement of many works in the Classical and Romantic periods, including concertos, symphonies and chamber music (e.g. string quartets).

This Sonata Form movement is often the centre of gravity for Classical or Romantic sonatas as it tends to be the longest movement. It was usually followed by three other movements - traditionally a slow movement, a Minuet or Scherzo and culminated with a lively finale of some sort.

The Sonata in the 20th century and beyond

Sadly the recorder missed out on Classical and Romantic sonatas, but many contemporary composers since the recorder’s revival in the early twentieth century have chosen to write sonatas for the instrument. York Bowen (1884-1961) chose to write his Sonatina (a small sonata) in a positively Romantic style, while Lennox Berkeley went for a more contemporary feel. Composed in 1939, this work is one of the first sonatas written for the recorder after its revival.

During its evolution from the renaissance canzona, to the endless variety of modern sonatas, this musical form has undoubtedly covered a lot of ground.

Do you have favourite sonatas you return to regularly, either as a player or listener, for the recorder or any other instrument? Why not share your favourites with us in the comments below - it’ll be fascinating to learn which canzonas and sonatas make it into your personal playlists!

Trios for four

in

Following on from my exploration of Italian recorder sonatas earlier this year, we’re expanding our horizons today to the Baroque Trio Sonata. All of them feature the recorder, but I’ve opened up my research to include other instruments too, so you’ll have the pleasure of enjoying many different musical colours.

What is a trio sonata?

Before I share my favourite pieces from this genre of chamber music, let’s explore the basic concept of a trio sonata…

The form originated in the early 17th century as a sonata for two instruments and basso continuo, often in several movements, and remained popular throughout the Baroque era. Not content with following the popular pattern, Bach also used the term for a series of organ pieces where all three lines are played by one musician on two organ manuals and pedals. Having recently arranged one of these for two recorders and continuo, the very idea of one human playing three such complex lines at once is simply mind boggling!

Returning to the standard trio sonata format, from the name you’d expect them to be played by three musicians, wouldn’t you? But counterintuitively this isn’t generally the case. Yes, a trio sonata encompasses three melodic lines, but they’re normally played by at least four musicians. Take a look at this extract from a Telemann Trio Sonata (one we’ll encounter again later):

There are three melodic lines - two for recorder, flute or violin (offering a piece of music for multiple instruments was common in the Baroque and a cunning way to sell more copies) and a third for an instrument in bass clef. This bass line would be performed by the continuo team of at least two musicians. The first would be a sustaining instrument - normally a cello or viola da gamba, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t use a wind instrument such as a bassoon.

Now look a few bars into the piece and you’ll see some numbers above the bass line. These are called figured bass and are intended for a harmonic instrument - usually some sort of keyboard, such as a harpsichord, spinet or organ. These figures tell the keyboard player which chords to play above the bassline to complete the harmony. Beyond the actual harmonies, the keyboard player has total freedom - they can play chords of just two or three notes, or create something more dramatic or melodic from them.

This short extract from a modern edition of a Handel Trio Sonata includes an extra stave above the bass line. Here the editor has created a suggested realisation of the figured bass. This is useful for keyboard players who can’t interpret figured bass on the spot, but there’s no reason why a performer has to stick rigidly to these exact notes.

As you’ll see and hear in some of the recordings I’ve selected, it’s entirely possible to expand the continuo team further still, with plucked string instruments, such as a lute, guitar or theorbo (a deeper member of the lute family), adding even more colour and texture to the performance.

Now let’s explore some of my favourite trio sonatas featuring the recorder. I’ve spent a long time seeking out some beautiful performances of these works, which I hope you’ll enjoy. Where possible I’ve also included a link to CDs including these performances (many of them are available via streaming services too), along with links to a playlist of the complete album on YouTube where it’s available. I’ve included a link to the IMSLP page for each sonata too, so you can play them if you wish to. There are usually several editions to choose from for each sonata, including facsimiles of the original 18th century publications for some of them, giving you a glimpse of the composer’s original intentions.

George Frideric Handel - Sonata in F major

Baroque Trio Sonatas performed by Opus 4 Paula Records PACD64

Baroque Trio Sonatas complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Play the Handel Trio Sonata in F with my Trio ‘minus one’ consort video

Handel wrote six wonderful solo sonatas for the recorder, composed after his move to London, and these are familiar to most recorder players. This charming trio sonata comes from earlier in his career, while he was still living in Italy, and is the only one he composed for two recorders.

Handel was a great recycler of good musical Iines and you may well experience a sense of déjà vu listening to the third movement of the sonata. As you can see below, the opening arpeggio patterns (and the harmonies too) are replicated almost exactly in his fourth recorder sonata, also in F major. But in this later solo sonata he uses them more concisely - no doubt with the benefit of several more years of composing experience.

Trio Sonata in F

Solo Sonata in F

Georg Philipp Telemann - Sonata in C major

Telemann Chamber Music performed by Passacaglia Barn Cottage Records

Telemann Chamber Music complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Play the Telemann Trio Sonata in C with my Trio ‘minus one’ consort video

Telemann was a talented multi-instrumentalist, playing the recorder, flute, oboe, violin, viola da gamba, double bass and more instruments besides. He had a natural instinct when composing for the recorder and his music is justly beloved by those of us who play the instrument. This Trio Sonata is one of his finest, often affectionately known as ‘The Girlfriends’ on account of the movement names.

Telemann composed four trio sonatas for two recorders but this is undoubtedly the most imaginative. In it he depicts notable women from history through music, from Xantippe, the nagging wife of Socrates, to Clelia, a Roman woman who swam the River Tiber to escape captivity, and Dido, Queen of Carthage. In common with Telemann’s other recorder music, this sonata lies beautifully under the fingers (as you’d expect from someone who evidently played the instrument so well) and it’s a joy to play this exceptional music.

Henry Purcell - Three Parts Upon a Ground

Live performance by Mélanie Flahaut, Jean-François Novelli et Jean Tubéry (recorders), François Joubert-Caillet (viola da gamba), Matthias Spaeter (theorbo) & Philippe Grisvard (harpsichord)

Download the music from IMSLP

This is the only work I’ve chosen which wasn’t originally composed for the recorder. Technically this piece for three violins and continuo isn’t a trio sonata, as it’s just a single movement, but the music is so fantastic I couldn’t in all conscience omit it from my list. Originally written in D major, it works very well on recorders when transposed a minor third higher into F major, and this recording is just fabulous.

The entire piece is based upon this repeating six note ground bass:

Unlike many works written around a ground bass, Purcell allows the continuo team to stray from this to become equal melodic partners from time to time. He also changes the time signature time mid-flow, from compound to simple time and back again - another unusual characteristic compared to most pieces of this type. This time change is followed by a section where the third recorder part pairs up with the bassline in canon, while the upper two voices play an entirely different canon against them. Before a final, energetic dash for the finishing line the continuo team strike up their own melodic line, while the recorder parts play the original ground bass - truly turning things upside down!

Daniel Purcell - Sonata in G minor

A Noble Entertainment - Music from Queen Anne’s London performed by The Parnassian Ensemble. Avie AV2094

A Noble Entertainment complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Daniel Purcell tends to be hidden in the shadow of Henry, who was either his older brother or maybe a cousin. Perhaps that shouldn’t be the case as he wrote some great music which is sadly neglected today. Having joined the choir of the Chapel Royal at the age of 14, Daniel spent time as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford before returning to London to work in the theatre, where he composed incidental music for over forty plays.

London had a thriving music scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with composers arriving from all over Europe to live and work here. If you’re interested in exploring this musical melting pot do listen to the complete album (playlist link above) as it includes music from many composers who may be unfamiliar to you.

Johann Friedrich Fasch - Sonata in G major for flute & two recorders

Live performance by Yu Ma (flute), Yi-Chang Liang & Zeng Yixing (recorders), Chia-Hua Chiang (cello), Asako Ueda (guitar) & Machiko Suto (harpsichord)

Download the music from IMSLP

Here we expand the concept of a trio sonata, adding a flute to two recorders to create a quartet sonata. In this work Fasch mostly pairs the recorders, using them to complement the flute line, both in tone colour and texture. Fasch was a German violinist and composer, well respected and performed widely in his day but little known today - Telemann performed a cycle of his church cantatas in Hamburg in 1733 and Bach arranged one of his trio sonatas for organ. I talked earlier about the flexibility of the basso continuo team and this performance is a good example. As well as cello and harpsichord, a baroque guitar has been added to expand and add variety to the texture.

Johann Joachim Quantz - Sonata in C major

Quantz: Musique de Chambre à la Cour de Dresde performed by Ensemble Baroque le Rondeau & Jean-Pierre Boullet Syrius SYR 141335

Quantz Chamber Music complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

It was quite unusual at this time to write music for recorder and flute together, but as the previous sonata demonstrated, not totally unheard of. Quantz was an important character in the late Baroque, working as a composer, performer, and flute maker at the court of Frederick the Great. We know he taught the flute to the monarch so perhaps he composed this sonata to play with his pupil?

Quantz’s working life straddles the transition between the Baroque and Classical periods and his music is known to have been admired by Bach, Haydn and Mozart. You can hear the subtle evolution of musical style, especially in this Larghetto, where he effortlessly creates long, expressive musical lines. In this recording the continuo team brings a lighter touch, swapping cello and harpsichord for bassoon and lute - a beautiful but unusual combination.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sonata in F for bass recorder and viola

Rococo performed by Dorothee Oberlinger & Ensemble 1700 Deutsche HM 88875134062

Download the music from IMSLP

If you think of the bass recorder as being the lowest instrument of a recorder quartet, often saddled with dull, repetitive music, think again! In this sonata it features as an equal with the viola, with musical lines every bit as challenging as those we play on smaller recorders. Carl Philipp Emanuel was the fifth son of JS Bach, born in 1714. The latest of the composers I’m featuring today, he began writing at a time when music was transitioning to the more expressive and turbulent style of the Classical period - clearly evident in this trio sonata.

The combination of bass recorder and viola is a curious but beautiful one - soulful and mellow. It requires a sensitive continuo team to allow the subtle melodic lines to sing, but Dorothee Oberlinger and Ensemble 1700 bring so much character to this performance and it’s a joyful experience for one’s ears!

Antonio Vivaldi - Sonata in A minor RV86 recorder and bassoon

Vivaldi: Gods, Emperors and Angels performed by Sara Deborah Struntz (violin), Pamela Thorby (recorder), Peter Whelan (bassoon), La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler (violin/director) Avie AV2201

Vivaldi : Gods, Emperors and Angels complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

We’re perhaps most familiar with Vivaldi as a composer of concertos (literally hundreds of them, including a number for recorder) but he wrote many different genres of music, including a number of trio sonatas. This example for recorder and bassoon is an astonishing work, demanding huge virtuosity from both players. The bassoon and recorder are equal partners, but each has a distinct character. The recorder often has singing, melodic lines, while Vivaldi exploits the bassoon’s more percussive articulation to create some sparkling and, at times, explosive contrasts. Having played the baroque bassoon (albeit it in a pretty average way) for a number of years I’m in awe of the way Peter Whelan negotiates this incredibly difficult music. In this Largo he provides an arpeggiated moto perpetuo counterpoint to Pamela Thorby’s beautifully ornamented and lyrical melodic line. Do explore the whole sonata (playlist linked above) and you’ll be equally astonished by the other movements!

Georg Philipp Telemann - Quartet in D minor from Tafelmusik

Telemann: Tafelmusik, performed by Florilegium & Walter van Hauwe Channel CCS19198

Telemann Tafelmusik complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

I finish today with perhaps one of the finest pieces of this type - another larger scale composition. Telemann published his collection Tafelmusik in 1733 - one of the last examples of this genre of music. Tafelmusik was initially published under the title of Musique de table (table music) and such collections were intended as an accompaniment for formal dinners at weddings and other events. Publishing it cost an exorbitant amount, so to offset the expense Telemann found more than 200 people who were willing to help fund it in advance. In return their names, addresses and social status were included in the first edition. Both Handel and Quantz were among these initial subscribers.

The music itself is very varied, opening with an overture for orchestra, followed by solo and trio sonatas, a concerto and this quartet. In a mirror image of the Fasch Sonata we heard earlier, Telemann chooses to use a solo recorder (this part can also be played on bassoon) with two flutes. The music may have been conceived as a diversion for an audience whose focus would perhaps have been less than 100%, but it’s far from trivial, conjuring up a host of colours, textures and characters. In this movement alone the music veers between a boisterous Allegro and music of a more lilting nature, making effective use of the tonal differences between the recorder and flutes. I encourage you to listen to the whole collection (see above for link to complete playlist) - it really is a musical tour de force!

~ ~ ~

If you’ve never explored the Trio Sonata genre before I hope my recommendations have opened your eyes to fresh musical horizons. But if you’re already an aficionado of this delightful chamber music perhaps you’ve discovered something unfamiliar to expand your repertoire? Do remember, if you want to try playing this repertoire with friends you don’t necessarily need a tame cellist or harpsichordist. Many of the bass lines will fit on a bass recorder (with just the odd low note shifted an octave higher) and even playing just the three melodic lines will give you a taster of their musical charm. There’s also no reason why you shouldn’t offer the score to a sensitive pianist and they can give the editor’s continuo realisation a whirl. Incidentally, if you use Apple Music, I’ve created a playlist there containing many of these recordings which you can find here.

If I’ve omitted your favourite trio sonata from my list why not tell us about it in the comments below, perhaps linking to your favourite recording of the work? This is a rich and varied repertoire and I’d love us to explore it further together as a community!

The same but different - the wonders of alternative fingerings

in

Think back to when you first started playing the recorder. Do you remember the simplicity of the earliest fingerings you learnt? Each note had one possible fingering and it was challenge enough to wrap your fingers around those.

In reality, how many different fingerings do you think there are for each note on the recorder? A couple, perhaps? You might be shocked to learn that some notes have dozens of possible fingerings, each used for different purposes. Today we’re going to look at the reasons why you might wish to learn some of the recorder’s many non-standard fingerings. How many you choose to learn, and the reasons for doing, so will depend on the level you’re at, but it’s useful to at least have an awareness of the principles behind them.

A word on numbering

I’m going to share lots of fingerings with you today, so it’s worth saying a few words about how these are notated. I’ll mostly use illustrative charts, but from time to time I’ll also use numbers. A standard has evolved in recorder tutor books for the numbering of the fingerholes, which is shown below. The left thumb is 0, while the holes on the front of the recorder are numbered 1 to 7, top to bottom. This may be different from other instruments you play - for instance the piano, where the fingers have different numbering patterns.

The standard fingerings we use every day produce a consistent quality of tone throughout the recorder’s range, with good intonation. In most situations these fingerings work perfectly well, but there are still occasions when we might need to tweak them a little…

What is a standard fingering?

If you consult the fingering chart provided with any new recorder it might be easy to assume there’s just one standard set of fingerings and anything else is an alternative. There’s a degree of truth to this, but in reality even standard fingerings can require a degree of flexibility. Those shown in your fingering chart are just a starting point.

Certain notes may need a little tweaking to play in tune - for instance low C sharp on the treble recorder (G sharp on descant or tenor). Most fingering charts will show the following fingering:

This generally works well, but may not always be perfectly in tune. To correct this, the simplest solution is to cover a little more or less of hole 6. For instance, my sopranino recorder needs finger 6 to be covering both double holes to be in tune in most circumstances. I learnt this a long while ago and using this slightly modified fingering is now habitual.

It’s worth remembering too, that unless you’re playing with a piano (where the pitch of each note is fixed by your piano tuner) the exact placing of any note will vary slightly, depending on its position within each chord. For instance, a C sharp which exists as the major third of an A major chord will need to be slightly lower in pitch than the same note used as the fifth of an F sharp major chord.

When you begin playing larger recorders (bass downwards), a little flexibility is often required, even with the so called standard fingerings. For example, on many bass recorders (especially plastic ones) the standard fingering for low E flat will be too flat. The fingering below is often a better choice, using finger 5 instead of 4:

Similarly, many basses are reluctant to play top C sharp with the fingering we would habitually use for the equivalent note on the treble recorder. The following is a much more reliable alternative, although curiously it tends to be out of tune on smaller sizes of recorder:

Setting these minor anomalies aside, why would you wish to use a different fingering if the ones you’re already using are serving you perfectly well? There are a number of reasons, so let’s take a look at some of them…

Ease of playing

The most practical sort of alternative fingerings are the ones we use to make life easier for ourselves. The recorder’s basic design hasn’t changed significantly over the last three centuries. The keywork which gradually developed on other woodwind instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet etc) during this period was intended to help extend the range of notes available and to make the playing of chromatic passages simpler. Our instrument is capable to playing fully chromatic music without these additions, but this does lead to some complex fingerings. Take, for instance, this forked fingering (treble E flat or descant B flat:

It produces a clear tone, but to move from there to the notes immediately above and below requires us to move several fingers up and down simultaneously. With practice doing this neatly is entirely possible, but at high speed it can still be a challenge.

For such passages there are a number of fingerings we can use to make life easier, minimising the number of digits to be moved. These alternative fingerings tend to be the ones we learn first, simply because they make our life easier. The ones shown below are the most commonly used alternatives, with notes about the places where you might find them helpful:

There are many more you can use - too many to include a comprehensive list here. I’ll point you in the direction of some useful sources of information later…

Trills and ornaments

Baroque music has always been a significant part of the recorder’s repertoire, and with that comes the need for trills and other ornaments. Many trills are playable using standard fingerings, but for some combinations of notes we have to find alternatives to make them possible. I wrote a blog about trills, their reason for being and how to play them better a while ago. If trills scare you, this is a really good place to begin - you can find my blog here.

Creating dynamic shape

One of the expressive challenges we face as recorder players is the limited dynamic range our instrument has. There’s a limit to how much you can increase and decrease your breath pressure to play louder and softer before the notes becomes unacceptably sharp or flat.

One way around this problem is to combine a change of breath pressure with slightly sharp or flat alternative fingerings. Let me explain the principles involved…

To play quietly - here you use a fingering which would ordinarily be slightly sharp, and then drop your breath pressure slightly to bring the note in tune and play softly. This fingering, for instance, is a slightly modified treble E flat (or descant B flat). By adding a couple of extra fingers and dropping your breath pressure it creates a beautiful soft treble D or descant A.

The following table illustrates the quiet alternatives I use most frequently when I’m playing. Don’t forget to combine these with gentle blowing!

To play loudly - here you need to find a slightly flat fingering (often by adding a finger or two to the standard fingering) and blow more firmly to keep the pitch true. For instance, for treble C (descant G) you could add an extra finger on your right hand to do this:

I won’t include a list of loud alternatives here as they are easier to figure out for yourself. Just try covering or shading one of the open holes to see how much of a flattening effect it has on the note and choose the one that suits your needs best.

While these principles are quite logical, you must also remember that dynamic adjustments are easier to achieve with some notes than others. For the lowest notes there simply aren’t many (if any) suitable alternatives, while for others there are dozens of possibilities! As well as learning these new fingerings you’ll also need to remember to adjust your breath pressure to modulate the pitch of the notes.

How easy you find all of this will depend on the level of your playing. If simply finding the ‘normal’ fingerings is still a challenge this may be a step too far for you yet. I wouldn’t expect to introduce such complexities to my pupils until they are reasonably advanced, so please don’t feel you’re a failure if the concept alone boggles your mind!

Special effects

Another niche use for non-standard fingerings on the recorder is to create unique tonal effects - something most commonly found in contemporary music. For instance, in Hans-Martin Linde’s Music for a Bird he gives very specific fingerings to create special effects, such as a particular tone colour or to play multiphonics (playing more than one pitch at once), as you can see in the extract below. Such techniques are used in many contemporary works, but unless this is a style of music that particularly interests you, you needn’t worry about such fingerings in other types of music.

Resources to learn non-standard fingerings

Perhaps the most comprehensive source of recorder fingerings of all types is a website I only learnt about last summer - www.recorder-fingerings.com. Here you’ll find hundreds of charts for any type of fingering you could possibly wish for - for ease of use, dynamics, trills, and even for specific makes of recorder. It’s worth bookmarking this page so you can refer to it when you need a specific fingering. If you care to take a deep dive the site, it contains a bewildering array of options, but they’re helpfully arranged by category, making it easy enough to find exactly what you need.

If you prefer books to online sources, I can recommend two containing comprehensive charts for different uses:

Eve O’Kelly - The Recorder Today (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

A fascinating book about all aspects of the recorder, with a slant towards contemporary music. Still available to purchase new, but there are also plenty of used copies available at AbeBooks

Anthony Rowland-Jones - Recorder Technique, Intermediate to Advanced (Peacock Press, 2013)

A handy book covering all aspects of technique, including a comprehensive chapter on alternative fingerings. Available direct from the publisher or to order from most good bookshops.

Getting to grips with non-standard fingerings

It can seem bewildering when you first begin using alternative fingerings – there are just so many of them to get to grips with! To help you with this process, here are some of my top tips to get you started.

Start gradually

Don’t try to assimilate lots of new fingerings at once – that’s a recipe for disappointment and confusion! Instead, be selective. Whether you’re trying to learn an alternative fingering to make a difficult passage easier, or a specific trill fingering, begin by selecting just one or two. For instance, if you want to become fluent with the alternative E on the treble recorder (B on descant or tenor), choose a simple piece and practise using that fingering every time an E crops up in the music.

If you’re beginning to add trills into Baroque music, don’t feel you need to include them all at once. Maybe pick one trill that occurs several times in your music and play only that one to start with. When you’re comfortable and are able to locate the right fingering reliably, then add in another one. Because recorder music tends to use a limited range of key signatures, you’ll notice some trills crop up much more often than others. Use this to your advantage and learn them gradually. There are no prizes for trying to wrestle them all into submission at once, especially if you fail!

Get to know your recorders

While plastic recorders are mass produced and identical, wooden ones tend to have at least an element of individual human work in their manufacture. Made from a living, breathing material such as wood, even supposedly identical models can vary, so you may find you have to use subtly different fingerings from instrument to instrument. Take some time to make friends with each of your recorders, listening to the tone and intonation of your fingerings.

Listen out for tone quality

Some alternative fingerings have a different tone colour to their standard  companions. For instance, cover your thumb hole and finger 1 (the fingering for E on treble, B on descant/tenor) and really listen to the quality of the sound - it produces a clear, solid tone. Now compare that with this alternative:

Do you hear the difference? The tone quality isn’t quite so clear, and on some recorders it may be a touch flatter in pitch.

Now consider the context in which you might use this alternative fingering. The obvious place is when you need to move swiftly (and perhaps repetitively) between E and the F (B and C on descant). If you’re doing this at speed, the difference in tone quality will be barely perceptible. But in slower music, where you may linger on the note for longer, its lesser tone quality may stick out like a sore thumb. In such situations it’s better to practise until you can use the standard fingering cleanly. If you’re adding an alternative fingering to make your life easier, be careful you’re not doing so at the expense of a consistent tone quality throughout the musical line.

Don’t neglect your intonation

When you start using sharp and flat fingerings to create dynamic contrasts you introduce another variable into the mix - an adjustment to your breath pressure. Over time you’ll learn to increase or decrease your breath appropriately, but it’s important to focus on tuning. You could practise this by playing with other people (or comparing your notes to the pitches on a piano if you have one). If neither of these is a realistic option, it’s worth investing in a tuning meter to help you. Standalone tuning meters can be bought quite inexpensively, sometimes combined with a metronome. But if you have a smartphone the simplest and cheapest solution is to download a tuning meter app. Using a tuner you can check the pitch of your piano and forte alternative fingerings and learn to modulate your breath pressure appropriately.

Elegantly dovetailed phrase endings

If you regularly play duets with a partner you’ll often find your phrases finish on the same note - particularly in Baroque music. If you’re both using the same fingering it can result in a final note which is suddenly much louder than those around it. To avoid this sudden bump a good solution is for one player to use a quiet alternative fingering, while the other sticks with the standard fingering. When I play with my friend Sophie in The Parnassian Ensemble we use this technique a lot to create smooth endings that don’t jolt the listener’s ear, and we both have favourite fingerings we know work well on our recorders. This is not a technique for elementary players, but if you’re looking to hone your phrase endings elegantly it’s worth experimenting with.

~ ~ ~

Have I opened your eyes to some new musical possibilities? Or are you feeling bamboozled by an unexpected array of alternative fingerings? Learning even a few of these fingerings can be a helpful addition to your technique, be they for trills, dynamics or simply to help you get around a tricky passage. The most important thing is it to begin your explorations of alternative fingerings gradually. Don’t try to learn them all at once - you may find yourself feeling lost and confused. Instead, be selective, picking just one or two at first, only adding more as you gain fluency and confidence.

Whether you’re new to this, or a real alternative fingering geek I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below. Do you have your own tips or perhaps favourite fingerings you wouldn’t want to be without? Please do leave a comment and let’s see if we can all learn at least one new fingering today!

The perfect excuse - real life mistakes

in

Are you the perfect musician? No? Well, that makes two of us who aren’t!

I’ve written on the Score Lines blog before about our need for perfection. We all know, deep down, that perfection may be a laudable aim, but in reality we rarely achieve it. I see this in my own working life, both in my playing and the mistakes I hear from other musicians. We all make excuses and apologies for our errors and there are certain phrases I hear time and again - from my own mouth and those of others. Teaching my evening class a few months back I heard familiar exclamations: “Oops, I missed the key signature”, “I forgot my reading glasses” and many more. It occurred to me that pulling these musicians’ excuses together might be an interesting and entertaining project, so I called out to my Score Lines community for your help.

Boy, did you come up with the goods! Over the last couple of months my email inbox has been peppered with wonderful emails from recorder players around the globe, confessing their mistakes and the ways they try to excuse them. Many a time I’ve found myself nodding in recognition and chuckling out loud. It’s time to bring your words to the wider recorder world so we can all be reassured these mistakes are completely normal. A huge thank you to everyone who got in touch to pass on their excuses - be that via email or in person. All your confessions will perpetually remain anonymous - it’s only my own deficiencies I’m openly revealing below!

Looking through your messages, our musical excuses tend to fall into various categories, so I’ve grouped them accordingly here. I’m going to talk about my own failings, bringing in lots of your comments along the way. Yes, professional musicians make mistakes too. You may not always notice them, and that’s because we’ve learnt through painful experience how to cover them up well! You’ll hear about some of my embarrassing moments and I hope perhaps my confessions may be reassuring.

Let’s dive in and explore the treasure trove of musical excuses we’ve gathered together between us…

Notational niceties

We all know we should look at the start of our music before we begin playing - the clef, key signature and time signature are useful pieces of information aren’t they? Can you say, hand on heart, that you always do this? No, me neither! If I had a pound for every time I had to make a swift, panic stricken glance back at the beginning of a line to check the key signature when I’m already several lines into the music, I’d be quite wealthy. I did this once while playing from a Salvation Army Christmas Carol book on Christmas Day. These tiny publications are printed on A5 paper so they can be mounted on a lyre while playing outdoors. To save further space, the key signature appears just once - at the very beginning of the piece. If you get as far as line two or beyond and realise you’ve forgotten to check the key, you have to shift your eyes even further to correct your omission!

Of course time signatures can be problematic too, especially if you’re playing a piece of music where there are frequent changes. While playing in the orchestra for John Hawkes’ Concerto for spinet and recorder orchestra I didn’t dare take my eyes off the music as the metre changed every couple of bars. Doing so risked me planting them back in the wrong place to count a of 7/8 bar when perhaps it should have been 3/4. There might be only a single quaver’s difference between the two, but that’s enough to make or break a performance. I made exactly this error in rehearsal, but in concert kept my eyes firmly glued to the music!

“Sorry everyone. I’ll play the piece in 4/4 instead of 3/4 this time.”

Have you ever noticed the most difficult bars in any piece of music always coincide with a line break or page break? I swear music publishers collude to make this happen, just to keep us musicians on our toes. I can think of one example in a Bach Trio Sonata where two consecutive lines have almost identical music - a sure fire recipe for missing a line or playing one twice. I normally only write on music in pencil, but on this occasion a highlighter pen helped me distinguish between the two lines and avoid disaster.

Generally speaking, music notation has evolved to be as clear as possible, so we can read the dots quickly and efficiently. If there’s one detail which could do with a rethink it’s surely the symbols for minim and semibreve rests. A single symbol is an entirely different length, depending on whether it sits on the third line of the stave or hangs down from the fourth. That’s a recipe for chaos if you’re not concentrating and I’ve seen many musicians fall prey to this.

“Oops. I thought that was a whole note…this edition doesn’t make it easy to distinguish the semibreves from the breves” (Said while squinting and leaning closer to the score.)

While we’re on the misreading of notation, we’ve all failed to see dots beside or above notes - and the difference between those two things can be enormous.

“Wait, was there a dot there?!”

A bad workman blames his tools. Yes, it’s easy to blame the quality of notation or printing in an edition, but I can think of two distinct occasions where this has almost derailed a session I was directing. At one course I ran a class studying the Telemann Concerto in F for four treble recorders. 99% of those playing had one edition, but we quickly discovered a whole array of errors in the music. This was bad enough, but imagine my bewilderment when I realised that in newer re-prints the editor had removed some of the mistakes, but added in different ones! The resulting music making was peppered with mistakes, but to this day I have no way of knowing which were the result of user error and which were typographical glitches…

“I forgot to come in because I had a GP in the bar before.”

Early on in my career I nearly reached panic stations with a piece of Palestrina I’d set for a course. I had a copy bought several years earlier, while my students mostly had copies purchased shortly before the course began. We started playing and I struggled to understand why people were playing the wrong lines. Eventually the penny dropped and I realised the publisher, in their wisdom, had swapped two of the voices in the latest reprint of this double choir work (quite sensibly, as it happens). This made the layout more logical, but they failed to make any mention of it in the foreword and I’d assumed my older edition was the correct one. These days I like to think I’d have cottoned on to the problem sooner, but the experience put a large dent in my confidence and I’ve never conducted the same piece again since!

User error

One of the classic exclamations I hear all the time from recorder players, is a realisation that they’re playing in the wrong fingerings - for instance, C fingering when it should be F. In nearly forty years of recorder teaching I can honestly say this is a universal error. Only once have I taught a pupil who never confused C and F fingering and I think we can assume that particular student was an exception to the rule. I can go one better though…

At the Northern Recorder Course, a decade or more ago, I was offered the chance to play a sub-great bass recorder, alongside two other excellent musicians. At the time I didn’t regularly play C fingering from bass clef so it took a fair degree of concentration. The music went quite high in places and imagine my confusion when I found my notes at odds with those of my colleagues. After a little cogitation I realised not only was I playing in F fingering for these high notes, I was also reading the music as treble clef - no wonder it sounded awful!

“Oops, wrong recorder!”

What notes am I playing?

With most recorders, you play exactly what you see. But for some of the more obscure variants a degree of mental gymnastics is required. There may be some who read G alto or voice flute music by relearning the way familiar finger patterns relate to the notes, but most of us don’t play these instruments often enough to justify the lengthy learning process. Instead we learn cunning tricks to get around these transposing instruments. In the case of the voice flute, I pretend the music is really in bass clef and add three flats to the key signature in my mind. That gets me to the right pitches, but also means I rarely have a clue as to the note name for a given fingering. Faced with the voice flute it’s not unusual to hear me mutter to myself, “What note am I playing?”

Terrorising trills & alternative fingerings

Another classic ‘excuse’ occurs in baroque music, with an exclamation of “I forgot the trill fingering”. I rarely get fazed by trills these days, but there are still occasional moments when I suffer a moment of brain-fade and plump for a completely wrong alternative fingering when aiming for a quieter dynamic. Thankfully this tends to happen in rehearsal (I’ve practised thoroughly to ensure it doesn’t happen in performance), but it’s still frustrating!

Accidentals or on-purposes?

I’ve always wondered about the name we gave to occasional sharps and flats beyond the remit of the key signature. We call them accidentals, and I can’t help feeling that’s a misnomer - surely they should be ‘intentionals’ or ‘on purposes’? Whatever they’re called, they’re behind a huge number of our musical excuses. After all, who can honestly say they’ve never forgotten an accidental that appears again later in the bar? I try to look ahead as I read music for the first time, so as to avoid such mishaps, but I’m not perfect and have often uttered apologies for missing one out. Of course, your best friend here is your pencil, so you can write them in and never forget again, but if you’ve been reading the Score Lines blog for a while you’ll already know I’m a big fan of pencils!

To repeat, or not to repeat - that is the question…

Here’s another classic - that moment when you go sailing on into the next section of a piece of music, only to realise that everyone has repeated the previous one. Yes, I’ll hold my hand up to this one - it’s so easily done.

One of my favourite light recorder pieces is Philip Evry’s charming arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime. He crams so many different characters and musical styles into an arrangement where all the parts fit on a single page and to achieve this he includes a Da Capo and then a jump to the Coda at the end. As a conductor you may have spotted me frantically flipping pages back and forth to find my way, and I’ve long since lost count of the number of players I’ve seen forget one or both of these geographical changes!

“I repeated, but nobody else did...”

Slow, slow, quick-quick slow

As twenty first century musicians we’re used to most of our music being written in crotchet beats as it’s this sort of notation we first learnt at school. As we start exploring earlier genres of music we begin to encounter the concept of counting in minim or (horror!) semibreve beats. This presents the opportunity for an endless array of musical excuses, usually because we’re counting in one type of beat when everyone is doing something different. Added to that, music written in minim and semibreve beats looks very white and, to our modern eyes, very slow. I’ve heard many recorder players excuse their slowness because of the type of beat, as well as a few gasps of horror when they’ve realised how quick crotchets and quavers can be if you’re feeling a minim pulse!

Musician 1: “Are you counting in minims or crotchets?”

Musician 2: “Crotchets”

Musician 1: “Well, I’m counting in minims!”

Thinking can be overrated

As we learnt recently in my blog about practising, the body has an uncanny skill for learning repetitive tasks without the need for us to consciously think about it - often (erroneously) referred to as ‘muscle memory’. This is all very well, but there are times when I make the mistake of thinking about an action which is usually instinctive. At that point, if it all goes horribly wrong, you’ll almost certainly hear that age old excuse - “I shouldn’t have thought about what I was doing!”

Distractions galore

One of my favourite (accidental) tricks is to keep counting rests for too long, forgetting to come back in at the right time. The reasons for this are many and varied, but there are two that have tripped me up several times. The first is when I use the rests to listen intently to another section of the ensemble. As I luxuriate in the beauty of their playing, time drifts on and instead of stopping after eight bars, I find myself counting “Nine-two-three-four, etc” until the point when I realise I’ve missed the boat!

“I can do it on my own, but not when others join in.”

“I was listening to how lovely the tenors/basses sounded, and lost count.”

The second likely distraction comes when I’m rehearsing in a particularly beautiful or unusual concert venue. Here my inner architectural photographer kicks in and I either find myself marvelling at the way a modern building is constructed, or else I’m musing on the beautiful play of light in an ancient church. Either way, there’s still that “Uh-oh” moment of realisation and a frantic rush to catch up!

For other musicians there may of course be different distractions. This one, which came from a member of one of my recorder orchestras, made me smile…

“I was so busy looking at you (the conductor) that I lost my place!”

Human limitations

Aside from our musical limitations, we all have simple physical limitations, which often increase as we get older. It’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve begun to wear reading glasses over my contact lenses for close up work and you can guarantee they’re never to hand when I most need them. My trombone playing partner has recently acquired some special specs for reading music or computer work and I’ve lost count of the numbers of times I’ve heard him same the exact words sent in by one of my Score Lines subscribers…

“Wrong glasses!”

Evidently it’s not just recorder players who make excuses for their musical shortcomings - I’m sure brass players have many special excuses all of their own!

If there’s one thing that’s become a permanent irritation as I’ve aged it’s the shrinking bar numbers in my music. Yes, I know they haven’t really shrunk, but it often feels that way. Yes, I could put my reading glasses on and they’d be beautifully crisp, but I don’t need them for playing or conducting music (I can see the notes well enough) so instead I go through my scores pencilling them in larger. It’s a clunky and time consuming solution, but it works.

In search of the perfect thumbnail

While we have no say over the deterioration in our sight (or hearing, come to that) there’s one recorder-critical element of our bodies we do have control over, and that’s our left thumbnail. Yet, still we attend rehearsals only to realise cutting this single nail was the one thing we forgot to do before leaving home.

I’ve seen many a recorder with a once round thumb hole, now worn away to something ovoid in shape, and this can make high notes a complete magical mystery tour. My personal solution is to roll my thumb instead of pinching with my nail, but I know that technique doesn’t suit everyone. At least I can do this without worrying about the length of my nail, saving me from that perennial excuse - “My thumbnail’s too long.”

“I must get my thumbhole re-bushed”

Technology that trips us up

While human nature is responsible for many of our excuse making, technology can be a trigger too. I’m guilty of occasionally forgetting my pencil (or omitting to sharpen in) but I’ve encountered ensembles where one pencil is apparently shared by an entire section of players!

Sometimes our instruments are the brunt of our excuses. Perhaps you have a leaking pad on a larger recorder, causing low notes to be unreliable. Another favourite of mine is discovering at a crucial moment that my key isn’t quite in the right place for my little finger. I’m pleased to report this only ever happens in rehearsal - by the concert I’ve always got my act together and actually checked it’s positioned perfectly!

“My bottom C (tenor) isn’t working!”

The ultimate instrument related excuse is actually having the wrong recorder to hand. I have to confess I did this once at a friend’s wedding. I was playing some informal music with friends as the congregation arrived, an hour or so before the ceremony. One of our chosen pieces was the Chaconne from Purcell’s Dioclesian, which begins with a repeating bass line, after which the treble parts come in one after another. Imagine my embarrassment when I started playing my treble line, only to discover I was a semitone flat - I’d inadvertently picked up my A415 recorder, while the others were playing at A440. Much hilarity ensued and we thanked our lucky stars that it was still early, so only a handful of the congregation had been there to hear my utter incompetence!

A more modern cause of excuse making is the e-reader, which increasing numbers of musicians use instead of carrying round a heavy piles of books. I’ve yet to make this transition, but from your emails I can see these gadgets can provide a rich vein of excuses…

“The lighting on my e-reader hid that note…”

“Er… sorry, my page flip advanced the score two pages instead of one.”

And finally

I couldn’t resist sharing a handful more of your quotes, which either made me chuckle or gave me a flash of recognition…

From a recent orchestral rehearsal I conducted:

I was distracted by a spider.”

From an inadvertent soloist:

“Oops, sorry for that solo where we were meant to have rests.”

This one sounds life threatening, but I’m sure it’s a thought many of us have had when we weren’t concentrating properly…

“I forgot to breathe.”

So what can we learn from our shared compendium of musician’s excuses? Most importantly, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes - some of them subtle errors that no one will likely notice but yourself; some of them great big howlers which leave us grimacing with embarrassment. Rarely will these mistakes be life threatening and I’ve even met audience members who love concert mishaps because it makes them realise we’re all only human - even the astonishing virtuosos we see in famous concert halls. The important thing is to learn from our mistakes and have some fun along the way.

I’ll leave you with two parting gifts. One was a request from Dr Winter, my harmony professor at Trinity College of Music. If we hadn’t completed the homework he’d set, we were instructed to at least have a creative excuse ready for him. For instance, “A swarm of bumblebees stole my harmony homework while I was riding the number 10 bus along Oxford Street” is much more entertaining than “I forgot” and shows some imagination, even if it has no bearing on reality. Next time you make a spectacular blooper, why not think up a really fantastical excuse, à la Dr Winter?!

Finally, here’s a priceless video from an informal concert in Amsterdam where the virtuoso pianist Maria João Pires finds herself faced with performing a Mozart Concerto… but not the one she’d been expecting. This is the sort of thing performing musicians’ nightmares are made of, but miraculously she recovers her composure and goes on to play with so much aplomb you’d barely know there was a problem. Next time you miss an F sharp, remember, it could be so much worse!

Do you have some priceless musicians’ excuses I haven’t included here? If so, do leave them in the comments below so we can carry on mining this rich vein of musical entertainment!

The Practice Files - How to practise like a pro

in , ,

What’s your approach to practising? Are you a last minute crammer? Or someone who works diligently every day? My hope today is to open your eyes to the way practice works. Not just a case of ‘do this, do that’, but what actually goes on inside your body. Learning about this has helped me understand the process of learning and practice and I hope it’ll also help you harness your body’s ability to learn.

How do we learn new skills?

Have you ever considered what goes on inside your body when you practise? I suspect most of us go about learning music without giving it a second thought, but a little knowledge can be a powerful tool to help us understand the best way to improve our playing.

Let’s begin with a few basics of physiology…

In order to move any part of our bodies, an electrical impulse needs to travel from our brain, along our nerves, telling the muscles and tendons to move. Every second of the day our brains send endless electrical messages out to all parts of our anatomy, almost all of them without any conscious decision making. Think about the simple act of eating, for instance. Messages have to be sent to our hands to manipulate the cutlery (quite aside from the process of deciding which piece of food you want to eat next), followed by another to lift the fork to our lips and then our jaws and throat need yet more messages with instructions to chew and swallow. When you break down that process it’s amazing how many complex actions we carry out every second without a second thought.

What you may not realise is that we have secret weapon helping us learn these repetitive skills, making them quicker and more instinctive. That weapon is a substance called myelin.

What is myelin?

Myelin is a phospholipid membrane - a dense type of fat which wraps about our nerve fibres to insulate them. As you can see from this image, it builds up in sausage-like shapes around the nerves. This insulation prevents electrical impulses leaking from the nerves, resulting in stronger, more efficient neural pathways. Myelin acts just like the plastic insulation around copper wiring, helping channel electrical signals to their destination without interruption. Fundamentally, when we’re playing the recorder, it helps messages travel from the brain to our fingers, tongue and lungs quicker, allowing us to play with greater fluency and speed.

The more layers of myelin we build up, the more accurate and speedier our thoughts and movements become. Uninsulated nerve fibres are like the copper wires used to provide the slow dial-up internet connection we used in the early days of the internet. In contrast, once they’ve been wrapped with myelin they become more like the optic fibre which provides us with super-fast fibre internet today – infinitely quicker.

The best way to trigger the myelination of nerve pathways is by making mistakes (something we’re all very capable of!), before fixing those mistakes through practice. Each time we fire a neural circuit (the path the messages take along the nerves) correctly, cells called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes sense this and respond by wrapping the nerves in myelin. The more often this happens, the more layers of myelin are laid down and the closer we get to building our own human equivalent of a super-fast optic fibre cable. A signal can travel through a myelinated nerve pathway up to a hundred times fast than an uninsulated one, and that can make a huge difference to the speed and accuracy our playing!

A one-way process

Once your body has wrapped a nerve pathway in myelin, that insulation is there permanently. It can only be disrupted by disease, such as Multiple Sclerosis, which destroys myelin. With diseases like this, the loss of myelin means nerves lose their ability to conduct electrical impulses, resulting in a loss of vital motor skills.

If you’ve ever wondered why bad habits are so hard to break, this is because of the one-way nature of myelination. Once you’ve created and insulated the nerve pathway to play a wrong note or rhythm, the only way to undo that is to practise the notes correctly, creating another freshly myelinated one. If ever there was a good reason to practise with care, this is surely it!

Is myelin only used for music making?

Absolutely not - myelin isn’t uniquely used to help us learn a musical instrument. It responds in the same way to any repetition, so it’ll do its job with any skill you’re working on. Whether you’re trying to play a C minor scale, develop your golf swing, memorising where the buttons are on your camera, learning a new chess move or language, myelin is used.

Following Einstein’s death, an autopsy was carried out on his body and the construction of his brain was revealed to be largely the same as other men of his age. However, his brain contained twice as many of the cells which support the production of myelin. At the time, the significance of this was unknown, but as we’ve learnt more about the way myelin works, it seems entirely logical that this would be the case in a man whose brain developed so many ground breaking mathematical concepts. Imagine how much myelin Bach must have had after a lifetime of honing his compositional skills!

Is there a best time to add myelin to our nerve pathways?

In our youth, and as young adults, we lay down myelin astonishingly easily - this is why children pick up new skills at such a fast rate. The ability to myelinate nerves at a high rate continues until around the age of 50. After this it’s a harder process, but we retain the ability to add myelin throughout our life - just at a slower rate. If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so much harder to learn a brand new skill as an older adult (be that learning a musical instrument, a new language, learning to ski) it’s because of this change in the way our bodies create myelin. Please don’t let this put you off though! You absolutely can learn new skills as an adult, but it will just take a little longer.

Something we can all do

The mechanism of laying down myelin is a unifying process for all humans. We often think of the best musicians as having an innate talent, with them from birth; something that’s missing from the rest of us. There may be an element of truth here, but in reality professional musicians and sports people have also spent many years firing particular nerve circuits over and over, laying down thick layers of myelin to help them make music or play sport really well.

I make no claims to be the best recorder playing in the world, but I sometimes see looks of astonishment at concerts and courses as I play fast music. An expression on the faces of the audience which says, “How on earth can it be possible to play the recorder that quickly?!” I don’t have a God-given gift, but instead I’ve spent most of my life practising, insulating my nerve pathways to make my reactions faster and more accurate. I had no idea all this was happening inside my body as I practised, but it means I can still play quickly, even though I’m now the wrong side of 50. If you’ve come to learning an instrument later in life it make take a longer to build up this speed, but it’s never too late to make more of the skills you have. Practise in the right way and you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.

If you’ve ever wondered why humans have the ability to create languages, this is down to myelin too. We have 20% more of it than monkeys – a key difference which means we can talk and they can’t. They have the equivalent of copper wiring, compared to our optic fibres!

The fallacy of muscle memory

The more we develop a particular nerve circuit, the less we’re aware that we’re using it. Gradually the activity becomes automatic; stored in our unconscious mind. This function is often described as ‘muscle memory’. In reality, muscles have no memory - it’s simply a convenient description. Instead, the process of myelinating the nerves makes it seem like our muscles have somehow remembered what to do.

What myelin means for our practice.

That’s the science bit over with – now to figure out what this means for our music making!

You’ll be pleased to hear that you’re not expected to be perfect. In fact, making mistakes is critical. As we recognise our mistakes we then practise to correct them, and it’s the process which trigger the myelination of our nerves. What is important is that you practise in the right way. In Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code he describes this as deep practice. I’ll help you figure out what this is in a moment, but first let me describe a scene I saw time after time when I was teaching children in schools.

Let me introduce you to Tom, a pupil I taught many years ago… Tom arrives for his lesson and plays me a piece of music he’s practised. After a few bars he makes a mistake. Realising his error, he immediately goes back to the beginning to start again, only to stumble at the same spot. This is the crunch point. By repeating that error Tom has already started the process of myelinating the nerve pathway controlling that mistake, meaning it it’s likely he’ll continue making it – the first step to a bad habit!

So what could Tom do differently? To avoid these bad habit making steps, it’s much better to stop straight away and attend to the error. Playing a much shorter passage of notes, ensuring they’re actually right, means you begin to trigger a positive myelination process, insulating the right nerve pathway rather than the wrong one. Of course, Tom is far from unique in this respect. I saw countless pupils do exactly the same during my years as a school teacher and I’m sure I sometimes did this too in my own practice.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

This short TED video shows the way Myelin works very effectively, as well as exploring some of the practice tips I’ll talk about in more detail next…

Now let’s take a look at ways you can put yourself on the path to deep practice.

Perfect your practice technique

The first steps to deep practice

Deep practice is a process of identifying and isolating your mistakes, then slowly and carefully, correcting the errors through repetition. At every point you want to ensure you’re playing things correctly so you fire the same nerve pathway every time, allowing your body to insulate it with myelin. Each correct repetition you make helps ensure you build good habits which will last.

The most important way to correct mistakes in your playing and your technique is to slow down. We all want to go as far and as fast as we can, but in reality it’s far better to take things at a slower pace. Let’s take a hypothetical example…

Let’s say you’re working on this movement from Van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lusthof and you stumble over the section marked in red, fumbling the fingering for the top B flat. These are the steps I would suggest you try to overcome the mistake, ensuring you gain complete fluency through the semiquavers:

1.      Check the fingering for top B flat and very slowly practise moving back and forth between that and top A. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at and feel the quality of your finger movements – make them small, quick and positive, while keeping your fingers relaxed. Repeat this movement many times and focus on consistency. Being able to play it correctly a couple of times could be a coincidence, but if you can do it perfectly ten times that’s less likely to be down to chance. Now make the same finger movements more quickly, only increasing the speed further when you have achieved consistency.

2.      Expand your zone of focus a little wider – a note further, playing G - A - B flat - A - G. Still go slowly – if you can’t play it slowly, it certainly won’t happen at speed. Again, make lots of repetitions before speeding up.

3.      Continue this expansion process – perhaps adding in the notes from the four notes before the B flat, through to the end of the beat containing the B flat. At all times begin slowly, focusing on precision and quality of finger movements.

4.      When you’re sure you’ve got the beats around the B flat secure, then go back further and play more of he piece to check if you can maintain the accuracy in the context of the wider music.

This whole process might only take a few minutes, but it’ll have a big effect on the fluency of your playing and can be applied to any similar mistake.

Chunking

Chunking is a term used to describe the process of breaking any concept or piece of work down into smaller units to understand and learn more effectively. It’s immensely useful for music, but is also often used in teaching children to read, and the principles can be helpful in many areas of learning.

The process of chunking involves breaking a piece down into small sections, which you slowly repeat over and over to achieve fluency. The important thing is to begin with genuinely small pieces, playing them slowly enough that you can consistently play them cleanly and accurately. As I suggested with the Van Eyck example above, repeating these chunks ten times is a good place to begin, because that helps you really understand whether you’ve nailed the passage.

When you succeed with an individual chunk, move on to the next group of notes and repeat the same process. When these are secure you can then bring the chunks back together and see if you can play the longer passage accurately. If reconnecting the chunks results in mistakes, choose a slower speed and try again, with lots of repetition.

Speed is a really important element of this process. It may feel like you’re admitting defeat by playing a passage at a metronome speed of 50 beats per minute when the music should really be played at 120. But if you can achieve real fluency and accuracy at this super-slow tempo you’re then in a position to gradually increase the speed. Remember too that you won’t need to follow this approach with every note in a new piece. There will be some passages which fall easily under the fingers straight away, and these won’t need to be chunked. Chunking should be your tool of choice for sections which are on the edge of your technique - the patches which feel tantalisingly out of reach!

Let’s look at the Van Eyck again and I’ll show with different colours how you could break it down. Let’s imagine you’re having trouble with the last bar of line 3. In the three examples below I show how you could break this down into small chunks, before gradually reconnecting those chunks together.

We begin by breaking the bar down into its four beats. Each chunk is shown with a red box. Notice how I’ve included the first note of the next beat into each box - that helps you make a connection between the beats, so you don’t hesitate here when you reconnect them. Play each box really slowly at least ten times, focusing on accuracy and fluency. Only increase the speed you play each chunk when you can reliably play them with fluency. If you still stumble over these chunks, don’t be afraid to break them down into even smaller elements.

Another useful addition to this process is to play the chunks in different ways. You could play them as dotted rhythms or perhaps add some slurs. These additions give you more to think about - if you can achieve fluency with added challenges, playing the music as printed will feel easier!

When you’re happy with these chunks you can then gradually bring the chunks together…

Finally, bring all four beats together. If you need to reduce the speed again at first, that’s absolutely fine. Again, fluency and accuracy is always the most important thing. Once again, make lots of repetitions to ensure you’re really myelinating those nerve pathways!

Extreme Chunking. At one American music school, Meadowmount School of Music near New York, extreme chunking is a technique used in the teaching. One technique the students use is to cut their music into strips (a photocopy, not the original!) and practise these short sections in a random order. They might also breaking the strips down into even smaller chunks and using different rhythm patterns as I’ve described above. Once the strips of music are fluent they can gradually be brought back together, building the pieces back up again in the right order.

If you ever find you can only play a piece of music well when you start from a particular place (often the beginning) this could be a useful technique for you. Breaking the music down into a random order helps you disassociate the different sections from each other. When you bring them back together you should then be able to start from any point with equal ease.

I used a similar process as a teenager when practising scales and arpeggios for exams. Learning them from a book meant I found I could easily play them in the printed order because I’d become accustomed to the familiar progression from one key to another. To prepare myself for the moment the examiner would ask me for scales in a random order I wrote each one on a small card and drew them from a box. Because they came out in a different combination every time I gradually learnt to disassociate the keys from the order I’d learnt them in.

Little and often

If you’re really doing deep practice, it won’t be something you can sustain for long periods. Don’t be afraid to work in shorter bursts - perhaps several times a day. When I’m working in this way on a piece of music I might spend 15-20 minutes really breaking something down, slowly increasing my speed. As soon as I feel my concentration is waning or I begin making increasing numbers of mistakes, I’ll step away from my music for a while and come back in an hour or two. This method of practising is useful if you’re a busy person who doesn’t have two hours at a time to practise. Little and often is the way to go! To really make progress on a new piece of music, it’s important to practise regularly. Even one short practice session every day will have more impact than a longer splurge once a week.

“If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”

Virtuoso pianist, Vladimir Horovitz.

Practice comes in different forms

Aside from the deep practice techniques I’ve described above there are lots of other ways you can improve your playing. Treat the list below as your ‘practice menu’. In a restaurant you may choose fish and chips one day, but might be in the mood for roast beef another day. Music making can be the same - there’s no reason why every practice session needs to follow the same pattern.

Contemplative/mindful practice

Not feeling inspired to really work on a whole piece of music? Feeling in a more meditative mood? Try this simple, creative exercise…

Pick an easy scale and play just the first five notes. Keep it really simple so you don’t even need to look at the notes on the page - it could be as simple as C-D-E-F-G.

Play the notes really slowly - spend four steady beats on each note. Do this several times and close your eyes. Really listen to your playing, focusing on your tone. Is it even and consistent? Are you making a beautiful tone that you really enjoy? Are there notes which suddenly jump out, either weaker or louder than the rest? Keep repeating the pattern slowly, aiming for consistency. There’s absolutely no rush - be in the moment and really listen.

Adjust your breath pressure and see what effect this has on your tone. Really focus on the physical sensations. How far is your tongue moving as you articulate the notes? Is the transition between notes smooth or lumpy?

Now think about your fingers. Are they relaxed? How far are they moving from the recorder and are they rising and falling quickly and neatly? At every repetition, be inwardly critical of what you feel and hear, actively adjusting your movements to improve every aspect of your technique.

Even this slow, contemplative form of practice is beneficial, even if you don’t feel you’re making great strides. This sort of practice can be very therapeutic and relaxing. Remember, even at this pace, every repetition and improvement you make lays down a little more myelin around your nerve pathways!

Practise by thinking

As you work on improving a piece of music, it can be helpful to do some mental practice away from your instrument. Studies have shown that just workng through an activity in your mind can help reinforce the skills you’ve been practising. Don’t try necessarily do this with an entire piece of music, but pick a phrase or short section to play through in your head. Count through the rhythms, imagining how it will sound as you play it. If you have a train or bus journey you could take your music with you and spend some of the time on this sort of mental practice. Elite athletes sometimes visualise the skills they use during their training. Gymnasts will think through routines in their mind before competing, and Formula 1 drivers will mentally drive the corners of the race circuit before heading out on track, imagining which gears they’ll use in different places.

Silent practice

Another take on the mental practice I mentioned just now is to work on your music without actually blowing into your recorder. You could hold the instrument and rest the mouthpiece on your chin. I’ve also been known to finger through passages using a pencil or an instrument cleaning rod - especially handy if you want to do some silent practice while travelling on the train! Taking away the sound makes you focus on the quality of your finger movements without being distracted by wrong or split notes. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at the way your they’re moving - are they quick and neat, or does one of them look a little sluggish?

Listening to improve your awareness

It’s easy to get obsessed with our own playing, but it’s important to also listen to other musicians - and I mean really listen.

Pick a piece you want to learn, or something by a composer whose music you enjoy. Seek out difference recordings of the same piece (perhaps using a music streaming service, CDs from your local library, videos of performances by professional musicians on YouTube) and try to identify which elements attract you to particular performances. Is it the way they phrase the music? Do you like one performer’s choice of articulation? Does one player pick a tempo which really sings to you, or is is their tone quality?

Be like a child in a sweet shop - pick and choose which elements you might wish to use in your own performances. If there are aspects you don’t like, ask yourself what you would do differently? When you come to play the music yourself, think outside the box and try different approaches. Go on, go really wild! Don’t be afraid to try radically different ways of playing - dramatic tempi, dynamics, ornamentation - and see what appeals to you. Take risks in the knowledge that no one need know about your failures, but you might discover something amazing!

There’s no shame in borrowing elements you enjoy in recordings for your own playing. You might like the way a performer adds a trill in a certain place, or their choice of dynamic for a particular phrase. Imitation is not stealing - you’re just trying on different musical clothes to see which styles suit you best!

Don’t be afraid to use your pencil!

If you’ve been reading my Score Lines blog for a while, you’ll know I’m a great believer in using a pencil to help you add useful reminders or creative decisions into your music. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with a really great idea as you practise, only to find it vanished from your brain as you slept and you can’t remember it the next morning! I wrote a blog post all about my enthusiasm for making greater use of a pencil in your music making - if you haven’t already read it, or need a refresher, you can find it here.

Practice should always be an active process

Finally, aways be sure to practise in an active rather than a passive way. Be alert, listen and pay attention to what you hear and feel physically, rather than just letting the music wash over you.

Further practice tips

Here are a few bonus practice tips which have helped me over the years….

Work with music that excites you. If you adore Baroque music, explore that and work with your enthusiasms. If you love jazz, don’t let others tell you you’d be better off learning the saxophone. You can play jazz on the recorder, so pursue your passion because it’ll motivate you to practise.

Fuel your motivation with your successes. Practising can be frustrating and satisfying in equal measure. Don’t always set yourself targets which are really well beyond your abilities. Sometimes pick a slightly easier piece and do some deep practice on that until you can truly play it well. Success in your practice can be addictive. Once you’ve proved to yourself that you can master a piece, that’ll motivate you to keep going and aim higher,

Think of the music you play in a more visual or descriptive way. if you’re struggling to find meaning in the music you’re learning, try to imagine a picture or story to go with it, or find some words to describe the mood you wish to conjure up. As a teenager I learnt a Capriccio by Heinrich Sutermeister on the clarinet and found it difficult to find the right character. Between myself and my teacher we came up with a storyline for the work about a lady having an affair with her gardener and each musical theme related to a character in the story. This did the trick and suddenly my performance came alive! Be imaginative - sometimes a visual or linguistic concept can help you find what you’re looking for.

Make friends with your metronome. I know many musicians have a love/hate relationship with their metronome, but it can be an immensely helpful tool. If you fall into the ‘hate’ category, do take a look at my blog about using a metronome and I hope you’ll pick up some tips to help you make friends with your ticking assistant.

Putting my own advice into practice

To end I thought I’d share a glimpse of my own musical experiences - first from my days as a student and again more recently.

When I first began studying the recorder with Philip Thorby, at the age of 17, he set me what seemed a very dull task - slow scales and long notes, plus some exercises by Hans Ulrich Staeps. I’d only had a year of specialist recorder lessons prior to this and I really needed this concentrated focus to set me up with a truly sound technique. Without the pressure to learn complex pieces of music I was freed up to focus on how I was playing rather than what I was playing. Through the endless repetition of scales and exercises I came to appreciate the satisfaction of playing something simple really well. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also laying down thick layers of myelin around my nerve pathways - something I’ve benefited from throughout my musical life.

Since I began my research for this blog post I reaped the benefit of my newfound knowledge when I needed to learn a new piece of Bach. Many of the scale and arpeggio patterns contained within it felt comfortable under my fingers - the nerve pathways I use to play C major, A minor, G major, D minor and other keys have evidently become so well insulated in myelin that I could rely on my fingers to find the patterns easily.

In contrast, passages containing more complicated, less predictable combinations of notes still needed some deep practice. This I did by playing them slowly, figuring out where an occasional alternative fingering might make things easier. I did exactly as I’ve described above, breaking the runs down into smaller groups of notes and made lots of repetitions. If I stumbled, I slowed it down further still until I could play it perfectly. I’d use different rhythms, slur notes that should be tongued so as to make it harder for myself. If I could play these passages well with extra hurdles strewn in front of me, performing them as written would feel like a walk in the park! Gradually I increased my speed, stepping back again if mistakes reappeared.

How long did this take? Remarkably little time. Every time I practised I’d play the music through, paying attention to areas which had settled, and noting the bars that were still rusty. These were the notes I then returned to and did yet more deep practice. Over the course of a fortnight, practising a little every day, I nailed those troublesome passages. I didn’t need to play for hours each day because my focus was laser like. Twenty or thirty minutes of really focused, deep practice is far more powerful than a couple of hours of playing through music, warts and all. Come concert day, the work paid off and all the passages I’d spectacularly fluffed at our rehearsal two weeks earlier had fallen into place - job done!

Could you do this too? Absolutely! Your aspiration may not be to perform a complex piece of Bach, with hundreds of notes per square inch, to a packed concert audience, but you’ll have other pieces you’d love to play really well. Perhaps you want to play your favourite folk song, or get to know a Handel recorder sonata really well, but the principles are the same.

Like many of my readers, I’m now the wrong side of 50, faced with the knowledge that my body will gradually lose its ability to myelinate my nerve pathways as swiftly as it once did. But the nerves I’ve already insulated remain and I can still reinforce those and continued to add newly insulated neural pathways. It may take a little longer, but I know that if I practise in the right way I can still achieve great things.

My advice to you is to slow down, repeat tricky bits often and well, and you too can avoid many of the pitfalls of sloppy practice. Use the knowledge you’ve learnt here as your superpower. Understanding the mechanics of how we learn gives you the ability to achieve more than you imagined you could ever do!

Further resources:

Through the course of my research, these are some of the books I’ve read and benefitted from. If, like me, you’re fascinated by the process of learning I can’t recommend these highly enough. I’ve included links to the books on Hive (my favourite online bookstore), but they’re available from all good bookshops.

Daniel Coyle - The Talent Code

This was a real ‘aha’ moment for me - my introduction to the existence of myelin and a much deeper understanding of how effective practising can best be achieved.

Glenn Kurtz - Practicing : A Musician's Return to Music

Notes on a life spent practising by a would be professional guitarist. I found a particularly interesting parallel to the recorder here. During his studies Glenn has a realisation that as a guitarist he’s a second class musician at music conservatoire - there’s unlikely to be a glittering career playing concertos with symphony orchestras, like pianists and violinists, or even a career as an orchestral player. This struck me as very similar to life as a professional recorder player - ours is a niche instrument whose players have to find their own unique way in the musical world.

David Eagleman - Livewired : The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

A fascinating book about the human brain and its astonishing ability to change and rewire itself, whether through our actions or in response to brain injury or strokes.

And finally, some videos related to the subject of music and the brain

How playing an instrument benefits your brain:

Why you're not stuck with the brain you're born with

A short film about neuroplasticity and the way our brains continually re-wire themselves through our lives as we learn new skills and create new neural pathways.