Some friends of mine and I were talking about working up my favorite piece of chamber music, ever: Spinoff, by Charles Wuorinen.

This piece is a beast. Listen to this excerpt from Wuorinen’s site to get a flavor of what we’re dealing with here. It’s head-banging rock and roll for classical musicians.

I played this something like 11 or 12 years ago back at NEC. We spent three months on rehearsing it, crying over it, and swearing at it. It was so fun.

So anyway, we’re just talking about it. As in, should we get ourselves into this sort of thing. Flirting with the idea. It is hard to find musicians that are into something like this, who are willing to put in the time, and who are skilled enough to be able to execute it. But it was fun picking up my old score and hacking away at some of the passages. The piece has a very tricky meter system ��� just a quick glance at page 1 shows that each measure has a new change in meter: 5/4, 9/4, 10/4, 4/4, 7/4, 11/4, 7/4, and that’s just the first seven measures. Hey, no big deal, the measures divided by 8th and 16th notes don’t show up until later. Oh, wait a minute – the subdivisions of measure three go 11/16, 6/4, 9/16. Nevermind.

The bass part alone has the additional challenge of skipping between bass, tenor, and treble clefs, and utilizing pretty much the entire range of the traditional modern double bass. Thankfully, Wuorinen did not write anything physically impossible to play or that would require at best the use of one’s forehead or big toe to achieve. The chords all have doable stretches with the left hand, or make available use of open strings. Overall I’d say a well-orchestrated piece for the double bass.

The nice thing about this piece, and much of Wuorinen’s work, is that it leverages traditional western classical music notation. Nothing funky like circular staves, pyramid beams, random sound effects, or tape recordings of humpback whales. There is excruciating attention to detail in the notation, and I as a musician I truly appreciate this.

But I’m making too much of a big deal about the complexities of the piece. The real deal here is this is an awesome piece. The 16th notes really chug ahead and it sounds more like something you’d hear on the streets of Greenwich Village or in a dark, smoky beatnick dive than in some prestigious concert hall. The piece rocks.

I found the iTunes Signature Maker at the blog of Ryan Shaw this evening. Extremely cool little idea to take your iTunes playlist and make a short little audio avitar of your musical tastes. Here is mine.

The creation of the file requires you to trust a Java applet to scan your iTunes collection and make hashes out of some of your favorite music. The applet is signed by Thawte, which checks out, but the usual cautions should still apply here. You can set some parameters such as the number of tracks to pick from and how long each segment should be. Here’s what it came up with for me, which I found particularly interesting:

I like how it finishes with a reference pitch that I use to tune to every time I practice. It makes a nice blend that tapers off into the solo E a nice touch. It was my first run of the applet, but I’m going to go with it.

I found this today in my Technorati subscription: Zeke’s Gallery: More from the archives – The Double Bass Quartet

Check out the recording. The opening piece is pretty cool sounding. Nice to hear a double bass quartet doing a regular appearance somewhere!

My favorite is of course Gunther Schuller’s work “Quartet for Basses”. We did that one back at NEC – and hello to Michael, Nancy, and Todd if you all read this some day…

Here’s an interesting set of blog posts from hella frisch, blogic, and AC/DC, all on their recent performance of the Hummel Quintet for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano.

Blogic notes that Johann Hummel’s middle name was “Nepomuk”, and his post is even titled “Nepo-who?!?” There are actually two Nepomuks worth noting in history. One is of course our hero of the hour, the composer Hummel, who gave us bassists one more worthy piece of chamber music. The other was St. John Nepomuk, a martyr and the patron saint of Bohemia.

Nepomuk is certainly a Bohemian style of name, and interestingly many of the prominent small chamber works that include the double bass have such a slant, including works like the Dvorak Quintet Op.77, or the last movement of Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Indeed just about any chamber work that includes a double bass is not naturally going to lend itself to the refined raised-pinky orchestration. The addition of a double bass gives the chamber work an instant sense of mystery, gypsy, deviance, cojones. I just wish there were more.

Back to work after almost two weeks of being on vacation ��� moving and a short trip up to the Redwoods for some performances.

The new house is the best part. We finally got DSL up and running today. Actually, Yingwen got the tech support call saying that it was finally fixed. I spent all day yesterday trying to get it to work, but it turns out that the problem was a faulty switch on SBC/Yahoo’s end. They replaced it today and walked Yingwen through the setup before I got home. Not bad! I just transferred her settings to the AirPort base station and life is back to normal.

Up in the Redwoods, we played tons of good music. I first had a chance to read down the Rossini duo for cello and bass, and that went pretty well. We then moved on to the Trout Quintet which was not bad, soon followed by the Dvorak Quintet which turned out to be a train wreck. I need to send these parts out ahead of time… Finally we wound down with a reading of the Brandenburg 4 and 5 concertos, which was sublime. Stellar musicianship on the part of my colleagues there, especially the first violinist and the pianist. That was the first time I had played any Bach ensemble with a piano instead of a harpsichord, but suprisingly the piano didn’t sound bad at all. I think it sounded fine, and really it shouldn’t matter what instrument is playing the continuo just so long as it can play all the notes and doesn’t sound too quiet or too loud.

And now that we’re all moved and life is back to normal, I’m looking foward to some regular practice again. I’ve been neglecting my scales and études, and want to spend more time working up some solo double bass pieces. I’m considering a heresy too ��� attempting to learn everything with the scortadura where you tune the G string on the bass up to an A, á la Edgar Meyer. I just am getting sick of swapping string sets and tuning up a whole step for solo pieces and then back down for orchestral all the time, and heck since I’m no longer a professional orchestral bassist then that kind of frees me up to do whatever the heck I want right?

I’ve been getting more and more back into my music lately. Gone are the days where I could practice eight hours and still have time for rehearsals and performances, but I’m getting in a solid hour or two every day which is good to keep the fingers loose. In the case of the double bass, one really must practice at least a little bit of technique on a regular basis to keep up the minimum amount of left hand strength required.

Petracchi

I have blog’d on this before. Petracchi’s book Simplified Higher Technique is a really sensible approach to double bass technique I think. These exercises are digestible and worthy of daily attention. As Rodney Slatford notes in the introduction, exercises 2, 7, 8, and 17 should be your daily workout.

As if I had that much time. Day job aside, the trick with my practicing double bass is that I live in a condo, and the kids go to sleep early. The only good time to practice is during the day, when I won’t annoy neighbors or wake children. I need a basement…

ISB Convention

Speaking of Petracchi – the man is coming to do a recital and masterclass at the ISB convention in June. The schedule of events looks quite interesting. And I see old friend Paul Bresciani is doing a talk on audition repertoire. Wow – I’d love to sit in the back and heckle Paul during that spiel. I wish I could take a week off and disappear to that event, but there’s just no way. I have in-laws in town and major projects kicking off at work. Perhaps next time…

Guitar

I’m making steady progress on the Bach lute suite in E minor, and my sheet music copy of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata 1st Mvt. finally showed up. I am working on transcribing some of Händel’s piano works into duos for two guitars. More on that process later as I figure out Sibelius.

The guitar practicing, by the way, is my answer to not being able to practice the double bass late at night. It’s quieter, and more portable. Gotta make do…

Pacific Collegium Concert

Here’s another shameless plug for the Pacific Collegium led by good friend Chris Kula, who are having another concert series with a June 3rd date in Oakland and a June 5th show in San Francisco. The program is entitled Couperin le Grand: Grand Motets – Sacred music of the French Baroque. Check them out. I am going to try to sneak out for one of these…

Chamber Music

I am finding damned near impossible to get together any groups to do the Dvorak quintet or the Trout. String players seem to be getting more and more scarce. I gotta figure something out here…

This coming February 26th I am playing bass in the 228 Memorial Concert (二二八紀念音樂會)!

Where:

East Bay Formosan United Methodist Church/East Bay Taiwanese American Community Center
1755 Sunnyvale Avenue, Walnut Creek, California

When:

February 26, 2005, 2PM

I am only playing on one piece, but the entire program seems very interesting and I’m looking forward to doing this. We did a similar program last year doing a number of Taiwanese folk songs scored for a Trout-style quintet plus voices for a New Year’s performance and it was also a lot of fun.

This morning I was listening to the Dvorak String Quintet Op. 77 and I remembered a kind of funny story. I’m writing it here so I don’t forget.

Eugene Lehner (of Kolisch Quartet and Boston Symphony fame) was my chamber music coach for this piece while I was at New England Conservatory. Mr. Lehner would get after us because we always seemed to sound a bit stiff. We were playing through the first movement at a coaching session and at one point he stopped us and said emphatically “All the notes you play are fine, but you need to play with tone!” He then said, “Here, watch my face,” and he proceeded to shake his jowls to and fro like an old bloodhound just after a dip in a pond. I remember in all too vivid detail the way the skin from his face and neck moved as if completely independent from the rest of his lower mandible. But what happened next was the most amazing part, and you would have had to have been there to appreciate it.

So then he picked up the first violinist’s instrument and tucked it under his chin and started to play. This violin I always thought had a very bright, tight, almost tinny sound. But when Mr. Lehner played it, this deep, gritty, gruff, rich, throaty sound appeared out of the space where he sat. It was not that Proper Classical Conservatory Training tone… no, it was pure Demon-Possessed Mad Gypsy Fiddle tone with Extra Goulash. What a sound. Dvorak, like so many other composers, is so much more fun when you play it with a dash of the Mad Gypsy(tm) flavor on top. I always look for this sound that he showed us that day. It’s so thick and hearty, you’ll wanna eat it with a fork. It was the unmistakable spot-on audio equivalent of his jowl-shaking demonstration.

Eugene Lehner passed away in 1997 at the age of 91. He had a pretty amazing career. Bartok himself had persuaded him to follow a music career after he had heard him perform at the age of thirteen, and Lehner then went on to play several premieres of Bartok’s works with the Kolisch Quartet. Koussevitsky hired Lehner to play in the Boston Symphony Orchestra without an audition, stating that he had heard him play in Germany fifteen years prior. When he was in his mid-eighties, he was still teaching punk-asses like me at the New England Conservatory about chamber music.

He told me he loved being able to coach a bass player, which I always thought was kind of neat since I knew he was usually busy with the more traditional bourgeoisie string quartets and elitist piano trios. (The bassist proletariat does not get as much representation in the body of chamber music repertoire as we would like…) Much of the style of the way I play (or wish I played) my bass is in some part due to my experience with Mr. Lehner in that chamber group. I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to have known and learned from him.