Lisa's Flute Studio Blog

Here are a few pictures from our recent musical soiree for adult students – again this is the combination of my flute students with the oboe, clarinet and recorder studio of Sandra Cathey. We had one of the biggest snow storms of the year for this one, this past February 24. Our numbers were cut in half due to nasty road conditions, but we had a lovely time nonetheless, and will look forward to future possibilities with those who were unable to make it!

Sandra asked for a little flute assistance to make up for the missing members.

Minuet from Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”

Many thanks to Arthur for providing lovely and fun accompaniment, and a little raw humor to keep the evening light!

And thanks to our hostess, Emily, for a warm welcome to your home and the gracious use of your lovely piano!

The final week before the Vermont All State audition is here – it’s getting close! Take a deep breath, enjoy your accomplishments so far, and check over all the details to make sure your final stretch sets you up to show the best of your abilities. As you go into the final stretch, savor the experience of playing well, and keep working.

First, keep practicing as much as, or more than, ever. I notice a big difference in my tone the more I’m practicing. I find that 1-2 hours a day is minimal to keep my tone at its absolute best, while 45 minutes to an hour is adequate for most purposes. Less than 45 minutes a day and I have notably less control than I would like. If I actually skip a day, it takes a couple of days of practice to feel like I’m up to par. So first, quantity of practice in the final week counts.

Second, quality of practice counts. A consistent tone warm-up routine helps a lot in general, and particularly at this stage. Listen to yourself – to every note – accuracy and tone – beginning, middle and end; to every phrase – the tone, the shape, the continuity, the breath control, and the dynamics; and listen to the flow as one phrase leads to another – the overall feeling of the piece and what it expresses. At this stage, as mentioned in the last post, the most important part of your practice may be to play your piece through without stops, but listen as each note and each phrase goes by, and come back to those sections that need extra TLC after you get to the end. To reiterate from last post, you may wish to record yourself many times in order to get a more objective view of what you need to come back to – as well as whether today’s recording compares favorably to last week’s recording. And continue performing for anyone you can get to listen.

Keep drilling scales – I recommend flash cards to make sure you’re practicing them in random order. Spend extra time on those that might occasionally have an error, but keep practicing them all. Obviously note accuracy is top priority, but hopefully your scales are learned inside out at this point, and your primary focus can be on tone, intonation, and a little expressive flair! Yes, even scales can be fun, expressive, and have a dramatic flourish!

Do some sight reading each day. Go over all the tips listed in the blog entry linked here EVERY time you sight read. Practicing DOING the steps consistently will make it automatic to think about each step once you’re there. So even though you don’t know what you’ll be reading ahead of time you DO know how to approach it. Remember that it’s not only ok, but recommended and expected that a strong player will take the time during the audition to look over the selection for 1)feeling the beat; 2) rhythmic variation; 3) key signature; 4) accidentals; and 5) dynamics and other expressive markings.

Enjoy how far you’ve come – yes, listen with a critical ear, but also take the time to revel in your progress. Even if you don’t end up being chosen to participate in the festival, you may know that you are a better player than you were before you started working on this piece. THIS is what it’s all about! So enjoy that feeling, regardless of how you or the adjudicators may think you compare to others.

Be prepared for nerves at the audition – hopefully playing for others informally will give you a little taste of how it feels, so those feelings are not foreign once you’re there. Start planning ahead for the following: 1) mark some extra breaths just in case nerves cause you to be shorter on air than you anticipated – and spend part of your practice time getting used to those breaths; 2)plan to bring extra water, and be sure to take some sips before you audition to keep dry mouth at bay; 3) practice focusing your mind on positive thoughts – be prepared to take a moment before your audition for reminding yourself that you’ve worked hard for this, and this moment is for YOU! Remember that whether you’re at your best or not, it’s a great learning experience. Even if it’s nowhere near your best, you have another notch on your belt and will know how to better approach an audition next time around. Stay focused on doing the best you are able to in the moment, enjoy your own accomplishments, recognize the ways you have grown as a musician and as a person through the experience, and be ready to play your heart out! And remember, the adjudicators are only there to help you to grow as a flutist.

Finally, keep listening to recordings of your audition piece. Notice something new about a recording. This gorgeous music can make you swoon, can take your breath away, make you lightheaded and send you into a revelry that just makes this old world of ours feel new, exciting, and unspeakably beautiful! Revel, jump, dance, sing along. Allow yourself to be carried into a realm of existence where worries and cares are swept away and only a pure, gorgeous, sublime ecstasy surrounds you in this one perfect moment. That’s what it’s all about – let yourself be absorbed and immersed in it!

You’re two weeks away from your Vermont All State Festival audition. Whew! If you’ve been following directions on these blog entries you’ve done a lot of work and are probably mostly pretty well prepared! Congratulations on your hard work! Now’s the time to 1) prepare yourself psychologically for the process, 2) go over all the details of audition preparation, and 3) refresh your love for the flute, and for your audition piece in particular.

With experience, auditions can truly be enjoyable – perhaps your biggest job now is to think of this audition as your friend and ally, your partner in the ultimate goal of helping you to experience and express that glorious and elusive legacy of humankind: music. How do we change our mindset from feeling that we’re being judged or that we’re being unfavorably compared with the skills of others, to a mindset of learning, loving, and reveling in our own experience of music?

First, remember that the adjudicators were high school students themselves once. Chances are, your adjudicator has been through many auditions and has felt similar nerves, concerns, and anticipation to what you’ll be feeling.  Remember, the adjudicators are there because they want to help with the process of helping students to both get the feedback you need in order to improve your playing and to make it possible for all those who are chosen to participate to have a fully inspiring experience. I believe adjudicators in general want to help every kid to develop the skills that would allow them to fully enjoy the All State Festival experience, and also knows that some kids will need to develop skills in some areas before they can fully enjoy the experience themselves and in order to be an asset to the group. If you don’t make it in, it simply means there are skills left to be developed, whether technical, tonal, or psychological, and their hope is to provide information to help you develop.

Next, think of it as not so much a competition with others as much as an opportunity to demonstrate all the work you’ve been doing and the progress you’ve made and are continuing to make. Remember that, unlike professional orchestral auditions where many people are auditioning and only one person will win the spot, in a Vermont All State audition many students will be accepted. In the general audition, often there is not an absolute number that will be accepted. There may be many students who are only a point or half a point apart, but often there will be a large gap between those accepted and those not accepted. If you’re above the cut-off, you’re probably close in ability level to others accepted. If you’re not accepted, it simply means there are areas to work on before your next audition – and likely not that you just barely missed the cut-off by a single point or two. Just knowing this may help to decrease the pressure and stress level – it’s not that every tiny detail is likely to make or break the whole thing.

Some of you may be auditioning for the scholarship competitions, in which case you’ve hopefully had quite a bit of experience with auditions, and your particular audition will be more directly competitive. But even in those cases, you’re most likely to do your best if you go into the process thinking of enjoying the experience for its’ own sake.

Another part of being prepared psychologically is to be as prepared in your practice as possible. If you know you know it, your muscles will take over the technical part, allowing your mind to enjoy the music and expression, and you’ll be less likely to become flustered. If you know you don’t know the music well, you’ll have to use all your brain power just to get the notes, and will be more likely to make even more mistakes as a result of nerves. My rule of thumb is that if you play something correctly 9 times out of 10 at home, the 1 time out of 10 that you make that mistake will almost certainly be in performance, due to nerves. Go over all the details of everything to make sure you know it all inside out – all the scales, all the challenging sections of your piece. I’ll go over more of this in the final entry for one week before the audition, but you have the general idea. At this point, it’s particularly important to be playing the piece all the way through as often as possible. If there are mistakes, make a mental note of them and go back AFTER you get to the end. It’s important to NOT stop for mistakes – note that in the adjudication form, in the pitch accuracy section, you could get 10 points for “All pitches were correct” 7, 8 or 9 for “Virtually all pitches were correct” versus 3 or 4 for “Wrong pitches detracted from the performance.” Unlike a professional orchestral audition where a single mistake will put you out of the running, the reality is that almost everyone auditioning in Vermont at the high school level will make some note mistakes, and other imperfections, somewhere. The key is to make sure you keep moving in a way that the overall feeling of the piece comes across. A little mistake is not a big deal. Stopping dead in your tracks or going back over the section with the mistake might be a big deal – and make the difference between losing 1 or 2 points, versus losing several points. Keep in mind that the goal is for the music to be beautiful – not to prove that you are capable of playing a specific section correctly.

So find anyone who will listen and create your own relaxed performances to give yourself trial run experiences playing in front of people, the whole way through. Even your or your siblings’ stuffed animals can make an ok audience in a pinch, at least for starters. Family members and friends often make a willing audience, once you’ve played it through in mock performance many times on your own. Perhaps try recording yourself. It can be hard to hear yourself make mistakes, but recognize that you’re human like all the rest of us (even professionals make embarrassing mistakes in these trial runs), hear the mistakes and imperfections as well as the parts that really sounded great, make a note of them, go back and fix the imperfections in your next practice session, and then record again. Do this many times over the next two weeks – it can really help if you use the information you hear to your advantage!

Finally, notice the things you like about your playing. This is really what it’s all about. If you like something about the way you sound, then it’s all worth every minute of practice, every comment, every audition, every attempt to improve. Those who do best in the audition experience love what they’re doing! Music is truly one of the most intensely satisfying, deeply enjoyable, and purest expressions of humanity. That’s what this is all about – so find your own place within that – and revel in the experience!

You’re four weeks away. Still breathing? Good – keep it up – but only where you plan it!

Now’s the time to make sure that ANYWHERE you think you might need a breath is marked in. Now Bach has a reputation regarding breathing among flutists. Make no mistake – Bach knew what he was doing regarding breathing. Only thing is, he was probably writing for top performers with extremely well-developed breath control. So yes – there are good places to breathe – and there are very bad places to breathe. Your first job is to mark all the good places to breathe and find enough additional places to ensure that you absolutely will not: 1) collapse on the floor; 2) breathe in an unplanned spot; 3)sacrifice tone or intonation; or 4) sacrifice the continuity of phrasing any more than necessary to avoid the above 3. Your second job regarding breathing is to practice enough to ensure that you will follow through on all of the above – i.e. remain upright; breathe only where marked; play with fully in control tone and articulation; and keep phrases flowing beautifully as planned.

First – DO breathe often enough to be in full control of your tone and pitch. Take full breaths at every opportunity, filling your lungs like a glass – from the bottom up. The two main things to keep in mind, in terms of mechanics, are: 1) taking full breaths and 2) using your air efficiently. Yes, I know, that’s pretty basic, but it’s amazing how often that’s forgotten! Ideally, by now you are basically comfortable with the mechanics, but if not, there are some great articles online regarding breathing – click here (http://www.jennifercluff.com/breathe.htm)  for some very helpful thoughts from Jennifer Cluff about the mechanics involved in improving breathing.

At this point, it’s time to make sure you consistently apply those strategies in the places you want. It’s also important to recognize that you can make an improvement in the capacity of your lungs and related muscle development in 4 weeks’ time – by stretching the limits of your capacity and exercising those muscles. Running or other aerobic activity plus crunches and other abdominal exercise can also help – ideally as a year round venture.

Bottom line:

1. figure out how far you can comfortably go between breaths without sacrificing tone or intonation
2. mark every breath you think you will need to take
3. mark additional “safety breaths” – places you probably won’t need a breath, but where if nerves got the best of you and you ran short on air you’d have a back-up option that would be more acceptable than a desperate, random breath – note these differently from the others – perhaps with parentheses
4. practice your preferred breathing as you would any technical spot – until you’re getting it in the correct place and as full as you want it to be ten times out of ten – but mostly with large sections to get the full feeling
5. for the most part practice without the safety breaths – but do practice some with the safety breaths, so that if you should need one under pressure you won’t be thrown off by taking it
6. play some challenging passages each day with fewer breaths than you think you’ll need – perhaps on the Bach or perhaps on something totally unrelated – in order to stretch your breath capacity over the next few weeks so that the safety spots won’t even be necessary under pressure, and to make your first choice spots feel easy
7. don’t ever breathe anywhere that’s not marked!

Perhaps you’re very confident in your intonation. Then again, perhaps you’re not. If you’re in the latter group, you’re not alone – in fact you’re in the majority.

Rule number one: intonation counts. If you’re just playing without giving any thought to intonation, you’re almost certainly playing out of tune at least part of the time.

Rule number two: even if you’re completely obsessed with intonation, you probably won’t be perfectly in tune on every single note.

Intonation can be a scary concept for flutists. Unlike string players, it’s not something we’ve normally been taught since day one – so not as well ingrained in our psyches. Yet the high range of the flute (and even more the piccolo) lends itself to sounding particularly horrific when played out of tune (click here for a great article explaining why this is so). And the answers appear to be less straight forward than for questions about correct notes, dynamics, rhythms, and so forth – intonation reaches into a less concretely tangible realm – it appears that either you understand it or you don’t and if you don’t there seems to be no way in – and maybe your teacher didn’t really explain it in a way that you understood, so there you are out in limbo land.

The fact that flutists can pretty much get by with just putting down the right fingers without being terribly out of tune is great in some ways, but unfortunately, “pretty much getting by” isn’t actually playing truly in tune. Fortunately however, the majority of intonation problems are predictable and therefore possible to find and eliminate. It’s beyond the scope here to cover ALL possible issues for EVERY flutist and EVERY flute, but with a few tips you may be able to get rid of most of your intonation problems in time for the audition, as well as allaying some of the fear and trepidation you experience in hearing the word “intonation.” So never fear! Follow as many of these tips as you are able to apply, and you’ll be a notch ahead of where you were, as well as being better set up to avoid intonation issues in the future, and build on your success.

A few common intonation issues:

1)      high range tends to be sharp, low range tends to be flat. This is an overgeneralization, but something to watch for.

2)      forte tends to be sharp; piano tends to be flat.

3)      flutist go flat at the ends of phrases and/or when running out of air

4)      some notes are inherently sharp and some inherently flat, and this varies from one flute and one player to another. I’ve just done an internet search, compared with a few books I own as well as my own experience with my own and my students’ and colleagues’ experiences, and am finding that, beyond general agreement that the low range is often flat and the high range often sharp, specific note details appear to be a highly variable matter of opinion among the experts. IF you are confident with steps 1 – 4 and still have time before the audition, then start getting to know your flute better – notice which notes tend to be flat, and which tend to be sharp FOR YOU – on YOUR flute.

5)      All of the above have to do with relative intonation of one note to the next. Since the Vermont All State audition is unaccompanied, the relative intonation of your flute to itself is what I’m focused on here. But it would be a good idea to get your flute tuned to your tuner, with A at 440 – which you can do by playing a note with your tuner and pulling the head joint out if sharp, or pushing it in if flat. (Also be aware that the way your head joint is lined up with the body can make a huge difference – so consistent line-up from day to day is important).

What to do about it the above likely issues:

1)      if sharp, aim down with upper lip, if flat blow more across with lower lip

2)      if sharp, part the teeth further – open wider – and aim down (maybe try sticking 2 fingers between your teeth to get the feeling of how wide you can be); if flat have teeth a little closer together and aim more across

3)      keep up diaphragm power even when short of breath, especially at ends of phrases. Take full breaths at every opportunity.

4)      work on consistent posture – stand tall and relaxed. Slouching will lead to flat playing and less overall control. Inconsistent posture will lead to erratic intonation. Consistent tall and relaxed posture will give you more room for embouchure maneuvers.

5)      In addition to listening carefully to the best of your ability, check with your tuner on any questionable spots– this will give you the idea of where changes need to happen. Better yet, get “The Tuning CD” and play with it daily – including specific sections of your audition piece (click here for Jennifer Cluff’s great suggestions on how to use it). Just a few minutes a day will move you in the right direction (more can wear out your ear to the point of temporary dysfunction – so this will be most effective as a long term project – be patient and persistent!).

6)      If you’re not able to correct the intonation with embouchure alone, it may be helpful to raise or lower your head for a specific note or section (use this technique only occasionally). The basic idea is that the angle of the air going into the embouchure hole will have a great impact on the pitch. However DO NOT roll the flute itself in or out – this is just a bad habit which will lead you into difficulties too numerous to list here.

7)      Since the Vermont All State audition is unaccompanied, the relative intonation of your flute to itself is what I’m focused on here. But it would be a good idea to get your flute tuned to your tuner, with A at 440 – which you can do by playing a note with your tuner and pulling the head joint out if sharp, or pushing it in if flat. (Also be aware that the way your head joint is lined up with the body can make a huge difference – so consistent line-up from day to day is important).

Regarding the first two movements of the Bach E flat Sonata specifically, here are just a few things to note:

1. When shaping the dynamics of each phrase, be careful to avoid sharping the louder parts and flattening the softer parts.
2. There’s often triple trouble at the ends of phrases: first, you’re running out of air; second, you’re often shaping the phrase to end with a piano dynamic level; third, you’re often descending from the higher range to the lower range. ALL three of these elements lead to FLAT playing – SO check your phrase endings with the tuner or with the tuning CD and be ready to use your lower lip to aim up, with teeth closer together to help the air move more upward, keep the diaphragm pressure up and controlled despite lack of air (and plan your breaths so that even under pressure of nerves you’ll know you won’t run out completely) AND be prepared to assist by raising your head a bit if you need to. (If none of these work, ask your teacher and/or analyze whether you’re really doing the steps as mentioned – if it doesn’t make sense, a good teacher should be able to help you through this).
3. In the Siciliano there are several spot where you slur a 6^th upward – m. 3: C-A-C; m. 5: E-C-E; and so forth. Watch out! You inherently need embouchure shifts just to reach the upper note cleanly and jumping nearly an octave in tune requires major embouchure confidence. Spend extra time on these notes specifically – make sure that you can get the note to speak clearly AND in tune 100 times out of 100 in order to go into the audition with full confidence. In my experience, the A2 in measure 3 can be the worst culprit, since I find that A to be inherently flat generally, and reaching up from the lower C exaggerates that tendency.

This is really only a starter. It is difficult to cover the bases in print, so hopefully your teacher can help you fine tune this. For some, reading it in print doesn’t work because you’re not actually making the embouchure shifts accurately – and if this is the case you’re not alone! Some people need to put a couple of fingers between your teeth to really realize how far apart your teeth need to be in order to really aim down and bring the pitch down. Again, if it doesn’t work, find a teacher who can help, or use a different suggestion on the list and do the best you can.

Your goal is to start where you are and make a few improvements. I would doubt that many, if any, at the Vermont All State audition will have intonation that is truly perfect. But if you can eliminate the most common intonation errors, you will be ahead of the majority.

(Added note: I am expecting to put up a series of entries on intonation with greater detail and logically sequenced in bite sized pieces – hopefully beginning in January – so be on the lookout!).