Need to relax more...

Thursday's Practice Time: 75 minutes

Scales and technical exercises:  Ran through harmonic minors , minor arpeggios.  Scale for this week is E major.  I’ll talk more about this section tomorrow.

Study:  A new study so initially sight read through to get a feel for it and see where the difficulties lie.  Like the other Luft studies, stamina and working out where on earth to take a breath are the biggest issues.  I tend to collapse in a heap somewhere in the middle, usually due to not managing to breath out enough stale air.  There are some awkward fingering corners but there have been worse and it all seems managable.  I focussed today on sorting out the trills in the first few lines – making sure I knew which fingers should be trilling and practising them slowly.  There's also interesting section of semi quavers with accented but untongued notes at the start of each group of 4.  These require a push from the abs/ diaphragm to stress them.  Watching in the mirror I seemed to be making a lot of physical effort without hearing much difference in the sound which suggested that something was going a bit wrong.  A bit more experimentation suggested that although I was pushing with my abs something else was happening with my shoulders and throat which was resisting that push so it made no difference except to upset my embouchure.  Focus of rest of study practice was doing this section slowly and being very conscious about pushing from the right place and relaxing my arms and shoulders.  There was some improvement by end of the pratice but this needs more investigation as there is definitely something amiss here.  I suspect this same resistance problem is limiting my dynamics at the top end and also preventing me fully exhaling my stale air before taking a breath.

Richardson: This is a new piece so my main focus, again, was on working through the whole piece to identify the problem areas.  First impression is that I like it (always goos).  There are some awkward sections from a fingering point of view, I need to think about how to play it musically – where are the phrases as they are generally uneven and not always initially obvious.  However teh  first hurdle for me is a rhythmic one.  It switches between 9/8 and 6/8 sections, I think I need to become more familiar with the individual sections before working out how to transition between them properly,   so I’ll focus on sorting out the 9/8 bits initially

Reizenstein: Did some work on the initial section, will focus more on this tomorrow

Binge: Had a play through this, I need to remember to build my phrases more rather than rounding off every 2 bars.  This is also a good piece for practising vibrato.  Vibrato does seem to be a bit of a mystery although some work has been done to identify exactly which muscles produce it and how it is controlled. Diaphragmatic “bumps” are meant to help you discover it and allow it to emerge in practice you don’t really use this muscle to produce it eventually.  I can feel a more natural vibrato emerging but I think I am trying to fight  it either by tensing up to stop it – probably linked to the issue above, or by trying to control it too much and imposing another vibrato on top of it using my diaphragm.  I think it is one of those things that you need to not think about too much.   Need to relax more and let it happen.

Orchestra: Ran through tricky bits in the Mahler to finish off, though in reality I think the trickiest bit of all will be counting the rests and making sure I come in at the right time.  There are lots of changes of tempo and time signature while counting large numbers of bars.  I am playing this with another local orchestra.  They needed a third oboist for the piece, my teacher is their principal oboist and asked me if I could do it.  Full day rehearsal for this on Sunday so will write more after that.

Overall felt like a good practice with a number of issues identified to work on over the next week.