juggling and fluttering

I feel like I am going through a particularly busy time at the moment trying to juggle work and lessons and life and rehearsals with two orchestras. I am hoping this is only for a short time as it is getting rather wearing.

I had a lesson last week which went well - we looked at the Luft Study no 11.  This had two weeks of practice due to half term so was in a reasonable state.  Now looking at Study No 12 which is actually completely different to all the others so far.  It is Adagio but has a large number of trills.  I think I'd rather go back to lots of semi quavers but I know that I need to pratice trills so it is definitely doing me good.   I am now working on the last piece from Richardson's French Suite and the Mozart is coming on quite nicely.  I need to get my trills sorted out in that one too! Telemann's Fantastia no 2 is also progressing.   I have another two weeks to practice again as teacher can't do this week's lesson.  So a few more days to make progress.

Last night we had sectional rehearsals for the Rite of Spring which seemed to go well.  We looked at the very beginning and the start and end of the second part.  I have a lot of rests at the beginning so I did have at least 30 minutes of counting rather than playing to start off with, which wasn't so great but part and parcel of rehearsals.  When I did get to play it was meant to be flutter tongued chromatics.  I haven't worked out how to do this yet.  I can roll my R's quite happily and flutter tongueing on the flute is reasonably straight forward.  But doing that with a double reed is quite a different matter.  I was trying to work out how I actually roll my R's to understand why it is difficult - I think I create a focussed high speed air flow and then allow the tongue to bounce off the stream of air pressure.  A little like doing a drum roll on a snare.  Trying to do that with a reed is so difficult because it is impossible to get that amount of air down it, and the reed then gets in the way of the toungue so that it doesn't rebound in the same way.  I need to do some more experiments but I think the embouchure needs to be different and less reed needs to be in the mouth.  Whether that will still then be in tune is a different matter.  for this piece i don't think it will matter.  The oboe is lost within the flutes and clarinets who are also doing the chromatic sections so I should be able to fake it a bit.