Green Arts Network: Pathways from Inspiration to Artistry

It’s always interesting for me to learn about some of the reasons why players adopt tuning in fifths on the double bass. The following comment just came in on one of my classic (i.e. old) blog posts about reaching the low notes:

I also use the fifths tuning. Joel Quarrington’s website persuaded me to try it, and my experience has borne out everything he says (from the other end of the food chain – I’m an amateur orchestral player.)

Not only do you get the low notes without the problems of either 5 strings or extensions, but the bass resonates and sounds far better.

Joel and I chatted about his use of tuning in fifths on our Contrabass Conversations interview, and he has a great document up on his website more fully detailing fifths tuning as well.

This week is the first week of the fall quarter at DePaul University, and I’m doing a fair amount of teaching there this quarter: bass lessons, string pedagogy, and the technology class for music education students.

As I set up for this class, I can’t help but recall a post I wrote a few years ago when I was a student in the very class that I’ll be teaching. This post documents some of the kooky problems we were having with getting Finale running in the lab–a bit of a problem for a music technology class! I was wondering about open source alternatives, and this post ended up getting a lot of responses with some good suggestions.

My first task as the new Technology Chair for the Illinois chapter of the American String Teachers Association has been to redesign the IL-ASTA website, and I am pretty happy with how it’s looking. Take a look, and if you’re an Illinois ASTA member, send me any upcoming events or news and I’ll put them up on the site:

http://ilasta.org

I’ll be doing a couple of clinics for this fall’s IL-ASTA Teacher Enrichment Workshop, which takes place on October 23rd at York High School in Elmhurst, IL. One session covers techniques for directors to get good bass tone out of students, and the other covers some simple steps to set up a quick and easy music ensemble/organization website. I’ll post more details (and probably the Keynote for the clinics) here on the blog as I continue to hammer away at them.

Alright, folks–it’s time to enroll for next summer’s International Society of Bassists competitions. These are big events that can do a lot for a winner’s career, so seriously consider applying for them:

Guidelines and entry forms for the 2011 ISB Double Bass Competition, with divisions for jazz, solo, orchestra and ages 15-18 and 14 and under, are available at http://www.isbworldoffice.com/competitions/performance.html.

Guidelines and entry forms for the 2011 ISB Maker’s are available at http://www.isbworldoffice.com/competitions/luthier.html.

Make plans to celebrate the Summer of Bass Love at the 2011 ISB Convention, June 6-11, at San Francisco State University. Stay tuned for details and mark your calendars!

We’ve been laughing at this one a lot at school recently. I’ve been considering teaching my bass students some moves like this:

From the International Society of Bassists:

The American Federation of Musicians is gathering signatures on a petition to urge Congress to adopt uniform rules for musicians to carry on or check their instruments aboard U.S. planes.

To view the bill as currently written, go to http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s1451/text. Section 713 “Transporting Musical Instruments” a.(3) provides for instruments too large to be carried into the cabin to be checked without additional charge (!), maximum combined linear measurements 150 inches, and maximum weight 165 pounds. Sounds like a dream come true!

You’ll have to sign in and create an account in order to sign the petition. If this kind of legislation would pass, life for traveling bass players could end up changing radically (for the better!).

I have spent the last decade plus preparing high school double bass students to audition for youth orchestras, competitions, All-State Orchestra, and college. A lot of my students have done very well in their auditions for these events, and I have always tried, through observing how my students do in these competitive situations, to refine my approach as a teacher.

The best piece of advice that i can give to any young auditioner is that your outcome is almost solely based on how much time you sound thoughtfully (that’s the key word!) preparing your materials. When a student doesn’t play well in an audition, they may mistakenly assume that they are not a good auditioned or that some outside force intervened to sabotage their efforts, when the reality is that they simply didn’t put in the time, or they put in the wrong kind of time. To me, the most frustrating kind of student is one who doesn’t prepare, doesn’t play well as a result, then offers up a litany of excuses for themselves rather than taking responsibility for their preparation and musical growth.

As a teacher, I can offer advice on how to prepare, take students through the process of effective practicing, show them how to be analytical, and demonstrate quality playing of specific techniques and repertoire. I cannot, however, magically appear and play all the notes for them. It’s on them to do that, and while I will always try my best to guide students through this process, it’s ultimately in their hands.

Here, then, are a few assorted nuggets of advice from an old guy on how to effectively prepare for an audition:

• Practice early and often – With rare exceptions, you cannot start preparing audition music too soon. People worry about burnout on a specific piece, and this may occur from time to time, but 95% of the time a student has under practiced rather than over practiced.
• Listen to recordings of what you are playing – A bass teacher once told me that listening to one or two recordings of a piece was just screwing around, but three or more recordings constituted research. Whether or not this is actually true, I do believe that the more interpretations you can find and absorb, the better. If you don’t like a recording, then you at least know what you don’t want to do, but don’t be too quick to write off a particular performer or performance. As students develop the skill of being able to discriminate quality, they frequently become overly quick to judge. Listen with open ears to everything you hear–you’ll be surprised what you’ll learn.
• Sectionalize your music and write down a plan – I always smile when I see a student come into a lesson with a practice log and a written practice plan–these people usually end up doing very well at whatever it is that they’re trying to prepare. It’s amazing to me just how powerful a written plan really is to the practice process, and I’m amazed that more people don’t do it. Perhaps one in ten students to whom I suggest that they do this actually does it.
• Get a three-ring binder and some protective sheet covers – This may seem like a strange suggestion, but vie found that the best way to prepare for an audition is to photocopy all the materials and put them in a three-ring binder using plastic sheet covers. You can also use this system to hold your practice journal sheets, mock audition comment sheets, info from the college or group for which you are auditioning, and even selected inspirational articles and quotes (if that floats your boat).
• Create technique exercises out of the repertoire… and write them down! – Again, setting pen to paper and getting this kind of material out of your head and into your practice binder makes a massive difference.
• Practice performing the music – Make sure that you practice playing the entire repertoire list for your audition in front of other people. Both musicians and non-musicians (i.e. your mom) will help. Do this frequently, but be sure to take note of what doesn’t go well and focus on that in your practice sessions.

Use a variety of practice techniques – Explaining these is much easier in a lesson setting, and my shorthand may not make sense to everybody, but I encourage students to use methods like acceleration, non-vibrato equal note practice, vibrato equal note practice, rhythmic patterns, shift isolation, building from the back, adding a note, isolating problem moments and fanning out, and sets/reps on isolated small sections.

Any additional suggestions for auditioning high schoolers? Feel free to leave them in the comments.

Last week I put out a video of Brandino on Helicore Orchestral Strings. Here’s more of Brandino, this time on the Helocire Hybrids:

Oh dear…

While I’m in “asking the public” mode, anybody know how to get ahold of a copy of the Glazounov Elegy? Here’s a video of the piece as performed by Hans Roelofsen. Drop me a line if you know details on publishers for this piece.

Wow–listen to that tone!

Double bassist Todd Matthews is selling his flat back double bass. A PDF flyer providing details about the bass is available:

Frenchbass.pdf

Anybody know how to get ahold of the score and parts for the full orchestra version of Paganini’s Moses Fantasy? If so, drop me a line at jasonheath -at- doublebassblog.org. Thanks!

I know I’ve been putting out a lot of videos recently, but this one really must be seen. I think it speaks for itself:

He likes his eggs over easy:

An oldie, but still great.

One of the fun things about running a blog is seeing how posts from many years ago still generate comments. The following comment comes from a discussion from 2007 about the merits of the Rabbath and Simandl systems as teaching materials for younger students.

The original post can be found here, and a quite articulate follow-up post from double bassist John Tuck is a must-read as well. Here’s the comment that just came in–interesting:

I am a conductor, composer and double bassist with an active performing and teaching career. While I have been a bass teacher for 37 years, I have never allowed my thinking about the bass to stand still. This curiosity moved me to spend most of my 45 years on the bass experimenting with and analysing every approach or system I came across. I believe the result of this journey is a synthetic approach that combines the strongest elements of each set of practices into a cohesive yet open architecture that consistently produces rapid progress for my students… and now their students as well.

I will return to add information when I complete the article.

Check out all the comments for the two previously linked posts as well–some interesting perspectives (and feel free to add your own, of course).

Double bassist Leon Bosch (we’ve featured him several times in the past on Contrabass Conversations) performs the Serenata from Suite Andaluza by Pedro Valls with pianist Sung-Suk Kang in the following video:

I know I’ll probably get hate mail for putting up two cat posts in short order, but I can’t help but be amazed watching this cool cat. The duets between Nora and her person are really neat to watch:

My wife doesn’t think this instrument sounds very good (!), but I still think it’s pretty cool:

About the Octobass, videographer Patrick Shannahan writes:

The 12-foot tall Octobass plays so low, it’s lowest string when played fully open is barely in the human hearing registry. To play it, a musician must stand on a stool and use leavers to fret the notes. It resides at the new Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and is the only one in North America.

I shot this with the Canon 5dmkii to run as a multimedia piece to go with stories we are running in The Arizona Republic about a new musical instrument museum in Phoenix. Photog Pete Scholz of KPNX helped me edit.

There were several concurrent revelations some years back that inspired me to look deeper into this frequency relationships and such. There were two books, “The Cosmic Octave” by Hans Cousteau and “Nada Brahma” by J.E. Berendt. Around the same time of reading these books I was introduced to the “Schumann Resonances”, and also spotted a news article claiming that a super-low, ultra-beefy B-flat was discovered at the heart of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster.

I enjoyed gleaning what I could from Cousteau’s “The Cosmic Octave” but progressively lost interest when the Swiss-born author intermittently insinuated that he was the long-awaited mathematician, scholar, and glass bead gamer “Magister Ludi” of Hermann Hesse lore. I then dropped the book entirely when the sexual pleasures of tuning forks of various pitches was discussed. The book seemed to go astray in terms of academic rigor at that point. Went completely off the rails. [It should be duly noted that this tuning fork phenomenon is not unknown in certain circles. However, as a bass player with an electronic tuner, I had no previous knowledge of such activities.]

At the moment I don’t remember anything specific about Berendt’s “Nada Brahma”, it blew my mind so much. Seriously, this book changed my outlook on many things. One of the 2-3 books in my life that has had a tectonic-shift type of impact. On the other hand, I’ve also spoken with insomniacs who would pick up the book when they really needed sleep, they found it so obtuse. (“Obtuse! Did you say ‘Obtuse’?”)

I admit that I wasn’t able to follow everything in “Nada Brahma”, which is par for the course for somewhat difficult reads since I can be notoriously thick-headed, but extracted enough meaningful content to be extremely happy to have read it. (The same goes for Fritjof Capra’s “The Tao of Physics”, who, incidentally, wrote the introduction for the edition of “Nada Brahma” in my possession.)

The Schumann Resonances are a fascinating phenomenon that is, literally, right under our feet, noses, etc. They are essentially “global electromagnetic resonances excited by lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances]

The resonances are ELFs (Extremely Low Frequencies) consisting of several tones and overtones, the strongest of which is the so-called and aptly-named “Schumann Resonance” after the German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who mathematically predicted the existence of said frequencies in 1952. This strongest of these at 7.83 Hz I sometimes refer to as the Earth Resonance.

I was introduced to the Schumann Resonance at a sound workshop hosted by Dean and Dudley Evenson, accomplished musicians and founders of “Soundings of the Planet”, an independent record label founded in 1979. They are still actively recording and producing music.

One thing they started to do when they became aware of the Schumann/Earth Resonance was to include the resonance itself in all of their recordings. This strongest resonance of 7.83 Hz is well below our threshold of hearing. However, some fun “facts” I’ve gathered about said resonance follow:

• Whales, crickets, and a myriad of other creatures communicate along this frequency, effectively using the earth as an amplifier to carry their signal over long distances.
• Submarines allegedly use this same frequency for underwater communication and navigation, and have been (correctly, in my opinion) blamed for killing/damaging marine life in the process.
• The Schumann Resonance has been built into space shuttle instrumentation to help prevent space sickness.
• The Earth Resonance is right at the threshold between two critical brain states, that of “theta” (dreaming, subconscious, hypnotic, meditative) and “alpha” (daydreaming, creative, relaxed). [I like to think that humans evolved around this “lullaby” sung by our very planet]
• The Earth Resonance is a B natural when A is tuned to 446.447 Hz (slightly sharp)

The aforementioned facts are as I understand them to be. (I know, “crickets”!) I am in no way a scholar, scientist or academic about this. If any facts or assumptions listed are incorrect, I would appreciate hearing about it.

If you ever google “Schumann Resonance”, you’ll see that some folks believe that the resonance is actually getting higher and higher as our planet’s panic increases, until all will be knocked cattywumpus in 2012. I’m not saying that nothing will happen in 2012, and it does seem that the earth is considered disposable by many, but for the record, a real-life scientist working on ELFs in Alaska told me that the Earth’s pitch is not changing.

As for the lowest known note in the universe, it was found in 2003 at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster by scientists at the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Essentially, there’s this B-flat 57 octaves below middle C emitted by a supermassive black hole at the center of a cluster of galaxies. The note is so low, one sound wave is produced every 10 million years and carries the power of 100 million supernovas.

The fact that the scientists figured out the pitch of something so low inspired me to do some simple figurin’ and octavatin’. As far as I know, I was the first person to figure out that the actual pitch of the Earth Resonance is a B natural. It’s quite beautiful that the earth has been saying “B natural” all along.

I sit here at campsite 17 in an undisclosed location in northern Minnesota, listening to the August screams of children treating the national forest campground as if it’s a Wisconsin Dells water park. Pity the mergansers, cedar waxwings, the confusing fall warblers, shallow-watered guppies, and campers who are here to get away from these very sounds. They are so distracting that I keep reading the same lines repeatedly in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” that I have finally, at roughly a quarter of the way through, started to make some sense of. It is admittedly quite a ride, even if I am unable to hang on at all times. But I digress.

Since many, if not most of the readers of this blog are bassists and/or bass players (unsure what the difference is, truth be told), it’s abundantly clear that octaves resonate with each other. To demonstrate, one only needs to play the low G on the E string to visually witness that the open G string sympathetically resonates with it. Other overtones can be heard as well, but for the purposes here only octaves will be considered. Based on the assumption that octaves resonate with each other, and that this resonance means something if only sheer consonance, I wish to expound upon certain theories based upon simple “math”.

OK, the term “math” scares a lot of people. The brain shuts off. “Oh my, I just don’t DO math”. And so on. My special brand of math involves only two things: multiplying by two, and dividing by two. Calculators are OK, too.

Sound frequencies are measured in “Hertz”, a term synonymous with “cycles per second” or “waves per second”. The shorthand for Hertz is “Hz”.

To obtain the frequency of the next higher octave of any given pitch, simply double the base frequency. To illustrate, the next-higher octave of 440 Hz (“A-440”) is 880 Hz. Doubling the frequency again results in an A of 1760 Hz, and so on. The human ear can hear upwards of about 20,000 Hz.

Conversely, dividing a frequency in half results in the next-lower octave. The octave below 440 Hz is 220. Going lower still, the frequencies of 110, 55, and 27.5 Hz are octaves of A-440. The open A string of a bass is 55 Hz. The human ear can hear down to around 20 Hz.

That’s all for octaves. For right now. In the next article, I’ll discuss a few books that influenced me and some very low tones below the human threshold of hearing.