Noise

By Mike Vaccaro
(from Mike's Musings #46, our newsletter)

Practice for at least a minute today.

I have a student named Don and I was trying to teach him the Circle of Fifths to help him with his jazz playing. He couldn’t catch on looking at the Circle, which can be found in just about any jazz instruction book. So I wrote the notes on a manuscript paper so he could see the notes from left to right instead of looking at a circle. The day before his lesson he sent me a file of him playing noise very loudly and pretending it was the circle.

This soprano sax student also had a problem with notes gurgling but when he played the noise all the notes were very strong sounding because he was blowing the air through the instrument.

Then I remembered this was something I used to do as a teaching technique and somehow over the years this technique slipped through the cracks.

I previously asked quiet shy people to play noise at the start of their lesson to get their air moving and, for those students who were outgoing and tended to play loud all the time, I would have them play soft, long tones or my chromatic exercise (The chromatic exercise is available on YouTube with the title “The Chromatic Scale”).

When Don came in for his lesson we started out playing a bit of noise and then went over the Circle of Fifths on the manuscript paper from left to right. Every time he played the Circle with a full breath he had a much better time playing and when he got lethargic in his playing the gurgling came back. So we added a breath mark about half way through the Circle and the gurgling was minimal.

Each of us has a volume we feel comfortable with and students especially will protect that volume no matter how much we try and have them play dynamics or extremes of loud and soft.

Advanced players understand that phrasing and volume changes played within the phrase are what makes music more interesting.

If phrasing could be understood early on in any musical training it would make the whole process of learning easier. The understanding of which notes are married to each other makes everything easier.

Some Quotes


A flower doesn’t think about the flower next to it.
It just blooms.

~Anon

People don’t judge music.
Music judges people.

~Anon

Try and be present when you practice.
When other thoughts enter your mind dismiss them.
Sooner or later, as you practice,
those thoughts begin to disappear.

~M.V.

EMOTIONAL PRESENCE
Knowing the content is not enough.
Knowing and loving the content,
and wanting to share it
gives it presence.

~Anon

Three core values in music and life?
Seeking Truth
Building Trust
Performing Service

~Anon

I am a human being first,
A musician second,
And a cellist third.

~Pablo Casals

In music we communicate on
the conscious and subconscious level.

~Yo-Yo Ma

The price of love is grief.

~President Biden

Study to be world-class at your craft.
If that doesn't work immediately,
just keep studying
and wait for it to come.

~M.V.

Love doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just has to be true.

~Regina Garcia

Change is the essence of life.

~Anon

Listen to your internal dialogue
and
really consider what you are saying to yourself.

~M.V.

Birth and death are much the same thing
in that they are part of the continuum of life.
We come from the universe and
we return to the universe.
 
Of course the major difference is when we are born,
and, if we are lucky, we gradually get stronger for
many years, until we change directions,
and ever so gradually we get weaker.
 
So much of the last period of aging in life
becomes giving up things gracefully and
being thankful for what we have done,
what we learned, what we owned,
and who we loved.
 
It is the story of all human life.

~M.V.

One of the most important things
that contributes to being a great musician
is admitting to ourselves what we can’t do
and accepting it.
Music is too large for any of us to capture it all,
even for the geniuses.

~M.V.

Life is terribly complicated
for a man who has lost his principals.

~G.K. Chesterson

We are all what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then is not an act but a habit.

~Aristotle

When people don’t have an objective
there is much less dynamic effort,
and that makes life a lot less interesting.

~Barbara Tuchman

There is no ending to our quest.

~Sonny Rollins

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