bocal soup
  • Home
    • reviews
  • cassandra
    • blog
  • media
  • lessons
  • happenings
  • links
  • bassoon quartets

Partington's "Making Music"

12/16/2007

0 Comments

 
I stumbled across an excellent book in the University’s music library the other day called “Making Music” and was written by sports-writer John T. Partington. He interviewed principal players in a leading Canadian orchestra about their performance processes and gave them all (mostly) anonymous names. I highly recommend the book if you’re at all into this side of the classical music business.

A few excerpts that struck me:
Bass The whole thing about musical performance is communication. You have to be willing to take a risk, be willing to open yourself up.

Timpani A If you are going to be a performer, it must be the passion of your life. If you do something in life, it has to be a passion for you. Just to work is silly. When you choose something, you live with the consequences. I have always treated my work that way.
In orchestras you have musicians, and then there are those I call “workers” of music. Musicians have a great talent and they love music. The workers also have a lot of talent, and function at a high professional level, but they don’t like music and they don’t like conductors. Music doesn’t enrich them in a personal way. Fortunately, most orchestras have 30% of the other kind, the musicians.

Violin B The moment that one said to oneself, “I don’t have to do this. I’m going to see what I can do…”, turned things right around. It was the sense of not being obligated to yourself, or to your past. You could actually look at the next note that you would play as something that is not in any way predetermined by any of the five million notes you have played before. That was a very freeing kind of thing. That got rid of the tension one gets from the sense of having to deliver something, which is actually at the bottom of one’s feeling of nervousness and the butterflies in the stomach.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    cassandra

    Freelance bassoonist and carpenter of the reedy persuasion in Tucson, AZ.

    RSS Feed

    other blogs

    Habits of Musicians
    Bulletproof Musician
    Bassoon Blog
    Christin Schillinger
    Have Bassoon Will Cook
    The Pedantic Bassoonist
    Music Matters-Bassoon
    Double Reed Ltd.

    Archives

    July 2021
    August 2017
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    June 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    March 2012
    December 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    September 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    April 2009
    March 2009
    January 2009
    July 2008
    June 2008
    May 2008
    April 2008
    March 2008
    January 2008
    December 2007
    October 2007
    September 2007
    August 2007

    Categories

    All
    Artistry
    Auditions
    Bassoon
    Bnl
    Bocal Anxiety
    Busyness
    Contrabassoon
    Dreams
    Injuries
    Johnny Depp
    Music
    Musing
    Other People's Children
    Performance
    Reeds
    Studenting
    Time
    Tucson Chamber Orchestra
    Unrepentance

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
    • reviews
  • cassandra
    • blog
  • media
  • lessons
  • happenings
  • links
  • bassoon quartets