INTO THE CONTRA PROJECT

I've been in Sydney for three weeks now, and the time has absolutely flown by. In the first week, we worked on getting software uploaded onto my computer, getting recording hardware set up and functioning correctly, and the interface between software and hardware all running smoothly. The fact that we wanted really accurate and faithful sound recording down past 30Hz really posed some challenges, and we used up a couple of days getting a system set up that we were happy with. I had to learn how to run the recording system, including the computer with the recording program, and do the checks needed to maintain consistency from session to session.

In the second week I did the series of recording sessions to record the samples I wanted to be able to analyze. Along with that came the process of creating the filing system for the sound files, so that I could always find any sample I wanted, and that each sample extracted had its unique reference to the entire session built into its file name. In between recording sessions and maintaining the log book, I got started using the special program that John Smith, a Professor in the Physics department at UNSW, wrote for the specific analysis I wanted to do on the note transients.

The recording room is a specially sound-deadened room that is designed to not reflect any sound waves. Needless to say, it is a dead room to play in. I call it "The Room of Truth". While I was doing my recording sessions, I was trading off time in the Room of Truth with Jer Ming, a grad student and teaching assistant, who is doing a big project on the saxophone. The first picture shows Joe Wolfe playing the sax during one of those sessions. My contra is taking a rest, waiting for the next run of tests.


By last weekend I had finished the recordings and had started working with the samples. John Smith came back from his semester break last Monday and I met with him to show him the progress I had made with his program. I also asked if he could make it do a couple of other things I had in mind, and he came back with a version 2 of it. Then this past week, we got set up to do the impedance tests on my instrument. There was a lot that actually went into being able to do the impedance tests, and it all came together fairly smothly. There were only two problems to deal with along the way, once we got set up, and the solutions to each one came within a couple of hours.



This picture shows the contra all set up in its special bracket, with the impedance head attached. It is specially calibrated, and is attached to a prepared bocal. Since the impedance head had a limited number of sizes of openings available, we sawed off the end of a bocal at the point where its diameter would mate with the impedance head, so there would not be a discontinuity of bore between the two. The missing part of the bocal will be added back in to the impedance curves mathematically. Then the compliance of the reed will be added in. Don't ask me how that is done! The explanation of that goes right over my head.
Towards the end of this past week, John Smith came back to me with the fourth version of the Mathematica program he has developed for this project, and now it has been developed about as far as it can go. So now we already have a lot of data collected, and have tools in place to do the analysis I (and we) want to do. Next we do another round of tests on a standard contrabassoon, to have another set of data to compare to.



The first weekend I was here, Joe Wolfe took me out sailing on Sydney harbor, and it was a special treat to have my first glimpse of the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House from a small sailboat out in the harbor.

Getting to know Sydney

The trip from New York to Sydney took longer than the travel itinerary promised. Because of stormy weather the day I left, I missed my connection in San Francisco, and had to wait for the next flight out, which was a full day later. So I arrived in Sydney on Sunday July 1st. Joe Wolfe was very kind and picked me up at the airport, and then treated me to breakfast on the rooftop of his apartment.

This week has been a time to get acquainted with Coogee Beach, the neighborhood where I am staying, and also with the acoustics group at UNSW. I have been getting a big tutorial in acoustics 101, as well as learning a lot about the computer.

Here are a couple of pictures from Coogee beach, and the local neighborhood.






The third, fourth, and fifth pictures below are from today's morning walk along the coastline just south of Coogee Beach. Sunrise over the Pacific is a thing to behold because the horizon is so clear and well defined. Along this cliffside walk there is a marsh with a wooden walkway, and there are lots of frogs in the marsh all singing at once. Some sections of the cliffside have a really wild look, and then in other parts you can walk down a series of stone ledges to the water's edge.

THE TO-DO LIST

Anyone who travels regularly knows that before you leave, there are a multitude of things to do, arrange, or otherwise take care of before getting on the airplane or driving away. There is no escaping the To-Do list, and the goal is always the same: Get all the important things done, and as many of the not-quite-as-important ones done as possible. New York Philharmonic players are well acquainted with the routine because of the amount of touring we do, and it always involves some amount of stress.

For this trip, some days I have been able to make the list shrink, and other days, as I cross things off, it still grows. And as the departure date nears, suitcases have to get packed while still trying to make the list shrink. In the process of pulling things together for the trip, big messes are created and have to get cleaned up. Sometimes at the end of the day I feel like I got a lot done, and other days I can't really remember what it was that made me so busy.

Yesterday I got the Bike Friday overhauled, and today I took it out for a test ride before packing it up for Australia. It's always satisfying to ride a bike that I've just had apart on a worktable and then rebuilt, so it was a good ride. I'm hoping to use the bike for the commute to UNSW (n addition to some real rides). The ruler feature on Google Earth tells me it's a 2-mile commute to the university, but Joe Wolfe says to think San Francisco hills for that 2 miles. Well, this bike has the gears! I'm looking forward to putting them to good use.

The IDRS Convention

The last 10 days have been a whirlwind. During the weekend before the IDRS conference, there were a lot of things going on at our place and I had to carve out the time to finish the powerpoint presentation about reed machine alignments. Then Monday the bees got re-located and I packed a car-full of equipment to go to Ithaca for the conference.

The IDRS conference is an amazing event: There are nonstop recitals, presentations, master classes, concerts, and vendors galore selling everything you can imagine for double reeds. I met many people there, including some I have known by name and reputation for years or even decades, but never had a chance to meet personally. There were a number of recitals and presentations I wanted to attend but couldn't because the schedule is so packed together.

Friday afternoon we had a 20-minute sound check on stage, where we determined, with Anne's help, that we had to be farther forward on the stage than the standard placement. 20 minutes goes by very fast when you are trying to decide final balances, cover critical transitions and spots of 6 pieces, and then find a better position on stage to play!

On the concert, Lorelei Dowling played the Berio Sequenza for bassoon (!!!) right after Barbara and I played the Bruns, and in the course of talking backstage, Lorelei said that she knows Joe Wolfe, the physicist I am going to work with in Sydney. Small world. Then on the second half, Terry Ewell played on the Strauss Duo Concertante for Clarinet and Bassoon. It was 29 years ago that he and I were studying bassoon together with Norman Herzberg at the Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. So it felt like my life was circling around and expanding outward all at once. That is a very nice thing.

Saturday morning, Terry Ewell gave a masterclass just before I gave my reed machine presentation. I arrived early to get equipment set up in advance, so we were both setting up at the same time. It felt like we were given a little chance to work together, even though our presentations were totally different from each other.

I really had my fingers crossed that I could pull off the presentation on reed machine alignments. It was my first powerpoint presentation, and I had visions that my mind might just go blank when I needed to talk. But then it got rolling, and it went fairly naturally. I did think of some things later which I wish I could have (or would have) included, but I imagine that's pretty normal. There were good questions from the audience, even some I had never considered before.

On Saturday afternoon we went to several conference events, which was really enjoyable for me since I had my own presentation out of the way! I had a deeper appreciation for other people's performances and presentations, knowing firsthand what it takes to put one together.

On Sunday we spent a little time seeing some of the waterfalls and gorges around Ithaca before driving back to the city. The falls I was really impressed with was Ithaca Falls, right in town. It was fantastic to walk through a clearing and suddenly see such a cascade of water, dancing down the rock steps.

Bradka Contrabassoon

In response to a request for more pictures of the Bradka contrabassoon I showed in a previous post, here are close-ups of the finger keys. This image is of the left-hand keys. I found these keys particularly interesting, as the touchpieces that represent finger holes are rings. There are no finger holes under the rings, but I presume that the idea was to provide something that felt like finger holes.

This picture is of the Right Hand keys.

Rehearsals for the Victor Bruns Six Pieces for contrabassoon and piano have progressed to a studio at Juilliard that has a Steinway grand piano. Before we had time with the Steinway though, we did quite a bit of work with the Yamaha keyboard I have, which I use to help prepare my orchestra parts. We were actually able to get a lot of work done with the electronic keyboard, but there were certain things which just couldn't be fine-tuned until Barbara had her hands on a real instrument.

A beekeeper came today and extracted our bee colony from the walls of our house. It was a fairly new hive, and the access was relatively easy through an outside soffit, so I think we got off relatively easy. We only have two holes to patch: the one the bees used as access, and the one the beekeeper made to access the bees.

Always something new

Next week my sister Barbara, who teaches piano at the University of Oklahoma, and I are performing at the IDRS (International Double Reed Society) conference in Ithaca NY, and we have been exploring ways of rehearsing long distance. We tried rehearsing using skype, but that wasn't satisfactory because the transmissions are not simultaneous both ways. So while she played the piano part, I recorded it (via skype) onto minidisc. Then I edited it and could use the recording to play along with. Skype distorts rhythms here and there, and makes it a bit of an adventure to play along with the recording. While it is better than nothing, the technique was just serviceable. Then she tried recording the piano part via another third party software, and posting the sound file to me via the .mac service. That recording had lots of distortion in it whenever she hit a big chord after a rest. It was less satisfactory than the skype recording. Then yesterday I sent her some sound files of the different movements of the Bruns piece. I learned how to record straight into the Garage Band program on the mac, edit it, and then via a series of conversions, compressions, exports, and imports, posted it in a folder on the .mac in reasonable file sizes. Then Barbara could save my recordings into iTunes and play them through her stereo in Oklahoma, playing along with her piano part. The learning curve was a little long, but since we have very little actual rehearsal time together, we will be glad we did it.

While I was working on all of this, my practice room became invaded by bees! I kept chasing them out, but knew something was up, as they kept coming out from behind the steam radiator vent covers. This morning I looked online about swarms of bees in house walls and read the sobering news about getting rid of bee colonies in walls. Then I went outside and saw where the bees are going in and out through a gap between the bricks at the outside corner of the dining room. I went back inside and put my ear to the interior wall opposite that spot, and heard a beehive's worth of activity. Stuffing a rag into the gap in the bricks outside confirmed that we have either an established colony or they are setting up house. I called a beekeeper and he is coming to look at our valuable but uninvited guests this afternoon. If it is an established hive, it will probably involve opening up walls and maybe the dining room ceiling to get the hive out. They say you have to do that, otherwise the honey attracts other bee colonies as well as insects and rodents. When a comb is chewed into by insects or other animals, it leaks honey and creates a big mess, so it needs to be taken out. We may soon have a few more holes in our walls!

This project was not included in my sabbatical proposal to the Philharmonic.

WHAT CONTRA FOR THE BRAHMS REQUIEM

Yesterday as we were rehearsing and then performing the Brahms Requiem, I was wondering what the contra players who originally encountered this piece were playing on. The Requiem was written in 1868, and there had just been a 25-year period between 1842, when Glinka wrote Russlan and Ludmilla, and 1867 when Verdi wrote Don Carlo, when no orchestral composer that I can document wrote for the contrabassoon. I think that the instrument was so primitive and so weak tone-wise, that composers quit writing for it. But during this time, all kinds of double reed contrabass instruments were being built. All manner of shapes and sizes, as well as materials were tried. The Requiem was one of the first pieces to be written which included the contra again, after this 25 year hiatus. But it was written a full 11 years before Heckel devised the configuration of the contra that we are familiar with. The experiments were still going on! So we can only guess what kind of instruments were used for the performances in the first decade or two of the Requiem's existence. Brahms was not shy about what he asked the contra to do in this piece, so I can only guess what the players went through to execute the part to their satisfaction.


(Picture to the left) The contrabassoon in this display case was built by Bradka, near Vienna, between 1850 and 1880, and it is on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a very sophisticated version of one of the old designs, which is essentially a giant bassoon with a big looping crook. It has beautifully crafted keywork. Click on these pictures for larger images.


The instrument on the right in this picture is a Contrabassophon, a contra design which did not survive. It was built around 1850 near Koblenz, and has a larger bore than even a modern contrabassoon. On the left is a Tritonikon, a metal double reed instrument which plays in the same register as the contrabassoon. These are in the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum. The feature of the contrabassophon is that Haseneier, who built it, re-configured the joints of the contra, and built it in what is called a four-fold wrap. This pointed the way for Stritter and Heckel to use the four-fold wrap for their redesigns of the 1870's, which Heckel patented in 1879, and which became the contra as we knew it for the next 120 years.

My apologies for the poor quality of the photographs! Instrument museums generally have terrible lighting and lots of glare from all the spotlights and glass, and one cannot get a picture of an entire instrument except to stand some distance back from the glass case.