Next weekend, the Chicago Flute Club will present a two-day festival at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston (1710 N. Orrington Avenue, Evanston).  This event is a great opportunity for students to hear new ideas and music and there will be concerts and workshops for flutists of all levels.  There will also be a vendor exhibition hall where you can shop for new flute music, purchase that metronome that you’ve been needing, or test drive a new flute.

Here are some of the offerings that I would particularly recommend.  You can also download the complete schedule by clicking here.

FOR ELEMENTARY AND JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS:

Saturday, November 7

10:00 to 10:45–Sonic Adventures: Exploring Cool Flute Sounds: For anyone in their 2nd year of playing and up.  Bring your flute and your imagination and Phyllis Louke will explore with you the sonic possibilities of your instrument.  Learn how to play two notes at the same time, make motorcycle sounds and other cool sound effects.  Learn how these fun sounds called extended techniques can help improve your tone and intonation.

11:00 to 11:45–All You Ever Wanted to Know About Big Flutes but Were Afraid to Ask: Learn the ins and outs of playing alto, bass and contrabass flutes with Phyllis Louke.  Tips for instrument set up, improving intonation, ergonomic hand position and instrument support.  There will be a special guest appearance by Conrad, the contrabass flute.

12:30 to 1:45–2008 Student Competition Winners in Recital

Sunday, November 8

9:00 to 11:15–Annual Student Competition Finals

3:00–Duo Recital with William Bennett and Denis Bouriakov: Bennet and Bouriakov will offer you a glorious afternoon of flute duos that will elevate your concept of beauty, artistry and exquisite musical taste to a new level of sublime appreciation.

FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS:

Saturday, November 7

10:00 to 10:45–Sonic Adventures: Exploring Cool Flute Sounds: For anyone in their 2nd year of playing and up.  Bring your flute and your imagination and Phyllis Louke will explore with you the sonic possibilities of your instrument.  Learn how to play two notes at the same time, make motorcycle sounds and other cool sound effects.  Learn how these fun sounds called extended techniques can help improve your tone and intonation.

11:00 to 11:45–All You Ever Wanted to Know About Big Flutes but Were Afraid to Ask: Learn the ins and outs of playing alto, bass and contrabass flutes with Phyllis Louke.  Tips for instrument set up, improving intonation, ergonomic hand position and instrument support.  There will be a special guest appearance by Conrad, the contrabass flute.

12:30 to 1:45–2008 Student Competition Winners in Recital

2:00 to 2:45–Ten Tips for a Better Tone: Do you control your vibrato or does it control you?  A participatory class led by Patricia George will show you the ups and downs of vibrato, shades of tone color and importance of breath control.

3:00 to 5:00–Masterclass with William Bennett: Observe a masterclass with world-renowned flutist William Bennett as he guides university flute students.

8:00–Marco Granados and Matthias Ziegler Go Beyond Mozart and Poulenc: Together, these men will give you a taste of flutists’ rich musical heritage, combined with passionate flute-playing, sizzling beats and rich sounds that will carry you far beyond the purity and perfection of our standard repertoire.

Sunday, November 8

9:00 to 11:15–Annual Student Competition Finals

9:00 to 10:00–Choosing or Upgrading a Flute: What are your options to improve your instrument, short of buying a $20,000 gold flute?  Is it sufficient to only buy a new headjoint?  What do all the new metal combinations do for the sound of an instrument?  Come discuss this with Sam Gordon, a flute dealer who wants to show you many of your choices and then let you make your own decisions.

10:15 to 11:15–IMEA Jumpstart on 2010: Teresa Muir will give you a peek at the High School IMEA audition materials for 2010 along with tips for practice and stress management through the audition process.  Bring your flute, a pencil and a folding music stand.

11:30 to 12:45–Masterclass with Angelita Floyd: Develop your musical artistry with Angelita Floyd as you hear her discuss the concise fundamentals and foundations of making beautiful music.  Explore freedom from tension, allowing the tone to roar and technique to flow; it’s all about the air!  Join us as we embrace well-established principles of musical phrasing in order to bring the music to life.

1:00 to 1:45–Getting Accepted into a Conservatory-or not: This workshop will explore the preparation for and process of applying to a conservatory.  Susan Levitin will address differences between different programs, admission requirements, repertoire, musical resumes, prescreening taping audition anxiety, and other relevant topics.

3:00–Duo Recital with William Bennett and Denis Bouriakov: Bennet and Bouriakov will offer you a glorious afternoon of flute duos that will elevate your concept of beauty, artistry and exquisite musical taste to a new level of sublime appreciation.

You don’t have to be a CFC member to attend the festival but student membership at $20 for the year will entitle you to two passes to all 2009-10 CFC events.  Here is the breakdown:

Student Member:

Attending for 1 day: $20

Attending for 2 days: $35

Non-member:

Attending for 1 day: $30

Attending for 2 days: $55

Adults accompanying a student may attend for $15 for 1 day and $30 for 2 days.

I will be attending on both days; hope to see you there!!!

My students have always received a weekly assignment sheet that includes a spot for them to log their daily practice time.  After some weeks when practicing was on a real roll, it always seemed a shame to discard that sheet and start clean again.  Then came along Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book “Outliers”.  Gladwell found a clear correlation between the total amount of practice accomplished by aspiring musicians and their subsequent success.  That gave me the idea for “The Practice Bank”, a musical savings plan that many of my students signed on to about six months ago.  We still use the same assignment sheets but now each week’s practice gets tallied into a running total.

Last week Andrea Gomes was my first student to reach 100 hours of practice–congratulations, Andrea!!!  Andrea is on to her next practice goal of 250 hours.  The best thing about the Practice Bank is that, unlike spending the money in your piggy bank, you can enjoy the benefits of your practice without having your investment decrease at all. Happy practicing, everyone!

Merit’s Honors Flute Quartet, featuring Jingyi Liu, Julia McGehee, Katie Scotkowski and Leen van Besien, was recently renamed the Lewis Weinberg Honors Flute Quartet in honor of Lewis Weinberg, a former Merit trustee and flute enthusiast.  The quartet gave its first official performance under its new name this past Friday in Gottlieb Hall and you can enjoy their performance of Gary Schocker’s Nymphs in the clip below.  This school year has flown by and I can’t believe that there is only one more performance for the quartet.  It has been wonderful for me to watch the group become tight-knit not just musically but as true friends.  That’s the cherry on top for a chamber music coach!  We’re planning to end the year with a performance of Raymond Guiot’s  Jazz Divertimento on Merit’s Spring Concert series (Tuesday, May 5 at 6 pm in Gottlieb Hall).  This piece is off the beaten path for quartet repertoire but has become one of my favorites over the last few years.  I hope that you can join us!

First thing this morning, four cars made their way through the snow flurries up to Highland Park for Midwest Young Artists’ Chicago Chamber Music Competition.  MYA’s event grouped the ensembles based on their instrumentation and whether they were affiliated with MYA or another organization.  I’m thrilled to report that Jingyi Liu, Julia McGehee, Katie Scotkowski and Leen van Besien took first place in the “Other Instruments” category of the Open Division!!!!!

Prior to the event, each ensemble had to submit a list of 15 minutes worth of repertoire.  As we entered the warm-up room, a competition monitor informed us of which works the judges wanted to hear.  The quartet performed Movement 1 from Quatuor by Pierre Max Dubois, Movement III (”In the Air”) from Nymphs by Gary Schocker and The Easter Islander by Mike Mower.  Playing in Ravinia’s beautiful Bennett-Gordon Hall, the girls danced through these three selections with speed, precision and confidence.  (That’s what spending hours with one another and a metronome in a small room will do for you!)  I am incredibly proud of how they have developed as an ensemble in just six months!!

Please click here to see the full list of competition winners.  JIngyi, Julia, Katie and Leen will each receive a $250 scholarship towards participating in one of MYA’s programs either this summer or next year.

As always, I am also deeply appreciative of the “behind-the-scenes” support that our group has gotten from their equally dedicated parents–applause goes to them as well!

And, thanks to MYA’s videotaping of each performance, you can enjoy the quartet’s winning performance below.

Anyone who has listened to jazz knows how players improvise by making up their own variations on the melody of the original song.  It sounds and looks like fun, doesn’t it?  At first glance, classical music doesn’t seem to offer the same chance to “jam” unless you’re a composer.  But, that’s not strictly true!

One of the genres of classical music is the concerto which is a solo with orchestral accompaniment.  (Many times you will hear concertos performed with piano accompaniment since the logistics are obviously much easier that way!)  Many of my students play their first concerto after studying for three or four years.  It’s often Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major.  The simpler concertos tend to be from the Baroque era and are played as written on the page.

In the Classical concertos of Quantz and Mozart, however, each movement has a moment towards the end when the accompaniment comes to a dramatic pause on an anticipatory chord and the soloist adds her own personal touch through an unaccompanied cadenza that plays with the musical ideas of the composer.  Cadenzas can be just a few breaths worth of notes (more historically accurate) or as long as a whole page.  They are often a chance to show off technique and should always be free and expressive.  For students of classical music, it can be hard to suddenly throw the metronome out of the window and I often spend a lot of time encouraging students to add excitement through making the tempo very flexible and adding dramatic pauses.

You can absolutely play a cadenza composed by someone else and, for the Mozart concertos, there are wonderful cadenzas written by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Paul Taffanel, Philipe Gaubert and Johannes Donjon.  In lessons, we study and learn these before my students take out their own blank manuscript paper.  As you’ll hear below from my student Leen, cadenza writing is not a favorite activity in my studio.  But after we spend a few weeks of repeating the assignment, cajoling, cheerleading and finding the potential in their ideas, each student ends up with an unique cadenza that inevitably makes their concerto performance extra special.

Leen van Besien is in her fifth year of studying with me and has just written her fourth cadenza.  Here is a recording of her cadenza for the first movement of Mozart’s Concerto in G Major (K 313), followed by her candid thoughts on cadenza writing.

leen-cadenza

I absolutely HATE the process of writing a cadenza.  I always have to make sure that no one else is in the house before I shut myself up in my room and begin.  While I try out various idea, I always cringe because, more often than not, it sounds pretty stupid.  Eventually, after several hours hard work, I’ll have about 30 seconds of music.  I’ll show up to my lesson and uncomfortably play through my cadenza.  Then, miraculously, after working with Ms. Ko for about 10 minutes on it, it will actually sound semi-real!  As I get more comfortable with it, it gets more and more convincing until finally I’m not embarrassed. 

Everyone thinks it’s cool when I tell them I wrote a cadenza and the finished product is usually something I can be proud of.  If I can write a cadenza, believe me, anyone can.  I usually just take random bits from the piece and stitch them together rather awkwardly, but with some dramatic slowing down and speeding up, it doesn’t sound half-bad.  Actually writing it is tough, but when performing a concerto, having your own cadenza is something special and worthwhile.

Thanks for sharing with us, Leen and I hope that our readers have a chance to hear your cadenza live some time this spring!

I believe that the appropriate word would be: “Wow”!  Two days after winning the senior division of Merit School of Music’s Concerto Competition, Leen van Besien also threw her hat in the ring for DePaul Community Music Division’s Concerto Festival.  Since she studies at Merit, Leen was in the “Open Division” and was the winner among that division’s flutists!!  She again played movement one from Mozart’s Concerto in G Major and her memorized performance also featured a cadenza that she composed herself (more on cadenzas in a future post).

Leen will perform Mozart with the Oistrach Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Mina Zikri on Sunday, February 1 at 5:00.  The winners’ concert will take place in DePaul’s Concert Hall (800 W. Belden) and is free and open to the public.  Please come join us and definitely congratulate Leen the next time you see her!!

To be honest, wind players always worry when concerto competitions have one big division for all of the instruments instead of a special category for winds.  The pianists and string players usually start their instruments at a much younger age and they have more pieces from which to choose.  So it is all the more exciting when a flutist wins a single division concerto competition!  That is just what Leen van Besien did on Friday in the senior division of Merit School of Music’s Concerto Competition.  Brava!!!  Leen played the first movement of Mozart’s Concerto in G Major.  As a result of winning the competition, she will get to perform her concerto at Symphony Center as part of MeritFest on April 30 as well as with Merit’s Symphony Orchestra at their spring concert to be held during the week of May 4.  I’ll put details for both of these events in the calendar as soon as I have them.  By the way, besides playing the flute, Leen also studies violin and piano.  Leen, we’d love to hear how you juggle all three instruments! (Use the comment feature below.)  Who else plays more than one instrument?  What do you think are the benefits or challenges of making music with more than one instrument?

If you are one of my private students at Merit School of Music, get ready to have fun showing off what you can do on Saturday, March 21st at 7:00.  You’ll get to perform your solos and duets on the beautiful stage in Gottlieb Hall.  Merit will provide an accompanist and I will give you all details for rehearsals in your lessons.  The concert is free and open to the public; all are welcome!

Congratulations to my chamber group at Merit School of Music!!!  They are one of four ensembles selected to be finalists in the 2009 Jules M. Laser Chamber Music Competition co-sponsored by Music in the Loft and Society of American Musicians.  Their competition repertoire will be the first movement from Dubois’s Quatuor and The Easter Islander by Mike Mower.  The final round of the competition will be held at Music Institute of Chicago in Evanston on Sunday, January 18th.  This is a really nice acknowledgement of how hard the students have been working since September.  Besides their weekly coaching with me, they also rehearse independently a second time during the week and take turns writing up rehearsal notes to reflect on what they accomplished.  Good luck Leen, Katie, Julia and Jingyi; I couldn’t be more pleased for you!!!!

The flute quartet that I coach at Merit School of Music has been hard at work since September, meeting twice weekly.  One session is their coaching with me and the second is an independent rehearsal–so important for developing skills of critical listening and problem solving!  We’re planning to apply to perform on “From the Top” and the application asked if the group has a YouTube clip (hint, hint…).  So, after a recent performance for the weekly Tuition Free Conservatory assembly, we headed back upstairs to our regular classroom for a few more takes.  Here is Pierre Max Dubois’s Quatuor as performed by Jingyi Liu, Julia McGehee, Katie Scotkowski and Leen van Besien.  Many thanks to Mr. McGehee for being our cameraman and wish us good luck in applying to perform on “From the Top”!!