I AM A LONEL Y BASSOON PLAYER ARE THERE ANY OTHERS
LET’S FORM A BASSOON ARMY
hey thur
We should gather all the bassoonists on tumbrl and have a huge reed party! We could make reeds together!
ugh I would love a bassoon army to make reeds with LET’S DO THIS
Source: davejadetier
I felt like a boss. A boss that still can’t double tongue consistently, so… kind of a loser after all, but still.
Just practiced for a few hours after taking the month after my recital off to let my damn tendons sort their shit out.
My left arm and upper lip are just like
We interrupt the Avengers spam to bring you a beautiful combination of two of my other favorite things: Angry Birds and playing the bassoon.
Sometimes I see videos of Dr. Ambrose conducting and I realize how much his conducting has become a perfect, fluent language to me. I’ve been in his ensemble for five years now and it’s become, like, “oh, his face looks like this, so clearly we are three measures before B” or “oh, he just did a really good impression of a wind sock, so obviously that’s the cadence at H.”
I love how he practically throws his shoulder out to stab the last note out of us. It took me a while to appreciate his conducting, but now I know I really couldn’t ask for a better ensemble director. He’s taught all of us so much.
I just wish this video had been taken on a piece we knew slightly better… it’s pretty messy in a few places. (Oh hey, you can almost hear me from 1:14-1:28, if you concentrate really hard and think “I’m listening to a bassoon”! Huzzah!)
Where did you first hear the bassoon, and what was your first impression?
I first heard the bassoon, so quoth my mother, when she used to put me to sleep with the soundtrack to Fantasia when I was a baby. She says I would stay awake listening intently until the Arabian Dance, when I would promptly fall asleep (this has since become my absolute favorite movement of the Nutcracker). Then, according to her, I always woke right back up when the Rite of Spring started, and smile the whole way through. (I’m not making this up. She tells me this story often.) (And then, apparently, she always had to turn it off before Night on Bald Mountain, because it would make me cry.)
The first time I remember hearing a bassoon, though, was at a youth symphony concert of my sister’s (she’s a violist) when I was about eleven years old. The bassoon section of her youth symphony walked by carrying their bassoons and it stopped me in my tracks. I remember thinking “that is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen; I HAVE TO PLAY THAT.” I recounted this to my sister after the concert, and asked her what the instrument was; she told me it was the bassoon, and introduced me to the principal bassoonist, who was a good friend of hers. The bassoonist sat down and asked if I wanted to hear some music; I said yes, and he played me the Sorcerer’s Apprentice bassoon soli, which I was thrilled to recognize, and the Rite of Spring solo, which I immediately went apeshit over. The next day I went to my band director (I played flute at the time) and demanded he let me play bassoon. I’ve had many gigs with him in the past few years and every time he tells me how shocked he was to have a student who wanted to play bassoon—-it’s never happened to him before or since.
Day 1 - Where did you first hear the bassoon, and what was your first impression?
Day 2: How many other people have you met who play the bassoon?
Day 3 - How long have you played bassoon? If you don’t, would you like to?
day 4: do you play any other instruments besides bassoon?
day 5: a…
Totally doing this. I’m too frustrated with the bassoon right now; I need to sit down and remember why I love it so much.
Source: fuckyeahbassoons
My NYO audition is the day after tomorrow. And I don’t have a reed. I’ve been doing Sweeney Todd all day, every day, but the reed that is fine for that is not fine for Mozart/Gazza Ladra/Tchaik 6/Figaro/Bolero/Till/Brahms/Ravel piano concerto. Like. At all. And I’ve been working as an assistant at…
Dude, I hear you so hard on all of this. It seems like it’s pretty much every double reed player’s life to be short one really good, dependable reed when you really need it. I read on an earlier post that you tend to play reeds for only about a week—-do you immediately throw them out after? If you do, try keeping a few of your favorites and pulling them back out after a month or so. The cane has had time to mellow and with a few adjustments you can get a lot of great playing back out of them (depending on the tone you like—-I like a super dark, velvety sound, and if you’re a fan of a really bright sound then this may not work as well for you). As for getting some stuffiness out of a reed, my best plan of attack is to very gently scrape the entire outside of the reed diagonally with a razor blade or your knife to get all the mouth gunk off (I do this about once a week to a reed anyway), take a little bit of cane out of the channels, sand the reed just a little and (if none of that works) squeeze both wires from top to bottom just a bit at a time until you have more sound coming out. I’m sure all of that is at least close to what you’ve been doing, but I hope some of it helps!
I hope your audition went better than you were expecting it to—-believe me, I understand the “I HAVE TWO DAYS BEFORE AN AUDITION AND NO MONEY FOR CANE AND NO REED AND IS THIS BUILDING TALL ENOUGH TO KILL ME IF I JUMP OFF OF IT RIGHT NOW” feeling. Internet hug and internet margarita for you.
(That said, off to practice Beethoven 4 for the eighth solid hour this weekend. Our conductor decided Friday was the appropriate time to inform us that he chose this concert to be broadcast on NPR… so I might need to make myself my own real margarita soon.)
I’ve been meaning to try one for about a year now (since last winter’s Hothlanta Snowpocalypse, when I got snowed into my parents’ house for four days and could sneak one cigarette per day, on the roof, perched dangerously on the six inches of icelessness outside my bathroom window), and recently a lot of my smoker friends in my school of music have been trying them out and telling me how fantastic they are—-how convenient, how scentless, and how easy it’s becoming to quit when you can dial down the nicotine slowly but still leave the oral-fixation aspect intact, which was always the hardest thing to get over for me.
So tonight I ran out of lighters (seriously, I think I’m starting to actually REPEL lighters these days, the number of them I’ve lost recently) and went next door to Walgreens to replenish. I was looking at the prices of lighters and noticed that they sell Blu disposable electronic cigarettes now—-a little expensive at $10 for the equivalent of a pack and a half, but I’ve been meaning to try one so long and I have a tiny bit of dispensable cash this week so I splurged (after the cashier swore I could return it if it was broken or something). Tried it out just now, and—-I swear to god, five (COMPLETELY SCENTLESS, I am so stoked, the smell of cigarettes makes me crazy) puffs later and I have a slight buzz (and I’m a pack-a-day girl—-I haven’t had a buzz since 2009), the throat hit was satisfactorily strong, it tasted great and—-best of all—-I had my boyfriend and my roommate come smell the smoke to see if they’d be okay with me smoking inside… and there is NO SMELL. I don’t have to go outside at 3am in freezing temperatures and destroy my immune system just to indulge my stinky cancerous habit.
The instant I get paid from school, I’m getting the Blu starter pack, and I am determined that I will quit regular cigarettes completely before my senior recital in April. I can’t keep destroying my lungs like this—-I’m young, yes, but I’m a bassoonist, and we need lung power. I still have a ton of power to spare (I work extensively on breath support every day), but I hate that I’m constantly wasting it one cigarette at a time.
I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE EXCITED ABOUT A DRUG IN MY LIFE. </UNBEARABLE CAPSLOCK OF BEING>
Does anybody have any tips on double tonguing? We’re playing Beethoven 4 in two weeks, and frankly the tonguing exercises I have are not cutting it, and possibly making things worse. Anybody have anything?
School starts on Monday… this will be my life for the weekend. Sigh.
life of a bassoon.
my entire existence summed up in one Tumblr post.
(via fuckyeahbassoons)
Source: anelderlyleg
