In August a YouTube commenter requested the Carl Baermann piece that appears as No. 33 in Pamela Weston’s 50 Classical Studies for Clarinet.
Unfortunately not only did this coincide with a lot of things going on (life is busy), the piece is actually hard. I wanted to make a good fist of it so I’d been practising it on and off since August but couldn’t ace it in front of the camera.
It didn’t help that I also had a lot of false starts. I borrow my sister’s DSLR camera, so we she needs it back, sometimes I forget to put auto-focus back on. Two hours of recording later, what seemed okay on the the tiny camera screen is actually a blurry mess at 1080p. Then there’s Audacity having its hissy-fits when, despite the waveform looking like it’s recording properly, is full of artifacts. Restart it and it’s fine. Go figure. If there was an opensource project I should get involved in, it’s to fix Audacity’s horrendous hotplugging issues on Mac. The Audacity devs are probably get sick of “that guy with the Max Pro and Motu M4 who sends all the automated crash reports”.
So what made it hard? Despite being in a regular B minor, the piece has just enough twists and turns to find deficiencies in one’s technique. I’ve practiced it slow to a metronome a lot, but once you’re in front of a camera with a thumb, wrist and embouchure that’s giving way the more takes you do, the more things falls apart. The only thing to do is try again later. The perfectionist bogey man doesn’t take kindly to performance music. Miss a note, re-take. The triplets are uneven, re-take. Wild high notes, random squeak, note didn’t sound… all re-takes.
Regardless, the Baermann piece is fun to play, so it’s not like it was a chore to practice over and over and over again. At some point though, you want to ship it and move on to the next project, despite not being 100% happy with the recording. Like I said before, despite being very much a B-minor piece, there is just enough passing note chromaticism and interesting articulation to make it really enjoyable to play, and there’s also a few sections that are open to interpretation, or, to put it another way, force you think of musical solutions to deal with “problems”. What are those? Well, perhaps watch the video and find out.
Coded Notes 