Christopher Millard E5 S2 Transcript
Leah:
Hi, Christopher Millard.
Christopher:
Good morning, Leah Roseman.
Leah:
I'm so glad you agreed to do this. So, I have to say, I know you well as a colleague, such an inspiring colleague. I think you're an incredible musician and such a beautiful bassoon sound and your phrasing and your timing. And you always ask great, very pointed questions to the conductors. I really enjoy that. So, we're going to talk so much about your career as a bassoonist, but you have done so many things. And I want to start with a podcast because this is a podcast. And I remember very well when you said to me, you were very excited. You were going to be doing this podcast. I think it must have been 2006 or late 2005. And I said to you, "What's a podcast?" Because it was very new then, actually. Podcasts kind of started in 2004.
Leah:
Most of us, we had just bought a computer. We didn't have any of these devices. It's hard for people who are younger now to appreciate how new this was. And I remember you were very excited and you said people can listen to this at any time from anywhere in the world. It's much better than radio.
Christopher:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leah:
And I was re-listening to some of the episodes I missed because I had young children at the time when you were making these early episodes. And I will point in the description of this episode, I'll actually put links to the specific episodes I think people will find very interesting. You did one about deep practicing. I think you called it Practice Makes Perfect.
Christopher:
Okay. I remember that.
Leah:
Yes. Very relevant to all musicians, not just ...
Christopher:
You know, it was a curious process, Leah, because the new media department at the National Arts Centre came to me and it wasn't all that long after I had started with the orchestra in 2004. And for whatever reason, they were looking for some sort of a willing victim to take on this experiment of figuring out what the heck is a classical, an orchestrally focused podcast going to be. And honestly, I should say that over a few years, we did, I think 65 episodes. It was a lot of content, but we certainly started out at the very beginning, it was kind of designed as a promo for upcoming concerts. That's how it was conceived. But very quickly I realized that I'm not sure that that was particularly valuable. And certainly, it wasn't of particular interest to me. And so they gave me kind of free rein, both in terms of content, and in terms of utilizing our dear technical expert, Martin Jones at the Arts Centre, who was just so willing to do deep dives with me into a lot of editing and a lot of creative stuff.
Christopher:
So, yeah. It was very interesting. And quite surprising to me after the first year that I would hear from people all over. There were thousands of people downloading this thing, probably because there was so little competition for anything at that time. But, yeah, it was a good adventure. And just as you have been discovering in the last year in doing your own video casts and podcasting, you understand what an amazing outlet it is for our creative, or cognitive disciplines and adventures, and interests. Having to organize beforehand, especially an improvised conversation with someone. It takes a kind of a, not just pre planning, but a willingness to go with whatever nutty thing your guests might have to say. So, you addressed that to particular practice makes perfect. That was one of a whole series of podcasts that I did where I was trying to touch upon pedagogical content.
Leah:
Yeah. And another one, you did the Clown of the Orchestra all about the bassoon. And although we'll be talking about the bassoon in this conversation, I will point to that episode is so great to people who really want to learn more and hear you play I'll kinds of excerpts and so on. And also, I think the one you had your students do when you were teaching at Northwestern University, Hijacked. It was really interesting to hear them talk and play. And also they talked about many of them are double majors and at academic institutions. I think more and more music majors are taking that route. And you had a very opposite experience. You went to Curtis Conservatory and didn't even spend that long there, because you got your first job so young.
Christopher:
Yes.
Leah:
Yeah. What do you think about that in terms of young people starting out now?
Christopher:
Well, of course we are living, if we just discount the last year and a half and just don't even think about the pandemic. If you had asked me this question two years ago, I would've answered it in a slightly more generous way than I would even now. And that would've been to say that we have the reality of ridiculous numbers of orchestral instrument students graduating from good schools at very high levels every year and extremely small vacancies.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
It's very difficult. So, this was always true. It was certainly true if you had asked me two years ago. And if you're asking me now, I think we are perhaps in an even more problematic period, although perhaps temporarily. And that has to do with the fact that many auditions are not happening because as orchestras start to regather their strength and start to schedule more normally and look towards a season next year, that's a little bit more typical, one of the things that's happened is that a lot of people my age have made a decision that it's time to retire. And so there are many openings. And in fact, in most orchestras, there are so many openings that they cannot be filled in one year.
Christopher:
But the thrust of your question is about the teaching of double majors, which is a concept I've always loved and supported. And there's, apart from the obvious reason that you are perhaps less concerned about the outcome of a particular student because you know that their alternative educational pursuits are more likely to lead to an employable situation and whatever that means because it's certainly ... When I was in my 20s and studying, careers were intended to be lifelong. And over the decades, as we've seen, younger generations now tend to move from career to career and a different skillset is required.
Christopher:
And that leads me to the second part of why I love the double degree, is that I do think that if you view the music performance aspect of a double degree student's work as being an exercise in helping them develop cognitive skills that cross between reductionist and wholistic thinking, where they learn disciplines certainly about how to organize their time and musical instruments do require enormous personal discipline. But even deeper than that, if you help them, you will encourage them to see whatever particular reductionist thinking you may be using and pulling apart a passage musically or technically is really just representative of a skillset that is applicable to many things, and certainly not just to music. But into their writing skills. Into their verbal and written communication skills. Into almost anything.
Christopher:
It's the kind of the touching between the heart and the mind which good young students are able to achieve. And if you are able to prioritize in your communication, certainly with all students, but most particularly with double degree students, this interest in ... Although, you don't dumb down the music. Perhaps the expectation of the amount of repertoire we do is a little bit reduced because they have very challenging academic requirements. But it's more to do with making sure that you are couching your language in such a way that they will have a glimmer always of knowing that even though they're focusing on something that may not be absolutely applicable to their lives in five or 10 years time, it's generally useful in their life in five or 10 years time. And that's a very different thing.
Christopher:
And if I just continue with one more thing. You mentioned that I had a very rigid conservatory training at a great school, which is true. Many folks from my generation who went through that, I think perhaps carry with them the baggage of feeling that's that the kind of teaching that they're all obligated to do. And out of that comes perhaps the occasional mistrust of the double degree student about knowing, "Well, am I really living up to the responsibilities of studying with this person?" It's really, really important that you communicate that it's okay for them to be using music in their lives for whatever purpose that they want. And I will be just as pleased if they're alive when they're 30 or 35, or 40, have nothing to do with music. That that the study of music has in some way enriched their ability to be happy in other fields.
Christopher:
I have some students who are playing principal bassoon in major orchestras. Sure, great. I have many students who have quit playing the bassoon and are doing other things. And those people make me just as happy, provided that the experience has ended up being enriching to them in a very broad sense.
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And in terms of broadcasting, so we talked about podcast. You played in the last remaining radio orchestra in North America, CBC.
Christopher:
I did.
Leah:
Yeah. The end of a long legacy. You played there for about 28 years I believe.
Christopher:
I played in the CBC Orchestra for a mere 25 years.
Leah:
Oh, okay.
Christopher:
Which was on top of 29 years that I sent with the sister orchestra, the Vancouver Symphony. And about half of us in the radio orchestra were also involved in the symphony. Yes, it was a great long tradition. For those of your listeners who may not know this, and it's easily forgotten. If you went back to the '50s and '60s, and '70s in Canada, we had CBC Orchestras in a number of cities. From Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver. And these were very important institutions because they filled content on the radio, and they were hugely important to the community. For whatever reason, Vancouver Radio Orchestra at CBC somehow continued for a couple of decades longer than any of the others. It was truly a wonderful experience. It trained me to be versatile and very quick in learning because often we would have ... On top of the symphony, we would often have 15 or 18 services a week. I would often have three or four days where I would be morning and afternoon recording sessions with the radio orchestra, and then go to The Orpheum Theater in Vancouver to do a symphony concert.
Christopher:
And we got through a lot of material and I had to learn to be a quick study. I'm very blessed with that. And I'm sorry that that experience is not available to anyone anymore because it was an amazing opportunity to get through a lot of repertoire. The red light would come on and between 10:00 and 1:00, you had to get this amount of music done. And when the light went off at 1:00 o'clock, that was it. And God help you if you didn't have it done.
Leah:
Yeah. And you were quite young when you started doing that, in your career.
Christopher:
I was. Yeah, I started in the symphony in Vancouver when I was 22. And really, I could hardly play an F major scale. I don't know how on earth they hired me. So, I had a lot of on the job training, and after a few years, started to figure out what you do. I mean that very sincerely. I have no idea how I was hired.
Leah:
Well, I think a lot of us, it's not imposter syndrome when we're young, right? I mean, I felt the same way, too.
Christopher:
Well, they call it imposter syndrome. But I think it's probably a healthy part of our learning responsibility when we're young.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
Yeah.
Leah:
And part of that for you as a double reed players, which a lot of listeners won't realize, is the making of reeds, which is a whole thing. It's a whole artistry.
Christopher:
It is. It's hard to come up with a metaphor of just the importance of it. I think if you were a violinist and you said, "Well, you have to make a bow every month, and you have to re-hair that bow every week."
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And you have to be responsible for it. If you don't re-hair your bow properly, you're not going to make a pretty sound. It's that kind of a difficulty. And it's an annoyance which never quite leaves us. But over the years, if you survive week after week of having to sound pretty much yourself, no matter what tortures you're going through, you do come to terms with it fairly early on. And you either do or you don't. And there are people who simply don't, and they give up because it's that critical to how well we play that we make reeds well. You can't play in tune. You can't finesse dynamics. You can't make a beautiful sound. There's basically nothing you can do if you don't have good reeds. And you can't go to the corner store and buy them.
Leah:
Yeah. I played oboe for five years as a teenager and I did have some forays into trying to make reeds, and it was just an exercise in frustration.
Christopher:
Yeah.
Leah:
But it was interesting to me that your teacher at Curtis didn't make his own reeds. And you were saying that generation-
Christopher:
No.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
That generation. So, I studied with a very famous bassoonist who had come into prominence before the Second World War, and was with The Philadelphia Orchestra. And he came from a generation of players where capital A, artists did not bother with this mundane stuff. So, somebody would make reeds for them. And often these great players really didn't have a clue about what to do with their own reeds. They played wonderfully but they really did rely upon other people to do the work for them. This evolved drastically in the 1960s. And so, by the time I was a serious student in the early '70s, there was just no way that you weren't going to master this reed making yourself. No way.
Leah:
So, you went and studied reed making with Lou Skinner?
Christopher:
Oh, you've done your research. Can you imagine that there were actually people, and not very many of them. There was one or two of them in the United States in the '70s, who actually specialize in teaching young bassoonists how to make reeds. If you can imagine after my first year at Curtis, getting onto a bus way, way up Northeast, on the coast of Maine, in a tiny little fishing village not far from the Canadian border, lived a man named Louis Skinner, who had been a bassoonist of course. And had found his niche as a reed maker for professionals, and later on, found his niche as a teacher of reed making. And it's hard to believe, A, that I would do this. And it's also hard to believe that there was only one man doing it at the time, because it was important to all of us.
Christopher:
So, there I was. I made several trips, week long trips up there and he organized my approach to reed making. Although my thinking about how reeds and bassoons function only began to evolve after that period. And it became quite important to me to actually understand how the whole darn mechanism works, which is not a knowledge that's actually of interest to most players.
Leah:
Yeah. So, I found your series of articles. What is it? Brains and Membranes about the acoustic, the physics of all this. And as a violinist, I really appreciated, actually you had this diagram of the waveform, the harmonic notes on a violin string, which I had a vague understanding of. But no one had ever explained this to me until I read your article actually. So, wonderful. And I'll put a link for that. I'm fascinated by science, but I have a little resistance. So, I had to reread some of this stuff. But if you could explain to the listeners how the bassoon reed acts as a valve, and what it would be like if we were tiny and inside that valve.
Christopher:
Okay. So, the first thing is, is that you assume ... Everyone who plays a reed instrument assumes and operates under the assumption that you have a reed which makes the sound, and the instrument somehow magically transforms that sound into whatever piece of music you're playing. It's like a kind of a one way street. And this makes sense because psychologically, we are dealing with always blowing out through our lips, into an instrument. And right in between us and the instrument is this silly little valve, which sounds, if I show you. Has this kind of a squeaky sound. Now, how that turns into the Mozart bassoon concerto is not built into the material or the reed itself. This is made out of a kind of cane which we generally get from cane grown in France. Although, there are places in the Americas and South America and Australia where you get this stuff.
Christopher:
It grows in a swamp and it grows 16 feet high. It's like a bamboo relative. I can tell you that there's absolutely nothing in the hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of the DNA of that plant that tells it anything about how to play the Mozart Bassoon Concerto. Now I'm being a little bit silly. But this idea that everything comes from the reed and goes out is as silly as to think that you as a violinist that the instrument is meaningless. What really matters is the hair on your bow, that that makes the sound. Violinists don't think this way. Sure, you value the quality of a bow. But I don't think a violinist ever assumes that the sound that you get, the actual musical tone is coming from the hair. And yet, that is kind of how bassoonists and oboists and clarinetists think. That the sound is coming from the material.
Christopher:
Well, in fact, the sound is coming from the air column in the instrument. Just as the sound of a violin comes from the vibration of the top plate and bottom plate of the violin interacting with the contained air with inside. The sound is pressure waves and our experience of sound is how we interact with the concept of music. Music is all these pressure waves are hitting. So, if you think in a very reductive sense, it becomes very helpful to understand that what's going on in a violin bow and what's going on in a bassoon reed are similar in the sense that they are kind of a feedback mechanism. Let me give you a really easy way to think of this. I think anyone who doesn't play an instrument never knows ... if they've ever attended a concert, they sometimes hear a violinist play what's called a pizzicato, where you just pluck a string. And that sound does not sustain. But it has a musical quality. And it has a pitch. And it can even have a volume and quality.
Christopher:
And all that is, is an excitation, a brief excitation of the string and the string presses down on the bridge. And that vibration is transferred into the body of the violin, which amplifies and resonates and projects a pressure wave, or series of pressure waves, which we hear briefly as a musical tone. You know you can make a pizzicato on a bassoon, and I'll show you. Okay, so here we have a bassoon, and it's a big long instrument. We won't get too much into detail. But I wanted to show that you can actually make a pizzicato. And how you do it is, you see, this is what we call a bocal. And the reed sits here at the end of the bocal. And I was talking a minute ago about how this becomes the energy generator. And now we need to talk and explain how it becomes a reactive energy generator.
Leah:
So, Chris, for those people listening who can't see it, can you describe the bocal?
Christopher:
The bocal looks like a shepherd's crook. If you hold it a certain way, it looks like a question mark I suppose. And the question is, is why are you doing this for a living? But that's essentially what it is.
Leah:
It's metal. It's a metal tube.
Christopher:
It's metal. It's metal and it's attached to an instrument, which is largely wood. But although there's normally a reed sitting here, if I just blow in the end, all you hear is rushing air, right? But if I slap my tongue against the end of this bocal ... If I slap my tongue, you can hear a pitch. And here I change my fingerings. Can you hear a chromatic scale emerging? I just played a chromatic scale from a low B up to an F sharp without a reed. And that is acoustically identical to what you're doing on a pizzicato, because what I'm doing is I'm doing a simple input of energy. And this air column has a propensity to set up back and forth waves, sound waves. And they want to send back and forth sounding waves at the speed of sound, at a frequency determined by how many fingers you've got closed down. So, if I close down all of the holes on the bassoon to create a really low pitch ... Just a minute here.
Christopher:
Here's a low B with a reed. Here's a low B with a staccato, like a pizzicato. And here is actually almost the same sound with no reed. Just my exciting in a pizzicato fashion the bore of the bassoon. Same pitch. Okay. So, the challenge that we have as bassoonists and the challenge that you have as a violinist is how do you get from a simple quick pizzicato or a slap of the tongue against the open end of the bassoon, how do you get from that to a sustained tone? And therein lies years of heartache for the bassoonist, is figuring out what you basically have here is a little double reed which has to react to the information coming back. Now, if I could slap my tongue against the reed at the same frequency as the note that wants to resonate, which in this case is about 62 vibrations per second, for a low B. Something like that.
Christopher:
If I could slap my tongue 62 times a second, which is of course, physically impossible, even for Superman. If I could coordinate that 62 times a second with the 62 times a second that the vibrations in the bassoon want naturally to do, then I would create a bassoon sound just with my fast tongue. It's a little like if you played a tuning A on the violin and the string is vibrating, moving back and forth 440 times a second. If you could move your finger 440 times a second and keep supplying pizzicato, you would sustain a long tone on the violin. Now, it's not possible. So, what you do is you get a bow which has a hair on it, and the hair is rough. And the hair grabs microscopically the string of the violin and it basically is grabbing and releasing microscopically at the same rate as the string is vibrating. So, you're drawing your bow and 440 times a second, if you zero in with a microscope, the bow hair is grabbing the string and sustaining that pizzicato into long tone.
Christopher:
And because my tongue won't move 440 times a second, what I have to do is I come up with a mechanism that will react. So, we build out of cane a little pressure valve. And it is capable of responding to this back and forth vibrations inside the instrument. The actual sound, it's capable of sustaining that by being responsive at the correct frequency to that sound. Does that kind of make any sense to you?
Leah:
It does. Like what you explained in that article is that the reed, it's opening and close ... I think a lot of us just picture the air as just going through. And it's the way that ...
Christopher:
No. It's not one directional.
Leah:
Y ah. That's what I...
Christopher:
It's bidirectional. So, it goes this way and it comes this way. And you think, "Wait a minute. Are you saying that a sound wave in an instrument goes back and forth, and it can do it 440 times a second? How can that be?" Well, the speed of sound at sea level is like 700 and something miles an hour and it's not going that far. This process happens very, very, very quickly.
Leah:
Yeah. And since you have your bassoon close to you, a couple other questions. For one thing, you're a woodwind technician as well.
Christopher:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leah:
Right? I'm not even sure what you do when you fix up clarinets and flutes. You're dealing with the keys.
Christopher:
These mechanisms are quiet complex, aren't they?
Leah:
Yeah, beautiful.
Christopher:
I mean, you look at them, there's pieces of metal that are mounted onto the wood of the bassoon through mounting posts. And they have hinges and screws and things which allow these mechanisms to control something like here. I'm working backwards here. See right here, that round thing is a cup and it covers a hole almost this big. And that hole helps to determine how long the air column is and therefore, what frequency all that interactive process occurs. And therefore, out of that, what pitch we hear. What note do we hear. So, what has to happen with instruments is that these mechanisms go out of adjustment, and the holes themselves, here, if you look ... Let me find one that's a little bit clearer to see here.
Christopher:
Right there. You can see this is for the bottom tone of the instrument. There's the hole underneath. And there's the metal of the key. And in between this is white stuff. It's a leather pad. And the leather pad, when you press it down, and if it's set up properly, it will very evenly seal up the bore of the bassoon so there's no air leakage. These things age and go out of adjustment. So, it's a constant process of taking care of that. In addition, there's adjusting the mechanism so that they've had the right degree of stiffness and looseness. And then the really interesting stuff is getting to the actual dimensions of the tone holes and the bore itself, and making subtle adjustments to that.
Christopher:
For example, my dear colleague in the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the principal clarinet, Kimball Sykes. I've worked on his instruments hundreds and hundreds of times over the years. And we have often done little adjustments with reamers and things changing the tone hole sizes just a little bit because he would come and say, "I'm sorry. I just can't get up to pitch on this A. The tone hole is not quite right." So, there's a lot of that stuff and it becomes very challenging and very interesting.
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And one more question since your bassoon's close. One thing you demonstrated on one of these podcasts was how difficult it is to get from a high A to a high B in the bassoon. And your description of the fingering kind of blew my mind. I couldn't believe how complicated it was.
Christopher:
Well, the problem with the bassoon, which I like to think is of a whole different order of magnitude than any of the other winds, is what the poor thumbs have to do. Now, right next to me here you see this is the back of the bassoon, kind of half way up.
Leah:
Okay.
Christopher:
And you see all these keys?
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Christopher:
You know how many fingers operate those keys?
Leah:
I'm guessing your two thumbs.
Christopher:
One.
Leah:
Oh, really?
Christopher:
One. One thumb.
Leah:
Wow.
Christopher:
My left thumb has to operate all of those keys. Can you imagine the flexibility in your thumb? Now if we go a little further down the bassoon, you see this array of, there are five keys here. Actually, there's six. I'm going backwards so you can see that there's one, two, three, four, five, six, and then there's even one more right here. And that's all for the right thumb.
Leah:
Wow.
Christopher:
Yeah. So, the problem is, is that you have to have a willingness to throw your thumb to the mercies of these keys millions of times over decades. And then eventually, one of the things that happens to older bassoonists is our thumbs start to suffer.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
Yeah. But I always say, Leah, that people said I couldn't play a musical instrument because I'm all thumbs. Well, I have an instrument for them to play.
Leah:
Now your first instrument was the piano, and you played jazz piano as a young teenager.
Christopher:
I did. I did. I attempted to and I loved it. And the great thing about studying jazz as a teenager is it got me off to a real headstart in terms of understanding harmony.
Leah:
Yes, which must be such a benefit to being one of the bass instruments in the orchestra too.
Christopher:
It is. I think it's really important to say and to say it publicly, that the average jazz musician has a far, far deeper and more sophisticated understanding of harmony than any classical musicians.
Leah:
Of course.
Christopher:
Because, in real time, they have to know where they are. They have to know their modes and their scales, and their substitutions. It's an extraordinary gift to learn that early on. And it helped me enormously. When I mentioned early in our conversation how important it was in a radio orchestra to be a quick learner, being able to look at a piece of music and see four or five notes and be able to say, I don't have to learn those notes sequentially. I look at the notes and I say, "Ah, they fit into a pattern with which I'm familiar."
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
That skill is curiously challenging to many young classical artists. That ability to simply see what is the context of the passage that they're playing. So often, I will ask a student, you have seven notes here. What scale are you playing? And it'll take them 20 minutes to figure out, and they should be able to see it like that. That's often because scales, as we have to execute them, are rarely starting on the first note and running eight notes up an octave. And especially if you get into minor scales and modal forms and octatonic scales and stuff. If you have a scale that begins with a minor second, a half step, you're immediately confused because there aren't any scales that from, what we call root position, where we normally see a scale. The bottom to the top. They don't begin with minor seconds. They begin with a major second.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
So, the minute that you can see a minor second, you're, "Aha." In my experience, I can visualize where I am and I don't have to practice the passage because I hook in, the neurons hook into something in the brain which has a familiarity in a wholistic way with the understanding of what that whole scale looks like. And the execution of the partial scale becomes far easier.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And I cannot tell you ... You know this. You're a very, very experienced, high level musician. So, you know this. Younger players don't get this. And they often spend a tremendous amount of time learning sequentially from A through Z.
Leah:
I have several videos on this topic, actually.
Christopher:
Okay.
Leah:
Yeah, I think it's very important. So, about jazz, though. Part of your drive must've been the joy of improvisation.
Christopher:
Yes. Yes.
Leah:
So, do you improvise on the bassoon?
Christopher:
No.
Leah:
Okay.
Christopher:
Not in the sense that you're asking. But do I play in an improvisational sense every day? Yes. I don't ever warm up with the same repeated patterns. I warm up every time I will do something and I will immediately transpose it into a bunch of different keys. So, I improvise it in the sense that I'm always exercising my fluency in the scales and modes as I just described them. So, there's improvisation in that sense. But certainly not in the sophisticated sense of interpretations of chordal changes in the way that jazz musicians do. If I sit at a piano, yes. But not on the bassoon.
Leah:
And do you still play jazz piano?
Christopher:
Poorly.
Leah:
And now that you're going to be retiring from the NAC Orchestra, are you going to maybe compose?
Christopher:
Arrange maybe. And for pedagogical projects. But, no. I think that composition is a skill that requires a tremendous amount of dedication. And I think I would be only a dilettante as a composer. But I will now say publicly, and you will be the first to hear this, that after I'm finished with my constant obligations to the bassoon next year, the first thing I'm going to purchase is the instrument that I started with as a teenager and I'm going to buy an alto saxophone. And I'm going to start working on my jazz improvisation chops as a way of keeping myself cognitively active and challenged. The reason I haven't done it for the last 55 years is that I personally found it difficult to maintain any sense of what we call the embouchure, the subtlety of control of a little reed like a bassoon reed. If I was going back and forth to a saxophone. Some people can do it. But I sure couldn't.
Christopher:
So, once I no longer have the obligation of intonation and sound production on the bassoon, then I think I will let myself go.
Leah:
What a fun project. That's wonderful to hear.
Christopher:
I hope so.
Leah:
It's so hard for musicians to retire in any sense, I think. For most of us, because we're playing with people at such a high level. It's hard to let go of that.
Christopher:
It is. I had lunch with a dear friend yesterday. As so many people have asked me, how are you feeling about retirement? And I said to this person yesterday, "Well, of course, I have mixed feelings because I know absolutely that arithmetic doesn't lie, and I'm at the point where I cannot sustain a level for much longer." I will miss it terribly. And the statement about I will miss it terribly. How blessed are we to have lived a life where when we're retiring, we say, "I'm really going to miss it." The reality is lots and lots of people are so relieved not to be capital W, working, that retirement, provided it's adequately funded, becomes a real release.
Christopher:
But as you say, it's a little bit more difficult for us because we're letting go of something that we love, reluctantly. And we all will need cognitive challenges to maintain something for the remaining decades.
Leah:
And also, as orchestral players, we're part of a team. It's that feel, which we've missed during this pandemic so much.
Christopher:
That's for sure. It's very hard to describe. I know symphony audiences understand because those who are regular listeners, I think really partake in that miracle of 50 or 75 people somehow achieving unanimity or purpose. It's not always as clean and as miraculous as it might appear. Sometimes it's messy internally. But mostly it's not. Mostly it's kind of a miracle. And a kind of a utopian vision of how people can work together. It often is. And I don't think that's naivety. I've been playing, this will be 47 years playing in orchestra. And while there are ups and downs, and the quality is not always A+, nevertheless, it's pretty miraculous. So, how lucky are you and I, huh?
Leah:
Yeah. And a key to that, of course, is the guy or the woman on the podium. You have a great deal of perceptiveness about conductors, I've noticed. You're always watching very carefully. And I think, of course, I think you've worked with a lot of conductors. But I was thinking, "Well, he doesn't have a million notes to play, like I do." And you're right in front of the person as well. So, you have them straight on. And not when you're sitting at the back of the violins, we get this awkward side view that's peripheral.
Christopher:
Yeah.
Leah:
Of course, I watch the conductor constantly and my section leader. But I think it is a different perspective. You're right there. You're in the heart of the orchestra. You can hear everything. And you were even on the key to selecting our music director.
Christopher:
Yes.
Leah:
You're friends with conductors, which I don't think is that usual with orchestra musicians.
Christopher:
No. You know the need friends. It's not an easy job.
Leah:
Yeah. Yeah.
Christopher:
It can be very isolating, which is ironic, considering that they're always in the midst of a group of people. But it's a very, very difficult job. It's very perceptive of you to say, I don't have as many notes to play. And therefore, I am able to be a little bit more observant. And the physical space on the stage where woodwinds sit, as you say, is central. It does give us, perhaps, a more balanced view than you get. But that doesn't mean that I necessarily would be any more skilled at defining for you, or defining for a non musician, what makes a good conductor. It's remarkably elusive. And it's so elusive, Leah, that if you as an orchestra musician are not performing and you go sit in an audience at your orchestra, or any other orchestra with a conductor that you have no familiarity with, and you're looking at this person from behind, it's almost impossible to know whether it's working or not. It may sound great. But if you've got a whole bunch of really great musicians who are familiar with repertoire, they're going to sound good.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
So, when does the sum exceed the parts and all that? And it's very hard to know, even from physical presence. You actually need to be having the sight line. You need to see the eyes. You need to feel the flow of energy back and forth on stage to really know what's working or doesn't, which is why I'm always amused when I see critics writing about concerts. Or people writing about this conductor is great, and this conductor is mediocre, or this concert ... Bless their hearts. I wouldn't be able to rate any better than they are. And I'm experienced doing it. It's really an elusive craft. And if I have a different perspective on conductors, I have a sympathy for them generally, because I think it's very difficult to do.
Leah:
And you have coached the National Youth Orchestra of Canada for many, many years.
Christopher:
Yes, I was there for 20 years.
Leah:
Yeah. So, these young players, especially wind players, I imagine they wouldn't have that much orchestra experience. And they come into this fabulous national orchestra for the summer. What kind of work do you do with them, and what kind of things do you impart to them?
Christopher:
It's been so long since I was there because I taught there all during the '80s and '90s, so I haven't been there. But nothing has changed.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And the answer I give you now is what I would have given when I was involved .The National Youth Orchestra of Canada has a particular philosophy and working protocol that has made it so successful. It's a model of how the allocation of time for students is split between one on one instruction between participation in small groups. Like, for example, the first violin section. And then, at a next level, to a group of string players playing together. And then, finally to full orchestra. It's kind of a tiered rehearsal structure, which allows for the assimilation of new repertoire in a very organized way and allowing students to get past the initial fear and lack of familiarity with the notes on the page. To learn for themselves how to play it. To learn how to play with the person beside them. To learn how to play with the people in front and behind.
Christopher:
And then you move onto a full string sectional, and you start to understand concepts of the problems of distance on stage, and of stylistic differences between the different instrument groups. Double basses and cellos often have different bowing challenges than violins, or perhaps violas do. Learn that. And then the miracle of full wind and brass joining in. That whole hierarchal structure of learning has been particularly proved to be beneficial to young Canadians over the last 50 years. You're right. It's been a blessing.
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, in your own studies, you were at esteemed Curtis Institute. And I noticed in your bio, you also studied with the French flutist, Marcel Moyse.
Christopher:
I did. So, this is a name which is probably only familiar to flutists. And unfortunately, less familiar now than that name would have been 40 years ago to every young flutist. But just as every young violinist should know who Leopold Auer was, and who Leopold Auer taught. Who is your great-great grand teacher, and the teacher of your grand teacher. That kind of lineage. The ancestor knowledge and the progeny knowledge moving down. So, Moyse was a flutist really born of the 19th century. He was born in the 1880s. And he knew Debussy, he knew Ravel. Played the premier of the Debussy Trio. Played the first performances of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe. That whole tradition.
Christopher:
He came to the United States around the time of the Second War, and he settled outside of Marlboro in Vermont where there's been a very famous festival that I went to when I was a young man. So, what Moyse was, was what we might call the ultimate exemplar of a tradition of French wind playing. Capital F, French wind playing, which was governed by an approach to sound production, musical interpretation that was significantly different from the European German schools that had predominated up until the early part of the 20th century. Moyse and several other very important French musicians, perhaps the most famous, the oboist, Marcel Tabuteau in Philadelphia, began to play themselves in ways that were much more oriented towards emulation of singing. Their use of vibrato and in particular in the oboe, and Moyse in particular, the subtlety of the use of what we call tone colors and sonorities. Being able to make a very dark sound or a very bright sound, and physically how you do it. And also understanding artistically the context in which these tools can be used.
Christopher:
And the curious thing about Moyse in particular, which was the reason he was important in my life, Leah, was that he represented a very right brain approach to music making. And I was studying at an institute with a very left brain approach. So, what I mean is that I was studying at Curtis, which was still, and perhaps even to this day, maintains some of the traditions that came from Marcel Tabuteau, the great oboist. Where if you analyzed how to play a phrase, we actually had a number system. And the number system would be like one through five or one through eight. Increasing value of intensity or dynamic. And if you had a phrase that went in a certain direction, you would actually analyze it to the point of putting number values on it. It's a very reductionist way of thinking. It's not unmusical. It's just that it gets to the music making, and it gets to the communication in music through a more granular way. An incredibly important way to learn and study at some point in every young musicians' life.
Christopher:
Moyse, when I went to him I was already studying at Curtis. Moyse was about stories and about ineffable things. And it's also about things that changed. That he might say to someone about a very identical passage, one thing on a Thursday, and on a Friday afternoon, teach it in a very different way. Which, when you're a young musician and you're impressionable, and you think that you're learning rules and what is correct and what is not correct, kind of an extraordinary experience to discover that a musician of this caliber would change his mind on a dime.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
So, that became about the connection between the heart and the mind was achieved not through organization, but through poetry. Musical poetry.
Leah:
I understand what you're saying completely. But I'm wondering also, were you playing solo bassoon things, or were you playing chamber music with him? What was the project?
Christopher:
Chamber music, yes. This is very interesting. Moyse's primary vehicle in working with students in master classes, and students who are not flute players as well, was centered around ... Although I describe him as sounding like he was just sort of off in the air, all about art and poetry. In fact, his own development had been highly structured. And he wrote and published many, many extremely organized books about technique and tone production, and wrote very intelligently. But my interactions with him were generally past that. And what he focused on a certain level was a book that he wrote, which he titled ... Now get this. Tone Production Through Interpretation. Tone production through the interpretation of music. Now, that sounds like either the most stupidly mundane thing you've ever thought of. Or actually, when you think about it, it's a profound amalgam and synthesis of what French woodwind playing was about.
Christopher:
What I'm trying to describe here is sitting down with someone, the idea of Tone Production Through Interpretation was a book about how you take simple melodies and learn to emulate the human voice. So, the book was all 19th century operatic arias. Mostly Verdi. Some Mozart. It was basically just the great tunes without words. So, in the place of words, Moyse taught sonority and color. And teaching us to listen in a very deep way. So, the fact that I was looking for very specific structural clear logical answers, he was able to fill in by saying there are not clear logical answers sometimes. Sometimes you just have to sing.
Christopher:
I have on my wall behind me in his handwriting, two bars of a piece of music, which I think encapsulate all this. There's a very beautiful melody for the bassoon in one of Beethoven's chamber music works. It's the sextet for winds and two horns. And in the second movement, there's this beautiful tune, (singing). It's written in 2/4 time with eighth notes and it's got a slur over it. Now, having studied at Curtis, I was encouraged. The number system, one, two, three, four, four, three, two, one, one, or something like that.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And I had been taught, well they say two notes are the same pitch at the bar line. So, I need to distinguish, (singing). And all these kind of structural ideas. And I was sitting next to him, to Moyse at a concert, and we had just studied this. And I was saying, "Maestro, I'm very confused on how to do this. Should I make a space at the bar line? What do I put?" He just started laughing. And about two hours later, I saw him again. I have it up on my wall. He gave me this music written out in paper on the staff, and there were the notes. And underneath were the lyrics. And the lyrics were, "Let me see your beautiful brown eyes."
Leah:
Oh.
Christopher:
And it was, "Let me see your beautiful brown eyes," in which immediately the context of text, not only in terms of Slavic pronunciation, but in terms of the deeper content, was illuminated in a way that for me thinking in a reductionist way, was not so evident.
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Christopher:
So, those of us who had the blessing of studying with him, or perhaps more recently, flutists like the great English flutist, William Bennet, who was perhaps, Moyse's most important student, and who taught in similar ways. Those of us who have been fortunate have found in our lives, hopefully someone who would teach us in a very organized way, utilizing and prioritizing what our left brain, if you buy the left brain, right brain, reductionist, wholistic argument of the bicameral mind and all that. But using that part of our cognition that's organized and granular. And how do you bridge the gap into something that's wholistic? Hopefully you have a teacher who can give you the one, perhaps both, or the experience of someone else who suddenly turns on light bulbs in your head about how to take the tremendous value of analysis that you've gained from one, and then apply the magic that you achieve from the other.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
Sorry. That's a very long answer to who was Marcel Moyse.
Leah:
I was fascinated, so I looked him up. I saw he was born in 1889 and lived almost 100 years. I was very interested. And of course, you're married to a very well-known flutist, Camille Churchfield, who's also a pedagogue. So, I thought well maybe there was that connection. But, no, it was different. So interesting.
Christopher:
Yeah.
Leah:
And you've had so many experiences beyond your major orchestras. You also performed with the World Orchestra for Peace and toured with them several times.
Christopher:
I did. That started around 2001, I was invited to do that. That orchestra, which has not done any concerts in the last four or five years, and I have not done anything with them in a few years longer than that. Created by George Solti back in the '80s, and after he died, Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor took over. So, I did about five or six tours with them. We were a very interesting organization where people from all over the world were flown into either London or Moscow, or Berlin, or wherever, and rehearse for three or four days, and then go on a short tour. One tour we did, we rehearsed in London. And in the space of eight days, rehearsed and played Proms in London, the Philharmonie in Berlin, in Moscow, and in Beijing all in the space of eight days. So, we went around the world.
Christopher:
That was an organization, the idea being that, Solti's vision being that musicians could be an example, a utopian example of people from different cultures getting along just fine, which is indeed what happened. And conducted by Gergiev, the great Russian conductor, who unfortunately in the last few years, has been tied fairly or unfairly with his associations with Putin. But, nevertheless, an amazingly important conductor. And one who stretched my own understanding of what a successful conductor can be and look like. And one of the reasons I have gained some personal humility about my own assumptions of my ability to evaluate conductors was working with Gergiev, because when you watched him, it was basically innate. How do you get the opening of the first chords of the overture to Midsummer Night's Dream, pa, when the conductor does ... And you have to do that.
Leah:
So, for people listening to the podcast, basically you're just wiggling all your fingers.
Christopher:
I'm wiggling my fingers.
Leah:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And if I was holding anything, I'd be holding a toothpick, because he usually would conduct with a tiny, tiny piece of wood like this, which we all thought was hysterical because he's got people in front of him with $2 million dollar violins, and he's got a 10 cent toothpick that he's conducting with. So, the thing about Gergiev, which is very hard to describe, I mean he's often criticized for doing too many things. But when he's wonderful, he understands in a way that a lot of conductors don't understand the in the moment dialogue and response to what he's getting. And while he had very clear ideas of what he was going to do, it was always able to react to what was coming. And I think great conductors do become, of course, great planners and they must plan and they must study. But I think at a certain point, they can achieve something better when they're able to be flexible and reactive.
Christopher:
So, my association with the World Orchestra for Peace, the main thing I gained out of it, apart from a lot of cool trips and meetings and very great players, was kind of understanding a little bit more than I ever had before of how little I understood conducting.
Leah:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I often end these conversations with a question about advice for young players. But we did cover that a lot in this conversation. But I'd referred to that podcast you'd done about practicing, and you talked about how people often just waste time instead of having very focused practicing, which I couldn't agree with more. So, could you just return to that a little bit?
Christopher:
Sure. Practice is a very interesting thing because the word, rote, R-O-T-E, which is a kind of practicing where you're repeating things over and over, and over, and over, is important because it establishes, "muscle memory." So, if you something over again, then your fingers want to do it. Now it is true we have muscle memory. But in fact we don't actually have muscle memory. We have cognitive knowledge, and what repetition does at a physiological level, it's not terribly well understood. But what we understand in this the trillions of available neuron connections in our brains. Ever time you do something that involves an interaction with your body, you are building up a signal pathway and the repetition of a particular sequence of signals produces a chemical response in the brain where that pathway becomes further insulated and becomes more efficient at a level of ... Probably a quantum level. But certainly a level of which your brain functions, repetition.
Christopher:
So, it's not muscle memory. It's the understanding that what you are doing, your conscious mind is creating an environment where your unconscious mind learns through physiology. All of which means that, if you're building up efficient neuro pathways in your brain to be able to execute as a violinist, the first two bars of Richard Strauss' Don Juan, the brain itself, nothing in there knows what's good or bad. So, it's very important that we recognize that repetition of something that's not 100% right, is just you're practicing rote, practicing how to do something at a mediocre level. Because, whether you call it muscle memory, or you use fancy words like myelin sheathing and oligodendrocyte, no matter what term you use to describe learning, the fact is that we have to be highly aware all the time that whatever subconscious process we are encouraging to become automatic are being repeated in the best possible manner, which includes intonation and includes quality of sound. And includes an awareness of a healthy body position.
Christopher:
It's like best practices, both physically and musically have to be evident. So, there's a heightened sense of awareness under which learning becomes efficient. And that learning is not so much dependent upon doing something 5,000 times. But learning about what the difficulty is. And I know that you're a very experienced teacher. And you will know that most of what we do at any level, and even at master's degree, or doctoral level teaching, I can tell you, most of what we do is discussing how to learn and how to practice. And learning a difficult passage, especially if you're going to spend 25 years in the radio orchestra where you don't have time to learn notes, you have to be able to zero in and identify the weakest link in the chain that becomes a passage. If you have eight notes together and it's just not working, there will always be a connection between two notes, or three notes in that chain where your neuro pathways are inefficient.
Christopher:
And once you learn how your brain responds to repetitive practicing and the environment in which you get the best results, then you learn efficiency as a practice where you can go to the weakest link of the chain, strengthen it on either end, and work out. Leah, have you noticed how poorly students will practice a passage that they always start at the beginning and move to go to the end. And when you ask a student, "No, no, no, no. We're going to start at the end and work forward. This is your arrival point. You have 11 notes to get there."
Leah:
Got it.
Christopher:
Okay. Don't play one through 11. Start at 11 and then go from 10.
Leah:
Yep.
Christopher:
Then go to the last two notes. Or take the passage in the middle. Take the fifth, sixth, and seventh notes and play them, and add one before and one after it. This kind of ability to hone in is how we create an environment in which the subconscious processes achieve results and healthy outcomes in a more efficient way so that you can do things like go for a walk or drink wine, rather than have to do something for an extra six hours.
Leah:
Yeah. And we need balance. I mean, it's not a joke about the walk. And so, of course, I want to thank you so much for this fascinating conversation. So, I'm looking forward to playing a few more concerts with you, of course, before you retire. What is your last concert you'll be playing with us?
Christopher:
I'm going to finish up in the middle of June with Mahler's first symphony.
Leah:
Oh, so great.
Christopher:
Yeah. And the week before that is The Rite of Spring, which is a big bassoon solo. And we're also taking to New York for our Carnegie concert in early April, the 9th Symphony of Shostakovich, which is the biggest bassoon solo in the entire repertoire. And I'm hoping that I still have the endurance to get through it and not embarrass myself. We'll see.
Leah:
Oh, it's going to be wonderful. Well, again, thank you so much.
Christopher:
Great to talk with you, Leah. I'll see you at work real soon.
Leah:
You will. Bye.
