08.18.23: Notes on Ferling

Ending the cliffhanger.

In a long-procrastinated follow-up to this newsletter, I suppose I should inform any remaining subscribers who aren’t yet dead from the suspense, that I did, in fact, cop a used YTS-62 — so, a tenor — at last rounding out my experience with the four core saxophones. I’ve played it for a couple hours every day since I got it. I’m in weekly rehab with an instructor and everything. Feels good!

It’s even more like riding a bike than I expected: I was immediately able to play up and down the standard range chromatically, and I could recall a few of the more natural major scales — you know, F, C, G, D — from muscle memory. But of course I was badly out of tune and easily winded, and I couldn’t remember any minor scales; in fact, I don’t remember ever working with any of them other than the natural minor, and I’d never even learned the circle of fifths, so clearly I still had a lot of fundamentals to learn in the first place in addition to the fundamentals that I needed to brush up on. So I’ve been in the shed, so to speak, with a drone, a tuner, and a dream.

I’m mostly playing scales, long tones, overtones, etc., and transcribing. I’ve also spent the past several weeks working through the famous 48 Études pour hautbois ou saxophone by the 19th century composer Franz Wilhelm Ferling, now known in my household, only somewhat affectionately, as Oboe Man. He’s a tricky bitch, this Oboe Man, and his etudes have a certain reputation.

Lest you assume our dear dallassax here is playing one of those manic and rambling battle themes from one of the older Pokémon games, no — this is Ferling’s No. 4. See the bit at 0:20 when dallassax begins to strangle his instrument to death? That’s him dealing with a rapidfire series of double octave leaps that frankly don’t sound very nice even when you play them perfectly at tempo; and you may as well be climbing Mt. Everest rehearsing to get this thing up to tempo.

I’m not even dealing with this bullshit just yet. I’m currently working on polishing my execution of No. 5, which sounds much prettier. (I started with No. 1.)

I didn’t play anything remotely as technical as some of these etudes in high school nor in the brief period when I practiced with a soprano on my own in college. But it’s not too bad — you dissassemble the piece, you take each part slow, and you drill the rhythms until you physically can’t play them incorrectly, you mind the dynamics, you reassemble, and then you pick up the tempo, and you remember to breathe. I’ve also started recording my practice with these etudes, and that makes it easier for me to review the unquantifiable flaws in my playing, like bad tone (typically due to weak breath support).

You’ll notice I’m playing this fussy conservatory bullshit when I probably could go straight to jamming one of those manic and rambling battle themes from one of the older Pokémon games. I first learned about these etudes from my instructor, and she didn’t even necessarily recommend them, but once I read through a few, I started to view them as a peculiar and potentially engrossing challenge — my sort of torture. Just the first few of these etudes have broken a lot of my old bad habits, e.g., ignoring all but the side key fingering for B-flat, and helped me develop a new perspective on the whole miraculous process of voicing a column of air into a brass cone with flute keywork to produce four octaves of power. Fundamentals, and then jazz, with its own tricky idioms. And then Pokémon. Rumor has it: Charlie Parker typically warmed up on these etudes, too.