Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

BeeKay wrote:

Have performed publicly twice - having a marvelous time the first time - the deer came out to see what was going on and raven stopped by - and an awful time the second time, which has prompted another long hiatus.

Welcome Beekay,

I going to guess that the first time was an outdoor concert

Would I be going to far to ask what happened the 2nd time that it was such a bad experience? If not, what happened?

edosan wrote:

Hey all,

Got a fabulous flute on eBay yesterday. It's a Magritte (obscure maker, I know), originally made ca. 1928; modified
into a 7-hole around 1957. It has a wonderful smokey sound, and I'm considering having it changed back to a 5-hole.

Here's a pic of it.

I got quite a good deal on it. What do you folks think?

eB

From what I understand about the flute, each maker had a very distinct type of tobacco they like to use on the bore of these flutes, does it smell "sweet and smokey"? Man I jealous, nice find...

edosan wrote:

Hey all,

Got a fabulous flute on eBay yesterday. It's a Magritte (obscure maker, I know), originally made ca. 1928; modified
into a 7-hole around 1957. It has a wonderful smokey sound, and I'm considering having it changed back to a 5-hole.

I got quite a good deal on it. What do you folks think?

eB

Ummm... Your not joking are you? Howard says a tobacco was used in it, it looks like a pipe...

If it's not a joke, is the blow hole the end? I don't see a fipple, how is the sound made?

......................

OK, before posting and showing how uncultured I am, I decided to do a Google search on Magritte. He was an artist (I've actually seen prints of his paintings and thought they were Dali), but I'm still clueless about the flute. About the pipe it says:

"A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)"

edosan wrote:

I got quite a good deal on it. What do you folks think?

Ed, from the photo it looks like the bore tapers in completely the wrong direction.  Dude, you got ripped off.

-Darren.

Reply to radi0gnome (before the thread got hijacked by edosan - Hi Ed!    

My second performance was the same venue as the first - outdoors at a State Park - but this time I had invited my father, wife, daughter, and friends.  Having them there, instead of an anonymous crowd, I couldn't calm down, was shaking so much that I couldn't make a clean sound.  I really struggled to get through the piece.  They were all very gracious afterwards, but I knew how bad my playing had been. 

After that experience, I've become convinced that it's very important for teachers to make their students give recitals periodically.  Otherwise, we don't get the experience of performing in less stressful settings, and building our confidence.

Yea Bee, I can't agree enough

It's the same with my kung fu.

My first public demo i literally forgot what to do in the middle of a form and just started making crap up. It can be pretty hard to face people's polite smiles and insistance that you were "great" after something like that.

Welcome to the forum (although I think you may have gotten here before me)

BeeKay wrote:

My second performance was the same venue as the first - outdoors at a State Park - but this time I had invited my father, wife, daughter, and friends.  Having them there, instead of an anonymous crowd, I couldn't calm down, was shaking so much that I couldn't make a clean sound.  I really struggled to get through the piece.  They were all very gracious afterwards, but I knew how bad my playing had been.

That's good they were nice about it. What's important to remember is that people generally want to be entertained more than they want to be critical. The standards have been set so high in our society where people generally get to hear mostly recordings or professional touring musicians that it's very difficult to go into a performance thinking that your playing is going to be compared to that select few that have made it to the top. In reality, people will appreciate almost any performance they attend.

I was wondering because I had a bad experience sort of recently where I brought my didjeridu to a farmer's market. There are usually folk musicans there who'd sell CDs or look for donations, and when I was told that I could come and play if I liked, I took the opportunity. I didn't put out a hat and don't have any CD's and just did it by myself. The shoppers seemed to like it, but I found out that it was annoying some of the vendors. The fact that it annoyed them didn't bother me so much, but it would have been nice if someone told me at the time. I would have stopped then instead of coming back a second time. Heck, I would have continued annoying them if no one eventually told me, and the way that came about was more by chance than anything else. It turns out that when they mentioned I could come and play they were expecting me to play Irish flute.           

BeeKay wrote:

After that experience, I've become convinced that it's very important for teachers to make their students give recitals periodically.  Otherwise, we don't get the experience of performing in less stressful settings, and building our confidence.

For some of us who get stagefright bad even the occasional recital isn't enough. What I did was to take up karaoke. I know it gets a bad rap, but it's pretty helpful for people learning to sing or trying to get over stage fright. I guess there's some public speaking groups that would help with stage fright too. The key is they meet every week. It went through some stages for me, starting with stagefright that would incapacitate me. I ran into that the first time with a music curriculum audition. I finally got through that one on the 2nd audition by learning the piece so well that I couldn't mess it up. I couldn't talk well to announce the piece, but I must have played it OK. I really couldn't remember how the experience went even a short time after, it was kind of like being in shock. The 2nd stage was that I'd get nervous only if I knew I may not have  prepared enough, and the 3rd stage that I'm at now is that I don't get very nervous at all, but I'm pretty darn aware beforehand what the quality of the performance might be. Of course, most performance opportunities I get as an amatuer are pretty low-stress, but you wouldn't guess it by the way most of the other participants of the groups I chose to perform with behave. Just try bringing up idle conversation with someone with stagefright while waiting to go on, you'll get all kinds of reactions like dumbfounded looks when you mention that the weather is nice to abrupt reponses about how they have to think about what they need to do. I wonder how it must be for pros. In the beginning it was fun just because of the adrenaline rush, but now the music has to be fun in order for it to be exciting.