QUIET CLOWNING ALOUD

QUIET CLOWNING ALOUD

QUIeT CLOWNING ALOUD…

 

Ben Glossop reveals the soul of the Harlequin

 

 

 

Allowed to act like a clown? Required to act the clown, while perfecting my sound by laughing. Please sign me up. Learn tricks like juggling, circular breathing, or double tonguing with a reed stuck in my mouth that I whittled from a plant grown in the earth while pretending to be drunk?

 

A bassoon-ee clown is almost always a little sad. My Harlequin’s backstory has a fondness for existentialist ‘loneliness, a falling leaf’ poetry, hoping that it will impress the fair Columbina.

 

 

The bassoon is a mask.

The secret to Commedia dell’arte is in the mask. The character will reveal itself to you when you look at yourself in the mask. You don’t have to be you. Being you can be scary. But being you behind a mask is a fun. No need to be afraid of the dinosaurs of the past, just act the part. We are all brave triceratopses working together to overcome the ferocious T-Rex.

 

 

 

Charlie Chaplin composed, charming and dramatic music for his films. He played a prince of the paupers whose frenetic movements were balletic and full of grace.

This is a Chaplinesque scene in suburban Ottawa.

 

Portraying the character of Pantalone on my bassoon in Manuel de Falla’s “The Three Cornered Hat” with the Kingston Symphony Orchestra was a thrill. It inspired KSO music director Evan Mitchel and me to reminisce about it on a “Kingston Symphony Sundays” video produced by the orchestra in 2021. This discussion gets to  the nuts and bolts of what this blog is all about.

When we play the bassoon, especially if we have a funny, slightly over the top part to play we can let out our inner rock star, or sitcom character. Even if we’re shy on the outside, our inner joy gets to bubble out with our thwackee stacatee and our goofee boopees.

Playing the clown puts us in touch with our inner child. We get to play with the coolest of toys for a job. What a joy it is creating music for and with kids.

The best thing about putting on a clown’s mask is that it encourages us to act as a slightly more audacious version of ourselves. Thus, we have the best of both worlds, sincerity and significance. We can allow parts of ourselves and the characters we can imagine in our heads to shine with extra brightness.

Sometimes you have to ask for inspiration. 

“Hey, Dottore, what fancy idea should I base my bassoon quartet on?” 

“Simple Harlequin. The bassoon quartet. It is Fun Music.” 

And so this became the goal as well as the title for the quartet. The fact that the piece ends in a blues (or bloose for the double oo in bassoon 🙂 tickled my funny boone. The bloose smiles while telling us its sad story. Neither Major nor Minor. Mixolydian mode makes me moody.

The thing that clowning around the way can most teach us as respiring bassoon players is to let go and open up. To use all of our air, and to fill the bassoon with all that it wants to take, and sometimes that little bit extra ends up being the growl in our voice. Part of the sadness we show, as we more often sing than talk.

We walk, dance, and prance. Craftspeople and Artists combined. When carrying a tune, say, as a loon on a lake of soft strings, blow your horn like it is on your bike as you ride down your favourite hill.

Go with the flow. Plan lots, but if life zigs when it could have wagged (and you feel like a bird on a bumping bike), then playing with those gags as a joyous act that brightens our way, is embracing what it is to be human. This is a clown’s first and only tool. Embracing and mocking humanity.

The rest is props and masks 🙂

 

Ben is a primary creator of Ottawa’s Poets’ Pathway. A monument of 14 bronze plaques and 35 kms of green space dedicated Canada’s past and future Poets. 

 

Ben is the Principal bassoonist of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony Orchestra, a regular extra with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and is bassoonist with the Bel Canto Quintet, the Ayorama Quintet, Harmonious Pigs and the Prisme Ensemble. 

Finnish Dreams

Finnish Dreams

Where My Dreams Took Me

Samuel Rouleau is a French Canadian bassoonist living and working in Finland.  After an initial visit as an exchange student in 2016 he returned to Helsinki in 2019 for his Masters degree.  He describes his love for Finland, where the culture resembles Canada in its polite, humble, nature-filled and open spirit, but with a special Finnish twist.

I am grateful to share with you some of my Finnish musical journey from the past few years; it’s been so formative in so many ways! I’m also glad to reconnect with the Canadian bassoon community as I have been away for some time! I have been given a world of opportunities and experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything. Learning the local language was a big part of my integration in the society and culture here;  language works a lot like music, connecting us to one another at the deepest level. [photo above…Mikko-Pekka Svala, Erkki Suomalainen, myself, Noora Van Dok]

Learn by doing

Finnish orchestras have a special tradition of often including music students to play with them, offering an unparalleled learning experience by being fully immersed in professional orchestral playing surrounded by a supportive section. Among many others, I have played with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra. These opportunities were made possible thanks to my wonderful teachers and colleagues, and by participating in various professional auditions over the years and being offered gigs or longer-term substitutions.

 

My time playing with these orchestras definitely taught me more than I could have learned by playing solely in student orchestras! The trust Finnish orchestras give to students is incredibly motivating, giving us the push we sometimes need to raise our level beyond what we thought possible! Notable repertoire included Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Debussy’s La Mer, Strauss’ Symphony for Winds, Brahms Symphony No. 4, and Rachmaninov Symphony No. 2, – to name only a few. [On the left below…Jussi Särkkä, Tuukka Vihtkari, myself; centre…winds of the Turku Philharmonic; right…with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen]

 

Meeting your role models.

They say you should never meet your role models, but I must admit at least in this case that I strongly disagree! As a student at the Sibelius Academy I have had the honour to play for two bassoonists I have admired for a long time, Carlo Colombo and Sophie Dervaux. Having these inspiring bassoonists and musicians by my side even for a short while gave me lots of insight into what I want to do with my music making and how I want to shape my sound and voice through my instrument. For Carlo, I played a selection of orchestral excerpts for an upcoming audition I had at the time, and with his help I reached the finals of that audition. With Sophie, I was nervous but excited to play the piece I first discovered her for performing, the famed Jolivet bassoon concerto. I soon after performed this piece on my Masters recital in spring 2022, and with her guidance was able to feel expressive and grounded during my interpretation of this monstrous work that has always been a dream of mine to play. In short, playing for and learning from my greatest inspirations has allowed me to unlock a new level of feeling comfortable and capable on the bassoon and reach new heights!

EDUCATION IS KEY

As I mentioned already, studying at the Sibelius Academy has given me many opportunities to develop my musicality and create important lifelong connections with my teachers and peers. I initially chose to study here for my year-long exchange from McGill University in my Bachelors degree, but soon after felt that my time there was not over, and I returned for a 3-year Masters program some years later. I was studying with Jussi Särkkä and Jaakko Luoma as my main teachers and also received instruction from Otto Virtanen and many guest artists, not to mention my wonderful teachers in other subjects as well. I performed my final recital in April 2022, performing Jolivet’s Bassoon concerto, Mozart’s Quintet for winds and piano in Eb-major, Gubaidulina’s Duo-sonata for two bassoons, and Corrette’s Le Phénix for four bassoons and cembalo. I graduated that same spring with my Master of Music and specialized certificate in pedagogy. [on the left…colleagues from the Sibelius Academy; centre…oboist Lucia Castillo and English Hornist Michael Lawrenson; on the right…me in recital]

MUSIC CONNECTS US

The musical community in Finland is very tight-knit and highly inclined focused on collaboration and education. For instance, the Helsinki Conservatory’s teacher extraordinaire Mikko-Pekka Svala organizes a yearly bassoon extravaganza inviting bassoonists from all around the country (and even abroad!) to join forces and play many different arrangements for various sizes of bassoon ensembles. A highlight this year was an arrangement of select movements from Mozart’s Requiem by Ashby Mayes for bassoon octet! Other highlights include performing a selection of songs by Jean Sibelius with a superstar of the classical music world, soprano Karita Mattila, as well as playing with the world-renowned Finnish a cappella group Rajaton for a Christmas concert in the quaint town of Kemi in the north of Finland last year. The close musical circles in Finland allowed me to collaborate with various artists and participate in different types of projects, inspiring me further to imagine other types of collaborations that could one day be possible…

[Photos: below left with cellist Aslihan Gençgönül and Karita Mattila; centre…a choir of eager Finnish bassoon students!; right…with Rajaton!]

EVERYTHING IS CHAMBER MUSIC

In addition to the abundant orchestral and solo experience I have gathered both within and outside of my studies, chamber music is always an important part of any musician’s life, as we know that anything can be and often should be seen as chamber music! Notably, I was happy to participate in a chamber music festival run by up-and-coming young classical musicians in Helsinki called Kamarikesä (Chamber Summer) last August, performing Barber’s Summer Music wind quintet and an arrangement of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin for the same ensemble. It was an enriching experience and allowed me to form more intimate bonds with my fellow colleagues and perform in one of Helsinki’s most elegant and beautiful venues, Ritarihuone (The House of Nobility). A few years ago, I also began learning to play baroque bassoon and have been studying with Jani Sunnarborg, a virtuoso period bassoonist in Europe. I attended the Kälviä baroque music camp this past summer for the second time and was able to perform pieces such as Platti’s Trio Sonata in c-minor for oboe, bassoon and continuo as well as Fasch’s Quartet for two oboes and two bassoons in F major. I hope to continue working on exciting chamber music projects in the future and also deepen my skills and knowledge on the baroque bassoon. [Below right…with oboist Nahoko Kinoshita, bassist Julius Pyrhönen, cembalist Laura Vihreäpuu]

Coming Full Circle

In May of this year, I was honoured to be invited by my high school alma mater De La Salle in Ottawa to teach a masterclass for woodwind students as part of the 40th anniversary of the school’s arts program, the Centre d’Excellence Artistique de l’Ontario. This truly felt like a full-circle moment to me as I was able to connect with the young bassoon students and help them on their musical journey, even if just for a day. I evidently saw a lot of myself in them as I was once in their very shoes, and my dear first bassoon teacher Jo Ann Simpson came to support both me and her current students, which was a treat. That day I also performed C.P.E. Bach’s Sonata in A minor for solo flute arr. for bassoon in D minor. [Photos…DLS students, with Dantes Rameau and my old teacher Jo An Simpson]

FINLAND AT ITS FINEST

Here are a few snapshots of my time in Finnish nature over the past years, including a dip in “avanto” (hole in the ice, traditionally done after some time in the sauna), staying safe from mosquitoes while enjoying a campfire, giving way to reindeer on the road, picking wild lingonberries, blueberries, and cranberries, staying warm by the fire in the Finnish “laavu” hut, and spotting northern lights in Lapland!

BACK TO BASICS

As I now prepare for my move to the small city of Kotka in Eastern Finland to start my first trial as co-principal bassoon in the Kymi Sinfonietta orchestra, I am reflecting on these past years and how they have shaped me as a musician and a person. I feel grateful to have had these opportunities, experiences, and adventures and am looking forward to what more lies ahead, hopefully also back in Canada. For now, I will continue my daily work at the reed desk with my favourite reed-making activity, watching tennis (if you can spot it in the picture below)… Thank you for reading.  I wish you all happy reeds and fun music making!

 

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Samuel Rouleau

Samuel Rouleau

Our Man in Kotka

One of several young Canadians occupying important orchestral positions in Europe, Samuel Rouleau has found success in Finland.

Ottawa born bassoonist Samuel Rouleau has recently graduated with a Master of Music and pedagogy certificate from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland studying with Jussi Särkkä and Jaakko Luoma. He previously completed his Bachelor of Music from Montreal’s McGill University’s Schulich School of Music under Stéphane Lévesque, and began studying bassoon with Jo Ann Simpson and the Ottawa Youth Orchestra Academy. Following his studies, he worked as a freelance musician in various Finnish orchestras and recently won the audition for co-principal bassoon with the Kymi Sinfonietta in Kotka. As a pedagogue, he has a few years of experience of private teaching and has recently given a masterclass at his alma mater De La Salle high school as part of the 40th anniversary of the Centre d’excellence artistique de l’Ontario. Samuel plays on a Püchner 24 model bassoon since 2019.

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Hope Springs Eternal In Calgary

Hope Springs Eternal In Calgary

New Bells, Old Heckels and Covid in Calgary

 

 

Michael Hope, in his fifth decade with the Calgary Philharmonic, professes two main goals before he retires: 

“To be the person who has been around the longest – I still have to outlast our English horn Player, our Principal Trombonist and a brave second violinist – and to be the first musician in the history of our orchestra to play 50 seasons. 41 seasons down, 9 to go!”

Michael writes about his happy, singing life in the second bassoon chair.

 

My partner at home is not terribly enthusiastic about me attaining these goals, because she believes that each day I play in the orchestra makes me a little bit more deaf.  She would like me to still be able to hear her talk after I retire.  She’s not wrong, but I still am having fun playing.  I think that comes from my belief that my career really has been like winning the lottery.

I was once asked what the high and low points have been in my career. I honestly couldn’t think of any low points.

That being said, coming to work these days is not as simple as it was 41 years ago when I first started with the Calgary Philharmonic.  Back then, I would just hop on my bike, ride 10 minutes to the hall, take out my horn and start playing.  Nowadays it’s a good deal more complicated.  My days of bike riding are long gone, so I take public transit.  From my beautiful (but quite suburban house) it takes about 50 minutes to get to the hall. For a number of reasons, I have to leave quite early now – the main one being that in order to play properly, I now have to warm up and practice way more.  Even with pieces I’ve been playing my whole career.  The best way to do this is to come way early.

 

Also, before rehearsal starts, there are now a few finicky steps I now need to take before I start playing:

Change my glasses to ones with special lenses for reading music.  They make mid-distance stuff on a music stand crystal clear, but the sacrifice is that I cannot see objects at distance very well at all.  These objects might include conductors…

Remove the face mask I now wear everywhere outside my house. I got Covid a few months ago – I don’t want that to happen again.  It was inconvenient…

Remove my hearing aids – worn to alleviate the hearing damage I’ve acquired after sitting directly in front of the aforementioned principal trombone player for the past 41 years…

Remind the stagehands to please install a plexiglass shield behind my chair, then insert my Musician’s Earplugs to prevent more damage from aforementioned trombone player…

Insert a non-adhesive grip shelf liner on my chair (tip: a shelf liner greatly improves posture and playing position. I’ve just discovered this!  Only because it’s gripping surface completely prevents your seat strap from slipping or moving around anywhere.  They cost $1.75 at the dollar store.  A steal).

 

At the end of the rehearsal, this sequence of events with my ears, eyes, and rear end is all done more or less in reverse – but I keep having to remind myself to take out my earplugs and re-insert my hearing aids last. Only because our brass players often “warm down” directly towards the side of my head as I’m bending down to put my instrument away (with hearing aids in this is quite uncomfortable). I kindly asked our principal trumpet player to do this off to the side.  He was a gentleman and kindly agreed.

The point is:  Getting ready to play a rehearsal is certainly more of a song and dance than it used to be when I was a young whipper-snapper. But I don’t mind. Just being able to come to work and still play music is a joy which compares to nothing. 

 

I often wonder if the secret to having a long and happy career is being a second player.  Playing second bassoon you get to play in the fun part of the instrument most of the time.  You’re important but not terribly exposed, and you still get to enjoy the music around you without the stress of the first chair. I have loved playing 2nd bassoon in this orchestra; it was the first job and will be the last job I will ever have.  It’s the life!

Playing second is an art unto itself.  I enjoy the responsibility of setting the foundation for the woodwind section’s pitch, stabilizing things by blending, and the most important part of the job – supporting my principal.

 

I’ve now had three principal players in my career.  All fine players with different strengths.  One was a lovely poet with the instrument, with a gorgeous sound always ripe with overtones. (Stephen Franse) He could make all the great lyrical solos sound like he had composed them himself.  Another (Chris Sales) was a technical master who could player faster and louder than any bassoon player I have ever heard.  My current principal player (Antoine St. Onge) is a splendid young man (younger than both my kids) who has a solid technique, a lovely sound, fine musicianship and perhaps the most enviable quality of all:  He is uncommonly nice. This is a quality that can make you as valuable a colleague as anyone could ever be.  It certainly makes Antoine remarkably easy to play with and a gift to me as a colleague and friend.

Antoine is also very smart.  At only 28 years of age he has already started wearing earplugs. I wish I had at his age.

He also plays a fine Bell Bassoon – #123. It is a very handsome horn with a “gentlemen’s cut” long joint and bell.  When ordering the instrument in 2012, Antoine had decided to get a thin wall instrument. (that’s what he was used to having played on a 9000 series Heckel that he had borrowed from the conservatory in Montreal) However, Antoine was surprised when he  saw in 2013, that Ben had made him a thick wall bassoon.

Apparently, Ben was familiar with Antoine’s playing and decided to make a bigger instrument thinking it would fit his playing better. After all, Ben has an incredible understanding of bassoon playing and he was right about that instrument fitting Antoine better. Since then, Antoine says it’s just been more and more joyful to discover making music with such a rich sounding instrument.

It took Antoine and me a little while to find just the right blend.  We eventually did it by being patient, listening (despite our constant earplug use…) and simply feeling things through. I think part of the challenge with this was finding common ground with the sounds of our different instruments – Antoine with his Bell and me with my Heckel.

My horn is a lovely 5611 series Heckel which I bought when I was 19.  Before that, my first Heckel was a brand new 12000 that I bought brand new from the Heckel factory in the 1970’s for the exorbitant sum of around $6500 Canadian dollars.   It was stuffy and dull with a bad scale.  My teacher at Curtis (Bernie Garfield) loathed it.  It had as anti a Garfield sound as any bassoon I’ve ever heard. That Heckel and I went mano a mano during my entire second year at Curtis until I finally decided to put both it and myself out of our mutual misery.

I traded it to a dealer named Alvin Swiney for my beloved 5000 series which has been by my side ever since for the past 44 years.  Swiney eventually sold that horrible 12,000 to a young man named David McGill who played it happily and went on to become the principal in The Cleveland Orchestra.  Maybe it wasn’t such a bad horn after all…

An ancient Heckel like mine has been just right for my career. Made in 1920, it is not an instrument of high value (5000’s are “strictly for collectors”, Nadina Mackie Jackson once told me over coffee). It has a gentle compact sound and a great scale (due to its long bore construction) which is just right for second playing. It’s very good at blending and making the instruments around it sound richer and warmer.   I love it, and I recently celebrated it’s 100th birthday by having it completely refinished by Frank Marcus with help from Ben Bell to get the colour just right. (It was imperative to me that they preserve the Heckel crest on the bell – this involved some finesse in blending the new colour with remnants of the old).  Frank put so much time, love and detail into getting everything just so. It looks beautiful and brand new. It is a treasured friend in my life.

Antoine with his Bell, and me with my 5000 have had fun times in the Calgary Phil.  From playing the most challenging of pieces to simply enjoying the everyday camaraderie that goes into the splendid life of being bassoon players.  Whether it’s a Mahler Symphony or a Jeans n’ Classics concert of Rock and Roll tunes, we always feel lucky to have jobs as splendid as ours.

Like the rest of the world, our jobs have come with challenges in the past three years but we’ve navigated the ups and downs of the pandemic with patience.  One week this season was remarkable.  17 members of the Calgary Phil came down with Covid at once, and had to be absent.  2 of those 17 people were our first call extra bassoon player and me.  Apparently, there was a similar outbreak going on in Edmonton and none of our regular extras in the whole province were available.  Thankfully, Catalina Guevera Klein – the wife of our principal oboist- is a baroque bassoon specialist and she came in to fill in for me with aplomb.  It was a crazy week for our personnel manager as people kept calling in sick and the orchestra kept getting smaller and smaller – luckily, we were performing Beethoven 8 that week which could withstand being a Farewell Symphony of sorts.

 

Our last concert of the season was a blast where Antoine and I got to play the mysterious bassoon duets at the beginning of La Valse.  I then got to hear Antoine completely nail the tricky and nerve-wracking solo from Bolero.  Of course, he made it sound easy – his specialty with difficult solos – and very, very expressive and stylish.  On my end, I had the more subtle challenge of playing the accompanying triplets on the high G in a way that sounded hopefully just right.  Most people who have played Bolero know that this is much harder to do than it sounds.  (If nobody notices you, then you’ve done it the way Ravel intended).

As I prepare and condition myself for the final 9 years of my career before hitting season # 50, I’ll continue to stay healthy, avoid complaining, keep using my earplugs, and most of all cherish this wonderful job that seems to somehow keep me feeling young.

 

When I first won the audition for this job, I asked my teacher at the time (Otto Eifert in Cincinnati) what the secret was to not becoming jaded.  “Drink beer”, he said. I think I may have done a bit of that over the years, but I think the best advice is to always feel lucky, to always be a good colleague, to help others around you to thrive, and most of all to revel in every single note you play.

 

  • Michael Hope is a CCOB Board Member who has been playing second bassoon in The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra since 1982.

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Wendy Rose

Wendy Rose

Wendy Rose

Several Canadian bassoonists have built successful careers in the United States.

Gwendolynn (Wendy) Rose is associate professor of bassoon at Western Michigan University where she teaches bassoon, chamber music, and music theory, and is chair of the woodwind area. She has served on the faculty at the Hot Springs Music Festival, the National Music Camp (Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada), and was invited to teach at the InterHarmony Music Festival in Tuscany, Italy in summer 2013. Rose was recently awarded the WMU College of Fine Arts Dean’s Teaching Award, and has mentored many students who have gone on to prestigious graduate programs and positions in schools, colleges and orchestras. Rose has been widely recognized as an accomplished chamber, solo and orchestral musician. She has performed at Stratford Summer Music, the Spoleto Festival (Charleston, S.C. and Spoleto, Italy), the Banff Festival of the Arts, and was selected to be a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has performed as a guest in many orchestras including the Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, Utah Chamber Orchestra, and the Grand Rapids Symphony. Rose is a frequent performer at the Saugatuck Chamber Music Festival and the Fontana Chamber Arts Summer Festival and holds the Principal Bassoon position in the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra. Rose received degrees in bassoon performance from the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan, where her principal teachers were David Carroll, Hugh Cooper, Christopher Millard, Christopher Weait, and Richard Beene.

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