It already feels like spring, and summer will be here before you know it! If you are planning your wedding for 2012, don’t forget to book your musicians! Summer dates are already filling up. Check out our classical music rates and availabilities here.
Are you getting married outsied? Check out our 5 tips to help wedding musicians outdoors.
Autumn is officially here, and October is just around the corner! If you’re getting married in October, it’s not too late to book a classical string quartet for your wedding. Beautiful music from a violin and cello will put the finishing touch on your wedding plans.
Book us for your Memphis October wedding and receive a $50 discount to your package! Click here for more information about rates and available dates!
Are you having an outdoor wedding in Memphis this summer? A classical string quartet or trio can add the finishing touch of elegance to your ceremony. Not sure what your musicians will need when they play on your beautiful day? Here are a few helpful hints to help your classical musicians make your wedding music beautiful.
Making music in the heat is hard work! The notes will sound so much sweeter if your musicians can have a cold drink in between songs. Bottled water is best; Styrofoam cups can crack, tip over and spill, or end up with small insects swimming inside.
Don’t let that beautiful gazebo go to waste; let your musicians play inside. Classical string musicians often play on instruments worth tens of thousands of dollars. Intense sunlight or a few rain drops are damaging to the varnish of these instruments. Not to mention birds, whose airborne toilet habits make no allowance for anything or anybody.
“God in His wisdom made the fly, and then forgot to tell us why” wrote Odgen Nash. We know why. It was to torment musicians playing outdoors. Sunny days also bring along bees and swarms or assorted gnats, wasps bugs, and spiders. Flowers and other plants attract these pesky creature even more. If there is no other place for your musicians to play away from flowers, provide a citronella candle to help ward off the insects.
While playing under the shade of a tree is better than nothing to keep the sun off, falling leaves and needles can be a nuisance to musicians while they are playing, and could be potentially damaging to their instruments.
Nothing can be quite as disheartening to musicians who have been playing in the heat for half an hour while the guests arrive, than for the coordinator to slip up to the group and say “can you play for another 20 minutes or so? We are running a bit behind.” Sweat rolling down the back after this point tends to make all the notes go a little flat.
String ensembles can take advantage of their surroundings by sitting near a building or wall for the extra help it gives to the sound. If possible, set up well away from main roads and competing racket, otherwise the sound will go nowhere.
Following these tips is a sure way to help your musicians make your outdoor wedding a success! For information about booking string musicians for your upcoming wedding or other event, click here.
Legendary cellist Bernard Greenhouse, whose playing has been very influential in my own life as a cellist, passed away Friday at the age of 95. The following is taken from npr.org
May 13, 2011
Bernard Greenhouse, one of the founding members of the Beaux Arts Trio and a prominent cellist of the recorded era, passed away this morning at the age of 95. His death was peaceful, said Paul Katz, a former student of Greenhouse who serves on the faculty of the New England Conservatory and is the former cellist of the Cleveland Quartet.
Founded in 1955 by pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Daniel Guilet and Greenhouse, the Beaux Arts Trio became one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles. Philips recorded several hundred albums with the Beaux Arts Trio during Greenhouse’s tenure. Their recordings of Haydn’s complete piano trios won Gramophone’s Record of the Year award in 1979, and their album of the Dvorak “Dumky” Trio won the 1964 Grand Prix du Disque. Greenhouse played in the quartet for thirty-two years before leaving the group in 1987.
Three books have been published about Greenhouse and the Beaux Arts Trio: “Bowed Arts: Reflections of Bernard Greenhouse on His Life and Music” by Laurinel Owen (2001), “The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait” (1985) by Nicholas Delbanco and Delbanco’s “The Countess of Stanlein Ex Paganini Stradivarius Cello of 1707″ (2001), concerning the restoration of the famous instrument Greenhouse played.
The cellist was born in 1916. At age 30, he began two years of study with Pablo Casals; he had studied previously with Felix Salmond at Juilliard and with Emmanuel Feuermann and Diran Alexanian. Greenhouse himself was deeply committed to teaching; he served as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music, the Hartt School (University of Hartford, Connecticut), and also taught at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Julliard, Indiana University and the New England Conservatory. In more recent years, Greenhouse had led master classes around the globe and continued to teach privately at his studio on Cape Cod.
As Greenhouse noted in a 2008 All Things Considered profile, “I’m considered the old man of the cello right now. I don’t know of any [other] cellists over the age of 90 who are still performing. I fight against the closure of my ability, and I’m not going to let it happen.”
Most girls have been planning their wedding since they were old enough to be able to walk down the aisle. They plan the colors, the flowers, and THE DRESS. Some even plan who the groom will be!
I have recently been planning my own wedding. Unlike many girls, I had never given the flowers or the cake much thought before I got engaged. But there was a big part of the ceremony that I have had planned for a long time: the music. I have provided music for many different styles of weddings in the Memphis area, for may different brides. As I have been planning my own wedding, I have taken many things I have seen different brides do and incorporated them into my own wedding, glad to have been able to pull ideas from such a wide variety of resources without having to do the research myself. Despite the wide variety of brides I have played for, there is one theme that runs true for almost all of them: They didn’t even know where to begin when it came to hiring musicians for their wedding.
Music can make or break a beautiful wedding ceremony, yet most brides haven’t a clue when it comes to planning this huge detail of the wedding. I would like to share the most common questions I get asked about wedding music, along with important questions that don’t get asked.
A. Yes! Even if I am personally booked for a wedding on the day of your ceremony, I will provide you with other musicians for you. I will continue to serve as a contact person between you and your musicians, even if I will not be playing for your ceremony. Don’t forget to provide the time and location when asking for availability. These two details often get left out of the initial contact, but are the most important.
A. Yes! I have music available for all instruments for any traditional classical wedding song. Any non-traditional music can also be played, as long as I am notified 2 months before your wedding date so that the music can be located and arranged.
A. Yes! There is a small list here to get you started. YouTube is a wonderful resource to use if you are not familiar with what a song sounds like. I am happy to provide free consultation to help you choose music to fit the theme of your wedding.
A. There is an up-front reservation fee of $50. After that, the cost is $175 per musician. There is a $50 travel for weddings more than half an hour outside the metro Memphis area. More information is available here.
A. The only thing you will need to provide is a chair without arms for each musician playing. For outdoor events it’s nice to have a bottle of water too.
A. We can tailor the songs to be the exact length you need, depending on the size of your venue and wedding party. Memphiscello uses only professional, experienced musicians who are used to the intricacies of playing ceremony music.
A. Yes! The musicians who will be playing for your wedding will have seen many a bride come down the aisle. It is very helpful to have an order of ceremony. We will arrive in time to talk with your coordinator about cues for starting each song, and will keep the music flowing seamlessly from one event to the next.
A. Start the process now! Dates are already filling up through the fall. Contact Sarah Bearden to begin stress-free planning of the perfect music for your wedding day.
Below is a list of my traditional wedding repertoire for string duos. Don’t see that special wedding song you want? Just ask – it may be available.
Air – J.S. Bach
Air from “Water Music” – Handel
Ave Maria – Bach-Gounod
Canon in D- Pachelbel
Entrance of the Queen of Sheba – G.F. Handel
Hornpipe from “Water Music” – Handel
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – J.S. Bach
La Rejouissance – Handel
Rondeau – Jean Joseph Mouret
Trumpet Tune – Henry Purcell
Trumpet Voluntary – Jeremiah Clarke
Wedding March – Felix Mendelssohn
Wedding March – Richard Wagner
The Phantom of the Opera
Ashokan Farewell (From the Soundtrack of PBS series “the Civil War”) – Jay Ungar
How Beautiful – Twila Paris
Merry Widow Waltz—Lehar
Serenade – Fr. Schubert – Liszt
Straussiana—Johann Strauss
Symphony No. 5 – Brahms
The Prayer – Carole Bayer Sager/David Fosterg
Valse de Musette From La Boheme—G. Puccini
Waltz From Faust—Gounod
On Friday, October 1, 2010, I had the opportunity to take my string students on the field trip of a life time: We went to see Yo-Yo Ma live in concert. Ma is the most well-know cellist, and perhaps the most well known classical musician, in the world. Although some of the students entered the performance never having heard of Yo-Yo Ma, they left with a feeling of awe, saying “He is AWESOME”. Some students had the privilege to speak to Ma afterward and shake his hand -something I am sure they will never forget. Ma entered the stage to the reception of a Rock-star, with the audience on their feet and cheering. His charisma and flawless playing kept the audience spell bound for the entire performance. Below is a review of the concert from Memphis’s Commercial Appeal.
It has been 10 years since Yo-Yo Ma first appeared with the IRIS Orchestra, the first soloist in the group’s inaugural concert that played to a sold-out house of 870.
Yo-Yo Ma
The cellist, then as now one of the world’s most highly regarded musicians, has long been close to the orchestra’s conductor, Michael Stern.
About 45 years ago, Ma played for Michael’s father, the legendary violinist Isaac Stern, while Ma’s father taught Michael violin. The familial bond continues on this 10th anniversary of IRIS, which performs several concerts a year at the Germantown Performing Arts Center.
In 2005, IRIS filled the Downtown venue for a concert with violinist Itzhak Perlman. It has had no trouble filling Cannon again for Ma — the auditorium of more than 2,000 seats sold out.
Ma will be playing two works, Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major and Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor.
In a phone interview, he spoke about that selection, saying, “We thought it would be nice to show two different characters of music — one would be the Haydn, a very joyful, exuberant kind of piece, and the Schumann by contrast is very romantic and intimate and in some ways very personal. So much of Schumann’s music was written for his wife, and you can sense that most lovely, soulful, romantic ode to Clara Schumann.”
Ma has received many awards, among them 16 Grammys, the Glenn Gould Prize and the National Medal of the Arts. Even at the top of his game, he works to stay inspired and fresh in his approach.
“I think the whole idea of live music is that the only reason people are there is because they want to be, and they want to share in something. So you bring all of yourself to that present moment. I often think of a concert hall not as a concert hall with a separation between stage and audience, but rather as one room where you are the host and people are your guests who you want to remember something from it and take away something. They will say, ‘I went away really moved by something, and I’m going to think about it, and I want to hear that again.’ That creates the fabric that makes society function.”
The IRIS musicians are chosen by Stern from around the country, although several are from Memphis. The out-of-towners fly in the week of the concert and stay with host families while they’re here.
Ma loves the concept: “It’s great because Germantown and Memphis are smack in the middle of our country, and here we have some of the deepest musical traditions in our world. But you also have musicians that are coming to the IRIS Orchestra from many different parts of the country just to celebrate the active creation and the act of creativity that happens everywhere. We celebrate it right here in Memphis, and that’s wonderful.”
Friday night, Yo-Yo Ma reaffirmed why we love superstars.
As much as we know of his illustrious history and as many recordings as we may have heard, the brilliance of the cello virtuoso’s live artistry still managed to surpass expectations and gave the audience at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts a night to remember.
The event was the first concert of the 11th season of the IRIS Orchestra, referred to with great hope by backers as the beginning of the second decade of the Germantown-based group that draws on musicians from around the country.
Ma had been the guest soloist at the first concert of the first season back in 2000 at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. Then, as now, he conquered.
Only once before has an IRIS concert been held at the Cannon — in 2005 Itzhak Perlman filled the hall. Ma did the same Friday night, luring the best of the town’s swells among the 2,000-plus, including three mayors, community bigwigs and titans of local industry.
Ma wowed them all.
He first performed Haydn’s “Cello Concerto in C Major” with remarkable verve, smiling throughout, teasing out Haydn’s wit and exuberance with cascades of precisely executed passages.
You might have thought such a performance would be tough to top, but after intermission, he gave us Schumann’s exquisitely romantic “Cello Concerto in A Minor.” With throaty growls and gorgeously lyrical runs, Ma and his instrument brought forth another round of bravos.
Sure, he had us at the Haydn, but when he’s performing, Ma seems to be having the best time ever. So he gave the audience an encore, a brisk jig from Bach’s Third Cello Suite.
The following is taken from Wired magazine on Sept 27, 2010, by Jonah Lehrer.
Somewhere, right now, a little kid is fighting with his parents about how much he needs to practice the piano. Or maybe it’s the clarinet. I fought with my parents about practicing everything. I didn’t want to practice my major chords, or my tennis swing, or my multiplication tables. I insisted that I already knew how to do it – I’d just done it – so why did I need to do it again?
Well, it turns out that 10 year-old Jonah had a point. There’s a brand new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience by a team of scientists at Northwestern (first author Beverly Wright) that investigates how much deliberate practice can be replaced with periods of “additional sensory stimulation,” or passive listening.
The experiment went like this: A large group of subjects was taught a difficult auditory discrimination task. Then, they practiced. And practiced. Every subject in the task performed 360 trials of the task per day for at least six days. But here’s where the interesting differences begin: In one follow-up regimen, listeners performed an unrelated task in silence. In another regimen, subjects performed that same task while listening to relevant stimuli in the background. In the final regimen, subjects didn’t get a break, but instead practiced the same auditory discrimination exercise over and over again. We’ll call this the nothing-but-practice group.
So which group improved the most? It turned out that you needed to be exposed to the relevant stimuli. This meant that the group which practiced the unrelated task in silence didn’t improve. However, these experiments also demonstrated that listening to relevant background stimulation could be just as effective as slaving away at the task itself, at least when the subjects had practiced first. In fact, the scientists found that we don’t even have to be paying conscious attention to the stimuli – subjects still benefited from the stimulation even when distracted by an entirely unrelated task. I emailed with Andrew Sabin, one of the co-authors on the study, who summarized the results:
A great deal of previous work has shown that simply presenting the stimuli to the participant is usually not enough. They actually have to do the task. This is where our group comes in. Basically, what we say is, yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you practice for 20 minutes, and then you are passively exposed to stimuli for 20 minutes, you learn as if you have been practicing for 40 minutes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit. This finding could be important for clinical training programs, such as the ones that attempt to treat language-based learning disorders.
Obviously, these results have big implications. We spend a lot of time trying to improve our perceptions on very particular tasks, whether it’s a jet fighter pilot learning how to fly or a baseball player learning to hit a fastball or child with dyslexia learning how to read. Although we currently assume that the only way to improve is to constantly practice – in technical speak, the act of practicing provides a “permissive signal” that allows the accompanying stimulation to “drive learning” – this research demonstrates that we can also improve through mere exposure. Furthermore, our obsession with practice comes with serious drawbacks, since the tedium of practice can prove discouraging for beginners. And so we quit the piano and give up on our reading lessons, because we can’t stand the training regimen.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can just play Yo Yo Ma in the background and expect to master the cello, or put the textbook underneath the pillow and expect to ace the algebra test. We still need to practice. We just might not need to practice as much as we think. Here’s the kicker from the paper:
On a practical level, the present results suggest a means by which perceptual training regimens might be made markedly more efficient and less effortful. The current data indicate that it may be possible to reduce the effort required by participants by at least half, with no deleterious effect, simply by combining periods of task performance with periods of additional stimulus exposure. If this proves to be a general rule of nondeclarative learning, it could help to explain how potent instances of learning can arise when sensory stimulation is not always coupled with attention.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/how-much-should-we-practice/#ixzz11PAfBv27
The solution for musicians to conquer performance anxiety seems to be for the performer not to take confidence in the fact that he has the piece well learned or memorized, but rather to conquer the anxiety itself. Because the path of fear in the brain is quicker than the path of realistic reason, performers must learn to associate performing with something other than fear. Unreasonable fears for performance situations are maintained in the brain when relief from performance anxiety is only associated with escaping the performance. This causes the reinforcement of anxiety every time the musician performs. Continued exposure to the source of fear under low stress situations is needed for the performer to test reality and build new memories in the brain to extinguish the old memories of fear. If performers are given positive immediate information concerning their performance, they are much more likely to gain control over their performance anxiety. This process has been termed biofeedback implosion, or flooding, by psychologists.[1] In other words, performers should not simply practice their music, but should actually practice performing to “flood” their brain with good memories of a musical performance, overriding the bad memories as a result. Sports psychologist Don Greene developed a technique called “centering” in which performers use breathing and visualization techniques to channel their trait anxiety to help them focus on the task at hand of performing, rather than being distracted by the audience.[2] Performing frequently for memory in less stressful situations such as older family members, or a few close friends at a time can help train the brain that performance does not have to equal fear.
Multiple volumes have been published on different techniques and tricks to help performers overcome performance anxiety. There is not room enough in this blog series to cover them all at once at any great length. Future posts will discuss techniques to practice performing for overcoming anxiety. However, understanding the concepts which have been covered is the first essential step for conquering the impact of performance anxiety on memory for performance. If musicians cannot understand their anxiety they cannot overcome it, and if they cannot overcome it, they might be well advised to deploy their talents in pursuing some less ego-destructive career.
[2] Greene 2001, 167
Works Cited
Greene, Donald. Audition Success: An Olympic Sports Psychologist Teaches Performing Artists How to Win. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Wilson,Glenn. The Psychology of the Performing Arts. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1985.
In learning situations, conscious memories are laid down by a system involving the hippocampus, and unconscious memories are established by fear conditioning mechanisms operating in the amygdala. These two parts of the brain operate parallel to one another and store varying types of information related to the learning experience.[1]
When a person is exposed to a stressful situation, the adrenal gland secretes a steroid hormone into the blood stream, which helps the body mobilize its energy resources to deal with the stress.[2] Because the amygdala is involved in the control of the release of adrenal steroids, when anxiety occurs, the amygdala sends messages to the thalamus, which then sends messages to the pituitary gland, which releases a hormone called ACTH. ACTH flows through the blood to the adrenal gland, causing it to release the steroid hormone. This steroid hormone flows through the blood to the brain, where it attaches to receptors in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.[3] When the steroid hits the hippocampus, signals are sent to the thalamus to tell the pituitary gland to slow down the release of ACTH. However, when the steroid reaches the amygdala, it tells the thalamus to tell the pituitary gland to keep releasing ACTH. If the stressful situation lasts too long, the hippocampus waivers in its ability to control the release of the stress hormone and to perform other routine functions.[4]
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen has shown how temporary severe stress can result in the dendrites in the hippocampus shriveling up. Dendrites are the part of neurons that receive input and are responsible for the beginning phase of long-term memory formation.[5] A study was done on a group of monkeys living under a dominant male who caused stressful situations. When some of the monkeys died, an autopsy was done in which stomach ulcers were found, suggesting that the monkeys had indeed been under stress. Notably, there was definite degeneration in each monkey’s hippocampus, but no other damage to any other part of the brain. More studies in humans injected with high levels of steroids, which mimicked the effects of severe stress, caused cells of the hippocampus to atrophy and die, and memory problems occurred as a result.[6] This explains one reason why performance anxiety can cause failure of memory for performance to occur.
Anxiety and fear are related because both are reactions to potentially harmful circumstances. Fear is a reaction to external situations, but anxiety stems from an internal stimulation. Anxiety has been called unresolved fear; fear is related to behavioral acts of escape from threatening situations, and when these actions are not carried out, fear becomes anxiety.[7]For example, musicians may be afraid to play in public because of poor previous performances that caused peers to make fun of them, or because of a teacher criticizing them in front of others. When the musicians are called on to perform again, they are afraid because of the past bad memories of performance and do not want to set foot on stage in front of an audience. However, they are required to perform, and because they cannot act on their fear and run off stage, anxiety sets in. Research by LeDoux and Claparede suggests that it takes only one fearful experience to put in place an emotional memory that is nearly impossible to erase.[8] Thus a bad performance experience as a child can impact a musician even as an adult. If adult performers cannot pinpoint the bad experience causing them to fear performing, they may feel even more helpless to react against it, causing their anxiety to worsen. As seen previously, fear response in the brain is not connected to conscious memory, so the musician may never be able to pinpoint exactly his source of fear. The anxiety causes stress, and the stress causes the information-carrying dendrites to shrivel up. The more the performer stresses, the more the dendrites shrivel, making it harder to retrieve the music that has been stored in the hippocampus. Performers may hope to rely on their sensory motor skills to make it through the piece they are performing. However, as previously seen, stress hormones released by the amygdala affect the body’s reflexes, blood pressure, and temperature. Movements which once seemed effortless become quite cumbersome, and motor skill memory fails the performer.
Unfortunately, the problem of performance anxiety affecting memory is a rather cyclical one. As shown, performance anxiety has a direct impact on memory. However, memory also has a direct impact on performance anxiety. The better musicians feel they have a piece of music memorized the less they tend to feel stressed about a performance. Performers who prepare a piece of music very well may tend to let their mind wander during a performance. Consequently, they may begin to play automatically and turn their attention to the audience, which can distract them by calling attention to the social consequences of having a memory slip.[9]
Now that the process of how the amygdala and the hippocampus affect performance anxiety (memory of performance) and memory for performance, memory for performance and how to overcome performance anxiety will be discussed.
[2] LeDoux 1996, 240
[3] LeDoux 1996, 240
[4] LeDoux 1996, 240
[5] LeDoux 1996, 242
[6] LeDoux 1996, 242
[7] LeDoux 1996, 242
[8] Horwitz 2002, 31
[9] LaBerge 1992, 53
Works Cited
Horwitz, Betty. Communication Apprehension: Origins and Management. New York: Singular Thompson Learning, 2002.
LaBerge, David. Attentional Processing: The Brain’s Art of Mindfulness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.