Invoicing, Returns, and Renaissance Music Summer School

TL;DR:

• I spent a long time making an invoice for my summer job
• I finished up my EMV job by helping return instruments and equipment
• I attended the first two days of Renaissance Music Summer School

New and Improved

• Added Practice Room section

Life Update

After working for three weeks straight for Early Music Vancouver, one of the first things I did upon no longer being employed was to create an invoice for services rendered on the 8th. I already had notes of how long I worked for and what I did, but the most complicated part was creating the invoice itself, since the templates I found weren’t to my liking and didn’t support the table formulae I wanted to use to make payment calculations easier. As a result, I spent the better part of two hours making my own template from scratch based on what I saw online, and I’m happy to report that it makes my life easier the way I intended it to. Hopefully, I’ll have more chances to use it in the future so my hard work doesn’t go to waste.

Aside from my usual routine pre-EMV job (practice trombone, play video games, watch TV shows), I didn’t do anything of note on the 9th, with the exception of researching some potential banks and rental properties in the UK. The 10th was pretty much the same.

On the 11th, I did my final day of work for EMV by helping move instruments and equipment back to their places of origin. This took me to the Chan Centre, the UBC School of Music, the EMV offices, and Long and McQuade’s rental centre at Main and Terminal. Since it was my first time there, I was initially surprised about the rental centre’s existence, but the ability to rent stockpiles of equipment for one-off events does make sense in hindsight. I guess it does provide a steady income stream for L&M, at the very least.

I resumed my regular free day routine on the 12th, and proved my new high range practice technique’s success during that day’s session, though I suspect this will be the last day I do so from this point forwards.

One of the reasons for this is because I began attending the three-day Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School for instrumentalists on the 13th, which was held at St. Helen’s Parish in Burnaby. Since the artist-in-residence for this workshop was renowned sackbut player Catherine Motuz, I knew I had to go and check it out. The workshop’s first day mainly consisted of early music ensemble playing with other attendees, which included other sackbut players, string players, some vocalists, and even a serpent player. However, I also got to participate in a masterclass with Catherine Motuz, where I played Willy Byrd’s Even From the Depth, a piece I looked at two years ago but didn’t get a chance to play. She not only gave me some really useful advice and recontexualized how I should deal with my recurring bad habits when playing, which I’ll share in Practice Room down below, but also made me discover that my summer practice in a tiny room had somewhat ruined my sound projection. Thankfully, this issue should fix itself with more participation in the workshop and going back to school in September.

All that is to say, I was basically cooped up in a church like a monk with a sackbut all day, but at least I got to have fun and go home at the end of it.

On the way home from the workshop, I stopped by the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra’s free outdoor concert at Jack Poole Plaza, since I knew a couple of friend were playing there. While I only caught the tail end of the programme’s first half, I did manage to meet up with them before continuing on my journey.

The 14th consisted of even more rehearsals of the previous day’s material in preparation for a performance on the workshop’s final day, although this was broken up early on by a lecture by Catherine Motuz on ornamentation in early music. This was something I had touched on in my early music studies at UBC, but I didn’t really put them into practice before because I mainly played continuo parts and the bass sackbut was too clunky to play the grace notes required for most ornamentation techniques. However, Catherine Motuz offered me some advice on simplifying ornaments on bass sackbut, and I was able to try this out during later rehearsal sessions.

Practice Room

In this section, I’ll be sharing any breakthroughs I made in my playing during my practice sessions. I’m also including what I learned in Renaissance Music Summer School this week for future reference. This section may be something I’ll turn into a video/reel series in the future, so stay tuned!

During my usual practice session on the 10th, I had some trouble with long phrases in my high range until I adopted a particular aspect from one of my warmup exercises. By using the minimum possible amount of air to play these phrases at the softest possible dynamic, I was able to make my airflow and embouchure more efficient, rather than solely relying on raw air-power to hit high notes. When I resumed playing these phrases at their regular dynamic, it was easier to go through them without ruining my chops or getting frustrated, so I’ll continue to try this with even more phrases and see if this fixes my perennial high-range problem.

In Catherine Motuz’s masterclass on the 13th, she pointed out how I was unconsciously hampering my playing by pushing my lips too deep into my mouthpiece, which put too much strain on my weak inner lip muscles. This was also the problem I was unknowingly trying to solve with my ‘soft practicing’ technique above, I was able to let more sound come out of my sackbut without sacrificing my chops thanks to her explanation, although it remains to be seen whether I can effectively transfer this onto regular trombone playing. I received some pointers on phrasing early music from Catherine Motuz as well, but this mainly relied on word painting and understanding the text of my pieces, so translating it to regular trombone playing will take some effort and lateral thinking. As an addendum to my earlier mention of ornamentation, the simplified technique I used on bass sackbut was just a three-note trill, though it did help with word painting on the 14th.