It's Jason Heath, and I just got back
from the 2024 Pittsburgh Globe Symposium full of inspiration
for these great performances. I've got all sorts of great ideas
from the master classes, and I've shared out about this event
over the years in various ways. Today, I'm going to give you a little bit
of everything, some of the masterclasses, some of the performances,
and if you want to check out everything, the Carnegie Mellon University
School of Music's YouTube channel has the entire livestream t
here
that's linked up in the show notes. And let's dive in. Jeff Mango teaches bass at Duquesne, also in Pittsburgh and plays in the opera
and has this beautiful career melding all sorts of different
gigs around the Pittsburgh area. There's a real treasure in the bass
community here in Pittsburgh. Why is there an accent? Is it something to do with gut strings? No, it doesn't,
and there's a lot of theories about it. Right before this wonderful,
magnificent moment in the opera, it dramatically
it'
s the pinnacle of the opera. Right before that, Desdemona
sings her Ave Maria and the applause
is thunderous, thunderous. So the only way that
that they could get the the the din of the applause to cease, you know, here
we are basses alone, starting on a low E, so that little accent,
I'm not sure if the accent was added during the rehearsal week
or after the first performance, Each year's symposium
has a different set of featured artists, and it is a testament to the work
that Michael Howard pu
ts into this event. Ten Make it different every year
and beneficial for students and beneficial for the Bass community as a whole. Year we had over
200 people attend the 2024 symposium and it was just wild to see
all these people from different walks of life. Tell me what you think is going on there, because it's very Godfather ish,
as I just said earlier. I understood that he was talking
to an assassin about killing the Duke or something. There you go. There is a duet on the stage and that duet
is all about murder and plot. And what do we have? What do we have? We have this beautiful duet. There's a dichotomy here. It's a there's a conflict of this,
by the way, this beautiful key of F major. It’s a beautiful key. It's the key of Beethoven's Sixth. Right? So here's this beautiful F major
while there's a talk of an assassin. So we have this this wonderful obbligato the play and we all sing
and we do all that. Galen McCormick is the current president
of the International Society of Basis
. And another person that I have just gotten so much out of
had a great time hanging out with her. everything I'm going to share with you
today is drawn both from my experience as a working musician, as someone
who takes auditions or took auditions, and as someone who teaches a class
in performance anxiety in audition strategies at the Eastman School of Music. There are things
I wish I had known when I graduated. Firstly, from my undergrad,
I struggled a lot with performance anxiety and while it
wasn't a problem, it wasn't
something that we really addressed other than to say a play more in studio
class, record yourself more often and I felt like we weren't
getting at the heart of it and I was really getting discouraged
that my results in auditions varied widely regardless
of how much I prepared. from We're getting ready to perform. You have your nonmusical preparation. This is the part that I call
super obvious, but never talked about the musical part
that I'm going to go very lightly
through because you have tons of mentors here
and tons of opportunity to talk about musical preparation
and then mental preparation. Another piece
that I think we don't talk enough about. in an audition situation, let's say,
how are you going to get there? You're driving me flying. Where are you going to stay? How much will that cost? Will you drive? Once you're in town,
you're going to need a car or you're going to need an Uber
that can fit your bags and maybe your trunk. I'm going to New York,
I'm going to fly. I'm going to stay in this hotel. This is how much I budgeted for food. But I remember watching one of my students
go through this and I said, Well, did you add that up at the end
just to do very quickly $800? And then she said, my goodness, and we're going to spend $800
to audition for a summer festival. Now let's talk about the day of your
recital or the day of the audition. I was surprised
nobody said anything about this. You're going to need some things. You need some food,
right? Something you can carry with you
bass players. If it's a banana, please check your case
the day after the audition so you don't have run banana this way. I tend to go with the kernel of hours
Now, if I forget, they're fine You definitely want to bring water
with you everywhere you go. You never know what's going to happen
when you get to the hall. Patricia Weitzel is awesome. I've known her for
well over a decade at this point. We were on the ISP board together
a few years back and we're
actually going to have her at our base camp
in San Francisco this summer. What an awesome player and teacher
and it is so cool to see her out here in Pittsburgh. Sometimes, when we hold our bows,
we're really just preventing the bow from falling on the floor,
especially French bow players. It's very common to have this kind of engagement
with the bow, and I do think that we need to get
a little more contact with the bow, especially some of the roundness
on the stick, even bring this thing close
r to your hand in a sense,
because you do need that kind of power. What we need to do
is unlock the smaller muscles of your arm so they can contribute
to that motion as well. So it's like smaller circles
you use that opposed to this. It seems to me
from the audience standpoint, the your left hand
seems so far away from your body. It's, it could be my eyes deceiving,
but it feels like the bass is here, and I like having it closer to me
so I can actually have my core a little more engaged
if it's
here. It feels really, really far away.
It seemed like your bass. It was not only further this way,
but also the knee was pushing it forward. So it's almost like we're not aligned a little bit forward. So let's see if we can make sure
that the bass is closer and the knee is not pushing
the bass forward. One of the things that I love
about Pittsburgh are these great cobblestone streets. And yeah, it has weather that reminds me of living in Chicago
a little bit in terms of that, but I just love th
e architecture. As soon as you get off of that Carnegie
Mellon campus, you get into this really just beautiful
old houses in the hills back here. Just just beautiful. We're had a For Mean, I, her And, remember what John said convenient and day. For me, this is my best place,
because that's where my arm drops. And so I try to keep in there
all the time. That's why I like to stand is I can keep, I can move the bass around
so I can keep my arm there. For this up and down two octaves,
just that type
of thing. Being able to grab it Nick Meyers is the new principal bassist
of the Pittsburgh Symphony. He took over that role in 2022
after being in the Detroit Symphony for several years. And he was joined for this recital
by Carl Anderson, who was a student at DePaul
while I was teaching there. He was studying with Alex Hannah. So it's so great to hear Nick
play this amazing recital and to hear him partner
up with Carl for some great music making. No, no, no, no, no, are never, you know, I hear
d, you.
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