Les éléments (or, less is more)

Dear Colleague,

As usual, I am always looking for ways in which to streamline processes and achieve maximum benefits or results with minimum effort and material (work lazy, not harder, or something like that). About 15 years ago I came up with an efficient way to practice flute and recorder, wherein I work on fundamentals (tone development and technical exercises without looking at music) for 20 minutes, sight reading for 5 minutes, and work on concert repertoire from 5-10 minutes, for a grand total of approximately 30 minutes per practice session. This may extend to 45 minutes in the month or so before a concert, and in the two weeks prior to the event I do this two to three times per day.

My point (yes, I have one) is that this practice is focused, intense, without distractions, carefully timed, and designed to build stamina, concentration, accuracy, and to gain control of your instrument without any excess physical stress. This method of practice is not without a downside. When preparing for a concert and my wife is in the house and can hear the practice, she has been known to say, “Are you going to practice more than those 3 bars?” or “I guess I’ll have to go to the concert to hear the entire piece in context.“ After doing this for several years I started dumping this efficient practice on to my students. A few years ago one student came to me and gave me a book, Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, and told me that I should read this book because it validates a lot of what I was asking my students to do. It seems I was asking my students to commit to deliberate practice, or, as pointed out by Colvin and others, practicing the things that are not fun and, for musicians of all types, reaping the benefits of being able to enjoy playing music for fun with, well, more fun. This type of efficiency, essentially the 80/20 rule (briefly mentioned in my post on The Right Tool for the Job), has been further solidified and embedded in my attitude about flute practice and cooking by Tim Ferris in his 4-Hour books (4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef; I’ve not read the 4-Hour Work Week).

“Well, yes,” you ask, “how does this help your cooking? Do you practice chopping onions to refine your technique?”

OK . . . no, actually. I have, however, watched some videos of different chefs chopping onions and other edibles and then tried to emulate that in my own cooking. This deliberate practice in cooking manifests itself in the types of dishes I prepare, as well as their frequency, and number. By making the same few dishes several times I learn how to improve my efficiency and rely less on recipes and written procedures and more on my ability to conceive a project, its ingredients, and procedures. Now with a set of ingredients (and over time these same several dishes get their ingredients reduced; if you can make something that is as good or better as the original with fewer ingredients and procedures, why would you do otherwise?) I can essentially create my own recipes. Mark Bittman, in his invaluable How to Cook Everything, states that you should have five dishes that you can create without using a written recipe. For me this number is somewhere between 10-15 meals.

Another beneficial byproduct of this 80/20-deliberate practice-use-less-to-get-more-results is that now I can take a set number of ingredients (between three-five; herbs and spices do not count as ingredients and an herbs and spices essay is forthcoming) and create several different dishes. Think of it as a ground bass with its repeated harmonic pattern and how creative you can be within those guidelines. One of my recent meals contained just two ingredients and required a hands-on time of about 10 minutes and a total cooking time of 60 minutes (grilled salmon and baked spaghetti squash and a light drizzle of truffle honey). And the homemade sauerkraut has two ingredients, shredded cabbage and sea salt (and if herbs and spices do not count, then it has only one). 

Now when I hit my recently reorganized kitchen to make something, I want to spend as little time as possible messing around with stuff and with as few ingredients as possible. And if the unattended cooking time is 20 or more minutes, I can either get in my efficient strength training workout or practice tone development and chromatic scales on the flute. What say you?

Here is a live performance of a group performing a piece with minimal harmonic material (and a lot of words): Conde Claros. 

I remain,

YMH&OS,

Quantzalcoatl

"Sweeter than roses" (or, Can we come to an agrément?)

Dear Colleague,

Today I wanted to discuss the humble sweet potato. Or is it the unpretentious yam? Tasty and versatile, regardless of which plant, but the task of discussing this food item became formidable when I realized that, like trills, mordents, and flattements, sweet potatoes and yams are completely different plants. How different? Well, to begin, they are not even distantly related.  Yams are from the dioscoreaceae family, and sweet potatoes are from the convolvulacea family. Read the details here. Who knew? Well, at one level we all knew there was at least a small difference, based on the appearance. And we're all in agreement on their tastiness and the health and nutritional benefits from eating them.

In order to eat them, they need to be cooked (although I have given raw, chopped yams to my dogs, as part of their whole and raw food diet; I usually give them cooked and diced along with their raw meat, but that's another discussion for another time). The first time I ever cooked a sweet potato/yam, was when my wife and I were dating. Astounding, I know, that until that time I had never cooked a sweet potato/yam thing in my life. So I asked her, and I don't remember what she said, but it involved a slight scoring/poking holes with  a fork, the oven at a particular temperature, and put them on a baking sheet for a prescribed amount of time.

When I recently decided to cook a couple of YAMS as ingredients for my wife's special creation of black bean and sweet potato enchiladas (or, the non-vegan option of adding goat cheese crumbles to the mix), I couldn't remember either the temperature or time so I went to our formidable, no enviable, collection of cookbooks. I consulted Mark Bittman's invaluable How to Cook Everything, the Moskowitz & Romero  notable work Veganomicon, the venerable Laurel's Kitchen, and the classic Joy of Cooking. How could I go wrong following the instructions of these landmark works? After reading them, the question became: How could I go right? They were all different! They were all different on temperature, time, cooking vessel, and preparation. OK, so do these over-hyped, under-done, half-baked cookbooks actually know anything? Oh, wait. Right. The reason they are invaluable, notable, venerable, and classic is because they actually DO know something. That's why we bought them, use them all the time, and each book bears the mark of a wanna-be chef's kitchen (they are all soiled with food, sauces, water stains, and who knows what else).

OK, now what? This all seemed familiar, not just in a déjà vu kind of way but in a ripple-in-the-space-time- continuum kind of way. Continuum, basso continuo. Of course. I needed to look at this through an historical performance practice lens.But what types of treatises was I looking at? Vocal? Continuo? Instrument-specific tutors? It didn't matter. All the books were telling me what they needed to, and my task was to collect the information, mentally collate it into some order, or categorize different parts of it, and then ignore what the authorities said and make my own interpretation, based on historical models, of course. I was interpreting an event in much the same way as I interpret a piece of music as I prepare for a concert. And the same things that go into concert prep are what goes into food prep. Over time cooks and flute players acquire a base of knowledge through experience that allow them to make decisions in real time ("on the fly," in the vernacular) during their respective performance processes.

I don't remember exactly what I did with the yams (or were they sweet potatoes?), but the end result was just what I needed. And I'll probably do it differently the next time, just as each time I perform the Siciliano of BWV 1035, or the opening of TWV 40:2. It will be a brand new performance, reminiscent of the earlier versions, yet unique. Kind of like the similarities and differences between yams and sweet potatoes.

Grass Fed (or, the Fundamental Bass)

Dear Colleague,

I recently had an exceptionally fine day with my wife at the State Fair. The usual things that come to mind were there: amusement park rides, textile and food exhibits, an extensive lumberjack competition, an exceptional plant exhibit (perennials and annuals), a formidable food gauntlet with everything from very good (crepes, Carolina bbq), to horrifying (corn dogs, and a place offering "mile-high fries"), livestock shows, a couple of horse competitions, and exhibits by the 4H and FFA.

Observing the young people involved in the FFA livestock exhibit brought home for me again the similarities between food and music.  Surely you are thinking "of course the FFA and the Brandenburg concertos have many things in common." Or not. But, from my way of thinking, with which you are familiar, the fundamental elements involved here will not come as a surprise. It was a heart warming experience to see a group of young people so dedicated to something, with a sense of purpose, The discipline involved in caring for the animals from birth to whatever their final destination may be. A daily practice is involved, to be sure, in caring for the animals.

You ask, "I see how this dedication, routine, and respect for something is similar to music, but how does this relate to food?"

It is not the dedicated young people by themselves that provide the parallel. It is the interaction with the animals, some of which become food. Being part of this process gives one the opportunity to watch something grow, mature, and finally be part of something else. The animals that mutate into the food state go through another process and become part of something else, and at this point the young people are no longer involved. But they provided a unity in the food chain, similar to what Jean Philippe Rameau called in  his Treatise on Harmony, the fundamental bass in music. Or as demonstrated in Francesco Gasparini's L'Armonico Pratico al Cimbalo, the building of harmony from the ground up.

An awareness of the source of our food, be it plant or animal, should be more a part of our daily eating. Ann Vileisis discusses this in captivating detail in her book Kitchen Literacy. And our daily practice of music should include an awareness of the composition process. Very few of us these days are performer-composers such as J. S. Bach, Giuseppe Tartini, or François Couperin, and fewer still of us have made the effort to study rhetoric and oration and their relevance in composition and performance. An awareness of the sources and processes is our foundation for food and music and are essential to a good understanding of them, and should be considered in our preparation of both.

When people speak of grassroots movements, they perhaps should think of Rameau or Gasparini, and build their structure from the bottom up, grass fed.

I remain,

y.m.h.&o.s.,

Quantzalcoatl

Tacos de Pescado con Agréments (or, ¿Did Couperin Visit the New World?)

Dear Colleague,

Tonight we had the simple fish taco. The finished product reminds me a of an air de cour, ornamented following Mersenne's guidelines in Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636-7). On the surface a taco is just a taco, and an air is just an air. Neither appears exceptionally complex but that is why both "compositions" provide such a satisfying result (when prepared properly).

The air de cour poetry will never be confused with Petrarch, Guarini, or Machaut. And shredded cabbage will never be anything but peasant food. But when you combine the air de cour poetry with the melodic line and seventeenth-century French harmonic vocabulary, the elements of performance practice, and my favorite performance element, rhetoric, each air can then touch your soul. The touch can resemble anything from a delicate caress of your cheek, to the searing pain of a boning knife jabbed right between your ribs en route to your heart.

The taco? The required elements:

• A homemade corn tortilla (I use a tortilla press, but, of course, a good quality, locally made tortilla purchased at a grocery store that sells primarily organic food will work just as well), 
• pan-roasted wild-caught true cod, 
• organic, refried black beans, 
• green, Napa, or Savoy cabbage (or, if you want some good color contrast, add some purple cabbage as well), 
• diced tomatoes, 
• scallions, 
• chopped cilantro, 
• lime wedges 

 And the essential elements, the rhetoric of the taco, so to say. My choices here reflect my personal taste and the philosophy of "think globally, buy locally."

• Lime-and-Chimayo-chile infused fat-free sour cream (one could use any chile powder from ancho, guajillo, to cayenne),
• either Rogue Creamery's Raw Milk Cheddar (Central Point, OR), or my favorite, Beecher's Flagship cheddar (Seattle, WA)
• queso cotija.

One could use just plain sour cream, or none at all, or any cheese, and have an ordinary eating experience. One could also just sing the words of the air just as they are, with no rhetorical inflections, no flexibility in the rhythms, and with nothing but the plain notes. In each case, what will you have? A list of ingredients that may or may not satisfy you.

As with most of the music we refer to as Baroque, the notes on the page are merely mnemonic devices; 50% of the music is the responsibility of the performer, who has to function in the manner of a composer-performer from the 17th and 18th centuries.

And as with any food we prepare for ourselves or others, the raw ingredients are just a point of departure. The beauty of the finished product comes from the way the ingredients are combined, supervised by the personal touch of the composer-performer. A chef is a chef; chef de cuisine or chef d'orchestre.

I remain,

ymh&os,

Quantzalcoatl

Iberia and the New World (¿Por aquí o para llevar?)

Dear Colleague,

To help prepare emotionally, as well as intellectually and musically, for the concert of Baroque, Renaissance, and Traditional music from Spain and Latin America (and one piece of Yaqui Indian origins), a sampling of cuisine from Spain, Mexico, and Argentina was needed.

The menu:

Paella (from Steve Raichlen's Healthy Latin Cuisine), substituting squid rings and bay scallops for the shrimp.

Posole (with blue corn hominy) (After I browned the pork loin chunks I just tossed everything into the slow cooker; may have overdone the Chimayo chile pepper for the taste of some . . . )

Tacos de carne asada (After rolling out a few tortillas by hand, I lost patience and just grabbed a package of the local corn tortillas I always have around, for just such an emergency) A good marinade of lime juice, salt, and olive oil worked well on the meat.

Matambre. This recipe comes from an older Time-Life book we bought at a used book store. The most difficult part is the flaying of the skirt steak. Next time I'm having the butcher do it, or at least make sure my knives are properly sharpened. That is another story for another time . . .

And the blending of cuisines: risotto with Chimayo chile, shiitake mushrooms, and sweet potatoes.
This seems almost redundant given that the paella is the Spanish version of risotto, but this had no seafood in it. The chicken Andouille was the perfect protein for this (and I took it easy on the Chimayo this time).

Yes, this was a ton of food to prepare over a couple of days but the gang pitched in to defer the costs and took care of the clean up.

The program, as usual with these cross-genre events, required me to do all sorts of things that, in theory, I've trained for, but the reality is that I don't get to practice these skills enough. Thanks be to Providence, the music writing software program does some of it for me. With the trad player on the program we went to a=440 Hz, which, as you know, is less-than-ideal for Baroque flutes, so I opted for whole tone transposition for the pieces which used the flute. I switched to recorder for a couple of pieces, and even played the quena on one piece.Add to that the occasional need to improvise an accompaniment in styles of music that are far removed from either Tartini or Quantz in their styles, techniques, and harmonic vocabularies, and you have a flute player on the edge. The edge of what, we cannot say . . .

The concert went well and was not without some shameless grandstanding. For the last piece on the program, an arrangement of Santiago de Murcia's "Folias gallegas," I played an African drum as well as flute, even doing both at the same time on a few occasions when the extemporized aspect of the piece allowed for a drone on the tonic note while I beat a rhythm on the drum.

Next time this program happens, I'll make sure you are on the gig. We had too many leftovers and not enough flute players.

y.m.h.&o.s.,

quantzalcoatl

Poulet-à-bec (Chicken and Hotteterre)

Dear Colleague,

Last night we had citrus chicken and roasted root vegetables (details below), while a cold winter rain confirmed our life at The Home for Wayward Muses in the Salmon Capital of North America.

The soundtrack for cooking was Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres, performed by a group which contrasted the Catholic music with Arabic instrumental and vocal music between each lesson. Very interesting, and a bit shocking upon first hearing. So for me, a successful recording; it kept my attention through its duration.

The food was comforting and the weather was merely a light rain (and a balmy 34 F / 2 C) so the Couperin recording seemed more appropriate than Vivaldi's Opus 8, no. 4. And it was Boxing Day so some primal need from my childhood for sacred music at this time of year had made itself evident. But just thinking about that Vivaldi concerto got me thinking of the Rousseau arrangement of the Opus 8, no. 1 (Am I wrong in thinking it is one of your favorite encore pieces? Or is that the one piece that might send you to the dentist from the fierce grinding of your molars at the mere mention of it?).

Speaking of Couperin, and French music in general, I've been using Hotteterre's "Ornamented Airs and Brunettes" for beginning traverso students.

Why in the world would I do that, out of all the things that could be done? Well, the melodies themselves are not complicated, have a relatively small tessitura, and are short in duration. I have them practice the pieces sans agréments. They can then focus their attention on tone, breathing, and with people used to the modern flute, remembering the fingerings and embouchure position for notes such as F#, F-natural, and Bb, for example. Once we get the tone, breathing, and blowing issues sorted out, then the ornaments are introduced and then the dental grindstone (speaking of molars . . . ) of music making can begin.

After a few months of wading through the Airs & Brunettes, they start to get comfortable with playing the traverso, playing ornaments without losing time or an excess of air ("you're spewing again" is a regular idée fixe in the studio). Then I introduce them to Hotteterre's L'Art de Préluder. That gets them used to playing in more than one key, and really developing an intimate relationship with the traverso. Then we go for non-French music and they are amazed at how relaxed they feel when faced with passage work that extends over several bars, even one bar, and that 16th-notes seem downright slow by comparison to the seemingly endless supply of notes that must be played in the space of an 8th-note in the heretical Hotteterre and his annoying agréments (those feelings belong to the students, not me!).

To put the orthodontia to better use, here is the Boxing Day Repast:

Citrus Chicken
(adapted from Giada Delaurentis's recipe on the Food Network):

4 chicken breast halves (boneless, skinless)
1 each of lemon, lime, blood orange, thinly sliced
Dash of lemon, lime, or orange juice
Salt and pepper

Pre-heat oven to 400 F / 205 C
Braise chicken in olive oil in an oven-proof skillet/casserole or a Dutch/French oven until lightly browned on both sides.

Remove chicken from pan and line pan with a melange of the sliced citrus.

Place chicken on top of the citrus, season with salt and pepper, and place remaining citrus slices on top of the chicken. Pour the dash of juices around the rest of the pan.

Bake, covered, for 1 hour.

Serves 4-6

Roasted Root Vegetables
1 Rutabaga
3 Parsnips
1 Red garnet yam*

*(Almost any root vegetable may be used here; this is just what I had on hand last night)

Chop rutabaga into 3/4"-1" chunks
Similarly chop the parsnips
Cut yam in half then lengthwise down the middle, then cut those pieces in half again

Put in bowl, lightly coat with olive oil, then season with salt and pepper.

Lightly oil a baking pan and arrange vegetables on it, trying not to overlap or layer.

Bake at 400 F / 205 C for one hour or until the rutabagas are tender.

Serve in large platter with the citrus chicken and watch your hungry diners devour with glee, gusto, and a general sense of civilized voraciousness.

Pears in Red Wine (adapted from Lesley Mackley's The Book of Mediterranean Cooking)

4 whole pears (I prefer red)
3 cups red wine (temperanillo or a temperanillo/garnacha blend)
1 cinnamon stick
3 tablespoons sugar

Remove skin from the pears

In a saucepan large enough to hold the pears, heat the wine, cinnamon stick and sugar, on medium heat (but do not boil), and gently set the pears in the liquid.

Simmer, uncovered, 15-20 minutes, turning the pears once. Basting is welcome but not necessary.

Remove pears, turn up heat and reduce liquid to a syrup texture.

We like to serve the pears on a buckwheat waffle and a wee bit of vanilla ice cream. Pour the wine-syrup on top and add a small garnish of fresh mint leaves.

Follow with a wee dram of Edradour (where they "take it back to the old school" as we say) or a snifter of Cardenal Mendoza, (established 1781), and contemplate your next musical project.

Speaking of next projects, my next project will be to finalize in paper form the "10 Steps to Baroque Ornamentation" that I showed you on your last visit to Salmon Central. After the paper form is settled, the next step will be to make a video recording of the musical examples. Looks as if I'll be in for some dedicated practice on the "Gavotte de Corelli" by Monsiuer Blavet. [And how did that little gem not make its way onto your Blavet recording?]

Until the next time,

I remain,

y.m.h.& o.s.,

quantzalcoatl