On the very first week of my summer break, my parents and I immediately flew to Massachusetts, where I would be attending an intensive flute boot camp at the Mount Holyoke College for two weeks.
Called Aria, the music program is one of the very few that give high school and college students the opportunity to study the flute with diva Amy Porter, winner of the prestigious Kobe International Flute Competition in Japan.
A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, Porter was as hip as any professional musician could be, I soon learned. She drove a Mercedes Benz, owned a Labrador and was an ardent yoga instructor/practitioner.
Porter was not to be taken lightly. Since she was one of the best, she demanded from each of us nothing less than excellence. The boot camp, though only for two weeks, was probably as rigorous as running a 20-kilometer marathon without any warm-up.
Master classes
Every day, including weekends, two master classes were held. Master classes were generally sessions where a student would play before the teacher and the class.
This meant being subjected to public praise or ridicule—in my book, it’s also the point where the teacher can “make” or “break” you.
Aside from the daily master classes, private lessons were also held throughout the day with each student assigned a specific time for his/her lessons.
In between these numerous classes and lessons, you would have to practice madly. Although most of my classmates were college students, the high school kids had just as much skill and determination to make the most of the two-week camp.
It soon reached a point when there were no longer enough hours in a day for me to practice, attend classes and get enough sleep. I had to force myself to wake up at 5:30 a.m., stagger over to the Pratt Music Center across my dormitory, lock myself in a practice room and repeatedly cough up a groggy Mozart Concerto in G until breakfast at 8:30 a.m.
I learned from one of my new friends that her classmate attended Aria last year. Reportedly, on the very first lesson, Porter made the student cry.
I must have been frightened stiff on my first lesson with Porter. She immediately corrected my slouching posture, bent from years of carrying textbooks up four flights of stairs.
“Stand up straight!” she instructed me dozens of times, while raising my arms. Lessons were undoubtedly beyond nerve-wracking, but I learned a wealth of new techniques and repertoire that I never thought would be possible in such a short time.
Porter was quite firm, yet friendly once you got to know her. But I reminded myself never to try to cross her—who knows what would become of me and the 10-meter radius around us if the diva showed us her other side?
After only a few days of rest in Vancouver visiting my grandmother, we flew to Frankfurt, then took the connecting flight to Cologne. This is the city where Ulrich Muller Doppler lives.
Private lessons
Doppler is a well-known flutist, a student of Jean-Pierre Rampal, and great grandson of Karl Doppler, a very famous German composer whose flute pieces were widely acclaimed.
Since we were in Cologne for only a few days, I only had two full days of private lessons with Doppler, who was always clad in a bright T-shirt and jeans, and who was one of the happiest and bubbliest personalities I had ever met.
For one of our lessons, we all squeezed into Doppler’s tiny car, which managed to drive us at a constant 150 miles per hour on the highway—Germany is one of the few countries that do not have speed limits on highways—to Essen, where the Folkwang University of the Arts was located.
The school itself is rich in history; its main offices alone have foundation walls that date back to 799 A.D.
As I stood in one of the practice rooms, Doppler began to drill me on the foundations of technique, exalting the “magic number seven” exercise from Taffanel and Gaubert’s method book, considered one of the bibles of the flute.
Afterwards we explored the interpretation of numerous required repertoires, ranging from the ever-changing tempi of the Doppler Mazurka to the stylistic approaches that one must employ when playing Bach.
Lessons with Doppler were just as challenging as those at the boot camp, but the insight I got on how to practice and interpret works was worth its weight in gold.
In Bayreuth, I was in for a treat since, for four straight days, we would be attending operas by Richard Wagner, hosted by the Bayreuther Festspiele and held only during the summer in special commemoration of the composer.
Wagner is a musical genius for all time. One had to question, however, his methods in building his opera hall, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, as audiences have to endure many hours of discomfort while listening to beautiful opera because of the absolutely minimalistic use of cushioning on hardwood seats and the 10-centimeter distance between rows of seats. Originally built in 1876, The Festspielhaus, has never been renovated.
A Wagner opera always starts promptly at 4 p.m., with two hour-long intermissions between acts. Depending on the opera, the performance could very well end between 10 and 11 p.m.
In the mornings, my parents and I explored Bayreuth, which was quite tiny. If one walked fast, it would take only around 30 minutes from one end to the other.
To my father’s delight, there were Antiquariats on every corner, where he would disappear into for hours on end while my mother and I wandered around Wahnfried, Wagner’s villa, which donned a large bust of Ludwig II, the composer’s primary sponsor during his time.
There was an old cemetery at the far end of the city where we found the tomb of Franz Liszt, the renowned pianist and composer whose bicentenary will be marked this year. The Wagner children were also buried there, along with Hans Richter, esteemed conductor of Wagner operas.
I bowed three times before each of their graves—a Chinese way of paying respect. Deep inside, I was also secretly hoping they might bless me with some of their musical brilliance.
Back home, while finishing the last bits and pieces of summer homework, my father tossed me a package. “Open it. We got this at Martha’s Vineyard while you were at camp,” he said.
It was a peculiarly carved wooden bird perched on a dragonfly’s back.
“That bird is called a flycatcher,” my father said. “It will leave its home to catch insects, then immediately return to its perch.
I nodded, inspecting the peculiar object with makeshift wheels and colors that were splotched on in a manner resembling a kindergartener’s work.
“So, were you able to catch many interesting things this summer?” my father asked.
I looked blankly at him at first. Suddenly understanding, I grinned. “Yep. Lots.”
The author, 17, is a student at International School Manila. This concert season, she will be a flute soloist with the Metro Manila Concert Orchestra and will have a duo-concert with Ulrich Mueller Doppler and chamber concert with her pianist mother Cristine, cellist Ann Alton and violinist Michael Emery. Coyuito will perform the world premier of “Psst!”, a new work written for her by Josefino Chino Toledo.