Being a beginner on your doubles

ByBret Pimentel

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I’ve mentioned often on this blog the idea of “being a beginner” on your woodwind doubles. Here’s what I mean by that.

When I was a college saxophone major just starting to get serious about doubling, I arranged to take some flute lessons one summer. At my first-ever flute lesson, the teacher told me she knew that I was an accomplished saxophonist already (a generous assessment) and therefore wouldn’t need much more than some instruction on embouchure. That made sense to me, so she sent me away with my first repertoire assignment: a Mozart concerto.

I had a fingering chart and plenty of misplaced confidence, so I hacked my way through K. 313 that summer. I did learn quite a bit in the process, and could sort of play it, but my flute technique had significant unaddressed gaps.

If I could go back and do that first lesson over again, I would ask that teacher to treat me like a beginner, since that is exactly what I was. I would have been an informed, adult beginner, and we could have skipped ahead on the every-good-boy-does-fine, but in terms of flute technique I needed to start from the ground floor. I would ask the teacher to recommend a good beginning method book and coach me through it page by page. Maybe get started on some one-octave scales and some nursery-rhyme tunes.

Starting from a beginner level might seem too elementary for someone who plays another instrument well, but those early lessons are crucial. Practicing a few pages of whole and half notes on three or four pitches would have done wonders for developing my breath control and tone production on the flute, and given me a chance to absorb correct fingerings in a slow and methodical way. Developing a strong middle register would have given me the foundation for beautiful and effortless tone in the highest and lowest octaves. I haven’t had many gigs since that summer of flute lessons that required me to play a flute concerto badly, but I’ve had plenty that called for steady, consistent, in-tune whole and half notes.

If you, like me, have made the mistake of trying to start a new instrument at an intermediate or advanced level, it’s not too late. Ask yourself what you would do to give a beginning student the best possible start (weekly lessons with a top-notch teacher? a well-organized daily practice routine? lots of attention to fundamentals?) and provide that for yourself. Don’t be too proud to spend a week on a few pages of whole notes.

Mozart will wait.

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    Reedmaking and choosing your college oboe or bassoon professor

    ByBret Pimentel

    US college/university music departments and conservatories are filled with talented, qualified faculty. If you are an oboist or bassoonist bound for a large school then there will almost certainly be both oboe and bassoon professors there with outstanding credentials and years of high-level teaching and performing experience.

    Smaller schools are also well-stocked with excellent music faculty, and can provide a very, very good education. But one thing to bear in mind is that in smaller music departments, the faculty members often have to wear multiple hats, sometimes teaching instruments that they don’t perform on.

    Those professors still have much to teach you, and while it’s not an ideal situation it’s also not unheard of. However, for double reed students, there’s an additional wrinkle: the need to learn reedmaking.

    Reedmaking is a crucial skill for oboists and bassoonists. At larger schools it’s not unusual for the oboe and bassoon professors to offer classes in reedmaking, or at least to spend a significant chunk of lesson time on it. And while still learning this art, you will probably need someone to provide you with reeds or adjust ones you purchase elsewhere. (The ones from your local music store or online retailer aren’t likely to play at the level you will need for college study.)

    So, if you’re considering a school where you might study with someone who isn’t a performer on your double reed instrument, it would be worthwhile to find out their plan for teaching you reedmaking. If they don’t have a detailed and convincing one, you might think about some other schools, especially if you are planning to pursue a performance degree, or ask your teacher about ways to fill that gap in your education.

  • Achieving an ideal tone

    ByBret Pimentel

    A lot of the questions people have about woodwind playing center on tone: how can I get a better tone? a darker tone? a tone like _____’s? There’s not a lot of clarity on this, for a few reasons:

    • Firstly, of course, “good” tone is subjective, and trying to communicate clearly about tone in more dispassionate terms is problematic due to inconsistent vocabulary.
    • Tone is made from a recipe of factors, so it’s hard to isolate individual ones. Will adding another egg improve your cake? Depends on what else is in it. Will a certain warm-up exercise or piece of equipment have a specific effect on your tone? Depends on what other equipment and playing techniques you are using.
    • Much of what affects tone is difficult or impossible to observe and measure.

    Let’s look at the physical factors that influence tone:

    • Yes, of course, equipment. It’s axiomatic in woodwind playing that your equipment does affect your tone, but not as much as you affect your tone. Still, your particular combination of headjoint, reed, mouthpiece, ligature, barrel, bocal, instrument, and various other parts and accessories does influence in some way the sound that you make. Equipment of good design and construction, and within typical parameters, will contribute to an essentially characteristic tone quality. (By characteristic I mean easily identifiable as a specific instrument by someone with a musically-educated ear.)
    • Basic woodwind-playing techniques, including most notably breath support, voicing, and embouchure. Assuming these are well-trained, they also contribute to a characteristic tone quality.
    • Some subtle aspects of those woodwind-playing techniques that are hard to pin down. These small things determine how the tone fits into the larger world of characteristic tone qualities, usually described poorly in vague terms like “good” or “pure” or “rich” or “buttery” or “vocal.” For example, an oboist’s embouchure puts different pressures on different parts of the reed. Those pressures can be adjusted very subtly using the small and flexible muscles of the embouchure, but most oboists probably aren’t very aware of exactly what adjustments they are making (though they may know what it feels like). Most are also not very capable of passing that wisdom (i.e. a feeling) along to a student or colleague. Some of them can be described in too-general terms (“bring the corners of your mouth in more”), or can be evoked with spotty accuracy through metaphor or through tone exercises.
    photo, Tom Page
    photo, Tom Page

    So, how do you ever develop a tone that is characteristic, personal, and beautiful?

    • Use appropriate equipment.
    • Employ solid fundamental woodwind-playing techniques.
    • Listen frequently, widely, and at length to good music, particularly on your instrument, to develop a tone concept—an aural impression of your ideal tone. In early stages, that might be based on how deeply you have absorbed the sound of a favorite musician, perhaps your teacher. In later stages, it might be a sort of composite of your favorite aspects of many tones that you have internalized, perhaps even things that inspired you about a performance on an instrument other than your own (or a voice). Ultimately, it might be a tone that you have never heard before, but which you can imagine.

    Here’s why tone concept is so crucial:

    All those subtleties of woodwind technique that affect tone, the ones that are so hard to understand and communicate? You can find them with patient and dedicated practice, if you know what you are listening for. As you have already discovered, your tone tends to change from day to day. This inconsistency can be a problem, but can also be a way of stumbling, even subconsciously, onto something positive. (When it’s a conscious process, your thought might be, “when I hold my embouchure this way, I get a sound that is more _____.”) Additionally, a clear tone concept may aid you in intuitively pursuing it; you already use the muscles of breathing, voicing, and embouchure to intuitively produce a huge and subtly-differentiated set of speech sounds, and for most of those you would be hard-pressed to explain how you make them. If you get comfortable and familiar enough with your instrument through years of practice, you can begin to tap into that intuitive control, but again: only if you know what sound you want to make.

    An ideal tone is a lifelong pursuit—invest in yours by listening and practicing daily.

  • Observing woodwind playing objectively

    ByBret Pimentel

    If you are teaching a woodwind methods course, you might be interested in my book.

    I have my woodwind methods classes do a lot of observing of woodwind playing. They comment on each other’s woodwind playing in class, write concert/recital reports, and make written comments on each other’s playing exams (for my eyes only). This is a crucial skill for their future teaching careers.

    I try to push them to keep their observations objective. But often the comments are things like:

    • “Your tone sounds really good.”
    • “Your articulation was sluggish.”
    • “So-so finger fluency.”

    Remarks like this, especially if detached from technique observations or recommendations, are unhelpful but often also unfounded. “Good” tone is a difficult thing to pin down, even for a specialist in the instrument. Even my college woodwind-instrument majors usually haven’t done enough critical listening in their lifetime for me to fully trust their judgments of what tone is “good,” even on their own instrument.

    I find it more helpful to the development of my students’ disciplined, precise teaching to hold them to a standard of objectivity. Tone isn’t inherently “good” or “bad.” (It might be more possible to effectively use a standard like “characteristic,” but even that requires some context.) But it’s fairly straightforward, and more useful pedagogically, to determine whether tone is, say, consistent.

    Some better versions of the above observations might be:

    • “Your tone is consistent from note to note, and also seems characteristic of the instrument.”
    • “I hear a moment of air noise before each note, especially in the low register. Try increasing breath support to help each note respond immediately.”
    • “Your fingers seem to move quickly and confidently to most notes, but you seem to arrive late at the F-sharps. Let’s review that fingering.”

    Keeping observations factual and non-judgmental makes lessons more efficient and targeted, and keeps lines of communication open for better teaching and learning.

  • Some woodwind problems with competition repertoire rules

    ByBret Pimentel

    Here are some repertoire-related problems I’ve encountered trying to get my woodwind students signed up for competitions. These range from significant national/international competitions down to small competitions within my own university music department. Some are competitions designed by woodwind-savvy folks and some aren’t. I mention these problems here in the hope that it will be helpful in designing competitions that are fair and sensitive to the particular repertoire quirks of the woodwind family.

    Style periods. The clarinet’s repertoire really takes off in the Romantic period (with some notable Classical exceptions), and the saxophone’s doesn’t really get going until the 20th century. Competitions that have requirements related to style periods make things difficult for these instruments, especially if there are restrictions on playing transcriptions. It can also be a challenge if rules for determining style period aren’t clear: can I count something like a Saint-Saëns woodwind sonata as Romantic, even though it was likely written in the 1920s?

    Accompaniment. While a pianist, classical guitarist, etc. can play significant repertoire alone, most wind-instrument repertoire is accompanied. This involves extra cost, rehearsal time, and logistics for the woodwind entrant. Concerto repertoire in particular often has unrealistic piano reductions that require a pianist who is both skilled and creative (and therefore expensive and busy). There exists unaccompanied repertoire, to be sure, but pieces of this nature often provide significant challenges to the less-experienced woodwind player. To write convincing unaccompanied works, composers often write for virtuoso players capable of filling up the space with notes. Stamina issues, too, are different for wind players than for pianists and others, and unaccompanied pieces can be especially taxing.

    Timing. Competitions that favor singers tend to have shorter time limits, which circumscribe repertoire options for instrumentalists, particularly if there are restrictions on playing partial pieces or making cuts.

    Cost. Pianists, singers, violinists, and others can buy large collections of public-domain repertoire by great historical composers for relatively little money. More recent works, such as those for the clarinet and saxophone, are much more likely to be under copyright and sold individually at higher prices. For me as a teacher, this means that I have in my file cabinet, for example, only so many unaccompanied-pieces-for-sophomore-level-clarinet-players-that-fit-within-eight-minutes-and-are-flashy-enough-for-competition. Are there more pieces out there? Definitely, but even to look at the scores may require expensive purchases. There probably won’t be IMSLP downloads or many YouTube performances to peruse.

    Multiple instruments. There is significant clarinet repertoire for clarinets in B-flat and for clarinets in A. Saxophone repertoire favors mostly the alto and the soprano saxophones, but also exists for tenor and baritone instruments. Competitions with too-tight restrictions on playing “more than one instrument” limit options for these entrants. It’s a nice courtesy if there is time and patience for entrants needing to bring a second instrument up to temperature before starting, or to wet a second reed.

    Many of these concerns dissipate at least somewhat at high levels of competition. But smaller competitions are often geared more toward participation opportunities than toward crowning victors, and a little care in designing the rules can help achieve this goal.

  • Dubious pedagogy alert: woodwind vibrato

    ByBret Pimentel

    I think there is a lot of garbage in the way woodwind vibrato—specifically flute and double reed vibrato—is taught.

    Flutists, oboists, and bassoonists use the same basic physiological mechanism to produce vibrato. I often read or hear debates over what, exactly, this mechanism is, with some arguing fervently that it is the “diaphragm,” and others insisting that it is the “throat.”

    It’s worth pointing out here that a major issue in wind-instrument pedagogy is the fact that so many of the important techniques happen somewhere inside the body where they cannot be easily observed. (Violinists don’t seem to have much disagreement about what part of the body to use for vibrato.)

    My belief is that neither the “diaphragm” nor the “throat” can be correctly identified as the organ of vibrato. Read More “Dubious pedagogy alert: woodwind vibrato”

  • David Liebman on not doubling

    ByBret Pimentel

    Living jazz icon and soprano saxophonist David Liebman discusses his decision to abandon his doubles, even other saxophones:

    There comes a point in an artist’s life that he or she must be objective and identify the strongest aspects of their work. After the first flush of talent and success with all the dreams and desires accompanying that stage, there naturally comes a point in development where concentration of energy becomes necessary and one can see that with increased focus greater gains may be realized. … I realized that in a given set of an hour when I played all three instruments it resulted in very few actual moments spent on each horn. It had always been clear to me that one of the most important aspects for attaining a high level was achieved by pure and simple instrumental virtuosity. The only way that is accomplished is by the sheer amount of man hours spent with the horn in your mouth. And that means ONE horn, because though the tenor and soprano belong to the same family of instruments, they are different in many ways. It was clear that the only way for me to advance further was to concentrate energy on one or the other horn.

    Read the whole thing at Mr. Liebman’s website.

One Comment

  1. I completely agree with this. While I actually had a great foundation on the flute, I remember getting frustrated spending entire hour-long lessons on long tones, breathing exercises, and octave leaps. I did not have the patience necessary at the time to take them seriously, wanting to skip to method books and sixteenth notes. And for about two years, every passage of every piece of music was a struggle.
    Fast forward to becoming a band director. I’d play daily with my sixth graders, demonstrating breathing and long tones and Remmingtons, etc. I played slow, correct scales. Played slow chromatic technique builders, slow octave leaps, easy vibrato-building exercises at slow tempos, then gradually increased the tempo each week as my students improved. And interestingly enough, playing fundamentals five days a week affected my higher-level reading ability immensely. I remember tackling the Mozart Concerto you mentioned–my first read back when I’d been playing for a year or so–just awful. After years of teaching sixth graders every day and demonstrating in 7/8th/HS sectionals? It sounded like Mozart. I was pretty proud.
    So yes–fundamentals, though tedious, are absolutely the best thing for development. I should remind myself of that more often. :)

    Reply

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