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Composers (or a performer’s interpretation) often call for “lightness” in music. How do you play a wind instrument “lightly?”
When I discuss this with my students, they often suggest that the way to play lightly is to be lighter with their tongue. When I turn that around on them—”is there a situation where you should use a heavier tongue?—they are quick to say no, the tongue should never be heavy. Sometimes instead they suggest using “lighter” air, but upon further interrogation they aren’t able to explain that without stumbling into no-nos like “less air” or “less powerful support.”
Creating musical lightness is easy, if not completely intuitive. The key is to forget about trying to make the tone light, and focusing instead on making the texture light. That means creating some contrast.
For example, consider the second movement of the Bernstein clarinet sonata. After an Andantino introduction, the musicians are instructed by the composer to play “Vivace e leggiero” (lively and lightly). Here are clarinetist Wonkak Kim and pianist Eunhye Grace Choi:
Notice the subtle but important contrasts Dr. Kim creates in the clarinet line. Many of the notes have a small accent at their beginnings, then quickly taper to a softer volume. Some notes get more emphasis from higher volume or from sustaining the note with less taper. The lightness comes from stringing softer notes between the more emphasized ones, or even from individual notes having louder and softer moments within them.
The volume in the Bernstein clip is soft, but this approach is very effective at louder dynamics, too. I stress this when rehearsing my university’s jazz big band, since things can easily get heavy- or angry-sounding at fortissimo. To bring some lightness back into a loud, thickly-orchestrated passage, I ask the band to look for the marked or implied accents and let those set the fortissimo ceiling. The in-between notes can be brought back down perhaps to a comfortable mezzo-forte, giving the musical line some texture and headroom without losing the excitement of the louder dynamic.
Creating lightness in music means giving some notes some gravity, so the others can float weightlessly.
Carl Seashore, in his In Search of Beauty in Music, defines “good” vibrato as “a pulsation of pitch usually accompanied by synchronous pulsations of loudness and timbre, of such extent and rate as to give a pleasing flexibility, tenderness, and richness to the tone.”
Debate over saxophone vibrato
Saxophone vibrato is a controversial topic for several reasons. In fact, some have questioned whether vibrato should be used at all. Paul Berler, in a 1996 Saxophone Journal article, notes that wind instrumentalists have only made serious study of vibrato in the last century. Robert Luckey points out in a 1983 article in Woodwind, Brass, & Percussion that “prominent saxophone teachers have equated their instrument with the human voice,” and that, since vibrato is accepted as a natural embellishment of the human voice, it should be accepted as a natural part of the saxophone tone. Read More “Saxophone vibrato”
Here is the handout from today’s presentation at the Mid-South Flute Festival at the University of Memphis campus. The audience was small but enthusiastic, asked good questions, and some of them stayed extra long to try out some instruments from my collection.
There’s a common misconception about woodwind articulation, that notes somehow “start” with the tongue. So, how do you start notes with your tongue? Does your tongue somehow strike the reed, making it vibrate? Try it, I’ll wait.
Hit that reed with your tongue as hard as you like, but I suspect nothing will happen until you add air. The truth of the matter is that air starts the vibration—the tongue actually stops it.
So why use the tongue at the beginning of a note—why not just start the air? Try it as an experiment. Starting from zero air pressure, very gradually add air. You will probably hear air noise first, and then tone. Can you predict precisely when the tone will kick in? Using the tongue allows the note to be “released” after sufficient air pressure is in place, avoiding the airy and unpredictable note beginning.
Thinking in terms of the tongue releasing the note rather than kickstarting it leads to more efficient, controlled, and subtle articulation.
David Erato, a Wisconsin-based woodwind doubler and teacher, describes the motivation behind his year-long “journey” to improve his clarinet chops:
The idea as a “doubler” is to make whatever instrument is in your hand not feel like a foreign object. One should really study the instrument as if it is the only instrument you play. Practice the same method books, etudes, solos, as a clarinetist in a symphony once did.
David devised a plan to work his way through a book of technical etudes, and carried it out. His plan was based on the a similar system he had used as a university saxophone student. The result?
I can say after all of that, I really do feel like I’ve taken my technique game up several notches on clarinet. It may be hard to believe, but about half way through the book I felt more connected to the instrument. Even though I was in more difficult keys, larger interval jumps became easier than when I started. By the end of it, I didn’t have to think much about playing 4ths in the key of D# harmonic minor.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. There’s one key point from David’s story that I’ve discussed here before, but which is worth restating: as a woodwind doubler, you have to be a beginner on each instrument. David had already completed a technique-building regimen on the saxophone, prescribed by a good saxophone teacher, but hadn’t done so yet on the clarinet. Many of us make the mistake of thinking that such things transfer automatically. They don’t!
I know that many of my readers are college students and/or educators, and may have some discretionary time coming up when the spring semester ends. What fundamental techniques can you spend the summer shoring up?
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In a recent recital I performed my own arrangement of Ravel’s Boléro for multiple woodwinds soloist using electronics, with piano and snare drum. I used electronics to try to approximate some of Ravel’s harmonies (and timbres), and used what in my mind are three different techniques, which I’ll try to outline here.
In performance, I used the BOSS GT-1000CORE guitar multi-effects unit to do most of the heavy lifting. I did find that it had difficulty tracking my flute playing (though, surprisingly, it did better with piccolo), so I used an Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork + to assist with that instrument in particular. I also used a BOSS SY-200 to try to create some non-woodwind tone colors. There are plenty of other equipment options that can achieve similar effects, but you’re on your own to read the manuals.
All of this was done with a microphone rather than pickups, which was less complicated for quick instrument switches, but did make it difficult to get relatively isolated woodwind sounds into the electronics, which ultimately caused problems with the audibility of some of the electronic sounds.
At rehearsal mark 8 in the score, horn and celeste play the A theme in octaves, with two piccolos playing in parallel a perfect fifth and a major tenth above the celeste’s highest octave, perhaps in imitation of a pipe organ’s mixture stop.
To achieve this harmony with electronics, I played the upper piccolo part “live,” and routed the piccolo’s sound into the GT-1000CORE where I split it into two separate signal paths. One got transposed down using a digital pitch shifter to create the second piccolo part. The other got transposed down to the melody pitch and split into octaves, then routed through the SY-200 to turn the sound into something vaguely celeste-like.
Since the intervals are strictly parallel, this is a pretty straightforward use of pitch shifting: whatever note I play on the piccolo gets transposed to the specified intervals.
Technique 2: smart harmonization
At rehearsal mark 16, a thickly-orchestrated ensemble of woodwinds, brass, and strings plays the A theme in harmony. I opted to play this portion on soprano saxophone, thickened and harmonized with a synthesized string section.
Since the harmony in this section is largely diatonic, I used the GT-1000CORE’s smart harmonizer. I added voices a diatonic fourth and diatonic sixth below in the key of G (like a first-inversion triad), which tracks with the notes in the first part of the theme. But there’s a moment in the first part that uses F-natural instead of F-sharp, and the second part of the melody uses F-naturals exclusively, so I used the unit’s footswitches to change to the key of C major as needed. I routed all of this through the SY-200 to change the three soprano saxophones into a string section sound, with the “live” soprano remaining audible in the room.
For the key switching, I set one footswitch as a “momentary” switch, so it changes the key just while I’m pressing it, and another as a “toggle” switch, so I can press and release it and the key remains changed. This gives me some helpful options for live performance.
Technique 3: smart harmonization with custom scales
The smart harmonizer works well out of the box as long as you want to use notes of a major scale (or mode thereof), but at rehearsal mark 15 Ravel’s harmonization is more complicated than that. Luckily, the GT-1000CORE supports smart harmonization with custom “scales.” What this really means is that I can tell the unit that any time I play a certain pitch, it should add one or more pitches that I can specify arbitrarily. I can add whatever pitches I like to each note of the chromatic scale.
I chose to play this section on clarinet, using the electronics to turn it into a 3-part clarinet section. During the first phrase, the melody pitches are harmonized in a consistent way: every time there’s a melody concert B-flat it’s harmonized with a G and an E, every time there’s a melody C it’s harmonized with an A and an F, every time there’s a melody E it’s harmonized with a C and a G, and so forth. I can just tell the effects unit which harmony notes to add to each melody note.
But things change in the first half of the second phrase: melody B-flat is now harmonized with G and D, and C is now harmonized with A and E. To accommodate this I have to create a second custom “scale,” and use a footswitch to activate it at the right time. To finish the second phrase requires a third scale, engaged with another footswitch.
Because of the flexibility of the custom scale system, I can recreate harmonies that use a variety of intervals. With a little analysis I can figure out where the scale changes need to be (basically anywhere a given melody pitch is harmonized in a new way).
Additional thoughts
There are some limitations to using pitch shifters and harmonizers, depending on your equipment. Each virtual pitch shifter and harmonizer in the GT-1000CORE can only add two voices, though by (virtually) splitting the audio signal into multiple paths and passing each through its own shifter/harmonizer I can build thicker chords.
When trying to reproduce specific harmonies written by a composer, there may be some decisions to make to balance accuracy with practicality. Serendipitously, most of Ravel’s harmony translated fairly easily to the effects unit’s capabilities. But there were a few spots where I decided that certain chord voicings were close enough, and that I didn’t need to complicate things with one more custom scale plus the corresponding onstage footwork.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m more interested in electronic effects that give my woodwinds new capabilities, like polyphony, than in just adding some distortion or echo (though those are also fun). Enjoy!
I mentioned in a recent post that I am trying to get away from using the term “ethnic” woodwinds, one that I have used frequently in the past as a catch-all for the instruments I play that aren’t modern Western flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, or saxophones. The term was problematic from the beginning, since, for example, I was using it to include instruments like recorders, which fall squarely under the umbrella of Western music traditions, but are arguably period or historical instruments.
Additionally, I find that the term “ethnic” increasingly grates on my ear as too ethnocentric and limited a view, and incompatible with my real attitudes concerning music from cultures and traditions other than my native ones. For example, it’s clearly not politically correct to lump non-white people or non-Americans together under the label “ethnic,” so it doesn’t seem to make sense for me to use similarly divisive and condescending language to refer to musical traditions, either.
I currently favor the term “major modern woodwinds” as an acceptable (though flawed) shorthand for all the Western orchestral woodwinds plus saxophones. But there isn’t a really accurate and culturally-sensitive way to lump together the woodwinds that don’t fall into that category. I frequently need to express verbally or in writing what instruments I play. If I am speaking to someone musically savvy, I can say that I play “woodwinds” and they will assume that I play most or all of the major modern woodwinds. They are unlikely to just assume, though, that I can also play recorders and dizi and Lakota flutes and a bunch of others, and that might be information that I want them to have.
Recently I expressed this concern on social media, and got a few interesting suggestions. “World” woodwinds came up, and is what I have adopted for now on this website, though I think ultimately it has some of the same issues as “ethnic:” aren’t my clarinets “world” instruments (and, for that matter, don’t they have ethnicity, too)? Someone else suggested “woodwinds of various cultural origins,” which I think is pretty good but too wordy to be practical. Someone else suggested that I simply list the instruments individually rather than trying to affix a single label; I think this idea has clear merit in terms of cultural sensitivity, but it does fail the practicality test.
It’s tempting to consider something clever like Pedro Eustache’s term “multidirectional flute soloist,” but, though charming, it doesn’t communicate the concept with any clarity. I have also experimented with materials-based terminology as in “wooden and bamboo flutes,” but this isn’t inclusive enough and ultimately has the same problem as the word “woodwinds” itself—wood construction isn’t what makes a woodwind a woodwind.
So for now it’s “world” woodwinds, or perhaps “woodwinds of various cultural origins” when that kind of wordiness is practicable. I welcome additional suggestions in the comments section.
