As I send my students off to their summer plans, I know many of them are asking themselves the same question I used to ask: Do I have to practice?
Your teacher might give you a summer assignment. I feel like I really can’t give my students official, enforceable assignments when they aren’t enrolled in my courses. I could possibly guilt them into summer practicing. Or I could threaten them with high fall-semester expectations.
On the other hand, some of my students need full-time summer jobs so they can afford to continue their education in the fall. Some have responsibilities to their families. Some may genuinely need a little downtime for their mental health. (Any mental health concerns should be discussed with a qualified professional.)
So, do you have to practice over the summer? I guess the answer is no for my students, since they won’t get grades, and since I prefer not to teach by guilt or threats. But it probably isn’t the right question. I think the questions to ask are:
What kind of student and musician do I want to be? If you’re planning on a career in music, or otherwise have your sights set on being the best musician you can be, then maybe you already know how you should spend your “vacation.”
What’s possible in my circumstances? You should move toward your goals each day if you can. But if bill-paying or illness or family life or other high-priority obligations get in the way, that’s not a personal failure. It’s life. It’s not a reason to feel guilty or incapable.
Ask yourself what kind of student and musician you want to be, balance that against what your circumstances will permit, and make your best use of your summer months.
The tip he shares is similar to something I do during final performance preparations: I jot two or three key reminders on a sticky note (“Take your time and breathe,” “Keep fingers relaxed,” etc.) and stick them at the top of the page, covering the first few notes. That way when I get on stage I can make myself remember and focus on those few key items, rather than stressing myself over all of the details, and I give myself an extra moment to think and relax while I move the sticky note out of the way.
I wanted to share an additional idea that I have used many times myself, and have had students use. I find it good for dealing with the really stubborn, ingrained habits: poor posture, excess tension, ignoring dynamic markings, using insufficient breath support, being inconsistent about vibrato (anything ringing a bell yet?), and so forth. These are the things that you can fix immediately, as long as you remember, but which somehow persist anyway. Have you had this experience, either as the student or as the teacher?:
Teacher: Play it again from measure 12, this time with better posture.
Student: [Corrects posture, begins to play, then slouches again.]
Teacher: Remember posture!
Student: [Corrects posture, continues playing, then slouches.]
Teacher:Posture! [Glances at clock.]
Something that has worked well for me when I find myself in this situation is to use a repeating timer. This can be a gadget, or, increasingly commonly, a smartphone app, that just beeps at you every few minutes. (I’ve been using Elapsed for iPhone [update: link dead], which is free and supports multiple simultaneous timers, but there are many, many options available.) At first I might set a timer as short as 30 seconds, and choose a single habit to focus on. Depending on the habit, I might stop playing to readjust what I’m doing each time the timer beeps, or I might readjust on the fly and continue. When I’m consistently making it through 30-second intervals without having to fix something on each beep, I can adjust the timer for longer intervals.
It’s surprising how easy it is to let my mind wander—even within a minute or less—and go into auto-pilot mode, losing track of what I’m trying to accomplish and further calcifying bad habits. The timer technique is a nice aid for me to keep myself focused on a specific improvement I want to make in my playing.
It’s scholarship audition season again, which means I get to meet and listen to some very nervous high school seniors (and community college sophomores).
My university is a small regional one, so our audition process probably isn’t as intense as some of the big name-brand music schools. If you’re preparing for an audition, you should definitely check in with that school to see what they expect, but here’s what I usually hear auditionees play, and what I’m thinking while I listen. Read More “What I listen for in scholarship auditions”
I have a recurring teaching challenge with my saxophone students who are tackling the altissimo register for the first time. They play a passage, and when they get to the altissimo note, if it doesn’t respond perfectly, they immediately stop playing. When I ask why, they look puzzled. “The note didn’t come out.”
“Well, what did come out?” I might ask.
More puzzlement. Sometimes I have to prompt them to play it again, and remind them to play it long enough to really hear it.
“A weird honk,” they might finally conclude. Or “a terrible squeak.”
“That’s a note,” I point out. It might be too low (honk) or too high (squeak). But it has a pitch, right? It isn’t the note we wanted, but it was something. And understanding what something it is helps us know what to try next. If it was a honk, the instrument responded at a too-low partial, and if it was a squeak, it responded at a too-high partial. There’s work to do to fix it, but we’re much farther along than we were the diagnosis was only as specific as “failure.”
This approach is helpful with a variety of woodwind-playing problems. Don’t bail and declare failure at the first appearance of a problem. Try leaning into it. What does the problem really sound like? Can you make the problem happen again, on purpose? If you change something about your approach, does the sound change (even if it just changes to a different problem)? All of this information is potentially useful in finding a reliable, repeatable solution.
Additionally, this approach encourages an attitude of curiosity and exploration, rather than self-judgment. That’s a much more fun and productive way to practice. It lets you finish your practice session eager to try again tomorrow, rather than dreading more failure.
Run toward your problem spots, not away from them, and see what they can teach you.
If you are preparing to start a college music degree, you may need or want a new instrument. I strongly suggest that you contact your professor before making this purchase. Every professor is of course different, but here are some things that you are likely to discover in most cases:
The professor will be happy and relieved that you are seeking their advice before making a purchase, and will be anxious to work with you on finding the right instrument. They have seen previous tragedies involving students arriving on campus with new, expensive, and totally unsuitable instruments.
The professor will likely encourage you to start the semester with your current instrument, even if it’s not really college-worthy, so that you can take the necessary time to pick out a new instrument together. The professor will in many cases want to try out instruments with you to help you pick out the very best one.
The professor in many or most cases will have a variety of suitable makes and models in mind, including some (relatively) budget-friendly options. They are likely to have a favorite—probably the model they play on themselves—but will likely concede that the same instrument is not suitable for every single musician. Still, some may require a specific model.
Serious college study will require a professional-grade instrument. If you are window-shopping at a music store or online retailer, you can likely assume that anything marked “student” or “intermediate” will not be adequate for the rigors of college study. On the other hand, be aware that not everything labeled “professional” by the seller is high-quality enough for true professional use, even if it’s that maker’s top-of-the-line model. Additionally, instruments that were genuine professional models several decades ago might not be considered such anymore.
You may need to prepare yourself for some sticker shock. Depending on your personal financial values, it may be appropriate to use student loan funds to cover this educational expense.
The professor’s opinions may not jive with your opinions, the opinions of your old private teacher or band director, or opinions you read on the internet. Be prepared to learn your professor’s way for now, and make better-informed decisions on your own after graduation.
The same advice holds true for mouthpieces and other paraphernalia. Have a great semester!
Some of the questions I am asked most frequently about woodwind doubling are about how I practice. Specifically, how often do I get to each instrument, and how do I divide up my time?
The truth is that there isn’t an ideal solution, and maybe not even a good one. There are only so many hours in the day. The best, say, clarinet players are spending a good number of those practicing the clarinet. If I practice the same number of hours, but I’m dividing that time among multiple instruments, then I’m likely to feel a bit behind. This is the big obstacle to fine woodwind doubling: practice hours are hopelessly divided.
Sure, there are ways of improving your practicing efficiency, but the best single-instrumentalists are using those same approaches. And any cross-training effect is minimal at best for players who are beyond the beginner level. If you want to sound like a serious player on your secondary instruments, you have to put in the hours on those instruments.
Realistically, an embarrassing amount of my practicing is triage: which instrument needs to sound passable to get through the next performance? But when I have the luxury, I like to organize a little better.
For me it generally isn’t useful to squeeze too many instruments into one day, since the time allotted to each instrument gets too short to be productive. So, if I am trying to practice five instruments about equally and can find about three hours per day to practice, I might decide to practice three instruments per day, for an hour each. But if I rotate through the instruments too fast, different ones each day, I’m not able to reinforce my improvements enough to make them permanent. So I usually settle into something like this:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
flute
oboe
clarinet
oboe
clarinet
bassoon
clarinet
bassoon
saxophone
bassoon
saxophone
flute
saxophone
flute
oboe
start again…
In that example, I practice each instrument three days in a row, then neglect it for two. That balance, for me, seems to be a reasonable compromise. If I want to rotate but I feel like a certain instrument needs extra attention, I might assign it two blocks of time on the days it appears in the rotation, and adjust the other instruments around it.
When organizing your own practice time, you should be asking yourself some questions about your own priorities: How many instruments are you practicing? Are you trying to bring them to a uniform level of proficiency, or do you have primary and secondary instruments? Do have instruments that are “behind” and need extra time for catching up? Does it make sense for you to devote separate blocks of time to (for example) flute and piccolo, or will you fit them within a single block?
At the small, regional university where I teach, it is common for incoming instrumentalist music majors’ entire previous musical experience to be limited to junior high and high school band. Few have had private instruction prior to entering college. (Although this has obvious disadvantages, I’m not complaining: our program isn’t trying to position itself as a highly-selective conservatory, and our new students generally arrive eager to learn.)
One thing that seems to surprise some prospective students is that we have different views about what I consider “auxiliary” instruments. For example, it’s common for prospects to identify themselves as bass clarinetists, or as tenor saxophonists. Some of these students have never even attempted to play a B-flat clarinet or an alto saxophone, and sometimes show little interest in doing so. They started on bass clarinet or tenor or baritone saxophone as beginners in the public school band and haven’t played anything else.
At the university, I don’t have bass clarinet “majors” or tenor saxophone “majors,” but neither do I have majors in B-flat clarinet or in alto saxophone. I do have majors in clarinet or in saxophone—that is to say, majors in the whole clarinet family or the whole saxophone family.
Since most of my students don’t have prior exposure to serious solo pieces and are taking a less-performance-heavy degree path like our major in music education, I like to focus on core repertoire. For clarinetists, that means probably 95% B-flat clarinet repertoire, perhaps with a few pieces for A clarinet done on a borrowed school instrument or played in a transposed arrangement. The idea of a “primary” member of the saxophone family is a little sketchier, even for classical study, but certainly a large majority of the central repertoire calls for the alto. For a student who has a strong affinity for an auxiliary instrument, I am happy to make sure they get to do a little extra solo repertoire or ensemble participation on that instrument, but at this point it doesn’t make sense to me take them through a four-year degree playing, say, nothing but bass clarinet.
A large fraction of our student population is made up of first-generation college students, and many depend heavily on financial aid and part-time jobs to meet tuition and housing costs, so blithely “requiring” them to buy professional-quality instruments immediately upon matriculation generally isn’t a feasible solution. And I obviously can’t expect high school band directors to steer all their students toward “primary” instruments in the event that they decide to study music in college. Ideally, those students would all be taking lessons while in high school, and those teachers would prep them on what to expect, but that isn’t a reality in this area.
It’s tempting to draw a hard line—nobody blinks when a professor at a top music school insists that his or her students meet specific equipment requirements—but certain of my students genuinely cannot afford to buy another instrument within the timeframe of college acceptance to college graduation. The university serves an almost exclusively regional student population, and is generally more focused on boosting enrolments than on tightening down selectivity.
At this point I don’t have a great solution to this problem. I try to make sure that prospective students understand the situation as early as possible and encourage them to start saving. I tell them that I can work with them now or after they arrive on campus to help them find a good deal on an acceptable instrument. I try to spread the word to high school band directors so that they can start dropping hints to students who seem bound for college-level music study.
I welcome some discussion on this. Am I old-fashioned to expect my saxophone majors to play mostly alto and my clarinet majors to play mostly B-flat, especially if they are headed for public-school band directing instead of performance? How firmly can/should I insist? Are there ways to better serve and accommodate (but also educate and challenge) college music majors who see themselves as “bass clarinetists?”
