illuminated stage of an empty theater

Five little things that will make a difference in your next performance, audition, or competition

ByBret Pimentel

When I listen to young and advancing woodwind players at the high school level (masterclass participants, scholarship or honor band auditionees, competition participants), I often think that there are some small fixes that would make a big difference in their success. There’s no substitute for lessons with a qualified teacher, but these improvements are easy and set you apart from the rest:

  • Slow down a little. Speed is only impressive if your playing is clean, even, and precise. If taking a slightly slower tempo gives you better accuracy and control, do it.
  • Breathe intentionally. Where you breathe in the music makes a huge difference in your phrasing. Never just play until you run out of air. Find places to breathe that sound natural. If you’re not sure, listen to a recording of a good player and copy their breaths, or record yourself and notice what sounds right or wrong. Mark the breaths in (all of them!) and practice them carefully until they are a habit.
  • Do bigger dynamics. Even if you think you are already following the dynamic markings, make your softs softer and your louds louder.
  • Choose reeds wisely. I hear lots of ambitious young players using reeds that are much too hard. If a little softer reed allows you to play with ease and comfort, you will probably sound better. And a performance isn’t the time to use a brand-new one, or one that is past its prime. A week or two ahead, break in some new reeds and pick the best 2-3 to have on hand.
  • Relax. Tension is the biggest thing that tanks even well-prepared performances. Practice releasing the tension in your body. As you feel tension creep back in, release it again. Take advantage of rests or other pauses in the music to release once more. Try a pre-performance ritual like box breathing to reduce your adrenaline response, focus and calm your mind, and steady your hands.

Sometimes the smallest adjustments make the biggest difference. If you are an advancing player, which of these do you think would help you the most? If you’re a teacher, what small fixes do you recommend most?

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    This is a bit of one of the excerpts that I provided for my saxophone students to play at their beginning-of-the-semester band auditions.

    "Excerpt

    I heard some very fine playing during the auditions, but many of the students were fooled by the “senza vib.,” with some going so far as to use fairly extreme vibrato at the beginning of the note.

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  • Jazz education and the “ya gotta listen” cop-out

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    It’s an article of faith among jazz musicians and educators that listening to jazz is crucial to learning to play jazz. This seems obviously true to me about jazz and about any style of music.

    (Doubtless one of the reasons the jazz-initiated like to bang this drum, so to speak, is because most of Western music education is so notation-focused. The “classical” tradition has developed hand-in-hand with a notation system that does a pretty good—not perfect—job of breaking down classical music sounds into visual symbols. That system, unsurprisingly, works less well for non-classical styles like jazz. But jazz music is still often expressed in classical-type notation, with some kind of caveat, explicit or otherwise, that the player must apply some significant additional stylistic know-how that will override the usual meanings of some of the notation.)

    But one thing classical music educators have done in their few hundred extra years is codify and explain many (not all, and not all well, and not all in agreement) of their stylistic and interpretive ideas. In jazz education, too often important details get waved away with a “ya gotta listen.”

    “Ya gotta listen” to classical music to play it well, too. But there’s also more clear, thoughtful pedagogy available to help you know what to listen for, and how to apply it.

    If you are a jazz educator and find yourself dodging questions or glossing over concepts with a “ya gotta listen,” can you add something to the picture? Try saying instead, “Ya gotta listen to how Cannonball Adderley ‘lays back’ in this particular phrase. He plays some notes later than expected in a way that sounds good. Listen a few times to see which notes, and how late.” Or: “Ya gotta listen to how Freddie Hubbard plays ‘outside’ over this turnaround. Can you figure out which scale he is drawing from? Where exactly does he resolve back to playing ‘inside?'”

    How long would it realistically take for an unguided young musician to listen to jazz until they had fully absorbed the nuances? I used to feel pretty overwhelmed and hopeless when teachers three times my age with thousands of well-worn records told me I wouldn’t sound better until I had really listened. Luckily I had others who were willing and able to accelerate and focus my learning by giving some direction and context to my listening.

    If you find that you have difficulty explaining some of the things you want your students to listen for, there are resources available to help you and them boil things down to understandable concepts. For improvisational theory, you might try free YouTube videos (or additional paid content) from teacher/players like Chad Lefkowitz-Brown or Aimee Nolte. For style, consider books like those by Caleb Chapman and Jeff Coffin or Ray Smith.

    And yes, ya gotta listen.

  • Woodwind dynamics and the embouchure

    ByBret Pimentel

    There’s a lot of confusion about how different dynamic levels are produced on woodwind instruments. How do you think it’s done?

    If you said something like “use more or less air,” you are on the right track, kind of. But how do you put more or less air into the instrument?

    If you said something like “blow harder or softer,” you are asking for trouble. Adjusting volume by increasing and decreasing breath support causes all kinds of nasty problems, especially sluggish response, unfocused tone, and saggy pitch at softer dynamic levels.

    dynamics

    So what method is left to adjust the volume of air entering the instrument, and the corresponding loudness or softness (weirdly, also called “volume”)? Surprise, it’s your embouchure. Take a look in the mirror at your flute aperture, or look at the opening in your oboe or bassoon reed, or the opening between the tip of your clarinet or saxophone reed and the tip of the mouthpiece. By manipulating the size of this opening, you can control the volume of air passing into the instrument, while keeping your breath support powerful and steady.

    The opening isn’t large to begin with, so bear in mind that the adjustments needed are incredibly small. But your lip muscles are well-suited to very small, subtle, expressive movements—certainly more so than your larger breath support muscles.

    If you are an advanced player, you are probably doing this already, maybe without realizing it. But if you are struggling with dynamics-related problems, like unstable pitch during crescendos and diminuendos, or the inability to maintain tone at pianissimo, you might want to reexamine your technique.

    Try this: play a note in a comfortable range at an easy mezzo-forte, with powerful breath support. Without letting up on the breath support, apply just the slightest squeeze with your embouchure. (For me, the sensation is that my lips don’t really even move, they just firm up a little.) Gradually increase the squeeze—don’t forget to keep the support strong—and see what happens.

    Try it again, this time starting with the lips squeezing, and see what happens as you allow the embouchure to become more and more relaxed. This maxes out when the reed is almost completely free to vibrate at its widest amplitude, or when the flute aperture gets too large to maintain focus in the tone. (At this point you may be able to get more volume by straining harder with your breath support muscles, but notice what happens to your pitch and/or tone!)

    Like so much of woodwind playing, the real key here is breath support. If you remember to keep it steady, then creating dynamic changes from the embouchure is really quite intuitive and produces much better results.

    Incidentally, this is why recorders, pennywhistles, and other “fipple” flutes really have only one dynamic level; the opening can’t be manipulated effectively because it is rigid. Blowing harder or softer does change the volume but at unacceptable cost to intonation. (This is probably a major reason the transverse flute essentially replaced the recorder in Western music—it could play with dynamic contrast.)

  • Sorry, but you still can’t bring your reed knives on US flights

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    There has been some buzz (no pun intended) among US reed players about an announcement from the infamous Transportation Security Administration that some knives will be allowed in carry-on luggage starting next month. But make no mistake—your reed knife will still need to go in your checked bag or it will be confiscated at a security checkpoint.

    There are a couple of catches to the some-knives-allowed rule that will eliminate virtually all common reed knives. One is that carry-on knives must be folding knives, with blades that do not lock into position. While there are some reed knives in common use that meet this qualification, the other catch is even more significant: the blade must be no longer than 2.36 inches (6 cm) and no wider than ½ inch (2.27 cm). Most reed knives fall somewhere in the 3–4 inch length range, and some push the width limit, too. (If you’re using a good-quality reed knife with a folding, non-locking blade that is small enough to qualify, I’m curious to hear about it).

    The newly-permitted knives seem essentially to be limited to those small keychain-type Swiss Army knives.

    Additionally, the TSA reserves the right to make judgment calls:

    The final decision rests with TSA on whether to allow any items through security checkpoints.

    Nope. Photo, APMus
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    Check out these resources for more information:

     Keep those valuable and razor-sharp reed knives in your checked bags.

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    Here’s a photo that doesn’t meet those criteria—the darkest and lightest parts of the photo are both sort of medium-grayish.

    blah

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    Q&A: The big picture

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    Here are some of the questions readers sent me in celebration of this blog’s 10-year anniversary. I have edited, combined, and otherwise adapted some of them but hopefully there are answers here for those of you who were kind enough to inquire.

    Why does music move humanity so profoundly?

    My personal belief is that music is divine in origin, and that there is something inherent to humankind that responds to music. Since I believe that everyone is a child of God, I suppose the love of music is a divinely-inherited trait. Leaders in my faith have said, for example, that “Music is given of God to further his purposes,” and observed “Music is truly the universal language, and when it is excellently expressed how deeply it moves our souls.”

    If that’s not your style, you may prefer Darwin’s speculation that the earliest attempts at human language were more like musical gestures than like words. An ability to relate to these sounds is at the foundation of language in the more modern sense, and thus underlies virtually all human experience and culture.

    In any case, even as a faith-plus-science kind of guy, I’m definitely out of my depth here, so feel free to share your theories in the comments.

    Are applied music studios in higher education sustainable considering the supply of music graduates exceeds available employment?

    There are issues here for sure. I can only vouch for my own approach:

    Most of my university students are music education majors, and where I live this does seem to be sustainable. My graduates for the most part are able to land and keep jobs doing what they are trained for: directing middle school and high school bands.

    Many of my students at some point inquire about the degree in performance. If they are interested in that route and have the skill to pursue it, we have a long talk about the career path of a performance major. Essentially, a bachelors degree in performance qualifies you for one thing, entry into an masters program. The masters qualifies you for a doctoral program, and that qualifies you to teach in higher education and perpetuate the cycle. We talk seriously about the prospects for employment in higher ed (slim).

    On the other hand, a college or university education isn’t a trade school certificate—it is meant to produce a well-rounded citizen of the world, with literacy in key fields of human thought and skills in areas like communication and critical thinking. If a prospective student wishes to study the art of musical performance for reasons that are not necessarily 100% practical, then I would like to see that opportunity available to them. Schools and students should be clear with each other about their goals, so there isn’t any confusion about, for example, guarantees of employment.

    Some of my students have leveraged some of the more general skills developed in their musical education to pursue careers in other fields, which I find to be a perfectly good outcome. There is also at least some anecdotal evidence that college music majors are welcomed by challenging, high-status programs like law and medical schools.

    When will woodwind makers deplete resources of grenadilla/mpingo wood?

    I don’t know the answer. My understanding is that these woods are not in danger of extinction, exactly. But the culling of the tallest, straightest specimens for products like oboes and clarinets has potential to cause an evolutionary bottleneck, since only trees that are unsuitable for instruments (because they are curvy, for example) are left alone to reproduce.

    I think that the inevitable conclusion to this is alternative materials for instruments. This will be a tough sell for some musicians, but will ultimately be for the better. If modern science can develop amazing new materials for everything from mobile phone technology to medicine to space travel, why not for music? I’m confident that the “wood”-wind instruments will continue to exist in materials that are more sustainable, stable, affordable, crack-free, ergonomic, and beautiful-sounding.

    Why does the principal oboist tune the orchestra?

    Tradition. We have methods of providing a reference pitch that are far more accurate and reliable than even the best oboist. But the ritual is a comfortable one.

    There are lots of additional theories. I’ve written previously about why a bunch of these don’t make sense, and that post continues to draw comments largely based on questionable understanding of “overtones.”

    Thanks for your questions! These are some tough ones.

    More 10-year anniversary Q&A

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