Here are handouts from the lecture I gave at the 2010 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance. The lecture was entitled, “Woodwind Doubling for the 21st-century Saxophonist: Increasing Versatility without Sacrificing Virtuosity.”
This year was my first time attending the National Flute Association‘s annual convention, held this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I’ve been to conferences of all the other major woodwind organizations in the US (IDRS, ICA, NASA), and here are some things that I think the NFA did exceptionally well:
Like the other major woodwind conferences, the NFA’s is packed with so many events that it’s impossible to get to everything you want to attend. Here are a few personal favorites among the things I saw and heard (in no particular order): Read More “Report: National Flute Association Convention 2011”
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For a “modern” woodwind player, recorders might show up in “period” classical music performance or in commercial situations like musical theater or studio gigs. They might be used in commercial settings to evoke Renaissance or Baroque periods, to function generically as “world” or folk flutes with robust chromatic capabilities, or (maybe due to their association with elementary school classroom music) to suggest themes of childhood or naivete.
The use of recorders in classroom settings is an odd one, as something like a pennywhistle has a similar just-blow “fipple” (duct) mouthpiece and a much simpler fingering scheme. The effort required to play recorders fluently and convincingly shouldn’t be underestimated.
Here are some important things to know:
There are many Native American flute traditions, but the one commonly called the “Native American flute” today is the endblown Lakota-style flute, native to the Dakotas.
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.
Mid- to late-20th-century music written for woodwind doublers, such as musical theater “books,” largely solidified around three main types of doubling specialists. The most common of these is the clarinet/saxophone/flute player. Less common but still widely used are the oboist with passable single reed skills, and the “low reeds” bassoon/bass clarinet/baritone saxophone player.
In the 21st century, “doubler” woodwind sections have shown a tendency to shrink in number of players while growing in number of instruments. That means that some new combinations of instrument are becoming common that weren’t before: for example, it would have been very unusual in the late 20th century to write both flute and oboe into the same book, but this is becoming much more commonplace.
My sense is that woodwind doublers today are more willing/likely to embrace double reed playing, despite those instruments’ reputation (deserved or not) for being more difficult and their reputation (deserved) for being more expensive. But there seems to be some emerging conventional “wisdom” that oboe or bassoon is the way to go, and that playing both is inadvisable. I have to disagree.
It seems unlikely to me that the trend of shrinking woodwind sections, with increasing demands on individual players, is going to reverse. I predict that within a decade or two we’ll see movement in major Broadway productions toward doublers playing oboe and bassoon in the same book.
There’s another wrinkle to this: not all doublers are making their living in top-tier performance situations. It’s quite common for a small- to medium-sized university, or a large high school to hire one person to teach “double reeds.” Nearly always, this means hiring someone who is well-qualified on oboe or bassoon and relatively clueless on the other. I think oboists or bassoonists headed for doctoral degrees and university teaching would be well-advised to consider getting a minor, or at least some lessons, in the other double reed. (There may even be room for someone to develop a graduate program in “double reeds,” or perhaps at least the ability to tailor an existing multiple woodwinds degree to accommodate this.)
Woodwind doublers already understand the benefits of being able to get the doubling gig, but also to get a broader array of single-instrument gigs. If you have the motivation to pursue both oboe and bassoon, I think you will find—as I have—more opportunities to make music.
As a follow-up to last month’s post on playing in tune, I would like to revisit the idea of adjusting woodwind tuning mechanisms (generally by the “pushing in” or “pulling out” of some joint of the instrument). Note that this information is probably of most value to advanced players; beginning and intermediate players should be focusing their intonation efforts on breath support and voicing.
A simplistic view of “tuning” is that “pulling out” makes the instrument play a little flatter and “pushing in” makes it play a little sharper. The problem is that not all notes are affected equally.
For example, let’s keep the math simple and imagine an instrument that is 100cm long with its tuning mechanism pushed all the way in. And let’s imagine that instrument has a tonehole that can be opened to give the tube an effective length of 50cm.
Now suppose that you pull the tuning mechanism out by 1cm. The lengths of the tube for the notes are now 101cm and 51cm.
They have changed by the same absolute length, but not by the same percentage. The shorter-tube notes (those with more open toneholes) are more dramatically affected by changes in the tuning mechanism than the long-tube notes are.
This is a problem without a tidy solution. A high-quality instrument is built to play at a specific pitch standard (A=440, A=442, etc.) with the tuning mechanism adjusted to a precise location and at a specific temperature. The “easiest” way to play in tune is to own an instrument built to your preferred pitch standard (such as the one your ensemble tunes to), play only in spaces having a suitable temperature, and adjust the tuning mechanism to that precise spot every time. In reality, of course, we need the flexibility of a moveable tuning mechanism to adapt to a variety of circumstances, but we have to be aware of the consequences of pushing in and pulling out.
An additional wrinkle, so to speak, is that adjusting tuning mechanisms can introduce perturbations to the instrument’s bore. Skilled instrument makers can purposefully create perturbations to improve an instrument’s intonation, but undesirable perturbations can have non-intuitive effects on the instrument’s scale.
Here’s what I mean by the tuning mechanism creating a perturbation. Notice how when the tuning mechanism is pushed in the bore is a consistent width, but when the tuning mechanism is pulled out, there is a wider spot in the bore:
This is one of the benefits of tuning a clarinet or bassoon flatter by switching to a longer barrel or bocal: you get the additional length you need without creating a bore perturbation (though remember, notes are still affected unequally). A workaround for clarinetists is to use tuning rings, preferably matched to the instrument’s bore size at that joint, to fill in the perturbation.
Most of getting tuned up has to do with obtaining a high-quality instrument and playing it with high-quality basic technique (good breath support, voicing, and embouchure). That last little bit of improvement is complex and elusive, and understanding some of the reasons for that can help you get there.
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Hi there – both links are dead
Fixed. Thanks!