Teaching a beginning or intermediate clarinet section? Here are some things to consider:
As a follow-up to my previous post on the role of the tongue in articulation, I would like to address the problem of accents.
When I hear my students playing heavy, thumpy accents, I ask them how they are playing the accents. The answer is usually the same: “tongue harder?”
But when the tongue is properly understood to release the reed (or release the airstream on the flute), the idea of tonguing harder doesn’t make much sense. (How do you release harder?) Unfortunately, for many developing woodwind players, it translates to a larger area of contact between the tongue and the reed, causing unwanted percussive sounds.
Accents are better understood as what they appear to be on the page: small decrescendos. An accent is a note shape: louder at the beginning, softer at the end. It is produced by the mechanisms of volume/dynamics, not the tongue. Often, but not always, the note starts louder than the baseline dynamic level and decrescendos back to it.
As with most aspects of musical interpretation, this leaves a great deal of room for variation; accents can have many characters and shades. But none of those should include thuds or thumps (unless, I suppose, called for by the composer). Practice beautiful and stylish accents by slowing down the music enough to give each accented note a graceful decrescendo.
When you’re working on a new piece and there’s no place to breathe:
Tone exercises are useful, sort of. Read last month’s post about tone for a reminder why tone exercises are only part of the process.
Here is what tone exercises do:
Seek out high-quality tone exercises and do them regularly, but don’t forget to listen.
I recently asked one of my (woodwind) students why she thinks I make her practice scales. She didn’t have a ready answer, and I realized maybe I hadn’t been clear about the value of scales. Here are some reasons to practice scales (and arpeggios, and other methodical technical materials):
Practice scales every day!
I remember as a young college student attending a masterclass by a world-class musician. He was scornful of students spending a lot of time in practice rooms playing scales. He urged us instead to get outside and watch a sunset, and then “play the sunset.”
Advice like that has its place. But I was doing exactly as my teacher assigned: spending a lot of time in practice rooms playing scales. My teacher assigned that because it was what I needed at that stage in my development. I wouldn’t have had much success trying to “play the sunset” because I hadn’t yet learned the technique I needed.
I have my university woodwind methods students do an assignment evaluating pedagogical articles. They use a few criteria, including appropriateness for teaching beginners. The articles’ authors don’t always make that clear. In fact, I suspect many of the authors would resist the idea that their advice is level-specific. “Oh, no, my ideas apply to all students.”
I understand the appeal of that viewpoint, that good woodwind pedagogy is made of unassailable truths. But here’s a counterexample. With beginner and intermediate students, I teach that voicing is stable; you learn the “correct” voicing and then stick with it. But with more advanced students I teach that voicing is a tool to adjust tuning, response, and tone. Their technique, ear for pitch, and expressive requirements have reached a higher level, and they are ready. (I’ve addressed this two-phase approach to voicing previously.)
Masterclasses like the one I attended are often taught by very high-level performers. Their own teaching studios are filled with advanced, high-achieving graduate students. With those students, it may be productive to discuss heady philosophical or creative ideas. But the less-elite students really do need to hit a practice room and learn their scales. For them, high-level advice is pointless, frustrating, and condescending.
Consider carefully the needs of those you teach. When necessary, be clear that your teaching may be geared toward students at a particular level.
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?
Practice smart, and keep at it.
