• Auxiliary instruments and college study

    ByBret Pimentel

    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.

    photo, Carst van der Molen
    photo, Carst van der Molen

    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?”

  • 12(+) ways to practice a technical passage

    ByBret Pimentel

    A popular article from the Bulletproof Musician blog has been making the rounds on social media again, which, to oversimplify, recommends variety in your practice routine.

    What is crucial is that you are keeping your brain engaged by varying the material.

    One of the suggestions the author (clarinetist Christine Carter) makes is to practice passages “in different rhythmic variations.” She doesn’t go into detail because that isn’t the main thrust of the article, but here are some of my favorite ways of varying rhythms for practice.

    Let’s take this example passage:

    Original excerpt (from Piazzolla Tango Etudes, notation simplified)

    The most obvious and common rhythmic variation for practice is to use uneven rhythms, alternating long and short notes. There are two ways to do it:

    Methods 1-2: Long-short, then short-long

    In all of these examples, note durations aren’t necessarily set in stone—they are just meant to show which are the long notes and which are the short ones. The first example above could alternatively be notated this way:

    Method 1a

    Those examples use groupings of two notes, a long one and a short one. We can extrapolate that to, say, groups of three notes, one long and two short. There are three ways to do that:

    Methods 3-5: Long-short-short, short-long-short, short-short-long

    Another variation would be groupings of four notes, done four different ways:

    practice4
    Methods 6-9

    For additional practice, try groups of five, six, and so on.

    Another extension of this technique is to keep the basic rhythm the same but shift it within the meter:

    Methods 10-12

    Use subtle anchoring to make this especially effective. Again, the possible variations are limited only by your imagination: try playing the passage in triplets instead of sixteenths, and then shift those within the meter.

    I find these techniques to be an excellent way to keep some variety and interest in my practicing even when I’m stuck on a particularly frustrating passage. The Bulletproof Musician article suggests rotating between several passages in order to keep the routine varied, and I agree that is a useful way to practice, but I find that, in moderate doses, playing one passage in many different ways has similar effects.

    Keep your practicing varied and goal-oriented!

  • Favorite blog posts, June 2014

    ByBret Pimentel

  • The problem with “ethnic” woodwinds

    ByBret Pimentel

    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.

    photo, Vernon Hyde
    photo, Vernon Hyde

    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.

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    Dissertation: Woodwind doubling on folk, ethnic, and period instruments in film and theater music

    ByBret Pimentel

    My doctoral dissertation is now available online through the University of Georgia library:

    Woodwind doubling on folk, ethnic, and period instruments in film and theater music: Case studies and a practical manual

    It was completed in 2009 so some things are already out of date. Also, lately I’m trying to steer away from the term “ethnic” instruments (“world” instruments seems slightly less problematic until I can find a better solution).

    Enjoy(?).

    ABSTRACT

    Woodwind doubling is the practice of playing instruments from more than one woodwind family. In musical theater and film music, woodwind doublers are valuable for their ability to produce the sounds of a varied woodwind section for a fraction of the cost of hiring a specialist musician to play each instrument.

    Since the 1990’s, composers and orchestrators in musical theater and film scoring have shown increased interest in instrumental sounds from outside the traditional symphony orchestra. Many have featured folk, ethnic, or period instruments as solo instruments, bringing authentic sounds to scenes set in faraway locations or historical periods, giving an exotic flair to fictional locales, or simply adding new colors to the usual palette of instrumental sounds.

    Composers of film and theater scores have used ethnic woodwinds, in particular, in their scoring. To meet the demand for ethnic woodwind sounds, many prominent woodwind doublers on Broadway and in Hollywood have adopted these instruments, in addition to their usual arrays of modern Western instruments.

    Eight folk, ethnic, and period woodwinds recently employed in film and theater scoring have been selected for study in this document: bamboo flutes (especially the Indian bansuri and flutes used by some flutists in Irish traditional music), the Chinese dizi, the Armenian duduk, the Native American flute, the panflutes of Romania and South America, the pennywhistle, the recorder, and the Japanese shakuhachi.

    For each instrument, a representative example of use in theater or film music has been selected and transcribed from a commercial audio recording. Each transcription is discussed with emphasis on demands placed upon the ethnic woodwind musician. Additional discussion of each instrument includes suggestions for purchasing instruments, fingering charts, description of playing technique, description of instrument-specific performance practices, discussion of various sizes and/or keys of each instrument, discussion of instrument-specific notation practices, annotated bibliographies of available pedagogical materials, lists of representative recordings (including authentic ethnic music and other music), and information on relevant organizations and associations of professional or amateur musicians.

    Read the full text at the UGA library website

  • Review: Ben Britton’s A Complete Approach to Overtones

    ByBret Pimentel

    About a year and a half ago I reviewed Ben Britton’s book A Complete Approach to Sound for the Modern Saxophonist, which is full of excellent information and exercises for development of fundamental tone production technique. Ben has just released a new book, and I was pleased to get a sneak preview.

    A Complete Approach to Overtones: Vivid Tone and Extended Range builds on A Complete Approach to Sound’s foundation with 50-some pages of overtone exercises and explanatory text. Overtone exercises are often associated with development of the altissimo register (Eugene Rousseau, for example, uses overtones extensively in his altissimo book), but this book is not specifically altissimo-oriented; it is a more broad-based approach to improving every aspect of tone production (particularly tone, intonation, and response).

    Ben Britton: A Complete Approach to Overtones

    The exercises are very thorough and systematic. A number of the exercises are similar to the simple ones I use with my own students, but Ben’s are better thought-out and cover the technique in a much more complete way. Between the book’s thoughtful organization and incisive text, it covers all of the usual frustrations that overtone beginners deal with; any saxophonist with a general command of the instrument’s basics should be able to jump right in and start hearing results. At the same time, the material is enough to keep an advanced saxophonist challenged for quite a while. This is a book that could very well be studied as a high school student, reviewed again at the college level, and re-reviewed throughout a professional playing career.

    Grab your copy (paper or digital) now and thank me later. While you’re at it, pick up A Complete Approach to Sound and Ben’s album Children at Play.

    Linkage:

  • Favorite blog posts, May 2014

    ByBret Pimentel

    Kind of a short list this month, so either all the bloggers are on summer vacation or I am getting pickier.

  • The amazing shrinking woodwind section: increasing demands on woodwind doublers

    ByBret Pimentel

    There is a long tradition of using small orchestras in musical theater as a money- and space-saving consideration. Presumably, if budgets and orchestra pit square footages were unlimited, full symphonic orchestras would be used for theater like they are for movies, with an 8-12(+)-piece orchestral woodwind section, plus perhaps a 5-piece saxophone section. But let’s go back a few decades and examine the compromises. Here are a couple of examples:

    Flower Drum Song

    (from original 1958 orchestration)

    1. Piccolo, flute, alto flute
    2. Piccolo, flute
    3. Oboe, English horn
    4. Clarinet, alto saxophone
    5. Clarinet, alto saxophone
    6. Bass clarinet, tenor saxophone

    You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

    (from original 1966 orchestration)

    1. Piccolo, flute
    2. Flute
    3. Clarinet
    4. Clarinet
    5. Bass clarinet, tenor saxophone

    The Flower Drum Song orchestration uses a 6-piece woodwind section. The bassoons, sadly, are the first thing to go. The principal flutist has to double on both piccolo and alto flute, an uncommon compromise in the orchestral repertoire, where the doubling is often relegated to an auxiliary flute part to allow the principal to be at his or her soloistic best on a single instrument. (The second flutist also doubles piccolo, which is a bit more common.) Similarly, the oboist pulls double-duty as soloist on both oboe and English horn. The full clarinet section is expected to double not on auxiliary clarinets, but on saxophones.

    You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is not quite as demanding on individual woodwind players; the first flute part does include piccolo (again, this is not typical symphonic-orchestral thinking), and the bass clarinetist doubles on saxophone. The double reed section is eliminated completely.

    photo, NK Eide

    Now let’s look at how these shows’ orchestrations have been revised in more recent revivals:

    Flower Drum Song

    (from 2002 revival orchestration)

    1. Piccolo, flute, alto flute, dizi in C, D, E-flat, F, and B, bamboo flutes in E, F, and G
    2. Flute, clarinet, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone
    3. Flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone
    4. Clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, tenor saxophone

    You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

    (from 1999 revival orchestration)

    1. Piccolo, flute, clarinet, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, soprano recorder, kazoo

    44 years later, Flower Drum Song’s woodwind section has shrunken from six musicians to four, but the number of instruments has boomed from 13 to 25. The first flutist is expected to play some “world” woodwinds in addition to an array of orchestral flutes, and the other three woodwind players each cover instruments from three or four woodwind families, with multiple members from at least one of those families.

    You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown’s revival after 33 years drops the woodwind section from five musicians down to one. The lone woodwind player covers seven instruments from (arguably) five families: two flutes, a clarinet, two saxophones, a recorder, and a kazoo (which, despite being vaguely woodwind-like in form, is not one). As the only player of each of these instruments, this musician should expect to be prepared to sound like a convincing soloist on each.

    Based on these examples and others, two trends seem to be emerging in theater orchestrations:

    1. Fewer woodwind players.
    2. More colorful orchestrations. In the case of both of these shows, the new orchestrations are not simply a slimming-down of a too-expensive woodwind section—new sounds are being introduced. In some cases these might be meant to rebalance the orchestra due to cuts in other sections, but it also seems that recent orchestrations involve creative choices tending toward a broader aural palette.

    Both of these mean greater demands upon woodwind players. 21st-century woodwind players need to be able to play a greater number of instruments, from a pool no longer limited to the orchestral woodwinds and saxophones, at a soloist level on each instrument. The common 20th-century clarinet/saxophone or flute/clarinet/saxophone doubler may find him- or herself less employable than in previous years, and less able to hide in the section on a weaker double. Double reeds are a must, and so are auxiliary instruments (piccolo, larger flutes, English horn, clarinets and saxophones of any size) and world or historical woodwinds.

    As the number of woodwind chairs shrinks and the standards of musicianship and versatility rise, the specialist and the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none will both be out of a job, and the rare jack-of-all-trades-master-of-each will become an increasingly hot property.

  • Did I play that “right?”

    ByBret Pimentel

    Sometimes my beginner students will play something for me, then ask, “Was that right?” What they generally seem to mean is something like, “Did I use the correct fingerings in the correct order?” A student who is slightly more advanced might ask the same question, but also wonder whether the rhythms were “correct.” A student farther along than that might take into consideration things like accurate observance of marked articulations and dynamics.

    Setting aside creative concerns and looking only at technical matters, when is a student’s playing “right?”

    I try to impress upon my advancing students that execution of musical passages isn’t really about “right” or “wrong,” but rather about degrees of rightness. To borrow an idea from manufacturing or engineering, we might think in terms of tolerances.

    In other words, for a beginner, a half-note rhythm might be “right” if the half notes are roughly twice the length of quarter notes, and a pitch of “D” might be “right” if it is closer to D than it is to D-flat or D-sharp. For a somewhat more advanced student, it might not be “right” until the rhythms can be played without wandering too far afield of a metronome and the pitches trigger the “in tune” light on a cheap electric tuner. For an even more advanced student, those tolerances wouldn’t be fine enough—we might expect the rhythmic ratios to be accurate to within a few percent, and the pitches to be accurate within so many cents.

    photo, Lewis Meyer
    photo, Lewis Meyer

    At the highest levels of musical technique, we question what tolerances are accurate enough for our audiences, or for someone with even more finely-tuned ears—a conductor, perhaps, or an audition panel, or collaborating musicians, or a record producer. Are my rhythms “right” when they are within a tolerance of a hundredth of a second? A thousandth? A ten-thousandth? Who will hear the difference if my pitches are within a tolerance of ten cents? Five cents? The more I think about it, the more I’m certain I can never really be satisfied, because as my execution gets more accurate, my ears get less tolerant.

    If your ears are currently “tolerating” your level of accuracy when you play, it may be time to listen more closely and critically. Don’t be satisfied with “right”—go for more right.

  • Irish flute/whistle ornamentation symbols à la Grey Larsen, in Lilypond

    ByBret Pimentel

    If you are nerdy/awesome enough to be into (1) the pedagogy of Irish traditional woodwind playing and (2) open-source text-based music notation software, then you may want to check out my set of symbols for Lilypond, based on the excellent ornamentation system by Grey Larsen. You can get the .ily file on GitHub (and submit your pull requests to make improvements to my code).

    Cuts, strikes, rolls, cranns, etc.
    Cuts, strikes, slides, rolls, cranns, etc.

    If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Larsen’s system and you play pennywhistles or wooden flutes, then really I must insist that you buy a copy of his The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle immediately—his ornamentation system is clear and logical and should be regarded as the standard for teaching and learning Irish-traditional ornamentation for wind instruments.

    If you are unfamiliar with Lilypond, chances are good that you won’t like it even though it’s free and produces much better notation than the software you already spent several hundred dollars on.

    Also, it’s worth noting that Chris Throup already had a similar idea a few years ago. Mine is a bit more complete, but his is really simple.

    Sláinte!