Jennifer Cluff posted this video on her excellent blog today:
I think Ms. Cluff’s commentary is right on the mark.
But I’ll admit the thing that jumped out to me was the brief conversation between Jean-Pierre Rampal and Dick Cavett, at about 5:10. Rampal takes a stand on the flutist/flautist thing, which is a big pet peeve of mine.
Response is how readily the equipment/player combination produces sound. “Good” response generally means that the player-plus-instrument are able to produce a sound that starts precisely when intended, with clarity and with no unwanted additional noise. Many factors affect the quality and reliability of the response:
For your best response on every note, be sure to address each of the many factors involved.
I get lots of emails and search traffic from people trying to find the answer to questions about woodwinds and “similar” fingerings: Do they use the same or similar fingerings? Which instruments are the most similar? Can I use fingerings from _____ instrument on _____ instrument?
I’ve addressed before why these questions might be coming from misconceptions about woodwind doubling, and why the answers might not be as useful as one might think. But beyond that, some of those questions are difficult to answer in a straightforward way.
Do any of the major modern Western woodwind instrument families use identical fingerings (such as saxophones using the same fingerings as oboes, or clarinets using the same fingerings as bassoons)? No.
Do instruments within those families use identical fingerings? Kind of. For example, the members of the concert flute family (piccolo, flute, alto and bass flutes, and others), use fingerings that are at least very similar. But some use slightly-varied fingerings to improve pitch, tone, or response of certain notes: for example, piccolo players often use a modified fingering for the third-octave A-flat, which they wouldn’t use on a lower-pitched flute. And the keys that appear on flutes aren’t set in stone—some might have a special C-sharp trill key, or a low B key, that other flutes lack. And clever flute makers can add anything else they dream up that customers will pay for.
Do any of the woodwind families have similar enough fingerings that you can play them without significant additional effort to learn how? No, not if you want to play them well.
But really, which ones are the most similar? It’s not as simple as counting up the number of “matching” fingerings between two instruments. You could argue that the written note D below the treble clef staff is “similar” for flute, oboe, and saxophone. D uses the three middle fingers of each hand on each of these instruments. But the flute also requires pressing a left-hand thumb key, while the others don’t. And the oboe has more than one key for the right ring finger, and I suppose it’s up to you whether the correct one for this note feels the “same” to you as the other two instruments. On clarinet, this written note uses a very different fingering, but the note written an octave higher has similarities to the flute/oboe/saxophone note. And the bassoon doesn’t have a D fingered in a closely similar way, but its low G uses a similar fingering that falls into roughly analogous scale fingering patterns.
(While brainstorming this post, I briefly considered trying to create some kind of chart showing which fingerings were the “same” or “similar” across the woodwind families. I quickly abandoned the idea because the necessary exceptions, explanations, and context would have complicated it beyond any usefulness.)
Like asking if two languages are similar, asking if two instruments’ fingerings are similar begs an answer that is incomplete, misleading, and ultimately not useful. If your intention is to apply that answer to playing or teaching woodwind instruments, your success will depend on instead approaching each instrument on its own terms.
I was pleased to receive recently some samples of D’Addario Woodwinds’s new “Venn” synthetic clarinet and saxophone reeds. In an upcoming post, I’ll share some thoughts about and demonstrations of the specific products. But here are a few thoughts to set the stage:
Zealous loyalty to “traditional” materials isn’t a virtue. (If you’re a woodwind player like me, there’s a good chance your equipment already includes materials that are “new” since the instrument’s invention anyway.) Keep an open mind!
I recall as a beginning flutist (coming from background in saxophone) finding the third-octave fingerings to be a confusing, illogical jumble, but they do actually make some sense. There is an incorrect explanation for these fingerings that I hear every so often, and have seen published on a couple of flute-related blogs recently. It goes something like this: the flute’s third-octave fingerings are some kind of combination of two different first/second-octave fingerings. For example:
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Or…
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If I squint my eyes just right I can sort of see how this almost makes sense fingerings-wise and overtones-wise, but ultimately this system is unnecessarily confusing and also doesn’t reflect acoustical realities.
Here’s a better way to look at third-octave flute fingerings: they are the same as the first/second octave fingerings, with a vent opened. This is very similar to how upper registers are achieved on the reed instruments: by adding an octave or register key or releasing a whisper key to open a vent. Since the flute doesn’t have dedicated vent holes, toneholes are used.
For some of the third octave notes, additional keys must be added or subtracted to improve pitch, tone, or response; again this is analogous to the systems used for the reed instruments. But here are the simplest examples of opening single vents for the third octave:
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→ | open vent | → |  |
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It is probably worth pointing out that having any “system” for remembering fingerings is just a crutch; for a performing musician, the only practical “system” is to thoroughly habituate them to the point that no conscious thought is required. Practice carefully and be on the alert for dubious pedagogy.
Make your own handsome woodwind fingering diagrams with the Fingering Diagram Builder
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.
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.
