Which instrument to “start” on

ByBret Pimentel

Every so often I am told by a band director or parent that a child wishes to play a certain woodwind instrument, and then I am asked which instrument the student should “start” on, instead of the one they have apparently already chosen.

I don’t see a good reason, at least within the woodwind group, for a beginner to start on a different instrument family than the one they ultimately wish to play. There may be wisdom in some cases in requiring a beginner to start with a “main” family member: a student who really wants to play the piccolo, for example, will find their opportunities limited if they do not have a strong foundation in the flute—they will be of less usefulness to a school band program, and, should they continue to more advanced studies, may find the piccolo’s repertoire and pedagogical resources comparatively limited. I also think the piccolo is inherently a bit more difficult to play, although that in itself is not sufficient reason to deter a strongly-motivated student; however, for some students a more difficult instrument might be frustrating enough to bring their musical pursuits to a premature end. I likewise generally recommend that oboists start with the oboe rather than the English horn, clarinetists start on the B-flat instrument rather than a “harmony” clarinet, bassoonists leave the contrabassoon until later, and saxophonists start on the alto, or maybe the tenor.

Photo, Herald Post
Photo, Herald Post

But I also sometimes run into an attitude that, for example, an aspiring saxophonist really should start on the clarinet. This, I believe, comes from an outdated school of thought that considers the saxophone a “color” instrument in the clarinet family, and concludes that you should start with the “main” instrument, the clarinet, in the same way that you would start with the flute and later add the piccolo. (It may even stem from a more outdated idea that the saxophone is vulgar or a novelty, while the clarinet is respectable.) But surely the saxophone has by now earned full membership in the wind band and has a sufficiently rich solo and chamber repertoire that it need not be seen merely as the clarinet’s half-sibling.

I encounter a similar approach to the double reeds, in which a beginner is made to start with something “easier” or cheaper or more common, like the clarinet, and is later permitted or required to switch to the oboe or the bassoon. If the cost of starting a beginner on a double-reeded instrument is prohibitive (and in some cases it may well be) then I suppose a less-costly instrument is better than nothing. And parents or band directors may have other reasons to delay putting an oboe or bassoon in a beginner’s hands: to make sure the student can be trusted with good instrument care before issuing them an expensive bassoon, for example. And I know that some band directors feel underqualified to teach the double reeds (join the club), and may wish to postpone for reasons rooted in that insecurity.

But as far as I am concerned there is no sound pedagogical reason to start a student on one instrument and then move them to another. If a student wants to be an oboist, the best hope for their success is to get an oboe into their hands as soon as possible (and, preferably, connect them with an excellent private teacher).

Still, some parents or educators, insisting that the “switch” is a foregone conclusion, press me on which instrument is the best pre-switch instrument for the student to learn. In my opinion, it makes no difference whatsoever. I think there is more harm than advantage in trying to choose a “similar” instrument; a flutist switching to saxophone can learn the embouchure from scratch, while a clarinetist switching to saxophone may find it more difficult to shed clarinet habits. Ditto for “similar” fingering systems.

Encourage your beginners to play, within reason, what interests them most.

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  • The bassoon’s special(?) staccato

    ByBret Pimentel

    I have a vague memory from childhood, well before my bassoon-playing days, of learning that the bassoon had some special quality to its staccato notes. (From an educational tv show? a children’s book on musical instruments? I can’t recall.) My impression was that this sound was different in some way than staccato produced on other instruments.

    That idea stuck in my mind, but it occurred to me recently that in my subsequent years of bassoon study I had never heard a bassoonist actually address this. I turned to some published sources to see if I could locate any information.

    Several books on orchestration (geared toward composers, not bassoonists) refer to the bassoon’s supposedly unique or unusual staccato. A masters thesis by Melissa Pipe brings several of these together. (I should confess I pulled these quotes directly from Ms. Pipe’s paper, and haven’t verified them with the original sources.)

    The real state of the matter is that the Bassoon has a preternatural power of playing staccato, and, if it is forced to play passages of a humorous, grotesque, or macabre sort, it easily endows them with a dry spiccato quality that is almost toneless.

    —Cecil Forsyth, Orchestration. London: Macmillan and Co., 1948, 2nd edition, p. 235-236.

    Its reedy staccato is often invoked for prankish diversions…

    —Bernard Rogers, The Art of Orchestration: Principles of Tone Color in Modern Scoring. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970, p. 36-39.

    For while certain passages (especially staccato passages) have a way of sounding comical on the instrument…

    —Kent W. Keenan, The Technique of Orchestration. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970, p. 89.

    Staccato passages are second nature to the bassoon.

    —Henry Mancini, Sounds and Scores: A Practical Guide to Professional Orchestration. New York: Northridge Music, 1986, p. 86.

    This passage from Adler is a little ambiguous, and may actually be saying that rather than being unique, the bassoon’s staccato is akin to the oboe’s:

    Like the oboe, the bassoon performs lyric melodies beautifully and produces attacks and staccato passages as incisively… Other composers have treated the bassoon as the “clown of the orchestra” and have written staccato passages for it that truly sound humorous.

    —Samuel Adler, The Study of Orchestration. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 3rd edition, 2002, p. 221-222.

    When playing staccato passages, on the other hand, it is an excellent instrument to portray humour…

    —Sammy Nestico, The Complete Arranger. Delevan, N.Y.: Fenwood Music Co., Inc., 1993, p. 57.

    But while orchestrators seem to find the bassoon’s staccato noteworthy, few bassoonists seem interested in addressing that aspect of it. (Many explain staccato technique, but do not point it out as remarkable or unusual.) I found only two counterexamples, but both are well-respected sources.

    Although each tone is started with the tongue, a tone may be stopped with either the the tongue (as in saying “tut”) or with the breath (as in saying “tuh”). Not all notes which are marked staccato should be played with the “tut” style of tonguing. It should only be used in passages in which the composer seeks to use the rather humorous, dry effect of the bassoon’s sharp staccato. Two quite typical examples are the bassoon solos in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, First movement, measure 64, and in Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

    All other notes which are marked staccato … should be stopped with the breath…

    —William Spencer, rev. Frederick A. Mueller, The Art of Bassoon Playing. Princeton: Summy-Birchard Music, 1958, p. 54.

    Among all the woodwinds our instrument possesses a special capacity for the rendering of staccato. This important effect features in many of the solo passages written for the Classical Bassoon by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; the 19th century French instrument possessed a quality of dry, crisp staccato which was also capitalized upon by many composers. My teacher Archie Camden declared: “a good reliable staccato is one of the brightest jewels in the bassoon player’s crown!” (Camden, 1961). However these days the German system bassoon has somewhat changed in character, being designed more for sonority and strength rather than the delivery of these effects. All too often today’s playing styles are better suited to powerful expressiveness rather than light staccato. Nonetheless we must strive to achieve these articulation effects by the judicious choice of equipment and deployment of technique…

    When stopping a note, there are occasions when we wish to terminate it precisely — chopping it off cleanly as if it were a slice of salami. At other times a more artistic effect will be called for — allowing the sound to die away like the tail of a comet. For the former we may use the tongue, for the latter the breath.

    —William Waterhouse, Bassoon. Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides. London: Kahn & Averill, 2003, p. 112.

    So, one possibility is that the bassoon’s supposedly special staccato is the effect of ending notes with the tongue. This technique is not unique to the bassoon, but is controversial. (Personally I use the technique on all woodwinds when I believe it to be musically appropriate. And I think most woodwind players do, too, even those who claim they don’t.) Perhaps the relatively open discussion of this technique by high-profile bassoonist-authors correlates to its being viewed as uniquely a bassoon effect.

    One other possibility I would like to explore is the possible relationship of bassoon staccato to another controversial technique: the bassoonist’s jaw moving during articulation.

    If you have thoughts or resources regarding the mystique of bassoon staccato, please join the discussion in the comments section!

  • |

    Anatomy of a bad bamboo flute

    ByBret Pimentel

    Bamboo flutes and other “world”-type woodwinds of true musician quality can be difficult to find, and if you’re not experienced with them it can be nearly impossible to tell if an online seller’s wares are genuinely playable or more like souvenir items. I’m going to share an experience of mine in which I gambled and got burned, in case it is instructive to anyone out there.

    Recently I needed a bamboo flute in a specific and unusual key (high B-flat) on very short notice for a gig (a performance of the Duke Ellington Nutcracker Suite). My favorite trusted flutemakers don’t currently make flutes in that key, so I placed an order with a flutemaker that I hadn’t bought from before. (I won’t identify the flutemaker here, but I will say that he and his staff were very nice to me. When there was a totally-understandable wrinkle in getting the flute shipped on time, they even overnighted it plus threw in a very nice flute bag at no extra charge.)

    Ability to ship quickly was certainly a factor in my choice of vendors, but I was also reassured by the fact that the maker sells flutes in three grades: student, intermediate, and professional. I ponied up the money for a professional flute, and expressed to the flutemaker my need for excellent intonation and a strong high register.

    Here is what I received:

    cute, right?
    cute, right?

    Now, the proof of a flute is in the playing, and there’s no way to know for sure if it’s any good without giving it a try. But here are some immediate visual warning signs:

    • Uh-oh
      uh-oh

      The embouchure hole is strangely shaped. I don’t know for sure what the flutemaker intended, but round-ish is pretty standard. Since bamboo is an irregular material, a certain amount of air noise (vibrational inefficiency) is to be expected, but this flute is very airy, and I suspect the oddly-shaped and roughly-finished embouchure hole is a contributor to this.

    • This is an extremely wide-bored flute. Often for flute-like instruments we see a length-to-diameter ratio of something around 30:1, but this one is closer to 15:1. To oversimplify the ramifications of this a bit, a wider-bore flute (a smaller ratio) will generally tend to be stronger in the low register and weaker in the high register. For this gig, I needed a flute that could play just to the second octave above the fundamental note—not an unreasonable demand for any common variety of bamboo transverse flute. I couldn’t get this flute to do it. A smaller-diameter bamboo would improve this flute’s upper range.
    • The finger holes are fairly large, and about the same size. Generally, similarly-sized holes leads to more even tone across the instrument’s scale, but also means that the right hand index and middle finger holes are placed very close together for a simple-system major-scale flute, and on this one the holes are uncomfortably close for me. Larger holes decrease the likelihood of finding usable cross-fingerings; I needed one good cross-fingering for this gig, and couldn’t find one that worked—couldn’t even “lip” the chromatic note into tune. A well-designed flute strikes a balance between large and small holes, and similarly- and differently-sized holes.
    • The second octave is quite noticeably flat. This is a common problem of bamboo flutes (or any cylindrical-bore flutes), but this one is particularly difficult to wrangle into tune. Really excellent bamboo flutes are sometimes made from bamboo carefully selected to have just a bit of taper in the embouchure-hole end, like a concert flute’s headjoint, or have some bore work done to create an internal taper; this helps to bring the upper register into tune with the lower.

    When I realized that the flute wasn’t going to be usable, I packed my piccolo and a B-flat pennywhistle as possible alternatives. As it turned out, we didn’t end up playing the movement in question, so I was off the hook.

    Shop smart!

  • Accents and the tongue (or not)

    ByBret Pimentel

    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.

    accent

    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.

  • Speaking the language of woodwinds

    ByBret Pimentel

    There are some terms I sometimes hear woodwind players use that make me think that they don’t know what they’re talking about. I could be wrong. But that’s the impression I get.

    I think as woodwind doublers, when talking to players of single instruments, we sometimes give the same impression that obnoxious foreign tourists give—that we have read a few paragraphs out of the guidebook and now consider ourselves experts on the local culture. If you’re a woodwind doubler hoping to function as an honest-to-goodness oboist or clarinetist or whatever, I think it’s worthwhile to speak the language like a native. Read More “Speaking the language of woodwinds”

  • The role of tone exercises

    ByBret Pimentel

    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.

    photo, valentina
    photo, valentina

    Here is what tone exercises do:

    • Excellent tone exercises demand solid fundamental tone-production technique, providing a chance to habituate useful muscular actions. Trevor Wye’s “Flexibility I” flute exercise is a perfect example. (I suggest you buy the whole Trevor Wye omnibus edition.) If your tone-production technique is correct, you can play the exercise successfully (in tune, in time, with all notes responding easily). But you will fail if your breath support, voicing, and/or embouchure are bad. If you are doing something wrong, you get immediate feedback.
    • Poorly-designed tone exercises lack that self-destruct trigger. Often the creators try to prop them up with text explaining fundamental technique: “Use strong breath support! Keep your embouchure flexible!” If that kind of textual instruction is necessary to make the exercise useful, then the content probably doesn’t really matter—it might as well be a single note with a fermata.
    • Regardless of quality, any exercise you do with tone in mind is an opportunity to focus on your tone. That’s a good thing.

    Seek out high-quality tone exercises and do them regularly, but don’t forget to listen.

  • Peter Hilliard on contracting woodwind doublers

    ByBret Pimentel
    Photo, danifeb

    Peter Hilliard has a nice blog, Music Directing the School Musical. It doesn’t offer any information about who Peter Hilliard is (presumably this guy), not even contact information*. But he does seem to know a thing or two about putting on a musical, and, in a recent post, offers some advice about hiring musicians. Here’s a little of what he has to say about hiring woodwind players—I do suggest reading the whole thing.

    The actual numbers (Reed I, Reed II, etc.) vary widely from show to show, but if you look through your books, you’ll see the following is generally true:

    …

    There is a book (usually Reed I) that looks like this: Flute and Piccolo normally, sometimes Clarinet, Soprano and/or Alto Sax. Normally this book is very flute heavy. In old shows, sometimes it’s only flute, with no doubling. Hire somebody with a good flute embouchure, not a clarinet or sax player who plays flute with an airy tone. Have the guy who dabbles on flute play the book with all the second or 3rd flute parts. For some reason, the alto flute got really popular from the 70s through the 80s, but beware. 1) you’ll never hear it. 2) You’ll never find one! I swear, I called every instrument rental house in Philadelphia and South Jersey for a show recently and nobody had one. 3) your player will pass out from too little oxygen to the brain.

    I can’t say that I’ve ever had a musical director volunteer to round up instruments for me—I need to work for this guy! By the way, keep that alto flute embouchure focused to avoid passing out, and make sure you’re playing right into the mic so the sound crew has something to work with. Read More “Peter Hilliard on contracting woodwind doublers”

8 Comments

  1. I started on saxophone. When I needed to add clarinet, it was a struggle to get enough embouchure strength, as I either have a naturally loose embouchure, or I learned it from playing saxophone.

    Most of the good doublers I know started on clarinet, no matter what instruments they ended up playing.

    I dislike Bb clarinet enough where I don’t regret starting on saxophone, but it seems to me that it is easier to learn saxophone embouchure after playing clarinet than vice-versa.

    Reply

  2. Amen!

    I started in 5th grade. I wanted to play tenor saxophone. (I wanted to be Boots Randolph, to be exact. :-) ) I was at least allowed to play saxophone, though I was instructed to start on alto. (Looking back, that’s probably a good idea. A tenor is huge for a kid that age.)

    At the music store, the salesman tried to talk me into starting on clarinet. His reasoning was that clarinetists can pick up saxophone easily but saxophonists struggle with clarinet.

    I stood my ground. I wanted to play saxophone! I wanted to be Boots Randolph!

    30 years later, as an adult, I did take up clarinet, and I certainly did find it to be challenging (much more so than flute or bassoon had been), but it was still the right choice to start on saxophone. I got there in the end. :-)

    Reply

  3. Looking at the issue from the point of view of a single student, the benefits of starting on a different instrument seem dubious at best. I suspect, however, that this mindset has more to do with insuring a reasonable band instrumentation and making the best use of limited band resources than anything else.

    When I was in beginning band they started kids on flute, clarinet or saxophone. By high school, the result was reasonable flute and clarinet sections and 14 alto saxes (only one of which actually practiced or cared). Not long after my class graduated they switched to only starting woodwind players on flute or clarinet and having them audition for saxophone, oboe and bassoon after proving their seriousness on flute or (most commonly) clarinet. Now, sax sections are leaner and “meaner” and the ever-present glut of non-caring, non-practicing kids get stuck on third clarinet (or even more questionably, bass clarinet) where they are thought to do less damage. I am not defending this; simply clarifying what I believe to ultimately be the true reason.

    For oboe and bassoon (not to mention lower saxes and clarinet), most schools in this area provide instruments. This makes it somewhat important to insure that the students who get these few instruments be serious and are likely to stick with the program. Otherwise, 4 valuable oboes may sit unused because the first four kids to sign up for oboe ended up flaking out.

    Lastly, for bassoon it is very often an issue of size. If we limited our future bassoonists to only those that had had early growth spurts I do believe we’d doing them a disservice. Now to convince middle school band programs to purchase some tenoroons!

    However, as a bassoon instructor I often get asked this question and this is my answer: “Any musician can become a bassoonist given the interest and practice. I started on trombone. One of my fastest learning beginning bassoonists started on trumpet. However, if you want to know which transition generally presents the fewest problems then my answer is flute. I’ve found that teaching a flute player (who has already developed a relaxed, open embouchure with a very slight overbite) to deal with a reed is faster and more natural than teaching a clarinet player to unlearn half of everything they’ve learned regarding embouchure.”

    Reply

  4. If as directors we let the kids play whatever we want we would have bands that not even parents would want to listen to. I once substitute taught a band that that had 12 flutes, 3 clarinets, 20 saxophones, 15 trumpets, 1 horn, 1 trombone and 20 drummers (not percussionists, most couldn’t play mallets). The band also had 2 dynamics loud and blast. Unfortunately I forgot my earplugs that day.

    Reply

  5. I agree that for bassoon, size of hand is the most important determining factor. As most kids do not have sufficient hand size until 7th or 8th grade, that’s when most programs start bassoonists. I think that’s reasonable, as all who play bassoon know that generally you want the smart kids who can function independently from their friends to be on bassoon. I began on flute, which I played for two years, switched to saxophone for one semester, then began bassoon. I also skipped a grade when going from flute to sax (entering marching band that fall —oops) but I loved bassoon and sax and continue to play each. I think beginning instruments should be chosen due to interest of the child so long as size is not a preventative factor. As stated above, with the desire to work hard on an alternative instrument, one can become good at anything, whether he/she starts on that instrument or not.

    Reply

  6. One thing I always tell my parents of students wanting to learn an instrument is whatever the student wants to play, try to allow them the chance to play that particular instrument, for they will be more inclined to stick with it in the long run. If a student gets discouraged from music AND they were on an instrument they didn’t want to play originally, they are pretty much a lost cause. If a student gets discouraged, but they are on an instrument they chose, they are more likely to stick with it a little longer because it’s an instrument they like.

    I’ve got a sax (now flute) student who’s band director tried to make him start on clarinet, but he really didn’t want to play the clarinet. He was told that he had to get lessons on sax before starting with the band. So I started him, and then he went a good 3/4 of the semester not playing more than 3 or 4 different notes. He was thoroughly frustrated, but he stuck with it because he liked the saxophone. If he’d been forced to play clarinet, he probably would have quit.

    Reply

  7. In my first long-term teaching assignment,the teacher whom I would be replacing advised me to start beginners on the clarinet, then switch them to the saxophone. She based this on poor pedagogy she had been taught, that “the saxophone is the easiest instrument to play poorly”. Having started on the sax myself, I knew this to be nonsense. (In reality, her decision seemed more to stem from availability: there were dozens of clarinets, compared to only eight saxes.
    The students I started on saxes did quite well, and quickly developed enough nuance to not overblow the sax.

    Reply

  8. I get the reasoning behind starting on other instruments. My secondary school didn’t have football, so there was no marching band per se. One was in “Band” which was the concert band that also marched in parades. Marching bassoons isn’t unheard of but I think it would be difficult as hell and probably not the best for our climate. Unfortunately we always ended up with more flutes we needed, and rarely an oboe, bassoon or French horn. Our director had always hoped there would be ambitious volunteers who would make a switch. It happened occasionally. There was probably little interest as anyone who took one of those instruments would be by themselves, no safety in numbers. Regardless, those instruments seem to be the least sexy out of most of the standard wind band.

    Reply

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