This last week was really trying for me. The company I work for had to lay off a fair number of people, including the guy that sits behind me in the office. We have worked together for 5 years now, and he was in there close to the beginning with me. What is the worst part is that I knew he was going to get the axe last week, and had to keep my mouth shut about it.
Its one of the curses of being a systems administrator, I always know before almost anyone when a person is being terminated for any reason.
Every night I was trying to do the clarinet gliss exercises I wrote about last week, with not much luck or really any improvment. Very frustrating, knowing that I was not understanding what Kurt had told me in such detail. I did make a bit of progress on some of the long tones, the A and the Bb that had really sounded awful to me. I mentioned this to Kurt and he told me that they sound poor on most any horn, but of course that is something we have to work on. I have to say, they sound just fine when he plays them, so once again its me not the horn.
Of course these glisses are the first thing we work on. I tell Kurt I just don't seem to get it, even to the point of making the sounds we talked about last week correctly. We work on this a bit, and finally I am able to at least make the sounds that he requests me to, without having the mouthpiece in my mouth.
What I find is that,as he described and I have in my notes, the rear of the tounge is actually hitting the roof of my mouth, and the movement is coming from the middle of the tounge. At least now I can make the pitch bends without the mouthpiece on. I still cannot do this when I am playing. I notice that my tounge almost automatically drops to the bottom of my mouth.
This may be due to the fact of playing the sax for so many years, with its much easier breath/mouth control. I mean, if you only play clarinet and not sax, pick up a sax sometime and you will see what I mean, its just so much easier!
In any event, I am now equipped to finally get the pitch bend with the horn, once I can re-train my tounge a bit. Difficult, but any teacher will tell you its much better to establish good playing techniques at the beginning, rather than try and correct these defects later when you they have become your habitual way of playing the instrument.
OK, enough of that, the lesson moves on.
From my notes, I am reading one thing that seems critical to me - that the amount of air pressure is steady, regardless of the pitch you are playing. Kurt says its like an electronic organ, where you press a key and no mattter how hard you press the key, the resulting tone is the same.
Take a moment to consider the ramifications of this: I have been having to use a lot more force to play the notes in the upper register, but if I can learn this technique, that should in theory eliminate the need to waste myself when I want to play the high notes.
The other benefit of this practice is that you can play longer on any single breath., which can only be of great benefit to any player, regardless of the style you are playing. Kurt told me that in many cases, when playing with other good musicians, he can do in one breath what they need at least two breaths for.
Kurt keeps stressing that all the breath has to be controlled from the abdomen, and that if you are really working correctly, any pain you get will come from down there in your gut. As he says, fill up the lower portion of you lungs, even expanding the stomach muscles, and the the upper part of the lungs. Your gut muscles should be as tense (or active if you will) as if you expected someone to come up and punch you in your gut. Hopefully not your teacher!
In light of this, he gives me one of my next assingments, and no kidding its more long tones. What to do: play the middle E (top of the staff) and start out at pp or even ppp if you can do that, and then get louder rather quickly and finally return to the pp or ppp. So its like the first 40% is the crescendo and the 60% the decrescendo, with the most important part of the exercise the last pp section. Its the hardest thing, when you are running out of air, to make this quiet tone, getting ever softer, and still keep the tone good. This is when the stomach wall muscles really come into play, as you try and really control the flow of air, and push out evenly so the tone doesn't go to hell.
So, the complete exercise: start on the E as mentioned, then when you are our of air, lift one finger to play the F just above it - but under no circumstances open your mouth or change your embrousure. Breathe in through your nose to get the air. If you can, complete this exercise by going back down again to the E, again without moving your mouth off of the mouthpiece.
Trust me, if you do this the right way, and really put your effort into it, you will get tired and eventually you will feel it in your stomach. Kurt does lots of sit ups to increase the amount of strenght and control he has while playing. I am the worst person in the world about exercise, which I think is the work of the devil (as if I believed in the devil!) but with my expanded middle section, it sure couldn't hurt.
Next we did some work on the Bb. I'm not sure if this is the same on the Albert system, but I would imagine there is something similar. The basic fingering for the middle Bb is of course the top A key and the key just beneath it. However there is an alternate fingering, where you use the A key and the side key Bb key, which simply sounds better to me. The thing is, Kurt stressed to me that this alternate fingering can be a bit too bright, compared to the rest of the instrument, and its normally reserved for trills.
Not a huge concept here: make the normal Bb sound indentical, as much as possible, to the alternate fingering. I don't know if I will ever be able to do this, but getting close to the brighter, open sound would be good, and since this is the preferred fingering, that is what I am aiming for.
To me, one of the payoffs of playing an exercise as simple as this, swithcing between the fingerings, is how, if I am in a good practice mood, how liberating it can be for my mind to focus my full concentration on the production of these tones. I have never been a person to have the ability to meditate, my mind is far too full of junk to do that. However, I find I can actually achieve a state of pehaps momentary timelessness when I practice like this.
I have found this to be when I am playing the best, when I can shut out the rest of the world for these brief moments of clarity. I think for me it goes past concious thought and someplace deeper, if only for a few moments.
This is why I love wind instruments so much, because if your soul is carried on your breath, then your sould is being played and amplified through the instrument.
Sorry if I got too off topic there! The rest of my lesson consisted of Kurt giving me some mechanical exercises, for developement of my fingers. He stressed that I need to monitor my finger position and to try and snap my fingers into the correct positions.
This led to a discussion of how I am to finger the clarinet. What he is telling me is that the fingers on both hands have to be at about a 45 degree angle to the stick, with the tips of the fingers pointing downward. Once again Kurt said that the difficult, critcal hand was the left hand, much moreso than right.
I mentioned last time about how you should be able to hold a piece of paper between where the thumb and forefinger meet. I was mistaken about the angle that the hand would take when doing this. I thought it would have to be very flat, almost a right angle to the horn, which is pretty much impossible. Its not anywhere near that severe, but unless I can somehow hold my horn and take a picture from the perspective of my face, I won't be able to show you what this looks like.
One thing however I can tell you is that the fingers should hit the keys with the meat, not the tips, of the fingers. Also the index fingers of each hand will lightly rest upon the closest side keys, certainly not opening them but certainly within contact. Same thing with the thumb, it should lightly contact the register key, so that when you need to change registers, the amount of movement is minimal. Kurt tells me that once I get this hand postioning down, the horn will set lightly in my hands, and it will be quite comfortable and natural.
One last exercise: staccato and slow on the high C. While doing this, keep the air going all the time; the tongue starts and stops the note while the abdomen continues its steady pressure.
Next week I get to go back to scales, thirds and arpeggios, using the classic Klose material, that has been used all over the world for what? 75 years now?
I will get back to you after that, and I hope you gained some insights from this weeks brain dump.