Klarinet Archive - Posting 000680.txt from 1998/04

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: Re: budget cutbacks
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 07:30:35 -0400

Roger Garrett wrote:
>......it is difficult to teach music within a band curriculum.

Oh, boy. Roger, have you ever pushed one of my buttons. Stand back.

I had never heard of a band method until I began teaching clarinet and
saxophone privately about ten years ago, and a succession of students began
coming to me because they, or their parents, were frustrated at their slow
progress on their instruments. The reason for that, in many cases, was that
they had basic problems -- bad embouchure, bad breathing habits, bad
posture, and no knowledge of the alternate fingerings. I discovered that
they all had learned to play, to the extent they had learned, in a clarinet
or saxophone class, from a band method. The store where I teach sells these
methods by the hundreds. I studied them and at first I tried to use them.

Before I became a newspaper reporter I was a school teacher - English and
French, not music. But I had been taught to teach, and I had been lucky
enough to have been taught in high school by a teacher who was an
accomplished clarinetist. He started me in the Rubank elementary book and
then moved me on to Klose and Langenus.

What I saw in the band methods was a lockstep system in which beginning
trombonists, clarinetists, trumpeters, percussionists and what have you are
all compelled to progress at approximately the same rate. On top of this,
they make ensemble performance the primary goal right from the start. To
complete the picture, I found that these teachers - many of whom I came to
know, and some of whom I know to be fine musicians - are working under
conditions that made it very difficult for them to give a struggling
student more than occasional personal attention. More about that down the
page.

Along with their other faults, the band method clarinet books push a
student into the clarion register almost immediately, which I consider to
be very harmful. I want a student's embouchure to be well formed, with
physical habits that are correct and a technique fairly well developed in
the chalumeau register, before she or he ventures to depress that register
key. The band methods drive teachers (who may be vocalists, pianists,
trombonists or pianists who have been taught how to teach the clarinet but
have never seriously played one) to move them up to a medium or harder reed
long before they are ready for one, in order to get those high notes, when
their problem is a terrible embouchure -- puffed cheeks, lower lip rolled
out, horn held too vertically, and so on.

I want my students not merely to play little tunes but do technical
exercises to master the mechanism, and sustained tones to strengthen their
embouchures and improve their intonation, almost from the start. The few I
have caught early enough to use this approach have surpassed all but the
most talented of their schoolmates in a fairly short time -- which brings
me to the competition for chairs, known in some schools as shoot-outs.

Perhaps they are thought to be motivational devices, and they may be - but
what they teach is that if you're not first chair, first desk, you are a
failure. Music is a collaborative art. Playing in a band or orchestra is a
great experience, and rewarding for its own sake, but in addition to that
it can teach something today's kids need to know - that cooperation is a
lot more rewarding than competition.

All of which brings me back to the topic of this thread, budget cuts. The
root reason for the problems I believe I see with much public school music
teaching is inadequate budgets. Music is not thought to be an integral,
essential part of education. It once was. Trust me. I was there. I learned,
and later taught in, schools where this was the philosophy. In addition, my
graduate degree is in school administration. Today there are too few music
teachers, with too little time to do an adequate job, and too many demands
on their time, including a crushing load of unproductive meetings,
paperwork and conferences that often accomplish nothing except to justify
the job of some second-level administrator.

Thanks. I feel better now.

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>