Klarinet Archive - Posting 000714.txt from 1999/05

From: John Dablin <johnd@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: Tounging testimony
Date: Sat, 15 May 1999 18:49:35 -0400

David Renaud wrote:-
> I think I've been cheating on tonguing for a long time,
> going beyond the tip slightly to the backside-backedge of the tongue.
>
> I normally begin struggling with sixteenths at about
> 140 and fight for but never quite make 160.
> The last page of Dances of Kodally is 160, and have
> never been able to play it without sluring alot.
>
> Upon playing with placement the results are immediate
> and dramatic.
What do you mean by "playing with placement". Like just about every
clarinetist who's ever lived I've spent my life searching for the holy
grail of fast, accurate tonguing, but I still struggle to tongue
sixteenths at much over 100 (crotchets / quarter notes a minute), so any
new insights would be welcome. I'd be grateful to reach 120, let alone
140.

This set me thinking about why I and many others have such difficulty
attaining a reasonable tonguing speed, and it seems to me that there are
two equally plausible reasons:- either there is some fundamental error
in our technique, or there is a physiological reason which means that
some people will never be able to tongue as fast as others, but how can
we tell which is the more likely?

I don't recall ever being taught very much about tonguing other than
that my tongue should touch the reed, and this is probably because
tonguing must be extraordinarily difficult to teach. If a teacher sees
a student playing with bad hand positions he can immediately spot the
error and knows how to correct it, but he can never see what the student
is doing with his tongue, and neither can the student see the teacher,
so he can't even learn by example. Perhaps successful clarinetists
stumble on the correct technique by accident? Equally because it's hard
to see what different players do it's difficult to determine whether
physiology is important. I've seen it suggested that players with long
tongues are at a disadvantage, but is this a result of proper research
or just speculation? I do hope my difficulties are caused by lack of
skill and not the way I'm made, otherwise I might have spent 40 years
playing the wrong instrument :-). Alternatively perhaps I was just
unlucky with my teachers?
--
John Dablin
Aylesbury UK

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