Klarinet Archive - Posting 000866.txt from 2001/05

From: "Rien Stein" <rstein@-----.nl>
Subj: [kl] performing?
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 20:43:11 -0400

Someone wrote

> Can you teach music without requiring performance? ... <

Yes you can. It all depends on what people want to make music for.
Some people are quite happy to play some anonymous role in a symphony
orchestra, or, even more anonymously, in a wind band as third clarinet.
Others strive to play whatever they can as best as they can, but know they
will never be able to play it in public because stage fright is so
overwhelming (I am one of them). And some really hope to be able to become a
performer.

I have been teaching all these categories. My first pupil, a saxophone
player, never had any aspiration to play in front of an audience. She lost
most of a finger, when she was sixteen years old, but her husband prepared a
saxophone for her so she can play it, and she is a very good player,
considering she plays only four years now. We performed some swing music
together in the local Maartensdijk competition last year, together with a
duet for two flutes by Kuhlau, but both of us were too nervous to play the
way we can play.

Most of my students just play for fun. Even if they did not start an
instrument with the intention to participate in the band, they have vry good
feelings in sitting between the others, producing six correct and five
incorrect notes the first time, and feeling they improve on it. As one of my
twelve-years-old ones expressed it: ''It makes it more fun to see you can
play something. Afterwards it is even more fun to see the piece we skipped
because it was too difficult is easy now.''

So ''yes, you can''.

Rien

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