Klarinet Archive - Posting 000651.txt from 2001/09

From: "Karl Krelove" <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Re: klarinet Digest 19 Sep 2001 08:15:00 -0000 Issue 3343
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 14:44:00 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Stoll [mailto:peterstoll2000@-----.ca]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 2:03 PM
>
> <snip>
> It was as if her throat was constricting or something,
> the tone colour was noticeably "choked off" and full
> of "white noise".
>
Peter,

You may have hit the nail on the head yourself here. Students often add all
kinds of tension to the blowing apparatus when they "tongue". Rather than
going after "air
intensity, embouchure pressure, angle of horn, height of back of tongue" and
all the other individual parts that may be getting screwed up by tightness,
it may be better to just start from what she does correctly ("a nice pure
sound in legato") and build on it carefully. Tonguing (I'm preaching to the
choir, I know) is not so much "attacking" as "stopping" and "releasing" the
reed while maintaining the same tone production (embouchure, oral
positioning and relaxation, breathing and breath support and all the other
things that allow the sound to come out freely and in tune). Starting from a
good legato, anything other than the tongue movement it takes to stop the
reed from vibrating is likely to cause trouble, whether a hiss or some other
problem.

FWIW.

Karl Krelove

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