Klarinet Archive - Posting 000674.txt from 2001/10

From: "Karl Krelove" <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Beginners and Chalumeau (was If you are interested)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 11:27:24 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Pay [mailto:Tony@-----.uk]
> Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2001 6:00 AM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] If you are interested
>
> (long snip) There's a strong and IMO good tradition
> of basing clarinet sound on the chalumeau register rather than the
> clarinet register, so that the instrument is thought of 'from the bottom
> up' rather than 'from the top down'. Because a lot of the best tunes
> are in the clarinet register, we can tend to think too much in the
> second way...
>
> The Israeli clarinet player Yona Ettlinger used to insist that all his
> beginning students at the Guildhall play nothing but long notes in the
> chalumeau for weeks on end. (Some said months, but perhaps they were
> exaggerating.) I don't do that myself, but it bears thinking about.
>
This confuses me a little, Tony. It's always appeared to me to be the case
that the longer young students remain exclusively in the chalumeau register,
the longer they remain able build embouchure habits that make anything
higher impossible for them to produce. Maybe it's because I'm not meticulous
enough with young students who, in general, only do things "because I told
them to" rather than out of any internalized understanding of what they're
trying to accomplish. But I find that the chalumeau is so much more
forgiving of inefficient "addressing" (as you frequently call it) of the
mouthpiece/reed/instrument that it isn't until they get to the next set of
twelfths that they begin to have a reason to do basic things efficiently. In
other words, they can "get away" with much more below the break and have no
intrinsic reason to change anything until the sound won't come out or is so
ugly that they can't stand it. Since non-production is nearly impossible in
the chalumeau and "ugly" tends to have a different meaning to a ten year old
who has never played an instrument than it has for me, I find it hard, even
if I hear an obvious problem in embouchure or reed approach, to motivate
many young beginning students to change until the second register forces
them to.

Am I missing something in Ettlinger's approach, or is he dealing with
significantly different students at Guildhall than I do here in
Pennsylvania, USA?

Karl Krelove

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