Klarinet Archive - Posting 000315.txt from 2003/03

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Piano and Clarinet Technique
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 11:36:14 -0500

Christy Erickson wrote,
>Does anyone else here play piano and clarinet? [snip]
>[A]s my piano technique has improved and strengthened
>along with the practice, my clarinet technique has improved
>also. I've noticed this in the past also and just wondered
>if anyone else here has had that experience or if anyone
>uses piano technique exercises to help with their clarinet
>technique.

At least half of what I can do on the clarinet I learned from piano
lessons, including nearly everything I know (or think I know...) about
music theory. Since children can start piano younger than clarinet, I
think piano is an excellent way to teach music-reading skills. Children's
brains learn to read music easily at about the same time they learn to read
words. They're too young for the clarinet at that point--too small to
support such a big instrument. The piano also develops the ambidexterity a
clarinet player needs. Kids can learn to use both hands and read music
from a recorder, but the keyboard makes harmony, counterpoint and polyphony
visible and obvious, in a way that no single-voiced instrument can do.

The keyboard also helps teach musicianship, because learning to put music
theory into practice is not just a matter of learning to read one's own
part and then watching the conductor and listening or paying attention to
the people playing the other parts in a band or an orchestra. Watching and
listening are passive. Just watching and listening keep the voices
separate, even if they're "together" in the sense of accurately following
the conductor's beat. On the keyboard, it's possible to think of each hand
or even each finger as a musician playing its own part, yet it's not
natural to think that way, since the student old enough to learn the piano
already has a sense of his or her own body as a whole unit. Those are both
*my* hands, even when they're playing two (or more) completely different
phrases or patterns. The left hand can't avoid knowing what the right hand
is doing! Therefore the lessons about ensemble playing sink in more
naturally for someone learning on a keyboard than for someone directing the
whole body to play just one line of music.

Playing the clarinet in my high school orchestra, I sometimes imagined that
I was one digit of a millipede-like creature. Ideally, all the orchestral
fingers connected to one collective brain, in which whatever I did with my
clarinet was in part a reaction to what other people did, but also, in
part, a cause of what they did. We were not good enough to become some
wise giant millipede from outer space, taking over the universe with a
phenominally well-organized brain. If sound were a picture, our collective
brain would have looked like an "Alien Autopsy" photo. But the kids who
studied any instrument privately played not only with better technique but
with more musicianship, and it seemed to me that the kids who studied piano
had a major advantage over those who didn't when it came to understanding
the whole score instead of just spinning out their one thin line at a time.

I don't think the keyboard is *necessary* to develop musicianship. Any
instrument will do, if the student takes an interest. The piano couldn't
save me from myself, that's for sure. I ended up becoming too
self-critical and developing such uncontrollable stage fright that for the
last 35 years, I've been unable to participate in ensemble playing or even
practice where I know that someone can overhear me. But I do remember a
rare but deep satisfaction when an ensemble would come together as a whole
musical organism instead of a collection of noises.

Watch a fine chamber music group that's played together for years: They
don't just play instruments, they dance with each other. Even if they
don't seem to look at each other a lot, their body movements, especially
the small, discrete, unconscious-looking ones, synchronize. There's an ebb
and flow, rather like jellyfish, hermit crabs and bright fish moving in a
tidepool, their fins, soft bodies, feelers and tentacles pulsing with the
waves, not all alike, but together, even if "together" sometimes means
darting apart. Good musicians sense their music and ride it, the way the
tidepool creatures respond to the water but also take control of their
place in it, to ride with the waves. That's what the keyboard teaches so
well, since the same brain constantly must act and react to (control and
respond to; direct and accept) all the voices at once. The actions of
swimming or diving or resting on the bottom all change the flow of the
current for everyone else in the pool.

Of course the tidepool creatures don't *produce* the water, but I don't
quite think of music as something we *make*. Even when it's not already
written down by a composer, even when it's improvised, it seems more like
something that's out there already, where we can sense the current and
slide into it, even learn to direct it, if we don't splash around too much.
Sound, intervals and polyphony are all around us in nature for anyone who
wonders why a falling tree makes a boom while twigs rubbing together in the
wind make a squeak, wind in the same tree makes a hiss and pebbles tumbling
downhill make a rattle.

I keep coming back to that archaeological discovery of a Neanderthal flute,
made of a cave bear bone, with holes in the correct positions to play a
diatonic scale. Either our ancestors got that scale from the Neanderthals,
or they got it from us before they became extinct, or we both got it from
some common ancestor, some primordial Orpheus who died more than 40,000
years ago, before our species diverged. That scale, surviving as a
mathematical foundation of modern music theory, proves its ancient ancestry
in the form of that bone pipe, not a keyboard.

Lelia Loban
lelialoban@-----.net
New address!

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