Klarinet Archive - Posting 000189.txt from 2005/04

From: "Margaret Thornhill" <clarinetstudio@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] legendary teachers and their Methods
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 15:21:43 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:
>However, those teachers become legendary in a rather less productive way.
>Their
teaching gets stripped of its context, and isolated statements of theirs are
presented as gospel... I actually have the Russianoff books, and I have to
say that in several regards I find them very lacking, even
>though there is a lot of useful stuff..I suppose what I want to say here
>about ´legendary teachers´ is: you can´t *do anything* with them -- unless
>you can, of course, in which case the thing to do is go and visit them.
But otherwise, if you weren´t there, you missed it>.

All true.

It's certain that famous teachers (especially the dead ones)get reduced to
hearsay. I suppose their written materials do mean the most to people who
knew them, but you can't blame them for trying the impossible, which is, to
convey in print how to be a better musician!

I'm quite sorry Russianoff's book is out of print, not just on a personal
level, though I'd rather have those bits of useful stuff (much of which I
don't agree with either!) than have no souvenir save my memory of his famous
salty teaching, where some of the dogma was anti-dogma... I mean, here was a
man who taught repertoire with one hand on the white-out bottle, ready to
eliminate the composer's nuances and write in his own! On your copy, too.

Russianoff's method wasn't for someone who is just starting, though it
*looks* like it should be a home-study method. I've had at least one
advanced student who found it pretty interesting recreational reading. I
don't think russianoff used it in a sequential way with his students,
either,(though I'd love to hear from any of his long-term students on that
issue.)

My guess is that both he and Mazzeo (and others of their generation) wrote
analytical text out of frustration with the mostly sparse and useless text
in the pedagogical materials that preceded them, Klose being only one
example.

Margaret

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org