Klarinet Archive - Posting 000284.txt from 2007/03

From: Margaret Thornhill <clarinetstudio@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Tone: beyond "dark" and "Bright"- unity and variety
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:06:50 -0400

Many advanced students come to me for lessons agonizing over whether
their tone is simply "too bright", just as on this list. Adult students
typically have favorite role models, often some our best players, and if
they can't copy the color of Schifrin -- Morales -- Daniels-- Meyer's
...sound, this frustrates them.

I try to shift my students' attention to what their own, best sound
truly is.
Far more important to good clarinet tone than the angst over dark vs.
bright are the less-discussed virtues of unity and variety.

What most professional players and teachers consider a "good" clarinet
sound today is one with a unified, tonally matched scale. This
consistency of tone is far more important than the actual color of the
sound (unless the tone is really unsupported, harsh, or crude, of
course.) It's my fundamental principle as a teacher that any clarinet
player--of any age and experience level--can have a good tone on at
least one note. Find the note; learn to replicate it; and everything
about that person's playing comes to a higher level.

How to replicate it? If you are a developing player without a teacher
you might try this. Play your beautiful note: loud, soft, in crescendo,
diminuendo, full, resonant. When you've explored all the ways of playing
this note, play it straight and just lift or lower an adjacent
finger,--without changing your breath production or favoring the note in
any way-- slurring to the note above or below. When these truly match,
continue up the scale, returning to the original note occasionally as a
reality check.

Afterward, move on to slow legato scales. Scales by ear, scales by the
book--Baermann, Hamelin-- as long as they are slurred for a start.
Connect to all the registers.

Simple as this exercise seems, this often takes students working with me
many weeks to fully master, though for many, the principle of a matched
tone-- the basic component of a good legato-- is easy to "get" in one
lesson. What is surprising to me is how many advanced players have never
really mastered this step and continue to live with their involuntary
timbral shadings popping out all over the instrument that they can't
fully control. Once a person's full attention is drawn to this area,
things start to change dramatically.

Listeners as well as composers prize variety of colors in musical
performance when the music itself calls for it. To approach the highest
level of playing, true control over variety of tone is achievable only
after a consistent legato (the "unity" I'm talking about above) has been
achieved. A player with a finished quality to her legato is ready to
cultivate the art of choosing to modify tone color for musical effect. A
player who has never really established a unified scale doesn't really
have the control necessary to do this at will. An artist player has been
trained to seek out the moments in the music which call for a
transparent sound, a rich sound, a shimmering directional quality in the
sound, an edgy brightness, a clear pure brightness, a veiled shadow, a
warm, rich dark. All of these can be present in the same player.

Margaret Thornhill
Los Angeles
http://www.margaretthornhill.com

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