Klarinet Archive - Posting 000035.txt from 2010/02

From: "Benjamin Maas" <benmaas@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Buck up friends. It's going to get worse
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:24:56 -0500

Back in the mid-90's, when I was a member of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, we
did a pretty major tour of Japan (17 cities in 4 weeks). In a number of the
cities we visited, we would perform a piece that was written for these band
competitions with a local group. Like these videos, they would also play
from memory with absolute precision.

When we started to talk with some of these students, we would also find out
that in almost all cases, they had been working on this piece all year long.
(ie we were touring in June and they started work back in September).

The pieces we played were not terribly difficult, although they often
sounded hard. Our band put them together in a few rehearsals without issue.
When the local groups weren't playing with us, we would use them as encore
works.

Thinking back, the thing that amazed us was not the fact that they could
play these works at such a high level, but the fact that they could play
them for so long. In the US, groups of similar quality probably would have
put them together faster, used music and then moved on to learn something
else. Perhaps that last percent of accuracy and memory would be missing,
but there would be more excitement because of the lack of boredom.

Still an impressive video, though.

--Ben

Benjamin Maas
Fifth Circle Audio
Long Beach, CA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Osborn
> Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 9:22 AM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] Buck up friends. It's going to get worse
>
> Wow! Thanks for sharing, Dan!
>
> They are very impressive. There are definitely some aspects of
> Japanese musical education that are worth emulating. However, let me
> tell you a story from when I was travelin in Japan in 2007 performing
> Daugherty's "Brooklyn Bridge."
>
> We were preforming with our host schools and at festivals with
> multiple schools - junior high, high school, and
> university. Everyone played from memory. I got to work with several
> clarinet sections. Everyone from about 7th-8th grade on could play
> the Weber Concertino from memory without any mistakes. That was very
> impressive. However, when they got to be seniors in high school,
> still the only solo they knew was the Weber Concertino from
> memory. They never learned anything else, and their interpretation
> never matured. In fact, their interpretation was never allowed to
> mature. When I would try to get them to change a crescendo into a
> diminuendo, they couldn't. When I asked them what kind of expression
> they thought should go in a particular passage, none of them could
> answer and many didn't understand the question, even with a
> translator. Weber was just how it was done, immutable, unchangable,
> impersonal.
>
> I'm not saying that this is how those kids in the video are, but that
> may be the only piece they know, and the've spent two years learning
> it. Even if that's true, it's impressive. There are some aspects of
> western music education that are also great.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sean Osborn
> www.osbornmusic.com
>

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