The Clarinet BBoard

Re: beginning to teach clarinet

Author: kdk  Date:   2011-10-24 02:03 A few reactions: DanzClarinerd wrote: > > has a decent horn to play on. a yamaha-250. > she is eager to get better, and i have agreed to give her > lessons for a year. she has trouble getting a decent tone out, The horn may be decent, but is it in good repair? If there are leaks or other mechanical problems, they could be a partial cause of her problems with tone production. Encourage her to have the instrument checked by a competent repair tech. Also make sure the mouthpiece is in good condition. Lots of students do considerable damage to their mouthpieces before they really learn how to handle them. Any nicks, scratches, etc. especially along any of the rails could cause problems with tone. And, to state the obvious, if she isn't choosing her reeds with at least a little awareness of quality and is playing on unresponsive reeds, she's defeated before she plays a note. > and a little trouble tonguing at a tempo faster than 130. We need to assume that you, as her teacher, are able to manage this better at a faster speed than she can. You have to try to hear what she might be doing wrong. Diagnosis is your main job as a teacher. It can help if you can reproduce the problem (or maybe remember a time when you had the same problem) - then you'll be closer to being able to suggest solutions. > I was curious if any of you have had experienced teaching > older players, and what methods are best to use. Older players??? When I think of an "older player," I think of someone at least past 25. To be serious, this young lady is a third year adolescent student. She can probably learn faster and more easily than a 12-year-old who is in the third year of playing because many of her fine motor skills and her verbal abilities are better developed Your relationship is a little different because you and she are more contemporaries than would be the case if you were teaching a twelve-year-old. But she's by no means "older" in any meaningful sense of the word. The only differences are that you can probably get away with bigger words, more complex sentences and be more explicitly analytic than you might with a 12-year-old. And you may (depending on the student) be able to concentrate on more detail than a younger student would have the patience for. > i myself teach > 12ths, breath control, major scales and minor (if majors are > learned), chromatic scales and basic clarinet care. With all respect, since you're just starting on this road, you don't teach 12ths or scales or other basic musical materials. The student *learns* to play them (or doesn't). Except for some possible explanation of the basic structures involved, learning to execute the material is really out of any *teacher's* control and in the hands of the *learner.* In a sense, you don't teach physical acts like breathing, either. All you can do is try to describe what needs to be done (see the thread on "Breathing"). The student still has to find her own way to apply the description to her own playing. Your role at your stage of development as a teacher is primarily to hear problems in your student's playing, diagnose their causes as best you can and, in one way or another (there are many possible approaches), suggest possible solutions, which, again, the *learner* must find a way to implement. You as the teacher need to be aware enough of your own technique and musical reactions and imaginative enough in analyzing what your student produces to be able to act as a guide to the student's discoveries of what works well and what fails to produce good results. All of this is probably less specific than you were hoping for, but there's no cookbook approach to good teaching, which is what makes it both challenging and rewarding. Good luck with it. Karl

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