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Rightly confused

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-01-03 21:13

Tyler wrote in another thread:

>>...all this mess is getting me a little frustrated. I feel like I'm always going back to basics, correcting bad habits, trying to decide between pedagogical theories, etc. Seems like I'm 'stuck' sometimes.>>

Something that strikes me about this board, exemplified perhaps by what Tyler writes above, is that it tends to be about what to do when we play the clarinet.

I think the board would be a much better resource if it were more about what's so when we play the clarinet. We don't have to be able to be explicit about what we do, even if the pedagogues want to tell us we should.

In the end, we want to make music when we play the clarinet. We want to make the clarinet do what we want -- or rather, what the music wants.

Those of us who play the clarinet on a professional level know that there are different solutions to the problem of making the clarinet do what we want. For example, if we understand that the embouchure both holds the reed against the mouthpiece in loud dynamics, and controls the upper partials by subtle damping, we may find our own way to do that subtle damping, because we apply an exquisitely controllable muscle to the reed -- and yet still are not able to describe exactly what we do in detail.

I spent some time here trying to say 'what's so' about the abdominal muscles and the diaphragm. And, if you understand what I said, you have some leverage on what other people say you 'should' do. You don't take them too seriously as a result.

There are equally factual things you can say about what the tongue does in staccato. These facts don't tell you in detail how you should do those things. They leave that up to you -- but they don't stop you from trying out all the dogmatic pronouncements to see if any of them work.

I have to say that I don't try to control what my tongue actually does when I play staccato. I just know about what it needs to do in general -- in detail.

Tongue position -- I have to say that I know that my tongue takes up many different positions as I play, just as it takes up many different positions as I talk. See:

http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2003/10/000046.txt

...which was a surprise to me.

But when I play, I know that if my mouth shape is such as to 'catch' the resonance of a given note -- open G on the A clarinet is a good example -- then that note will stick out. I know that altering my mouth shape by raising my tongue around where the note occurs gets rid of the problem. So I allow my tongue to learn the positions that will work when I play. But I don't have an experience of what it actually does.

Notice that the very characterisation 'will stick out' puts the problem in a context that isn't just about your sound on one note. What we do mostly is to play melodies. And if not that, certainly intervals.

In fact, because our sound is judged not just on one note, the whole concept of 'a clarinet sound' is suspect. Some notes need to be resonant, some not.

What constitutes 'your' sound, given that?

What's 'the' sound of your voice, come to that?

I'd say, we have to understand what lies behind what we do, without necessarily understanding exactly what we do in detail. So, we're rightly confused on that lower level.

Tony

Post Edited (2006-01-03 21:37)

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Rightly confused new

Tony Pay

2006-01-03 21:13