 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Fontalvo
Date: 2007-04-24 13:54
Once one has a strong technical foundation. Would your time be well spent only on excerpts or both?
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Author: Gretchen
Date: 2007-04-24 15:04
Both!!!! Etudes will maintain and improve your technical (and musical) foundation. I'm not a believer in exerpts being used as tools for learning. That's what etudes are for. But you can find etudes to help you practice the exerpts! 
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Author: vin
Date: 2007-04-24 16:03
When gearing up to return to the National Symphony after a stint in the military, Robert Marcellus practiced the Polatschek etudes until he could play each one without a mistake and then moved the tempo up and did it again. Etudes are especially difficult because there are no breaks. If you work on etudes in this manner and then apply the same level of concentration to excerpts, your excerpts will be much stronger (and vice versa, if you work on perfecting each excerpt's musical style, your etudes will have better phrasing as well). Work on the music-making in the excerpts, don't just be able to play them technically. That being said, there are plenty of extremely challenging tutti passages in the orchestral literature- don't just practice the solos, get the complete part. There's a difference between having "a strong technical foundation" and "nailing your entire part without fail." The difference is hours of practice and concentration. In short, practice both etudes, excerpts and complete parts with extreme focus.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2007-04-24 21:21
It depends on who you are what you need to accomplish. Unless you can play with perfect fluency in any key, you need to work on technical scale material before you get to etudes or excerpts.
Nobody has a stronger technical foundation than Robert Spring. Yet he spends 45 minutes every day doing scale and arpeggio exercises. See http://www.woodwind.org/OCR/Spring/spring1.html. Listen to some of Spring's amazing recordings and then decide whether you have the basics well enough engraved into your nerves and fingers.
If you've completely worked out an etude, with all the technical spots nailed, playing it again will give you pleasure but won't do a lot of good, unless you switch to working on something else. By all means play Rose 32 #1, but concentrate on making music -- on sending your sound and personality out to the audience.
Listen, for example, to Pablo Casals play the Bach Cello Suites, and work to get his tonal and emotional intensity.
Listen to John McCormack sing almost anything -- The Garden Where the Praties Grow, Il Mio Tesoro, O Sleep Why Dost Thou Leave Me -- and try to produce his singing line. McCormack could leave his audiences in tears. So should you.
Listen to Franco Corelli or Maria Callas and put that kind of operatic thrust into your playing. You won't yell through Rose #1 like Corelli, but it could do a lot of good to put some of that in.
It's the same with orchestral solos. If you toss off Miraculous Mandarin, Gypsy Baron, Nielsen 5th and Daphnis & Chloe before breakfast -- and you are delicate and perfect in Midsummer Night's Dream at the Toscanini tempo -- then it's time to work on the lyrical ones. Your Schubert Unfinished solos should put a lump in the listener's throat. Your Galanta solo should leave people dancing in the aisles.
Listen to the Piatigorsky/Ormandy/Philadelphia recording of the Dvorak Cello Concerto. Ralph McLane makes it as much his concerto as the cello's.
The up and down scale solos in Scheherzade should let the audience know that Sinbad's ship has rolled completely over in a storm. Twice. It needs to leave them dizzy. The little princess solo with snare drum should leave the audience in love.
And how about the simple unison solo with the horn in the Franck Symphony? Can you make it sound like a third instrument -- the combination of clarinet and horn? How many different great tones can you make? http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=94788&t=94788
Technique is is the foundation, but it's not the music.
Ken Shaw
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