Author: mrn
Date: 2010-02-20 22:08
clarinetmc wrote:
Quote:
It seems as though pretty much everyone who was won a major job in the last few years has been playing a Vandoren mouthpiece.
Pretty much everyone who plays in a high school or community band and will never win a major playing job in his/her life plays on Vandoren mouthpieces, too. Correlation doesn't equal causation.
The only thing that matters is whether you can get good results with what you have.
To do the best you are capable of, you need to get to the point where you can trust your own judgment about what is good and what is not good. I don't play clarinet for a living, but I think that's generally sound advice for anyone in any field.
If you have good musical judgment, but don't trust it, you won't ever reach your full potential. And if you have bad or under-developed musical judgment, you are going to be at a serious disadvantage in auditions, anyway, so you might as well begin to trust your own instincts now--in the long run, it's the only way you'll be able to develop them, anyway.
So if you feel you get better results with your Hawkins mouthpiece than you do with a Vandoren, then you need to stick with the Hawkins--plain and simple.
The fact that you asked this question suggests that you believe there is some special quality about these players' playing that is imperceptible to you but that makes the difference between winning an audition and not--you seem to believe that using the same mouthpiece as they do will give you this imperceptible quality that you lack.
I think that's baloney. I firmly believe that you cannot reliably produce, duplicate, or emulate what you cannot perceive. A mouthpiece can never make up for a lack of musical perception. Instead of asking yourself what mouthpiece so-and-so uses, you ought to be asking yourself what it is about the way they play that's good. If you can't figure it out yourself, then ask somebody else to tell you what they hear, so you can learn to hear it for yourself. That's the function of a good teacher, after all--it's not to give you an easy formula for success, but to teach you how to find your own way (which is harder, but nonetheless absolutely essential).
Incidentally, I once watched a video masterclass presented by a professional musician (whose name escapes me, unfortunately) who remarked that the #1 reason people get eliminated in professional auditions is *rhythm*.
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