Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2010-05-31 13:26
Karl wrote:
>> Tony, out of curiosity, apart from trying your students' equipment to diagnose a specific playing problem, do you normally demonstrate on your own clarinet or on the students'?>>
I normally demonstrate on my own. I have on occasion demonstrated on a student's instrument if for some reason my own isn't available.
I started to write a post about the various reasons why it can be useful to try someone else's instrument 'as is' -- that is, without changing it in any way from what they have just played on, and with their sound still in your ears -- but I think I'll just give a couple of examples, along with the general remark that making the experiment is often a useful corrective to the wrong assumptions we all tend to make about what sort of setup produces what sort of sound.
At the most basic level, a teacher may want to try a student's setup in order to make reasonably sure that what they are asking the student to do is actually possible on that particular reed and mouthpiece. But beyond that, it can be most instructive to try a colleague's instrument. I have already described here how I was able to try Reiner Wehle's Wurlitzers, and what that experience taught me about those instruments when they're properly set up.
And I well remember coaching a student period instrument group in Mozart K388, and finally offering the frustrated first clarinettist my own instrument to try.
"My God, it feels like….like a CLARINET!" she said.
She thought it was spozed to feel like a piece of rubbish, you see; that judgement seemed to be indicated by all her previous experience with period instruments, especially her own. And of course, after that, she was in a position to do better.
I think what can be learned cuts both ways. You can learn that the setup is important, and that you may have been making unnecessarily heavy weather -- as I learned from Reiner about modern German clarinets. But you can also learn that it may be possible to get good results on a colleague's setup -- after all, THEY do -- even though you yourself would have dismissed that particular setup out of hand to start with. That realisation may lead you to explore other ways the instrument may 'feel', and go beyond sticking to what seems normal to you just because you've got used to it being that way. You may begin to choose different sorts of reeds.
Apropos reeds -- final story, with yet another moral: as a student, I had to play a Brahms sonata in the second half of a clarinet concert, and was having terrible reed trouble. A friend of mine played most beautifully in the first half of the concert, and I persuaded him to lend me his reed for my own effort, figuring that, even though our mouthpieces were slightly different, what he had played on so well had to be immediately better for me than what I was struggling with.
Wrong:-)
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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