 The Clarinet BBoard
|
Author: kawallace91
Date: 2011-11-12 17:48
I'm having my junior recital in early April, now less than 5 months away! My professor and I haven't decided on repertoire quite yet, but it's a half recital, so I imagine about 30-40 minutes of music(?) I'm splitting it with another person, so we'll likely be alternating pieces, and we'll have an intermission.
I've never given solo performances more than probably 8-10 minutes in length, and that is usually enough to get me pretty tired. I think I tend to bite more with my embouchure and not take as good breaths because of nerves and everything, so I'm worried about getting worn out. I know obviously building endurance requires playing more, but I'm wondering what people have found to be the best approaches to it. I'm looking for ideas of what I can do now while I still have quite a bit of time left and also what I should do as the time gets closer.
Insight from anyone with experience would be appreciated! I'm really excited (although I know I'll be nervous later!) and want things to go well!
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: johng ★2017
Date: 2011-11-12 18:12
You got it. Play more. In my opinion you cannot lose by getting a good scale book and playing from it every day....slowly. Not only do you build the endurance you want for your recital, but you also gain by working on the note-to-note movements that will make your playing more clear and beautiful.
Consider backing off a little with your practicing just before the recital. This sounds counterintuitive, but by that time you should have the music down and a little relaxing helps.
John Gibson, Founder of JB Linear Music, www.music4woodwinds.com
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2011-11-12 19:36
Kelly -
You can do it, but you have to take it seriously and make the commitment to give total attention to the clarinet, at least for a while. You may or may not become a professional player, but will never succeed unless you make it your life. School is the time to discover whether you have what it takes. Use these five months to find out.
You build endurance the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice. Particularly slow scales and arpeggios. Five months is more than enough time, but you must work on it every day. In the beginning, you'll be exhausted after an hour, but 2 hours is achievable within a month, and 4 hours within 2 months.
Go into a practice room in the morning with your Baermann III and your Klose, Langenus, Lazarus or other method book, plus a metronome. Open B-III at random, pick an exercise, start the metronome at 60 and play one note per click, "engraving" the patterns into your muscle memory. You'll lose concentration after a minute or two. The moment you do, stop and rest l minute and do it again, rest a minute and do it a third time.
Then take a 5 minute break and fool around for a couple of minutes with a song you know perfectly. It could even be Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The purpose is to clear your mind and relax your body.
Next, turn to the etudes in the intermediate section of a method book. Play at a bit under your best speed and make them musical, as if you were playing to That Special Person. Keep going as long as possible, resting for short periods as necessary. Then go to the water fountain and come back to do it again. And a third time.
Repeat in the early afternoon and again in the evening.
In the interim, do away-from-the-instrument exercises to build up your embouchure and wind.
For embouchure, see http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=358978&t=358972 .
For wind, go to the snack bar and get 3 plastic coffee stirrers, the kind with a small hole down the center. Hold these between your lips, take a good but not excessive breath and blow as long as you can with medium pressure -- not enough to get light-headed. (Grab a couple of paper napkins, to, since condensation will drip out.)
If you want something more formal, go to one of the wind faculty members and ask for a Breath Builder, or buy one at http://windsongpress.x-shops.com/store/product.php?productid=16134&cat=253&page=1.
---------------------------------------------------
Now some tough talk. Professional players get that way by (1) having the talent and (2) out-working everybody else. If you take a day off, believe me there are people who are in the practice room getting a day ahead of you. Now is your best and only chance . You have hours of time every day when you're not in classes or studying. Once you graduate, earning a living sucks up that extra time. If you don't make it now, then you never will.
If this is not the life for you, there's no shame. (It wasn't for me.) But it's now or never.
Ken Shaw
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: Trevor M
Date: 2011-11-12 21:31
Hiya Ms. Wallace,
I had some good and some (very) bad recitals in college. The bad ones were a really good learning experience- hopefully one you won't have to have, though. : )
Everybody's nervous system is wired a little differently, and things that are easy in the practice room can be difficult or impossible if you're suffering from too much adrenaline pumping through your system. It can cause you to make bad decisions.
I did two things for this. First, I asked strangers in the hall of the music department if they'd listen to me play a little since I was getting ready for a recital, etc etc. People who hang around in music departments are usually happy to oblige. I also asked some music history or music appreciation teachers if I could perform something from my recital for their class if it suited their curriculum. A lot of profs are very happy to have 'real' music. Performing mini-recitals like this makes the real recital less of a psychologically foreign experience. Second, I got some beta blockers and took them. For me, this was a magic bullet: no more adrenaline problems, no shaky unintentional vibrato.
Also: overprepare like crazy. Try to be able to play your pieces through three times rather than just once, and be meticulous about all your breath markings so that you're not tempted to improvise new breaths onstage. Stamina is hard and I don't think there's a way to acquire it easily, no matter how much you mess around with coffee stirrers.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: sfalexi
Date: 2011-11-12 21:52
Quote:
Now some tough talk. Professional players get that way by (1) having the talent and (2) out-working everybody else. If you take a day off, believe me there are people who are in the practice room getting a day ahead of you. Now is your best and only chance . You have hours of time every day when you're not in classes or studying. Once you graduate, earning a living sucks up that extra time. Too true. I really got a passion for music too late in life for me to have the time to spend practicing. But I'm figuring that it's better late than never. The talent is certainly there, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the people who don't get to be REALLY good are not so much a lack of talent, but really a lack of dedication to practicing. A "I can practice tomorrow, but I really wanna go with my friends to the movies tonight" or "I was GONNA practice after lunch, but I'm pretty tired and I practiced yesterday and I'll just practice twice as long tomorrow". It's slow, but those breaks will hurt you in the long run.
Do the practice, keep it steady, and schedule it AROUND distractions if you can't get rid of the distractions.
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: EEBaum
Date: 2011-11-12 22:55
To speak to the contrary, networking is as important to a musical career as practice. Skipping out on parties with friends and colleagues too often can lead you to a situation where you're incredibly skilled but have nowhere and nobody to play with, and can also severely limit your mindset as to the breadth of music's possibilities. Relying on your chops alone may lead you to be good enough to win an orchestral audition, but the same will be true of the other 150 people in the audition room. The people I see performing gigs the least often are at both ends of the spectrum: those who never set foot INTO the practice room, and those who never set foot OUT of it.
Additionally, quantity does NOT equal quantity as far as playing music goes. This applies twofold: Most obviously, as is advocated around here, your practice time has to be of quality -- mindful, directed -- for a large portion of the time. However, the much more neglected angle of this is that playing a musical instrument is a FAR more diverse pursuit than putting air through an instrument while twiddling keys accurately. I consider the mechanical aspect of playing the clarinet to be maybe 25-50% of the picture, but typically people spend 95% of their effort on it. State of mind, rhythmic internalization, pushes and pulls, stage presence, passive vs. active involvement, interplay with other musicians, playful meandering, issues of improvisation from the micro to macro level, quality of listening, myriad contextual considerations, awareness of idiosyncracies of the concert experience, etc. Many of these are ignored, glossed over, handled with safety gloves, or treated as side-effects of technique development, when in fact they can and should have quality time spent on them. Lest the performer end up on stage, only able to reproduce what has been technically drilled in the practice room, with a look of deer in headlights, opting for self-medication in order to block out the scariness that results when the stage is different from the practice room.
Lots of time spent on the instrument is definitely completely necessary, and greater instrumental skill opens up more and more possibilities and easy play, but is not anywhere NEAR the total picture.
Back to the initial question, though... if endurance is your problem, regularly playing a lot is key. Spend a lot of time on the type of stuff Ken suggests, but also spend a lot of time just playfully enjoying the instrument, improvising in the corner, blasting off a balcony, playing at the cat, exploring the possibilities the music and the instrument hold. Retaining the joy of playing the instrument, rather than treating everything as a test to conquer, is easy to lose sight of.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
The Clarinet Pages
|
 |
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
