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Re: Re : Tone and it's production

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2013-01-06 16:11

Saying that you are a "Clarinet performance major" implies, I think, that you're studying at the college or university level with a clarinet teacher who works with you on a regular basis. These are all areas in which this teacher should be in the best position to offer help.

One problem that seems to come through in your post, which underlies the rest, is that you don't seem to have a concept of your own of what you want to or should sound like. You're experimenting with "embouchure, tongue placement, using the 'aaahh' 'eeee' 'ooo' and et cetera" and are "still being greeted with comments that my tone was not fantastic enough." What is "fantastic enough?" Your own ears are often your best teachers, but only if you have a fairly clear idea of what you're listening for. You write that "even when I ... felt that I had slowly gain a respectable tone, that it was largely not well received" by your teachers and fellow students. Are you striving toward a different ideal sound and are maybe in the wrong school environment? Or are you simply trying to satisfy various, perhaps even conflicting, demands by others (hopefully you're listening more to the teaching staff than to other students) without having formed a clear concept of your own that you want to achieve? Changing things without a goal is a blind path that prevents you from ever knowing whether you've succeeded or not. Changing too many things at once risks having a destructive change cancel out a beneficial one.

Squeaking isn't a surprising outcome when you start to make many changes in your blowing technique. Something you've changed may have caused tension and inflexibility (making the change probably destructive). Air leaks in my experience come from fairly specific approaches to embouchure formation (unless they're just the result of fatigue late in a playing session). This should again be between you and your principal teacher, but I don't think it should generally take months to cure a leak that results from embouchure formation unless you have a serious muscular weakness on one side of your mouth. Of course, some clarinetists, including major performers, don't consider a slight air leak to be a flaw so long as the sound doesn't reach the audience.

Karl

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