Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-07-24 21:54
Nathan--here's my take.
Perhaps, correctly, you are taking measure 150 slower, playing it correctly rather than at speed incorrectly. If so, bravo.
Playing incorrectly at speed only reinforces mistakes that have to be unlearned.
And if you are taking it slower, the intonation differences on this high D, with and without the right pinky on the clarion Eb lever are more noticeable.
If so, don't worry about these intonation differences, as when you play it at speed it will be less noticeable.
Such tradeoffs of ease of play versus pleasantry of pitch lie in many places on the clarinet as tradeoffs we must come to accept as clarinet players. For example, the trill from throat Bb to clarion C is much faster and easier when taken with a right hand trill key that lies in the upper joint, but its sound/pitch may not meet that of a full fingered clarion C.
Such is clarinet life.
Mr. Pay's compromise of keeping the pinky down for the C# is a good one both from a playability and temperament (the pitch interval between the notes) standpoint, but I'd consider it a more advanced skill. "Time" is always the obstacle in advancement. And time you may have to spend perfecting this has to be balanced with time you are taking away from other obstacles you'll face with playing: this piece or others.
But asking the right hand's middle finger and pinky to go up and down in perfect unison, like a see saw, where the ring finger is the fulcrum, as you were doing, is, IMHO, just too much to ask for the gain in intonation from such steps. Just leave the pinky off.
The second factor you may have to deal with is the mental anticipation of screwing this up. The great irony in play is how we tense up for the hardest phrases, which paradoxically enough is the time we need to be most relaxed to play them well.
If you are experiencing this slow down the metronome. Perfect it at one tempo before going 1 click faster at a time. Then tomorrow, when all of these advancements have seem to gone away, repeat.
They're not gone, as you'll get up to speed faster each day, or each few days.
Then practice this at different slower and faster tempos. See if you can eventually take it faster than tempo so when performance comes, the task will seem relatively easy (like jump training with ankle weights on.)
(When drilling this with students I call it "mystery metronome." Years back I wrote a simple computer program with a [pseudo] random number generator to calculate a random tempo within a window of speeds, that would change tempo after the number of clicks (or randomly) I deemed it to do so.)
Good luck!
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