Author: donald
Date: 2018-01-03 00:52
Many times I can think of when I was impressed or inspired, also I can recall hearing a "local hero" play some incredibly technical stuff super fast and impressive but with no expression whatsoever- and vowing to never play like that...
But here is the "aha" moment.
Richard Hawkins played at the Oklahoma Symposium in 1995. I had met him before when he'd done some refacing for the students at OU, and certainly thought he was a pretty good player, but at his OU recital I saw something that teachers had tried to explain to me but I'd never really "got" it...
He played the Denisov sonata, and jumped around the clarinet- and played extreme dynamics- with what seemed to be minimal physical effort. His embouchure stayed steady at all these extremes (I'm sure he adjusted but at a very subtle level). The impression I got was that it was his AIR that was controlling the sound and that the control of the air was happening INSIDE his mouth.
At that time I was a masters student- and had been taught about embouchure/air etc by more than one teacher but never really incorporated much of what I was taught into my playing. Seeing this in action (from fairly close up) somehow reached me. Having played badly for 25 years, I've spent the 23 years since then trying to undo bad habits and improve- and often still visualise that performance.
I've heard many of the greats play, and been inspired- but this performance was a turning point and started a wave of change.
dn
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The Clarinet BBoard
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