Author: brycon
Date: 2018-03-06 06:09
Quote:
When I was in high school and college, my teachers had me spend a lot of time with (post Rose) studies and etudes: Kroepsch, Jeanjean, Polatscheck, Sarlit, and Jettel. My daughter was a clarinet (and math) major as an undergraduate. She studied a lot of solo clarinet literature but was never exposed to etudes like these. I'm wondering what is the place of these and similar etudes in the course of study of today's clarinet students.
I usually do Rose and JeanJean etudes with my students--the JeanJeans because they're often nice music and the Roses simply because they're such a part of American pedagogy and are required at a lot of universities and conservatories.
But to push back against the "in my day, we had to walk 10 miles in the snow..." idea you seem to invoke with regard to etudes, you have to admit that today's young clarinetists, on the whole, are more technically advanced than any other generation.
Maybe the disappearance of etudes (if it actually exists--you seem to be using a very small sample size) only correlates with current students' technical achievement. But for myself, and I'm relatively young, I did Rose and JeanJean in high school and then moved on to Nielsen, Francaix, Copland, etc. as I entered college. Perhaps if I got bogged down going through Kroepsch, Polatscheck, Sarlit, Jettel, Uhl, etc. before getting to "real" music, my technical abilities might not have advanced so quickly. Or perhaps I might have quit clarinet because I would have been stuck playing a bunch of crappy music.
Is it possible, then, that as we've become smarter about practicing, we've simultaneously made a move away from breadth of study and toward depth of study--that is to say, doing well only a few etude books versus doing many etude books? Or maybe we've found repertoire that fills the role of etudes? I myself often practice and assign the Bach violin sonatas and partitas in place Rose etudes; they focus your attention on many of the same issues and, of course, have more music in a single phrase than both the Rose books combined.
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