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Re: good books for sight reading

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2020-09-13 01:17

Karl,

I responded to SunnyDaze's question by taking a very long view of what
sight reading might mean and require. Short range, try simple scales and arpeggios, duets like Klose's, an automated program that gives you control over the level of difficulty, and some exploration into choros. I like choros because they are so strong in both the melodic element and the rhythmic placement that they force you to pay attention to everything--the notes and the time division. (And you can get over a hundred of them online for free). Fred Lipsius' book can be useful to clarinetists because they don't see anything much like his rhythm patterns in the Rose, Baermann, Klose, Cavallini, JeanJean orbit, but in the music of today (and at least the last 50 years) these rhythms are ubiquitous. I believe he learned at Eastman that classically trained players need to recognize the rhythms of jazz and commercial music that the standard etude books don't cover.

Long-range, some of the ideas here came from the late Lonnie Shetter who played with the North State Texas Jazz Ensemble, worked as a studio player in Los Angeles and recorded with Don Ellis in his famous mixed-meter band of the 1970s. He is one of the few studio guys who actually made the cut to play the raga-like rhythms in that band's charts. Multiple and odd meters aside, he noted that in many jazz and advanced commercial charts arrangers write accidentals in and dispense with key signatures. This requires a sight reader to know and respond to each note "by any name it can take." The chord book by Joe Viola (fondly remembered as a teacher at Berkelee School of Music) is wonderful for presenting all the most encountered chords and extensions and the notes that comprise them in all their guises. Intermediate clarinet students can easily play through about three quarters of the book. The gaps (and the gasps) come with the rest, but they go away if you practice the chords slowly and keep saying to yourself "this is a familiar pattern and I know all these notes but under different names." After a while you get to know them under ALL their names, and your sight recognition and reading improves. As you say, practically speaking, on most gigs players do not encounter lots of double flats and sharps but still it helps to have the confidence to play on the page whatever notes come up. Regular work in Viola's book improved the accuracy of my sight reading more than anything other than Joe Allard's advanced rhythm book.

Oliver Nelson's patterns are not bizarre; they are from notebooks that he complied to spur his own creative imagination as a gifted tenor sax player and arranger. They are just off the beaten path for classical clarinetists but they shouldn't be. The same can be said for the Bugs Bowers and Lennie Neihaus books. The rhythm and harmonic conceptions in them (dating from 1950s jazz) should be part of every working clarinetist's vocabulary. Julian Bliss (a Wayne Shorter fan) has been pointing out the need for this sort of thing and Jon Manasse has a YouTube video playing a bop duet with his son. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAfW6npL-UQ. By embracing styles and sight reading experiences outside the narrow classical/romantic tradition, classical players do not become less adept; they gain stylistic perspective and flexibility.

Post Edited (2020-09-13 16:28)

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