Author: brycon
Date: 2021-03-18 17:40
Quote:
Never really thought about rhythm moving from one hand to the other. I usually play C, F, G major with BOTH left and right pinkies down going up (or down) because it avoids any gap in note and it would be necessary on a German horn anyway. Also I find myself using keys more from both rather than one or the other.
Yes, there's a rhythm to the right hand in my F major scale example. But what's important is that there's always a sense of rhythm to technique, and for good players, it's a much more important facet of technique than keeping your fingers close to the keys.
Maybe one more example to show the point. Finger through the Alberti bass passage at the end of the Mozart exposition. Assuming you're playing a French system, the left-hand ring finger will move up and down from it's tone hole in eighth-note pulses; the right-hand index and ring fingers will move up and down in quarters except for beat 4, where they join the eighths; and the right-hand middle finger will move mostly in eighths, on beats 1, 2, and 4, but in quarters on beat 2.
Among other things, the steadiness of the eighth notes in the left hand combined with the rhythmic integrity of the right hand, playing accurate quarters to and matching eighth notes with the motoric left-hand ring finger, are important technical aspects of playing this passage well. And while I myself don't pedantically think through passages this way, because I'm unconsciously competent in terms of good technique, it can help students who are struggling.
Quote:
The piano may be a poor analogy because one moves up and down the keyboard but with clarinet it is more (in my opinion) like the typewriter. I tell students that if you move your hands around you can wind up hitting keys or part of tone holes you don't want to hit in a similar way one begins to type gibberish if one's hand or the other shifts off the home key position.
Yes, pianists shift their hands up and down the keyboard. But for music where the position remains set--the opening phrase of Mozarts K. 545, for example--the finger motion is very similar to clarinet.
An exercise I do with good students--usually the types who want to please their teachers and therefore developed terrible habits from trying to keep their fingers ludicrously close to the clarinet--is to have them sit at the keyboard and play C-D-E-F-G-F-E-D-C, which remains in a single position. (I myself use a Brahms trill exercise as a similar finger "warmup.") The students can then hear which of their fingers moves improperly much more easily than they can while playing the clarinet. Once they can play the scale segment well, with good rhythm, articulation, etc., I'll have them play it while blowing air through a coffee stir straw. And finally, we'll play some games, such as do a crescendo-decrescedo through the straw while playing piano on the keyboard and so on. I find this exercise gets their fingers moving much more fluidly and naturally than much of the advice I read here.
But because you mentioned hand-position changes on the keyboard, I should point out that I think the hand position on the clarinet also engages in shifts. The left-hand throat-tone G# key or the right-hand side trill keys, for instance, both require a shift or pivot with your wrist. If you try to maintain your hand position (and yes, keep your fingers hovering above the tone holes) while engaging these keys, it's going to screw up your technique and possibly introduce unnecessary tension. So these shifts, such as occurs in the clarion F to Bb leaps in the second movement of Beethoven's 6 symphony, require some practicing. But again, it's that sort of thinking, not mindlessly keeping fingers hovering above keys, that leads to good technical facility.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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