Author: brycon
Date: 2021-05-12 22:22
Quote:
If you have fundamental issues of accuracy, then you need to create a BASE LINE with slow practice. If you personally 'brycon' have not had the need for fundamental work or have NOT had success with slowing things down with students, I might suggest you are in the minority......mozel. But I think most of us can benefit from starting from a place of "sure footedness" that can only be achieved in a manner much like a baby taking its first steps, or as Marcellus once described learning how to tongue properly - "It's like potty training."
The student, though, had issues with intonation and rhythm in a section of Debussy that's already slow. So I'm not sure how slow practice would fix these problems: seems like a canned response to me. If it were me, by contrast, I would practice with a drone or do rhythm and ear-training exercises to improve these facets of my playing. Again, like most practice strategies, slow practice is good for some things but not others.
(A bit of an aside: You must know that babies don't learn to walk by standing up, very slowly taking a left step over and over again for weeks until they feel comfortable with that step, then adding a right step and slowly practicing taking two steps over and over again for weeks, and so on. Instead, they challenge themselves, go for it, make mistakes, fall over a few times, but eventually figure it out. Focusing on perfection just isn't how kids learn things. I suggest clarinetists should learn more like kids and less like adults.)
Quote:
And this is where your teacher's guidance comes in, to help you form goals and work towards them. I'm always really curious what the teacher's perspective is when I read posts from developing players.
Yes. But the point is, if a teacher, player, or internet poster says, "you need to work on intonation," and you therefore set that goal for yourself, until you actually hear for yourself that you do in fact need to work on intonation, progress will be hit or miss.
The work of a teacher, then, isn't so much guiding a student toward proper goals as it is guiding a student toward awareness--uncovering for his or herself what areas need improvement and in what ways. The great writer Walter Benjamin made this distinction in what he called "information" versus "knowledge." A teacher saying "practice slowly" or "improve your intonation" is information; it's cheap and an internet poster can give it to you. Guiding a student toward hearing an intonation problem, which he can therefore fix on his own, is much more valuable.
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