Author: seabreeze
Date: 2022-01-09 21:37
With Baermann, "do I just start at the beginning and work through?"
Baermann book 1 is all words, no music. When you get to book 2, the fun starts. Both the original German and the English version edited by Gustave Langenus are on line as free PDFs. You're in good hands with Baermann. Like his father, he was a world-class performer and a pretty fair composer as well. Unlike many pedagogues today, he wrote exercises that are musical and not just mechanical, but his understanding of the mechanics of the clarinet is unsurpassed. He knows what every finger needs to do to get the notes out and he will train your fingers to do the same!
In the Langenus edition of books 1 and 2 combined the finger exercises start on page 29 first in throat register and then higher. Practice these both actually playing them on the clarinet and also just singing the rhythm while you silently finger them. You can practice them silently when you don't even have a clarinet in your hand. His instructions are perennial: "As a matter of course, the above exercises must be practiced very slowly at first and gradually faster until they can be played fluently without mistakes in quick tempos." I suspect that Baermann was a bit of a comedian and his comments were addressed to open mouthed students looking with terror upon what he has set for them to play. In book 3 of the method he has a note on a page of terrifying octave and double octave passages to the effect that "one cannot expect to get through this in one sitting. it must be learned gradually, piece by piece."
The little musical interludes that Baermann writes between finger torture segments even have piano accompaniments and can be performed as real musical pieces if you care to track down the piano parts. If you plow through
all 90 some odd pages of book 2, that could take a year or more. But if you can really play everything "fluently without mistakes in quick tempos" you will also be able to TRANSFER that technique that you have gained to many other compositions, for example by Robert Schuman, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and, yes, Gade as well. And when you read new music, you will often discover that you have already woodshedded many of the passages you encounter. Baermann has concentrated them into his frightful drills so they will be easy to play when you later encounter them in the music of other composers.
Here's a dissertation on Carl Baermann's life: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=ucin1282049217&disposition=inline.
Post Edited (2022-01-09 22:28)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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