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 How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: ruben 
Date:   2025-07-05 13:43

There are rushers and there are draggers. I would say that for every dragger, there are 15 rushers. Do you have any techniques -besides the metronome- to keep oneself or others from doing this? I feel the reason for racing is often psychological: an unconscious, irrational fear of not playing fast enough.

rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com


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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: Paul Aviles 
Date:   2025-07-05 22:54

For me, I found thinking of rhythm more as a "chunk of elapsed time," is more helpful. Counting seconds is a good place to start (60 beats per minute on your metronome). And you can practice anytime you use the microwave. Count down by units of 5, looking away from the counter, then checking at every 0 and 5 to see how well you're doing every time you heat your Hot Pockets.



.............Paul Aviles



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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: kdk 
Date:   2025-07-05 23:13

ruben wrote:

> There are rushers and there are draggers. I would say that for
> every dragger, there are 15 rushers. Do you have any
> techniques -besides the metronome- to keep oneself or others
> from doing this? I feel the reason for racing is often
> psychological: an unconscious, irrational fear of not playing
> fast enough.
>
I think the reason for rushing difficult passagework is usually some level of anxiety about the notes involved in a passage. Not necessarily irrational - the fear may be entirely realistic.

When I catch myself rushing, the result is usually jumbled fingers from unconsciously trying to play too many notes at once. It helps me to sing through the passage so there's no longer any finger coordination involved and then play the passage the way I've just sung it.

Rushing slow, or even moderate lyrical passages depends on how the player hears the music and senses its meaning. Again, singing first in a way you find musical can establish a tempo when you're the only one playing.

In an ensemble situation, of course, we're not individually in control of the tempo. You have to be conscious of the tempo the group is playing, and when you practice those passages away from rehearsal you first have to be able to remember what the conductor's/group's tempo is. If necessary, slow down and sing-then-play to eliminate the muscular tension and work back to the needed tempo (or a little faster, so long as it's under control).

Karl

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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: SecondTry 
Date:   2025-07-06 02:04

On the clarinet board, where if you want "10 opinions you need ask only 4 people" (lol) I think, despite this, we can agree that the following is NOT a method to achieve the OP's objectives.

(BTW: This doesn't happen, it's theater. Teachers who did half of this would be thrown out on their keister. Even Revelli couldn't get away today with half the stuff he did in his tenure.)

https://youtu.be/GBvBu5ErSSo?si=0YkXqS6tGVlG4P3n&t=143

Undesired tempo changes often arise from nerves and exhaustion. Practice, with a slower beat first, addresses both, albeit it creates exhaustion as sure as it develops proficiency with less effort (i.e. endurance,) which also helps stave off some exhaustion.

...a more inspirational approach, if not also theater:

https://youtu.be/ad5pKiflwew?si=QxnDSHRu-pVBmgBL&t=123  :)



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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: Paul Aviles 
Date:   2025-07-06 06:16

Yes, the above snippets are just caricatures of what music looks like to people who are not musicians.



I couldn't possibly be the only person who HATED Mr. Holland's Opus with a passion. Everything was beyond the "suspension of disbelief."



Whiplash is also a cartoon, but there are still folks around who played in Buddy Rich's band who have some interesting stories.




.............Paul Aviles



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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: ruben 
Date:   2025-07-06 10:39

Karl: -great advice: the singing bit! Anxiety brings about a "jump the gun" syndrome. We fear the tricky bits in the music and fear causes haste, which in turn, makes waste. As for rushing slow movements and passages -this also exists- it is often due to impatience. The one thing that often improves with age is the playing of adagios. Youth is impatient.

rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com


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 O.T. - Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: kdk 
Date:   2025-07-06 17:00

Paul Aviles wrote:

> I couldn't possibly be the only person who HATED Mr. Holland's
> Opus with a passion. Everything was beyond the "suspension of
> disbelief."
>
>
At the risk of seriously diverting the thread, I disliked Mr. Holland's Opus for a different reason - futility. In the end, as I remember, nothing anyone did or said mattered. The position was lost and everyone, presumably, went their way.

A little too realistic and close to home in my view at the time (and, although I've been retired from public music education for 18 years, probably still).

I did suggest to a student and her mom a few years ago that they watch Whiplash when my student was having a problem with a band director she thought was unreasonably negative. I told them, basically, "if you think your guy is bad..."

Karl

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 O.T. - Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: kdk 
Date:   2025-07-06 17:02

Paul Aviles wrote:

> I couldn't possibly be the only person who HATED Mr. Holland's
> Opus with a passion. Everything was beyond the "suspension of
> disbelief."
>
>
At the risk of seriously diverting the thread, I disliked Mr. Holland's Opus for a different reason - futility. In the end, as I remember, nothing anyone did or said mattered. The position was lost and everyone, presumably, went their way.

A little too realistic and close to home in my view at the time (and, although I've been retired from public music education for 18 years, probably still).

I did suggest to a student and her mom a few years ago that they watch Whiplash when my student was having a problem with a band director she thought was unreasonably negative. I told them, basically, "if you think your guy is bad..." They told me they had a good laugh as they watched it.

Karl

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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: SecondTry 
Date:   2025-07-06 21:24

> >
> >
> At the risk of seriously diverting the thread, I disliked Mr.
> Holland's Opus for a different reason - futility. In the end,
> as I remember, nothing anyone did or said mattered. The
> position was lost and everyone, presumably, went their way.

Do know Karl that l I completely appreciated where your thoughts above are coming from, particularly with your Music Education background and likely witness to real life threats to arts programs I suspect you've seen. To your point, Louis, the character which Mr. Holland spends time working on the rhythm of this thread, as I recall, is killed in Viet Nam.

And at the end of the movie when budget cuts effect Mr. Holland's district's music program, but not core programs like English, I remember the quote, which I'm sure I'm only paraphrasing, about "without music, what will there be to write about."

But that said, and despite some of the campiness of the movie, I'd like to think, both for you and the movie's protagonist (were he real, and the role Dreyfuss played was very real for many of us), as well as for its viewers, that it was the positive impact Holland had on students during his tenure that is the true legacy.

In case a little inspiration is needed, here's the character Gertrude, initially too shy to play "Stranger on the Shore," inspired by Holland, then getting it right in performance, where the "confidence seeds" are sowed for her character to then become Governor of Oregon, the State in which the movie occurs addressing an auditorium packed with Holland's supporters upon his retirement.

Sure---again, it's campy but the impact my music educators had on me, and I suspect a lot of you, and I hope for you Karl as an educator, has been positively profound.

https://youtu.be/Q_oKiecsAZE?si=Ze0iVAH5z1qYk_Md&t=130

https://youtu.be/Q_oKiecsAZE?si=w0UT1hwBsM5p6PBX&t=286

https://youtu.be/tQqjIVUQdTI?si=-Vd4mVjWmmfE-z6w&t=30



Post Edited (2025-07-06 21:28)

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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: brycon 
Date:   2025-07-07 02:43

Quote:

I feel the reason for racing is often psychological: an unconscious, irrational fear of not playing fast enough.


It's important to get at why a student is rushing in order to fix it. In general, as a teacher, I'm very wary of go-to fixes for things: "you just have to use the metronome." Sure, there are patterns among young clarinetists. But sometimes similar issues, such as not maintaining a consistent tempo, manifest for different reasons and require different fixes.

With tempo, for example, there are some students who don't hear the pitches they're playing. They don't think A-C-F-G-G#-A on the last page of Weber's second concerto, but rather they think finger combination 1-2-3-4-5-6 as though memorizing a particular button combination in a video game. While these students can play very fast, it's jumbled and rushed sounding to someone listening to it.

Some students, when they get a piece of music that's fast, always think of it as "fast." As they live with the piece, gradually bump up their tempo, and achieve their goal speed, the piece ought to feel slower to them. But because they've always thought of the piece as fast, they continue pushing the tempo because in tempo feels slow and it needs to be fast.

More advanced students, who practice regularly with a metronome, by contrast, might begin a piece at a slightly different tempo than intended. Perhaps they want to play Weber at quarter-note equals 120. For whatever reason, though, in the heat of the performance they begin the piece at quarter-note equals 112. Because they've practiced for many hours with the metronome, they'll often gravitate back into their practiced tempo. For us listening to the performance, it sounds like rushing.

And, of course, some students can't "feel" the pulse or tempo, but rather they "think" or count the music. In the heat of a performance, it's too much to think "bring down the A to match the flute here, cue the bassoon and oboe here, etc." while also thinking "one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a." At some point, it's going to fall apart and a rhythm is going to be unwittingly shortened or elongated, which will sound like rushing or dragging.

These issues are just a few of the ones that sound like rushing, and it certainly isn't an exhaustive list: students are always coming up with interesting ways of playing out of time! Haha! At any rate, they all have different remedies.

Quote:

Do you have any techniques -besides the metronome- to keep oneself or others from doing this?


If you're going to recommend using a metronome or want to use one yourself. It's important to use it as a tool to bolster an internal sense of rhythm rather than as a crutch to provide an external source of rhythm.

To that end, I recommend to students to switch the metronome clicks to the up beats (or perhaps to the second or third eighth-note in compound time); to remove beats, such as clicking on beats 2 and 4 only; and/or to combine both of these strategies together, such as having the metronome click only on the upbeat of beat 1. In general, if students struggle with these things and can't quickly pick them up, their rhythm has some fundamental issues. At that point, I might go back to some basic rhythm exercises, like the ones we do in ear-training classes, because it's more a matter of poor musicianship skills than clarinet skills.

Moreover, I generally try to avoid having the metronome click on every beat or on every subdivision. When students use the metronome in this way for the majority of their practicing, their tempo and rhythm tend to go out the window when the metronome goes away (because they haven't strengthened their internal sense of rhythm).



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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: Paul Aviles 
Date:   2025-07-07 05:34

One last swipe at the "sense of time." I was helped by thinking of that being our
"memory" of how long a quarter note (at a given pace) is. One teacher just sang a note, "BAAA." Then he said, "ok, that note will be that long five minutes from now. I could even go to lunch have a nice meal, come back and that note will still be that long." I found that revelatory.



............Paul Aviles



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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: Fuzzy 
Date:   2025-07-07 06:46

How to keep them from rushing or dragging?!

Pursuade them to play bass clarinet for a year. Hahahaha!

Fuzzy
;^)>>>

[Edit: fixed typo]



Post Edited (2025-07-07 06:46)

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 Re: How do you keep from rushing or keep your students from doing this?
Author: ruben 
Date:   2025-07-07 14:34

Pau Casals said that runs and tricky bits should be thought of and played as micro-melodies, not just smears. This would imply playing them slowly for a while and getting the melody-assuming there is a bit of one-in your ear. "Runs" is the word! -like turista. Making somewhat of a melodic statement will prevent us from rushing runs. As for rushing tempos, this has much to do with nerve management. We often confuse fast and lively. Music can be fast without being lively; lively without being too fast.

rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com


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