 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-20 20:46
Clearly, anyone I'd want teaching me clarinet should be highly proficient in play. But I'm not sure the top players we know by name necessarily make the best teachers.
This, of course, isn't to say that those top echelon player expressly don't make great teachers. In fact the years of study that took them to the level they are, the multitude of experiences and other students to learn how to teach from...as often (good) teaching is not a one size fits all proposition...are probably necessary prerequisites for top pedagogy. An orchestral player of longevity is bound to have been exposed to the repertoire their top students will hopefully also play some day professionally.
But some of these top performers, who derive income primarily from performance, and teach secondarily—as important as their students may be to them—sometimes leave me wondering if some well know university clarinet professor pedagogue, who teaches first and performs as a secondary thing may be, on the whole, a better choice to study from.
Of course we can debate not only what constitutes the best teacher, but the best teacher at the level a player is at. Aside from it possibly being monies not well spent, as name players charge top dollar, I think I'd want a beginner with someone who truly understands and works on fundamentals as a regular course of their teaching.
Conversely I don't intend to disparage top player's abilities to not only build a aspiring professional's resume by who they studied with, (and their professional connections) but their ability at the master class level of instruction to teach the interpretation of famous musical works, if not, or less so, the technical steps one takes to achieve such mastery.
I don't have answers here. Perhaps you do.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-08-21 04:04
Well, teaching and playing are overlapping though distinct skills (same with auditioning, recording, etc.): being excellent at one of these skills doesn't make one necessarily excellent at any other one. But to be a great teacher, someone must have, at some point in his or her life, also been a great musician.
There are many examples of top players being fantastic teachers, such as the masterclass video on YouTube with Jorg Widmann. And there are other examples of top players being less than effective teachers, such as the numerous Karl Leister videos. Being a great teacher requires analytical skills, figuring out what you're doing when you're playing, what the student is doing when he or she is playing, translating what you're doing for them, and so on. And some players never cultivate these skills.
Mediocre players, of course, often lack these analytical skills. Or perhaps they possess them but only devote a small amount of time to playing, or started later in life, or whatever the case may be. At any rate, I've never heard of an excellent teacher who was a mediocre player.
But this seems pretty clear and common across all fields: chefs and educational cooking show personalities, writers and English critics, composers and theorists, etc. Just because you're good at one aspect of a thing doesn't mean you'll be good at other aspects of it.
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Author: Tom H
Date: 2025-08-21 08:43
I agree with a number of points in the above posts. Not to just simplify it, but I think there is no real rule here. In my 19 years teaching Band I came across some directors who were great players and great teachers. Others that were neither and some who did one or the other thing best. I would imagine it's similar regarding the top echelon clarinetists and professors.
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Author: Jarmo Hyvakko
Date: 2025-08-21 08:55
Here is The logic in this: Being a good player has nothing to do with teaching abilities. But you need to be a good enough player to be a good teacher. You simply shouldn't teach above your own playing level. You simply must be at least on the same level with your student to give sound teaching to him/her. Preferably on a clearly higher level. And when approaching professional level usually the best results are achieved with a teacher who is a performing artist himself.
And i have learned some of the corner stones of my clarinet playing from Karl Leister. But at that time i was already a professional clarinetist too.
Jarmo Hyvakko, Principal Clarinet, Tampere Philharmonic, Finland
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-08-21 12:48
A friend of mine here in Paris said he studied with the world's best clarinetist, who also happened to be the world's worst teacher. I think he was probably neither, but I take the point. The teacher in question was ultimately arrested for child molesting during the lessons he gave.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-08-22 10:41
Jarmo: Did you gain very much from Leister's teaching? I have seen master classes by him and found him rather impulsive; rather disorganized. I greatly admire the player, though.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2025-08-23 02:39
Depends on what the student wants to learn.
Haha!
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-08-24 03:08
The very best practitioners at anything are rarely great at teaching it. For one thing, they rely in part on natural talent that others don't and will never have. They've never had to learn to understand that part themselves, so they don't/can't explain it. For another thing, their lives are heavily committed to performing, and they are less apt to take the time to prepare and provide the level of instruction that great teachers do.
Practitioners who, while still great, have reached an elite level more through learning and persistence and less through natural ability may be just slightly less elite than the very best, but from them often come some of the greatest. most understanding teachers.
This distinction has been noted often in competitive athletics.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-08-24 09:01
Quote:
This distinction has been noted often in competitive athletics.
I was listening the other day to an interview with a professional shooting coach who had played high school basketball in North Carolina against Steph Curry. He said that, although Steph was very good in high school, there was no indication of what he'd become: it was through his incredible practice regimen that he turned into one of the best basketball players of all time. In the words of this coach, there's a minimum physical standard one must have in order to make it into the NBA. As long as you meet this minimum standard, it's up to you what you make of it. (Now, this minimum standard is pretty high! Steph is 6'3, can run at a full sprint for several miles a game, can deadlift 400 pounds, etc.)
But for the most part, music doesn't really have this minimum physical threshold preventing players from becoming whatever they'd like to become. We're all kind of on the same level as far as the physical part of playing goes. So if "natural talent" in basketball is, say, hitting a growth spurt in high school, shooting up to 6'10, and exceeding the minimum physical threshold for the NBA, what's natural talent in clarinet? From what I've seen, it's learning something at a very young age so that it's completely absorbed into your playing and you're unconscious of it as you reach adulthood. Often this type of early childhood learning occurs in musical families, with Bach and Mozart, for example. But with clarinet, I've seen it even with something like language: French speakers, for instance, have a natural tongue position that works well on clarinet. More than a few of the students I've worked with from Korea, however, have had to work on their tongue position. One of them told me she thought it was because of the way the tongue is positioned in the mouth when she speaks Korean. So something like your native language could teach you something about clarinet playing years before you even begin to play clarinet, at which point, you're not even thinking about it.
By the way, in sports, it seems like the ones who go into coaching are often the ones who get phased out along the way by that minimum physical threshold. They can think the game at a high level but are too short, slow, etc. to advance beyond college athletics. Moreover, they likely have had to make up for their physical shortcomings through the mental aspects of the game and their practice regimen. Coaching, then, comes naturally.
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-08-24 14:42
At the Paris Conservatory, the tradition is that each teacher -whatever the instrument-has an assistant that does the "dirty work": technique, scales, etc.,-and the this theoretically allows the official teacher to focus on musicianship, interpretation..the final finish. My objection is that there is an overlap between technique, interpretation, musicianship. I'm not sure it is right to draw a line between them. At any rate, I know many graduates from the Paris Conservatory that state that they learned a lot more from the assistant than from the official teacher.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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