Author: Clarinet4hire
Date: 2007-06-17 21:00
I've recently posted on one of GBK's threads, but don't want to take it over. So I thought I'd pose my problem here.
I've heard it called stacking, and I've also heard it is my weight. But I don't think it is my weight, necessarily. I consider myself to be a fair clarinetist, but not great. There is one huge thing holding me back from getting to the next level of my playing. I've always been told, for a good ten years now, that I needed to draw as much air into my lungs as deep as possible with each breath I take. I have been doing this and I must admit, it fixes my pitch problem. But it has created some worse problems. I always feel like I have to exhale after a time, or a long phrase. I can get through a third of a movement or solo work, and I start to focus more on this than the music. My body is telling me to exhale and take a new breath, but I can't because I am in the middle of a very important part of the music. I try to exhale at the next possible point, but there is not enough time to do so and inhale agian properly. (An example would be the opening of the Copland Concerto, or a slow movement from Mozart, Or Brahms, etc.) It simply will not allow me to focus on making music; singing. People have told me I am more of a technition then a musician, and I can see why, but the problem isn't that I can't sing, but I seem to be fighting myself. I would hate to think that great players like Gigliotti could be wrong in this technique, so the problem has to be me.
I"ve never won this battle, as elementary as it may seem. It could be the fact that I'm overweight, but I really don't think that is the real problem, as I have seen and heard, and heard of very large players phrase though passages without any effort at all. If they were struggling, they sure hid it well.
I could do so much better if I could just get past this.
Does anyone have any words of wisdom on this topic. It really feels like I start to hyperventilate.
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