Author: cjwright
Date: 2009-10-20 18:16
Howard,
Good explanation of your playing and issues as you see them.
Regarding scales, I've worked on scales all my life and a grateful that I had a teacher who drilled them into me at such an early age. Only now am I seeing why we practice arpeggios, scales in major thirds, etc. (See Martin Schuring's section "technique"),
Martin has me doing all of these daily, and then doing my Ferlings and such daily. Every week I bring in two new Ferlings (say 3 and 4) while I also play Ferlings 1 and 2 from the previous week, except the old ones are transposed up and down a half step. Martin explains that there's several points to this grueling routine:
1. To get me practicing a hell of a lot.
2. To practice his instruction for another week on the previous etudes.
3. To get me looking for patterns in diatonic scale-based music so that rather than looking at a bunch of notes, I look for Db minor arpeggios, or a Gb minor scale with an accidental thrown in. This is much more efficient than learning a passage with 10 different notes in it that I have to compute individually.
Martin explained to me that most of the pre 20-century music is indeed scale-based, and therefore learning to look at music and particularly fast sections in chunks is what helps us to sightread better (an activity I despise like the plague) and ultimately read music better.
The first month of sight-transposing was a nightmare, but I am happy to say that I am onto my third month of doing this and it certainly is making a difference, and has gotten a lot easier.
So I hope that gives you hope as to why to practice scales/arpeggios/thirds.
Cooper
PS: Martin also explained to me that "warming up" is for the purpose of loosening up our fingers, mind, and most importantly, our sore embouchure from the previous day's grueling work. And it makes sense to me now! I've never practiced so hard in my life, and every day my mouth wakes up feeling stiff, sore, and ready to take a vacation to the beach!
Blog, An Oboe In Paradise
Solo Oboe, Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra
Post Edited (2009-10-20 18:19)
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