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Re: Tongue'n cheek

Author: wrowand
Date: 2006-03-16 23:16

There's no question that you can play adequately, or even pretty well using sub-optimal techniques. I've seen people play with straight fingers, on flat reeds and with poor posture, but still sound pretty good. It just requires a lot more work and probably won't work past a certain level.

My old method of tonguing, which involved touching my tongue to the roof of my mouth and the reed at the same time (with sort of an arched tongue), got me through college (my teacher never noticed it). I could tongue pretty fast (sixteenths at quarter note=132). I even played in master classes for John Mack and Elaine Douvas and they never said anything about it -- but that certainly could have been because the repertoire I was playing didn't require any smooth legato tonguing. It wasn't until I played the Herbert Howells Sonata in lessons with Alex Klein and Jan Eberle that the problem became noticeable. Jan Eberle told me I needed to fix it and after about a year of work, it was fixed.

If you can spend the time to fix your tonguing I'm sure you'll be much better off in the long run.
Best Wishes,
-Woody

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