Author: ohsuzan
Date: 2006-04-24 19:48
<that's where an oboe teacher comes in. (Do your best to find someone who is an actual oboist, not just a doubler>
Amen to that! I spent a year with a bassoonist as my teacher. Lovely, lovely person. But not conversant enough about things oboe to go beyond beginner questions. When I finally went to an actual oboist, it was like starting over again.
SilverHare, if you can do all the things you mentioned, esp. keeping time well, I'm at a loss to understand why you've had such a miserable time, thus far, with your forays into musicianship.
Or, maybe you are like my husband, a clarinet re-beginner. He played in high school -- always anchored the third clarinet section (and we KNOW what that means -- he never even mastered clarion register). 40 years later (second marriages for both of us after being widowed), he decided that since I played, he would play.
Now, he is a phenomenal music consumer. Loves Grand Opera. Has a great, great listeners ear -- can tell you the composer and the title of virtually anything he hears on the local classical station, and sometimes can even tell you which orchestra, or who the soloists are.
But -- put a horn in his mouth, and he would forget how to count to four, and his intonation was whatever came out of the horn. For some reason, he always treated whole notes and rests as if they were not a meaningful part of the music -- just skipped over them and went on. And dotted rhythms -- fuggedaboutit. I was honestly ready to tell him to throw in the towel. It was very frustrating, and impossible to play with him.
Someone on the Clarinet Board suggested that the problem was that he knew neither the instrument NOR notation well enough to allow himself to generalize the appropriate responses to the stimuli provided within a musical score. He was having to think too hard, and in effect, "re-create the wheel", every time he played a note, and thus he would become hopelessly lost within just a few bars.
The suggestion was that he spent more time with the mechanics of the instrument, and with learning or relearning the technical rudiments of music theory, so that his responses would become automatic.
The hardest thing for him (the quintessential overachiever) was coming to the point of realizing that he had to start SMALL and SLOW -- which I think is what we are all telling you to do -- do it, but SLOW DOWN and KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Hubby has worked at this assiduously -- got the big nasty metronome called "Dr. Beat", which absolutely *screams* the counts at you in an authoritarian Teutonic voice. And he has taken that great listener's ear, and learned how to make his clarinet sound like the clarinets he hears on the radio and CDs.
And now that he has understood that good musicians are continually COUNTING and LISTENING, he is getting to the point where he can "play well with others". Even with his wife. ![[wink]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie3.gif)
May you be so successful!
Susan
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