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Sausages

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-12-29 23:50

OK, now it might be worthwhile saying what the sausages were all about.

If you're dealing with young players, it can be useful to use a vivid metaphor in order to communicate a basic technical point. In this case, I was dealing with a player who had the wrong idea of what the tongue does, so that there was a strong 'clunk' at the beginning of very many notes.

I picked a passage where it was possible for him to see that he could think of the action of the tongue as STOPPING the previous note rather than as BEGINNING the first note that he was currently thinking of as 'tongued'.

(To clarify that, think of the eighteenth bar of the solo part of the Mozart concerto -- the one that consists of a descending dominant 7th arpeggio starting on a clarinet G at the top of the stave, articulated with one slur between the first two semiquavers and with the rest detached. The young player I was dealing with wasn't playing this piece; but what I said to him was the equivalent of saying, in this bar, that rather than thinking that the first 'tongued' note is the D, he could think that the first 'stopped' note is the F.)

The 'sausage' metaphor -- one of several that I told him about during his lesson -- is then as follows:

Imagine that you're pushing a thick sausage or salami that rests on a wooden board up against a very, VERY sharp, broad knife. Your left hand pushes the sausage, and your right hand fingers control the knife, which is on a hinge that allows it to be moved up and down with very little effort from your fingers.

Whilst pushing the sausage quite hard (it's a good idea to act this out very clearly, because it's the fundamental idea you want to get across) you flick the knife up (releasing the sausage for a moment) and then bring it down almost immediately, cutting through and stopping the sausage once more.

The result is a small chunk of sausage that travels off in the direction you were pushing. (You can act out watching it go:-)

In the Mozart example, the F sets up the 'sausage situation' and the D is the first chunk, to be followed by the B, G and so on.

What creates the flying off of the sausage chunk is the strong left-hand push, whilst the right hand flick can be very gentle (it's a super-hero knife:-)

The idea of all this is to provide an idea that is vivid enough (or stupid enough) to distract the young player from WHAT THEY'VE ALWAYS DONE. Then, remembering it, they may be able to catch on to a better, different way of doing it.

In this sort of situation you have only a few moments with the student and the audience. You want to give them something that they'll remember -- for whatever reason.

Tony

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Sausages new

Tony Pay

2006-12-29 23:50