Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-12-30 11:11
tictactux wrote:
>>Tony, please. I didn't mean to appear snarky. Sorry if I made this impression.>>
Well, I'm sorry too. I replied on the wrong foot, late at night.
The thing about this metaphor business is that you don't want to be a one-trick pony. Something I have against the electronic medium, including both the BBoard and the Klarinet list, is that it encourages simplification and authoritative pronouncement; whereas teaching is almost always concerned with a PROCESS, and with finding the best way to lead a student to a successful playing experience.
So, the 'sausage-slicing' metaphor was just what seemed appropriate to that kid -- and he did improve, actually, so the metaphor was justified, at least at that moment.
A few years ago I wrote an article, called 'Metaphors for Articulation', in which I outlined six metaphors I'd found useful: 'Mud', 'The Pendulum', 'Pickup and Turntable', 'Half full or half empty?', 'The Bow', and 'The Hosepipe'. Clearly there are others -- you can see that the sausages don't appear, and neither does 'Lightswitch and Power Station', another one that I talked about in Israel. (So I'm not just SAUSAGEMAN:-)
ALL of these can be useful interimly with a student, but they shouldn't be an ENDPOINT for them. Because, I don't think about ANY of them when I encounter an articulated passage, even though I created some of them because I found staccato difficult early in my playing life.
These things should be a 'Wittgenstein's ladder' for the students -- Wittgenstein said that his observations were like a ladder, "to be thrown away once you have surmounted them." So here, what you should be left with is a natural ability to play staccato.
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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