Author: brycon
Date: 2021-02-26 20:00
Quote:
While I can do some of the harder stuff at very slow speeds, until it becomes set in the fingers, at which point metronome speed is slowly increased, how would you teach such a beast? What is your methodology, your approach?
Every student struggles with unique difficulties and learns best through unique strategies.
For myself, for example, aside from a couple of spots, I don't find the technical aspects of Nielsen all that difficult. After you've played the music of Carter, Babbitt, Donatoni, Mantovani, Boulez, etc., Nielsen isn't so tough. When I was younger, though, all I heard was how hard it is; older players talked about Nielsen like mountaineers talk about Everest.
One of the main issues I had when I first learned Nielsen, then, was getting away from thinking "This piece is so hard!" and focusing more on the music. Nielsen is a piece with countless beautiful details and moments. Many clarinet players, however, focus so much on their technique that the piece becomes an angular, jagged, and grotesque half-hour etude that no one--aside from other clarinet players--would want to listen to.
The students whom I've taught Nielsen to have, for the most part, been in the same boat.
But I'll offer a few general practice things I think about. Maybe they help, maybe not.
1.) When preparing a solo piece (concerto, sonata, etc.), I don't ever listen to recordings of it and encourage my students to do the same. Aside from judging your own playing against the impossibly high standard of a world-class recording artist with a world-class recording engineer, you begin to gravitate toward the recording's interpretation: using its tempo, expression, etc. If you want to listen to something to get into the mindset of a piece, listen instead to something similar: Mozart A major piano concerto instead of the clarinet concerto, Schumann Dichterliebe instead of the Fantasy Pieces, Nielsen symphonies instead of the concerto, and so on.
2.) Begin thinking about expression early in the process. If you try and tackle technique first and add expression second, you'll probably never get around to expression, which leads to a horribly boring performance. If you do get around to adding expression in, however, your technique will suddenly feel different. Synchronizing finger motion to a change in your blowing as you do a crescendo, for instance, will take additional practicing, which leads to a waste in time. Moreover, in many important ways technique and expression are two sides of the same coin.
3.) Think of practice techniques as variables you can alter to focus on specific aspects of your playing. You can vary the tempo (play faster or slower), the dynamics (louder or softer), articulations (remove them to check finger coordination), rhythms (use different rhythms to clean up finger motion), the amount of music you play, and so on.
Many people, it seems, gravitate toward starting slower and getting faster as their only practice technique, often creating some sort of schedule (week 1: first page at half tempo). This method is just about the most mindless and wasteful way of practicing ever devised. It aims for no specific goals other than sheer repetition; if improperly done, doesn't relate to the physical sensations of playing quickly; contains innumerable redundancies; and puts off the most difficult practicing until the later stages of preparation, which can lead to performance anxiety.
There's a saying among elite runners: "In order to run fast, you have to run fast." And I think the same is true of clarinet playing. Practicing that first duet with the snare drum in Nielsen at one-quarter the actual tempo isn't going to help you get up to tempo. Practicing it at a quicker speed, isolating the exact moments of difficulty (e.g. the high C# to high G connections), devising some sort of practice exercise to solve the problem (and here, it could be starting slowly and building speed), and then slowly incorporating it back into the line will help you get up to the tempo.
If you're not already familiar with it, the website Bulletproof Musician, has lots of better practice advice than what you received from me. Check it out.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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