Author: brycon
Date: 2021-03-13 21:38
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I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I feel like there's been an unwritten standardization in everything clarinet related: the sound, equipment, interpretation, etc.
Individuality, in the sense that you argue for it, is a Romantic sentiment. The earliest music conservatories, by contrast, taught by way of rote memorization. The sense of "standardization" was so strong, in fact, that many Italian pedagogical materials don't have the names of their composer-authors and are instead treated as expressions of a communal knowledge.
So it's important to point out that individuality--the solitary performer or composer striving to express his or herself--isn't a timeless truth but rather a tradition.
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Let's start with equipment.
Although there are many brands and models of clarinets now available, I agree with you about the ubiquity of Vandoren mouthpieces. I was speaking with a very fine mouthpiece craftsman a few years ago. He felt as though the decline in artisan mouthpieces was the result of some combination of 1.) Zinner closing down, 2.) the easiness of Vandoren products (if you break your BD5, it costs less to buy a new, and equally good, one than it does to have it fixed), and then 3.) the artisan skills and knowledge falling out of circulation over time.
While all those points might be true, there's also a bit of herd mentality at play with equipment. Ricardo switches from Backun to Uebel; a slew of people who swore by their Backuns suddenly switch as well. Yehuda switches his students from B40 lyres to BD5s; after a ton of high school kids see the mouthpieces on Instagram, they go out and get their own BD5s as well.
When an increasingly large pool of people are competing for an increasingly small number of spots, whether at elite universities and conservatories, summer programs, performing jobs, etc., there's going to be homogenization.
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I told my friend that he sounded like he's just straight up jealous, but he mentioned that his teacher would talk frequently about playing clarinet "the correct and only way." It's one thing to not like someone's playing--that's normal. But calling someone "bad" simply because their concept is different is just childish.
While I agree there's homogeneity in terms of equipment, I actually find current educational practices to be more open and less dogmatic than what my own teachers went through. Someone else, for instance, mentioned: Quote:
There are tried and true methods for teaching the instrument e.g. fingers curved and close... Keeping your fingers close to the clarinet used to be pedagogical dogma. With very good students, however, I find this method makes their technique rather bad and adds extraneous tension in their hands. Good technique is much more about finger motion and rhythm than about proximity to the tone holes.
But a lot of the post-Bonade generation taught this stuff as a religion--thou shalt keep your fingers close to the keys, blow to the end of the phrase, use a Chedeville-style mouthpiece with a lighter reed, etc.--in many cases, I think, because they simply weren't as good of musicians as Bonade himself. They needed to simplify and systematize in order to do their own teaching. Now that young students don't know Bonade's name, however, the appeal to authority doesn't work. If someone says, "Keep your fingers close to the clarinet; it's what Bonade did and my teacher X, who studied with Bonade, told me." and then his or her technique isn't as good as someone on Instagram, the students aren't going to listen.
So this openness in pedagogy and interpretation (about which I could write a lengthy essay but will spare you) are pretty healthy. I haven't really experienced much standardization in these areas. In equipment, however, I think it's simply a matter of YouTube, Spotify, Instagram as well as the business of music driving people toward whatever they think will give them the best chance for success.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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