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Re: Help Mastering a Passage

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2021-10-03 21:39

Just fudge the notes? Surely there are better ways to proceed. If you can't play a passage as written, write a simplified ossia passage with similar harmonic and melodic contours and play that substitute well. But don't fake playing the original. If a composer writes a B half-diminished (thank you Brycon for that terminology) arpeggio, that's the harmony the composer wants in that spot and not some blurred substitute or approximation. Playing the chord the composer indicated is not "perfection"; it is mere adequacy. Playing the chord with exactly the contextual phrasal inflection intended--that would approach perfection. In playing a musical instrument, one cannot let the fingers decide what notes to play. The object of the musical game is to train the fingers to follow the music. Speaking metaphorically, the mind and heart perceive the work to be done, and the fingers fall in to do it. Telling the composer, "well my fingers just didn't feel like playing this combination of notes" is as poor an excuse as telling the teacher that the cocker-spaniel noshed on the homework.

The German clarinetist Josh Michaels worked with students to help them play not what their fingers wanted to but what the composer actually set on the page.(He may have been going through Richard Strauss excerpts with them). Out of his struggles to help students corral those wandering fingers, Michaels wrote a couple of study books that are worth looking into. The one most relevant here is Erganzungen zum Skalensystem or Supplemental Scale Systems (published by Zimmermann - Frankfurt). Michaels combines patterns that look familiar with little unexpected alterations to train the player to pay rigorous attention to what is on the page and direct the fingers to move accordingly. The book is even more tedious to play through than the Baermann Scale book but the result of sticking with the torture is that after a few months the fingers do indeed (for the most part) make great progress in doing what they are told to do rather than what is easy to do. This is a great book for any clarinetist who wants to go beyond the easy bad habit of fudging and reach the greater joy of playing the music.

Post Edited (2021-10-03 21:56)

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Help Mastering a Passage new

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2021-10-02 22:27