Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2022-12-03 00:49
justwannaplay wrote:
> I wonder if this has been changed at all. For those of you who
> teach, what do you think? (I know the students have to learn
> the upper register at some point but I think it could be done
> better - they get something like 5/6 upper register notes in
> one lesson!)
>
> Elizabeth
Long post - but this is a more or less unavoidable issue for clarinet beginners and their teachers and it isn't completely straightforward.
To continue in the direction Paul was pointing, the Rubank books in general are much more useful for early private instruction. They have serious drawbacks when a band teacher tries to use them in a school program. For an individual (private) student I never found the pacing of the material to be too fast. The teacher can always slow things down with supplementary material that puts the technical content in the Rubank book into more musically interesting contexts. The problem I always found with Rubank Elementary, and even more, Intermediate, was that it was dry and almost exclusively technical. The series is old (my Rubank Elementary has a 1933 copyright ). There has been much more interesting material published since then. But Rubank, like the 19th century methods (Klose, Baermann, Langenus, etc.), is very much to the point technically.
But to your specific question about the jump from Lesson 10 to the 5 clarion notes in Lesson 11, I don't think it should be a problem **if the chalumeau notes are secure** - that is, if there no issues with covering the holes or even reaching some of the lower ones. This is sometimes a problem with young students who start before their hands are big enough to reach everything. It shouldn't be an issue for an adult unless the adult is old enough for flexibility and mobility of the fingers to have become a problem. (I am now, in my mid-70s after 60 years of playing clarinet, having trouble sometimes covering everything that needs to be covered - very frustrating).
Assuming the lower (chalumeau) register is secure and all that is needed is to open the register vent to produce the right hand half of the clarion register (G-F-E-C-B), there isn't I don't think, much reason to delay them or separate them on different pages. You're starting on a note that, once it comes out, should be fairly easy to produce reliably. Once that happens, adding one finger of the right hand for each of the other notes in sequence isn't much different from C-B(b)-A-G-F-E in the chalumeau. You can get used to the difference in embouchure on 6 notes as easily as you can with only one. As long as you stay mostly with the notes in sequence going up or down, Rubank's introduction of 6 notes at once shouldn't be too much of a hurdle.
The real problem with true beginners when they hit those notes tends to be, not producing them, but re-associating the fingerings with names that are different. For a student with more or less mature hands renaming the fingerings can cause more frustration than the notes themselves. This isn't really a clarinet problem, it's a cognitive one. I've personally never felt that there was any reason to postpone this process any longer than was necessary because of a student's hand limitations. Some books split the initial 6 notes into two groups - G-F-E and D-C-B. You can certainly do that on your own. Take your time while going back and reinforcing earlier material or finding some of the supplementary books Rubank published with the basic series (or look for anything else designed for beginner clarinetists who are not yet comfortable "over the break").
Many of the "band methods" used in school programs do introduce the clarion register relatively early. The ones that introduce those 5 (or 6, if you go down to B4) notes as a downward sequence tend to be less frustrating for students than the few books that start on C5 or B4 and go upward.
I do think that Rubank, like many other books, makes a mistake in Lesson 12 by having so many passages that move *upward* over the "break" - from A or G up to B. IMHO the actual crossing should also be started by playing downward from B4 to A4 and C5 to Bb4 and not the other direction at first. I'd much rather see descending C and F scales reinforced first, before adding the ascending halves. You might find the whole transition easier if you try that on your own. Take exercises 5, 6, and 7 in Lesson 12 and learn the descending halves of each section first (#5 has two different patterns with a double bar separating them).
Karl
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