Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2023-10-20 19:31
Hi Micke and moma4faith. I'm reluctant to give details here publicly, because I'm a long-time self-teacher, and hah, what I might hear back scares me a little. My credibility is zilch, so either this makes sense on its own or not.
Btw, I'm not an advocate of self-teaching. Having a good teacher is by far the best way.
What I changed this summer that probably affected pitch stemmed from a discovery I made last winter. That concerned the necessary independence of tongue and lower jaw. I'd been practicing bending clarion tones, and it appeared that bending could if desired be done without moving the jaw at all, just the tongue. I practiced that on each note, noticing the different flexion points along the tongue for each, trying to see how far they'd bend, making low clarion B bend, trying to play fragments of chromatic scale by bending a single note, smearing notes together, using it for vibrato, trying it in chalumeau - that kind of thing. Undirected, not systematic. Just tongue, no jaw. NOTE, you can strain the tongue doing this: it has to be built up gradually.
Every time I practiced that way, my tone would sound much better afterward: fuller, sweeter, more controlled. Still does. My model now assumes that the tongue voices not just pitch, but tone. The jaw function and purpose are separate and controlled separately - a separate subsystem. When altering the tongue, whether for articulation or pitch or tone, the jaw mustn't move in tandem, or even flex differently: it just keeps doing its own program. (And vice versa: jaw change shouldn't alter tongue.)
It seems I'd been inhibiting tone production with unnoticed and unnecessary changes with my jaw (which a teacher would have stopped, for sure.) The active use of the tongue to voice tone was part of what I changed about the time my overall pitch went higher. I'm arching my tongue a lot to tension it, in all registers for every note. It supports resonance, or maybe better, it reflects it.
Other muscles can also support resonance, and in particular, the soft palate and uvula are both muscular; the soft palate opens/closes the air passage to the nostrils. You can tension those muscles and feel resonance with them. I've been working on that as well.
Thus, I've been consciously adding muscular tension along my inner air passage to promote resonance. If some of those points of consciously added tension had hung slack(er) before, then wouldn't that "tightening up" raise pitch? I haven't dug through acoustic theory yet, but my provisional theory says, "it could." That would mean it's ME that's sharper, not the clarinet.
That whole theory of inner resonance is not one discussed here, or maybe anywhere, and that's strong reason to assume it's inaccurate. I've long continued following it because it makes more sense to me than "fast air" and similar descriptions, and well, it's what I've got. With practice it's developed.
The greatest support for this theory, perhaps, has come very recently, just this fall: a new "discovery", and the most awesome thing I've ever stumbled on in my long solitary stumbling path. Breath support, an expression I've heard a million times: hah and aha, now I think I know what it means - for myself at least.
My personal revelation is, you tighten the abdominals not merely to push air; you tighten them to **resonate**, to reflect and support resonance. It's exactly like a singer does to project a singing tone, they fill their chest and abdominal air column with resonance. It's palpable from your lips to your bottom, pressing and vibrant, and you contain it actively, with muscular tensioning. In this way, you literally ARE your sound. Thus, "breath support" currently means to me, "air column active containment with muscular tensioning."
At this point, abdominal tensioning seems to me to be the principal system of tone generation, with embouchure & voicing & etc. being secondary systems. I'm just starting to practice it, but when it gets working, everything else just falls into place, both physically and conceptually. Its effect is so strong it overrides small mistakes in secondary systems, and just keeps producing good strong sound (at any volume.) The scope for expressive power and control this seems to open for me is boggling. I can sing my music now. I've been adding a second two-hour practice some evenings just to enjoy it.
Any teachers or good clarinetists who are still reading must be smiling at a self-teacher finally stumbling onto basics they could have been taught years ago. Then again, I've never seen or heard anything in my terms about it, so maybe not. And maybe all this is nothing, or something that only will work for me, etc. Caveat, caveat. Question asked, answer attempted. Fall gently, chips, I beg.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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