Author: Craig Matovich
Date: 2007-07-17 22:16
Susan,
Thanks for your kind words and enthusiasm about my teaching style...
What started out with Susan as a reed tieing lesson while going east quickly morphed into more of a fundamentals of tone production seminar with reed making splattered across the day.
Susan like many adult oboe converts needs a very different approach than what a teacher uses with a young learner and I think this may be unaccustomed territory for many oboe teachers. Adults learn differently than young players, they master concepts quilckly and tedious details a bit more slowly than the young (under 25 crowd).
She reminded me in many ways of myself as an adult student of flute and piano where my repertiore interests were already established (jazz for flute and piano) and I really just wanted/needed to learn aspects of the instrument. I was already teaching oboe and music theory at the conservatory level, so standard by the numbers, page after page of the usual lessons did not fit my interests or needs.
For Susan, a couple simple tone production exercises and a warm up routine she can take to the bank seemed critical and obvious needs. She did very well with them and seriously was producing pro quality sounds in less than a day.
Once Susan settles these things into good reliable habits, she will move quickly to other areas of improvement and I think will progress amazingly well.
Next up for her is pre-tone preparation ( just a refinement really ) where she compresses the wind and gets it moving a beat or two before the tone is released.
After that, 'drives', doing long tones with articulation and going from pp-f-pp using a variety of articulations.
Susan has a remarkably strong core to her sound, plenty of volume and good pitch controll. She now just needs to get comfortable with the pp - p range of things.
All in all, for me, this was a great reminder of how much I like and miss teaching oboe. I hope to do much more with it going forward.
-Craig
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