Clarinet Emb
Clarinet Emb
Clarinet Emb
attached to the clarinet. Make sure the reed is not contributing to any problems by being too hard, too dry, or incorrectly placed on the mouthpiece. Preparing the mouthpiece tenon with some cork grease ahead of time will facilitate the insertion/withdrawal of the mouthpiece or mouthpiece-barrel combination into/from the clarinet. Let me pause briey in this discussion to point out that I am a rm believer in holding separate introductory sessions for each instrumental group: i.e., clarinets alone, utes alone, trumpets alone, and so on. The attention to details and individual problems possible in segregated beginner instruction sessions cannot be replicated in classes where beginners on different instruments are all trying to make their rst sounds. I am also a proponent of having beginners play by ear before they attempt to read music, so as not to divert attention away from the embouchure and sound production too soon. Early in my career, I taught Grades 6-12 instrumental music for a few years, and the strongest beginner band I ever had happened the year the band books did not arrive until a few weeks after classes began. By that point, the beginners in question, playing mainly by ear, had far outstripped my previous beginner classes in their command of the fundamentals. The reasons were easy to gure out. Some basic rst tunes to be attempted by ear include the following, which can all be played in C Major on the clarinet using only the left-hand: Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle, Twinkle, Lightly Row, Oh Susanna, and Fiddle-I-Dee. When tunes requiring only the left hand have been sufciently mastered with the embouchure intact, the right-hand ngerings of low B, B-at, A, and G can be introduced, and tunes such as these can be attempted: Alouette, The More We Get Together, Amazing Grace, Go Tell It On The Mountain, O Christmas Tree (all in C Major), and We Three Kings (in A minor). As students develop some prociency on the instrument and expand the range of notes they can play, the basic embouchure shape described above should remain unchanged no matter what kind of music is played: low or high, soft or loud, fast or slow, staccato or legato. The clarinet embouchure can be equated to a violinists grip on her bow: no matter how she plays, her hand grip never changes. For clarinetists, our grip is our embouchure, and our bow is the air we blow. What does change is the air speed: faster air for loud passages, slower for soft (just like the violin bow speed); more intensity in the air stream for the high register, less for the low but our embouchure always stays the same. With young clarinetists, this is rarely the case, so it is a goal for them to keep in mind and work towards, with periodic reminders from their teacher. Some embouchure Dos and Donts include the following: 1. Too much lower lip turned over the teeth will interfere with the free vibration of the reed, and can also cause discomfort or pain from insufcient cushion between the reed and the bottom teeth.
Timothy Maloney
has played clarinet in professional orchestras and chamber ensembles in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught clarinet at the college/university level in both countries. His playing can be heard on commercial CDs issued by the CBC, CanSona, and Albany labels. Among his clarinet teachers were Harold Wright, Stanley Hasty, and Guy Deplus.
Est. 1980
116 - 255 West 1st St., North Vancouver B.C. phone: 604 983-2470 1-866-983-2470
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