Short-term Practice Strategies for Advanced Players, Part II: The Art of Critical Listening
by Margaret Thornhill
March 2006
Most advanced clarinet players have had the experience of learning to listen for detail through their teachers’ ears. The end result of your training should be the ability to listen objectively while playing and act as your own coach. But it doesn’t always continue that way in adult life. Especially for players who work both inside and outside music, practicing after a demanding day job—whether music teaching or working in a bank—can become simply learning the notes for the next gig. This kind of practice that rarely perfects anything takes an artistic toll.
“Tim," who has a bachelor’s degree in clarinet performance but who works as a programmer, badly needs the experience of completely mastering something every day in order to bring his musical standards back to a higher level. He’s far more critical of missed notes or fatigue than he is of the bad habits he’s formed since college.
What are some of these fixable flaws that keep otherwise accomplished clarinet players from creating a consistently artistic performance? Here is a list, compiled from recent experiences with some of my advanced students (Your List May Vary):
Messy Attacks. An initial attack can be under pitch, in the wrong volume, poorly supported, or too aggressive for the character of the note or phrase that follows. (The best fix for this all-too-common habit is to pre-hear the note the way you want it to sound.)
Throat note spreading. Often an unconscious habit, even among some famous players, this is when a note changes volume, pitch or timbre for no reason. It’s especially common on throat notes in legato passages or at the ends of tied notes in a syncopated passage, such as the legato triplet section in the first movement of the Brahms Sonata, Op. 120 #2.
Pitch change along with dynamic change. Another unconscious habit, this is getting flat as you get louder, sharp as you get softer, following the tendency of the instrument.
Dynamic change along with change in register. Don’t let high notes stick out simply because they are high.
Fuzzy, inconsistent articulation. Players with limited practice time often try to make themselves look better by cheating on the clarity of their articulations, or simply forget that variety of articulation is a powerful expressive element.
Insufficient difference between piano and forte.
Re-writing the score. Hold yourself accountable for what the great composers have asked of you, remembering that guys like Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven were ruthless self-editors!
Misjudging the style of the work. Remember what you are playing! Please don’t bring the same kind of tonal delivery to Bartok that you would to a big band solo or Fiddler on the Roof.
Unsupported final notes of phrases. You’re so eager to take that breath that you don’t even listen to the way the final note gets dropped!
Chewy legato. Sometimes the result of a misjudged attempt to be expressive, this spready sound may mean that your embouchure is moving. If so, back to square one with sustained playing and a mirror!
Note groups played too woodenly. Make a distinction between stronger and weaker parts of the meter.
Rhythmic or tempo instability owing to unsolved technical issues.
Breathing that doesn’t support the phrasing concept.
Phrasing with no sense of overall direction.
To sharpen Tim’s critical listening, I’ve suggested that he focus on details like these, spending about a third of his daily practice time perfecting short pieces or passages with more musical than technical difficulty:
Work daily for perfection of detail on short passages that are not part of your present concert repertoire. On each repetition—personal “bad habit” list in hand—check for and fix such aspects as beginnings and endings, accuracy of articulation, purity of intonation, evenness of support in your legato; dynamic shaping.
For this purpose, select music originally written for clarinet that requires the utmost in refinement in attacks, dynamics, and tone—the chamber and orchestral works of the great masters.
If your total daily practice time is only one hour, this activity should occupy 20 minutes, with time remaining for some sustained playing and technical study.
My choice would be for you to start with Mozart. Because the Concerto and the Quintet may already have associations with previous study, performance, or audition experiences, pick from the less familiar ensemble repertoire so that you aren’t building on old habits. The clarinet parts to the Grand Partita, K. 361, or the Quintet for piano and winds, K.452, or the Sinfonia Concertante, K. 297b, are extremely demanding in attacks, articulation, dynamics and intonation, and have more specific printed nuances than many of his other clarinet works. The chamber music of Beethoven — the Septet, Op. 20, for winds and strings, the Piano Quintet, Op. 16, and the Trio, Op. 11 — are also excellent for detailed work on articulation, dynamics, and rhythmic vitality, as is the Octet for winds and strings of Franz Schubert.
Choose Urtext editions, such as the Bärenreiter edition from the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. Follow the directions on the page with as much fidelity as possible. It’s surprising how difficult this is, and how unwilling most players are to relinquish their urge to modify what the great composers wrote, particularly the great composers of the late 18th century.
Look at the score carefully before playing a note so you can have a plan for tempo, phrasing, breathing, and the overall character of the work. To save practice time, study it away from the instrument by taking it along when riding the bus or eating lunch at work.
After a couple of months of careful work on some of these ensemble parts, you can switch to working on familiar orchestra excerpts requiring similar precision: Beethoven’s 6th and 8th Symphonies, the Mendelssohn Midsummer’s Night Dream, the Symphony #39 of Mozart. Work with the entire part, if possible, not just with an excerpt book. Avoid virtuosic selections that present technical distractions. The exercise isn’t about playing orchestra excerpts, but rather about cultivating the drive for perfection.
A second way to work on your critical listening requires an investment in technology:
Get a music recording device and learn to use it in your practicing,
With or without regular access to a teacher, recording yourself in practice is a fabulous fast-lane tool to sharpening your perception of everything about your playing. By comparing what you noticed during a given take to what you hear in playback, you’ll refine indispensable real-time critical listening skills.
The easiest way to use recording in your practice time is to conduct your practice session like a lesson in which you wear two hats. You—the student—play and record. You—the coach—then play back and critique. You—the student—fix, play and record again. You—the coach—play back and evaluate the improvement.
The most difficult aspect about doing this is staying focused on your task. If you are listening to detect the presence or absence of some specific aspect of your playing, don’t get distracted by something else.
My friend and colleague, pianist James Boyk, has published a useful book on the art of self-recording in practice, To Hear Ourselves as Others Hear Us.
http://www.performancerecordings.com/tohear.html
The major principles in Mr. Boyk’s study can be followed by players of any instrument.
Boyk advocates a multi-level recording and listening approach, listening to the same “take” of your performance several times over. He recommends starting with the “big picture” and working from the “top down,” a useful approach for something as short as an orchestra excerpt or as long as a concerto. To follow his specific listening exercises you will also need pencil and paper:
“On your second listening for the big issues, jot down some notes to yourself, then work through them at the instrument. If the tempo wasn’t steady throughout, practice playing the whole piece with steady tempo. If the dynamic shaping was wrong, practice that.”
Boyk also believes that “Close-up Listening” can help you make a distinction between random errors and recurrent ones:
“After you have worked through the large-scale aspects, you are ready to listen to the same tape again, this time focusing on the details.
It’s important to mark down everything, for two reasons. If you notice the same things wrong the second or third time you record the piece, it alerts you that they are what my teacher…used to call errors — things that need specific fixing — as opposed to random mistakes, which don’t recur and are more telltale of carelessness.”
Don’t underestimate the value of this distinction! Critical as we clarinet players are, too much valuable work time is lost blaming ourselves for randomly dropped notes and other irreproducible “accidents” instead of focusing on controlling predictable mistakes. Not being able to tell the difference causes many players to despair of ever playing anything “right” or to feel that they are incapable of being consistent under pressure.
Even if you already know you may have some of these bad habits from time to time, playing for the microphone will help reveal whether these are random mistakes or things you now do habitually.
Once you eliminate these fixable glitches, you can concentrate on the artistic “big picture,” perhaps using some of the techniques from James Boyk’s book. When you have material that’s nearly performance-ready, you can explore to what extent you can turn down the critical inner voice and give yourself over to the music.
Conclusion
As the drive for perfection comes to occupy a greater portion of your clarinet life, you will become increasingly intolerant of coarse and inartistic playing. Perfecting short pieces and following a multi-level listening and recording process can raise your overall expectations for what you hear. You’ll be freer to play more expressively, and the long-range goal of producing great art will move closer into reach.
It isn’t going to be easy for a clarinetist like Tim, whose practice time is typically limited to 90 minutes, four or five nights a week, to satisfy all his priorities at once: endurance, precision, musicality, being ready for his next gig. As his teacher, my best plan for him seems to be treating his practice like an investment portfolio: re-balancing the allocation of his time periodically to favor what seems most rewarding to his current stage of artistic growth. After six months focusing on sustained practice, he’s now ready for the challenge of perfecting shorter works where he can realistically achieve mastery, and learn again to hear the difference this level of preparation makes. In a few months, we’ll reassess his achievement, and he’ll get back to preparing for a possible recital, using further time-management techniques, and with higher standards for his critical listening.
Copyright © Margaret Thornhill, 2006
All rights reserved. A version of this article appeared in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Australian Clarinet and Saxophone Society, and the Autumn, 2006, issue of British Clarinet and Saxophone.
