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Michael Drapkin
Yamaha Performing Artist, Composer, Executive Director of The Foundation for Entrepreneurialism in the Arts, Inc, Author, etc, etc. etc. Read more about Michael Drapkin at www.drapkin.net The list goes on...
My Fellow Clarinetists:
By enrolling in Rose Sperrazza's studio, you have embarked in a wonderful journey of the clarinet, one that will hopefully bring you satisfaction, adventure and a pathway through life that is unique in our society. Even after all of the years and diverse experiences I have had so far in my life, and even as far away from music as some of the things I have done have taken me, I have and always will be a clarinetist. It is part of the fabric that makes me the person I am. If there is any single bit of advice I can give you, it is to find satisfaction in your world of the clarinet, and enjoy it for the wonderful universe that it creates for you.
Here are some ideas that might be helpful to think about. These are things that have worked for me; you have to find what works for you. Hopefully these can give you some direction to explore.
ON PLAYING THE CLARINET
The physical act of playing the clarinet and the beautiful things that it
produces is a conglomerate of a diverse set of activities, and the whole, when working well, is definitely greater than the sum of the parts:
REEDS: Reeds probably have the single biggest impact on how you sound as a clarinetist, yet the vast majority of clarinetists don't know how to adjust reeds and make them work for you, rather than trying to adjust yourself to them. I've given a lot of reed master classes, both publicly or privately for friends, and I am still astounded at the lack of knowledge that exists among clarinetists regarding how to work on reeds. If you find reeds that work right out of the box, then you don't know how to work on reeds. If you use a reed clipper, or reed duplication machines, or your reeds only last a couple of days or weeks, or even know the number reed you use, then you don't know how to work on reeds.
Most clarinet players play on reeds that are too hard, because they tend to be more concerned about the number on the box (e.g. "I only use #5 reeds!"), so consequently they get fuzzy sounds and a tone that is non-responsive, especially in your ability to articulate and play soft in the upper register. While a full, substantive discussion of how to make and adjust clarinet reeds is beyond the scope of this piece, here are some tips:
You need to start with good, aged, golden cane that is cut evenly, and the fibers must be absolutely parallel to the reed and be even, not clumped.
You can't make a good reed if you don't start with good cane. Stick with a major brand like Van Doren (or "VD", as one of my old teachers called them).
You need good tools for working on reeds. Find a good knife with a sharp flat blade. It doesn't have to be a reed knife - I steal my wife's folding flower knifes. I also use three grades of black wet/dry sandpaper - 220, 400 & 600, and I use a piece of Plexiglas (it keeps knife blade from being damaged) that is about 1" x 1/2" x 8" - it fits nicely in your hand, and you can hold the bottom of the reed with your thumb while you work on the reed with your knife or sandpaper.
When I break out a new box of reeds, I soak them all and give them a quick toot to sense the quality and potential, even if it is stiff as a tongue depressor. I rank them from 1 to 5, and work on the 1's first. Use whatever system you like.
Adjusting a reed is a highly iterative process. LOOK at the reed, hold it up to a light. Examine the fibers. FEEL the reed. Feel the tip, the
heart, sense the resistance at various places down the reed. Is it heavier on one side or the other? PLAY the reed. Does it sizzle? The tip is too soft. Is open G fuzzy? The reed is too heavy. Does it lack clarity? It is imbalanced somewhere. A reed must vibrate evenly in order to produce a clear resonant tone.
Adjust the reed as it changes over time. Good reeds can last for months, not days, and you need to adjust it as it goes though its life cycle. A reed on Day 1 will get heavy by Day 7 (approx.) and you will have to take off cane. Ironically, most clarinetists discard a reed before it really settles in and gives you its more gorgeous tone.
TECHNIQUE:
There is no mystery to building rock solid technique. You merely need to do your "clarinet calisthenics." I use Baerman and Langenus, but it really doesn't matter what books you use as long as you find something that allows you to play all major and minor scales, scales in thirds, arpeggios, etc. Give yourself a workout. I have two - a 30 minute version and a one hour version, depending on what shape I want to be in. Be consistent and USE A METRONOME! The metronome does not lie, and tells you exactly where your unevenness are. My mentor, Stanley Hasty, put it simply: "Do your technical exercises every day - it does not matter what you use - and eventually you will build a marvelous technique." I didn't do this until I graduated from college, and they became vital when I was on my own because I didn't have the cradle of school to keep me practicing or playing. Clarinet calisthenics makes up for all of that, and my starting to do them clearly coincided with my ability to methodically win auditions. Play the same set of exercises and become intimate with them - measure the period in which you change your clarinet calisthenics in years, so that you build up tremendous muscle memory of all of the elements.
The materials we study in our clarinet calisthenics are the building blocks of EVERYTHING that we play, so if you want to have that marvelous technique that you see others display, here is where it comes from. Your sight reading will also improve, because if you are used to playing scales and arpeggios in E Major, for example, your fingers will know where to go when you see them on a piece of music. I also believe in doing clarinet calisthenics in place of long tones, since every scale you play or exercise in itself is a long tone! Strive to make your tone even, clear and all things you try to do in a long tone when you do your clarinet calisthenics. Practicing long tones is like practicing driving with the car parked. Work the fingers!
EQUIPMENT:
Too many clarinetists focus on equipment as the primary cause of their
shortcomings as a player rather than the other issues in this section. It is not hard to find great equipment! All the major brands make great horns. Buy one. Don't get "mouthpiece-itis" where you search for the holy grail of mouthpieces. Find a good one and focus instead on your reeds, or technique or tone, etc. Don't waste your money looking for a panacea to solve your playing ills - the potential for beautiful clarinet playing is innate to all of us, and your quest is to bring that out by being smart and looking at the weaknesses in your playing, not your equipment. Your teacher can help with the equipment; it is ultimately up to you to figure out what you need to do (with the help of your teacher) to play the instrument.
TONE:
This is the first thing point of perception when anyone hears you play. Do you have a beautiful tone? - not how fast you are playing or technique. Yes they are important, but if you don't have a nice tone and play in tune, the rest is for naught. The same is true when I coach bands and orchestras -how does it sound, and how is the intonation?
The most important thing to acquiring a good tone is to get an idea of what the clarinet should sound like in your head. My ideal Super Clarinetist would be a meld of the tone of Robert Marcellus, the technique of Stanley Drucker, and the expressive musicality of Harold Wright. The good news is that there are recordings of all three that you can buy. Listen to them (or whomever else you see as the ideal) and thing about HOW you want the clarinet to sound. How can you sound good if you don't know what you want to sound like? Learning to work on reeds and doing your clarinet calisthenics will take you most of the way to a beautiful clarinet tone -probably 90% of the way. The rest is subtlety and nuance - your teacher can help with that.
MUSICALITY:
Another tough one to write about. However, let me take a shot. One of the great misconceptions of clarinetists is the belief that playing expressively and musically comes from being an expressive and musical person. WRONG! While those allow us to develop individual styles and nuanced playing, there are fundamental principals to sound musical phrasing. These include letting dynamics follow the musical line, change of position, cadences. Very unromantic and methodical, but also very fundamental to expressive phrasing. Again (he says copping out), your teacher can help you with this.
One point that is important to make is the concept of doing "more." When you play and think you are making dynamic contrasts and making big expressive gestures, chances are they are small or unnoticeable to the audience. You really have to do a lot to get things to carry to the audience, obviously within the scope of musical good taste. But let your bias be for doing more - bigger dynamic changes, contrasts, tone colors. Use the full range of tools in your belt to make listening to you an enjoyable experience.
A CAREER AS A CLARINETIST
OK, so you've enrolled as a clarinetist in college. You want to be a
clarinetist as a profession. What does that mean? What are your options? Guess what? The sky is the limit. The key for you is to start to figure out what constitutes a satisfying career as a clarinetist, and only you can be the one to ultimately decide.
When you go through our educational system, we have some early standards set on us that don't necessarily hold up when we become adults. For example,when we are in band, you strive to be the first chair clarinet player. So the lesson we learn is that success equals being first chair. Hogwash! Success comes in so many shapes and sizes. Leon Russianoff wasn't aparticularly great player, but was revered as one of the great clarinet teachers of the New York school. Yet, if we used "first chair" as a litmus, then he was a failure.
Your career as a clarinetist can take on many shapes and sizes. A lot of people poo poo teaching in public school, yet which would have the greater impact on our society if it went away? School music or symphony orchestras? Don't be brainwashed into thinking that there is only one pathway to success. Yes, I did get my major symphony orchestra job, but guess what? I didn't like it. It wasn't for me. So I do other things and consider myself a highly successful clarinetist. On the other side of the coin, my close friend and best man John Bruce Yeh got into the Chicago Symphony at age 19! And he is STILL there! I'd want to shoot myself, yet he loves it. Go figure! We're all different and we have to find our own pathway to gratification as a clarinetist, not have it imposed by others.
By the way, college is a great place to do exploring. In theory, it is a
nurturing environment that allows to you try out and learn different areas. Take a course in economics! Alan Greenspan started out as a clarinet player. Go take classes in foreign relations! Secretary of State
Condelezza Rice started out as a concert pianist. Go take classes in
journalism! CNN's Paula Zahn started out as a cellist. If you want to see a really wacky career, go see my website at http://www.drapkin.net. Yet for all the diverse things I have done, I am still a clarinetist (and always will be).
Learn to take risk in college. Your teachers and professors (and fellow
students) will help you. Then, when you graduate, DON'T STOP. Be the risk taker, the entrepreneur. A wise person once said "change only occurs when the pain of the status quo becomes unbearable." Be an agent for change! Remold the world! You can do that AND be a great clarinetist, too!
HOW TO WIN AUDITIONS:
OK, this is way too much fun. But if you skipped to this when you skimmed my article, be warned: You aren't allowed to read this unless you have read the earlier parts first. ("Rose! Grab 'em")
Auditions are a major pain, and I am really glad that I don't do them
anymore. They are way more stressful than actually playing a concert, and doing auditions are far more difficult than actually doing the job that you are trying to get.
That having been said, the key to auditions is managing focus and control. Actually, the key is learning all the fundamentals that I discuss in the section "On Playing the Clarinet" above, since you need to have all of those in place BEFORE taking an audition.
Assuming you are doing all of that, let's talk about why auditions are so stressful, and why we freeze up when we do them. When you do an audition, you have one shot - just a few minutes - to sell to whomever is listening that we are "the one." You feel out of control, because you are! Someone is dictating how to play, what to play and when to play (kind of reminds me of playing in orchestras...er...). So you feel out of control, and you get scared and you tense up. Your breathing gets messed up, you flub the hard stuff, you want to be anywhere but sitting behind a hostile screen with a bored docent pushing you along.
There are a lot of things you can do to mitigate that feeling of being out of control. One technique I used was rituals and grounding. I developed a set format when preparing for an audition.
The first thing I did was to decide when I would start doing my clarinet
calisthenics. What? Yes - the first thing to preparing for an audition is
doing the calisthenics. Get your technique to settle down FIRST, then start preparing the pieces on the list. Buildings are built starting at the
foundation.
Do a lot of auditions. The more you do, the more you will get used to it. Take every opportunity.
Learn the pieces until they sound good to you, but no further. Don't go crazy or overdo it. If it sounds good to you, then it will sound good to the listeners. Once you reach that level, you've prepared it. Try to
predict how much time in advance of the audition you will need, not because you don't want to "peak" too early, but certainly for me, I get bored maintaining and keeping pieces under my fingers and I won't practice them.
At the audition, don't pay too much attention to the other clarinetists.
EVERYONE is nervous and everyone thinks the other guy sounds better. Focus on yourself.
I ritualized the countdown. Once I knew the time when I would be playing, I would decide when I would first take out my clarinet to warm up...perhaps a half hour before. Then I would only do certain exercises, perhaps play some of the tunes SLOW to remind my muscle memory. I would swab out at T-5 minutes and sit quietly. This is all ritual - a way of bringing calm, order and a way of feeling in control. Think about it.
Thank yourself for feeling fear, and acknowledge it as 1) always being
there, and 2) a source of energy you can use to focus your playing even more under battle conditions. Fear will be there, everyone will have it, but the question is whether you can make it work for you, instead of succumbing to it.
When it is time to go in to play, TAKE YOUR TIME and DO NOT BE RUSHED! Look around you - ground yourself. When you sit down, take a moment to look at where you are. Take several deep breaths and find center. This is YOUR time. Enjoy it - all that work and prep you have done will finally get to be used. It isn't a panic moment, but a rare time to enjoy the culmination of focus and preparation. You are like the dragster waiting for the green light - the engine is warm, tuned, the tires are hot...the roller coaster is almost over the top. Enjoy the ride!
Listen to yourself play and enjoy it. You play beautifully, and BELIEVE
that everyone else feels that way. You are revealing the inner you through your playing. Transcend the physical situation of the audition and make music. Soar and float on the music.
Here's a really good trick. Before you play a hard piece, think of what
the tempo is and mentally take it a metronome notch down. It will mentally make the piece feel easier, even though you are virtually playing it at the same speed.
Also, don't jump into playing a piece without finding the phrase in the
music that you use for figuring out the tempo and thinking it in your head.
Don't pay any attention to errors. Everyone makes them and that isn't the criteria. Just play and enjoy.
Wow, when you're done, don't you feel great? Warm, relieved?!? Its over! Yea! I'm done!!! The anxiety will start up again when they will be coming out to announce the results. (Personnel manager: "we had so many talented people, and you all sounded great, however, we can only take the following individuals for the finals....blah blah blah")
These are my techniques - find what works for you. It worked well for me - in the Spring of '82 I did six auditions for major orchestras, mostly for principal clarinet, and I was finalist in FIVE of them. I had it down, and that was when I won the job I did with the Honolulu Symphony. Make the process work for you; don't be a victim.
There is this common fantasy that you have to do some "heroic" deed of playing in order to succeed at an audition. WRONG AGAIN! What you really have to do it be you. First of all, on any given day, no many how many people are at an audition, there are only a few actually in the running. Also, on any given day, the listener has to be buying what you are selling, and also on any given day, you goal is merely to do what you do and be yourself - no heroics. Either your everyday "good" playing will carry the day, or it won't. If you aren't doing well at auditions, you have to look at your own playing, not your audition technique. Build confidence through clarinet calisthenics - that rock solid technique will carry you through the stress of an audition. That good reed will shine and your sound will fill the hall. Notice I didn't say "great" or "heroic." Your everyday playing merely needs to get up to the level that makes you the worthy, day in or day out. I know it is easier said than done, but again I want to debunk the idea that you have to do "better than you ever have" to be successful at an
audition. Be you! If you make a mistake in the audition, so what? I made mistakes at auditions and still made the finals. The people listening know that everyone makes mistakes - if you want perfection, buy a CD - instead they are listing to your level of playing. They decide in the first minute and the rest is reinforcement.
I hope this has been as much fun to read as it was to write. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at michael@drapkin.net
GOOD LUCK! Go get 'em!!!
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These established clarinetists have graciously agreed to share their
thoughts on clarinet playing. May their words offer inspiration and
insight.
Artists
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