Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 2001-05-16 20:56
Jan -
I hated my sound for years. It's only in the last year or two that I've started to be able to please myself. When you make music, there are no words to hide behind. You reveal who you are and how you feel directly. Nevertheless, I've found that some physical things make a difference. Please recognize that this is a work in progress (even though I've been playing for many years). It's a synthesis of things I've learned from many great players and teachers.
Breath is the basis of playing -- much more so than finger dexterity, embouchure, tongue position or whatever. You start by sitting or standing up straight and "sucking your stomach in" and expanding your chest as if you were a guy trying to impress a girl at the beach. Then you drop everything down and out with a bump, and simultaneously inhale, beginning at the bottom of your belly, expanding your abdomen and the ribs in your lower back. As you fill up, your chest will rise naturally. (I learned this exercise from the great teacher Keith Stein.)
You'll probably get dizzy or cough. That means you're straining to get the last bit of air in. Practice stopping just before that point. As you learn to do it, you won't need to "suck in" or get tense first. That's only to let you feel the difference between tension and relaxation. Ideally, you want to just breath.
Once you are full of air, you simply let it out. Never push up from the bottom, but always push down. (This comes from William Kincaid.) When you do this, your tone will be more resonant and you'll find that intervals that tended to have blips in them (like altissimo D to clarion C) will connect smoothly. You're looking for the feeling of a direct connection between the airstream, beginning in the bottom of your abdomen and connecting with the reed.
Next, you need to take more mouthpiece -- what Leon Russianoff called a "chonk." That is, you push up with your thumb until the reed vibrates freely. (You should have only about half of the red part of your lower lip over your lower teeth, and your teeth should be right under the point that the lay of the mouthpiece starts to curve away from the reed.)
Next, arch your soft palate (at the back of your mouth, where your uvula is) as if you were yawning, and raise the back of your tongue into that open area. Your tongue should be in a ski-jump shape. Experiment until you hear plenty of high overtones. Don't worry right now about being "bright" -- you want the resonance. It helps to whistle and think about your tongue position, although the middle of your tongue has to be lower when you play than when you whistle.
Be sure you're not closing off your vocal cords in a silent "grunt." Keep your throat relaxed and open. Remember the direct connection between your breath and the reed.
Even if you don't play double lip, you should experiment with it. Use a slightly softer reed, let the mouthpiece "rest in a bed of roses" (in Ralph McLane's phrase) and let the reed loose to vibrate. Yes, you'll squeak. You need to learn to let things go without squeaking, but you can't play freely without that possibility.
You'll sound dreadful - a bright shriek.
What you do then is start to round things off. Back off on the volume and round your lips and your sound idea to have an "ooo" (as in "moon") in it, while keeping the resonance. (This comes from Kalmen Opperman.)
Once the reed is vibrating freely, you will find you can make many good tones - warm, sweet, excited, angry, loving, show-offy, sleepy - it's limited only by your own personality. The clarinet can do only so much for you. The rest comes from who you are. This is where you really come in as a person. You need to open your heart and feel the sound as part of you, coming from your guts.
It helps to listen to the great musicians, and not just clarinetists. Get any record by the great tenor John McCormack. Play just the first phrase of any track and then play it on clarinet, going back and forth with the record to learn to get the feeling into it that he does. Of course you can't actually sing the words, but you need to get as close as possible. Do the same with the Pablo Casals recording of the Bach Suites for solo cello. These have no words, so you don't have that excuse. Nevertheless, you'll find it hard to get the same intensity and personal expression that Casals does. Other musicians whom I listen to for this immediate and learnable impact are Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Fritz Kreisler and Dinu Lipatti.
You never stop learning. If you're stuck with a sound you don't like, you have to burst out of the boundaries you've gotten used to. For a little while, you have to be a beginner again, making new, bad sounds that you then bring under control. Be prepared to squeak and sound awful. Then find out what you can do with it.
It isn't easy. It's about getting to know yourself better, including what you don't like very much.
Ken Shaw
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The Clarinet BBoard
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