Short-term Practice Strategies for the Advanced Player: Part I, Endurance Training
by Margaret Thornhill
December 2005
In my studio, the most common problem among my advanced students is practicing efficiently in limited time. College students in performance degree programs have the luxury of balancing hours of practice time against other work in music performance or study. Adult amateurs, often returning to serious music study after professional life in another field, may find that any time spent with the instrument, no matter how short, yields enormous benefits. But for a person who already has one or more degrees in clarinet performance, now in a demanding day job with a mortgage and a child—it's another story. Suddenly, he is forced to shift down his aspirations for mastery and perfect control into a miserable five or six hours a week of practicing, (if that!) to accommodate the financial and personal demands of adult life. To complicate matters further, into these few hours come sporadic gigs, for which personal practice may be almost non-existent. How can this person hold onto his standards without feeling diminished or defeated as an artist? For obvious reasons, it's the top-notch sight-readers among this level of player who survive this cycle longest without help: with little or no learning curve for notes and fingerings, this player can get by with almost no preparation for gigs.
“Debbie” finished an advanced degree in clarinet performance six years ago. After graduation, she had some unsuccessful auditions, then got married, took a job in music education and bought a house. She is an extraordinary player, but is only performing in volunteer groups, something she’d like to change. In coming back to private lessons, she revealed that she hasn’t really done what she considers practice in the six years since university. Frustrated, she is aware that her control is only good for an hour’s rehearsal, and that it would be difficult to prepare fully for a recital or an audition. She also knows that she’s developed some bad habits, but doesn’t have the perspective to know where to start making changes. Her idea of practice and study is based on the model of her college work, something her current job situation will not allow.
A clarinetist in this situation may find it reassuring to take stock of his true abilities before attempting some new solutions to short-term maintenance practice. First of all, even if you feel that you haven’t practiced in years, if you were well-trained, that training doesn't entirely leave you. Your finger response may be a little slower, but the fingers do not have to re-learn “how” to move; your musical instincts did not disappear; and unless you've stopped playing clarinet entirely, you won't have to rebuild your support. There are, however, two main areas of loss I keep seeing in such players: endurance and the habit of critical listening.
For the sporadic player, endurance—though probably adequate for a community orchestra rehearsal with lots of stops—isn't adequate for more than an hour of sustained playing. And, sad to say, this player may be accepting a lot of sub-par details simply because he hasn't been spending much time listening to himself: he's substituted the ensemble rehearsals, in many cases, for solo practice time. To get to the point where you are truly able to continue to grow as a player under these time-constrained circumstances, you first need to first get past the endurance issue, while also rebuilding the habit of selectively-critical listening.
Let’s talk about these two factors, one at a time.
My suggestions for building endurance in your practice time may seem simple, but they aren't necessarily obvious. The first of these have to do with re-establishing a practice routine, and are applicable to almost anyone, adult or child, professional or amateur:
1. Build a practicing routine with the cooperation of your family/partner—it will be easier for them to respect your need for work time if they know when it is and about how long it will last. Be very clear with family, as well, that your practice time is work that should not be interrupted except in case of emergency. To avoid distraction, don’t work in the room you use as a home office, and turn off the phone.
2. Pick a start time, and stick to it as closely as you can, even if it isn't every day. If you need a transition time between your day job (or class, if you are still in school) and practice, make it a short one. There’s a price to be paid by making your first priority after work relaxation, exercise, eating or drinking: when you finally start playing you may be too tired or unable to focus well. If you are hungry, have as small a snack as you can in order to be able to play without distraction. A systems engineer who hates his job likes to pour himself a stiff drink when he gets home before practicing his clarinet. Needless to say, this isn’t the best preparation for doing careful and detailed musical work. Find a compromise between your current habits and your basic needs without deceiving yourself.
3. Script your practicing. Choose an order of materials to work on each week and follow it every day the same way during the week (remember, we are talking about practicing for a particular purpose here.) Set it up so you are not giving yourself frequent breaks or pauses during that valuable hour. You don’t want to waste time searching for something else to play.
4. To increase your endurance, spend a majority of your precious time on sustained playing. As simply stated as possible: to build endurance, you can either play longer at a sitting or you can play for longer periods within the time you have. This is the same principle as running “sprints” or doing “interval training” with weights. In other words, for endurance training, given a choice of how to fill your hour's practice, put aside the sight reading, the orchestra excerpts, the ensemble parts, and the short, choppy one-line finger or articulation studies in favor of material that requires more sustained playing.
This is my critical point, so I’d like to elaborate further. With beginners and young students, teachers often advocate a shopping list of different activities for practice: a few minutes of long tones, ten minutes of scales, a one-page etude, an ensemble part, and so on. This scatter-shot practice style doesn’t suit the player whose technique is already formed, and who is literally trying to maintain her “chops.” Concentrate instead on two-or three-page etudes that require more continuity and style than digital virtuosity (good examples are the Thirty Studies of Auguste Perrier, which include both baroque and classical sonata movements and several of the Paganini violin Caprices) or long, preferably legato, exercises. For the short term, you will get more immediate results with materials you've already mastered, since there’s less impetus to stop playing to review notes and rhythms, but in case you need new materials to try for this purpose, here are two ideal suggestions:
Jeanjean's Vade-Mecum (published by Leduc) is a quirky collection of six sequenced scale, arpeggio, and interval-based technical exercises, each two and three pages in length, with no respite, and one sustained etude at the end that is a true control study. Unlike his melodic studies, (such as the well-known 18 Etudes) these exercises are mostly diatonic, aimed at standard technique. When these are mastered, the entirety of this little book can be read through in less than 40 minutes. While "about" exploring tricky finger alternations, all but one of these studies is legato and thus gives your embouchure a workout at the same time. True multitasking! I've recommended this to many an advanced student as a short-term daily workout to regain embouchure control, before spending the remaining part of the hour on repertoire.
In a similar vein, another favorite is the Hamelin Scales and Exercises (“Gammes et Exercises,” also published by Leduc.) The big payoff in this book is a series of arpeggiated exercises in velocity that travel back and forth up into the altissimo register, fully integrating the high notes into the entire range of the instrument. Organized by key, these and the elongated scale repetitions in the front of the book are really ideal for regaining control of the highest register while burnishing your command of diatonic passage work. Used selectively, this book can give you more bang-for-your-buck in twenty minutes of scale work than most other "methods."
When working afresh with either of these materials, it’s important for you to explore fully the technical discipline that the authors have created. Work through small chunks of the material, checking for evenness of tone and intonation, clean finger mechanics, and a fine legato. Pick a comfortable tempo and keep the rhythmic figuration exact. Each affords an opportunity to study lifting of individual fingers, singly and in pairs, for perfect digital control. As endurance studies, their straightforward articulation and scant opportunity for creative nuance is just the ticket: there’s no hiding the slightest sign of a less than perfect embouchure or erratic tonal delivery.
5. As you grow more comfortable with sustained playing, create performance opportunities that require your endurance to improve. Preparing for a recital six months away, or for a private lesson in two weeks will help create accountability for your routine. As you approach the recital date, you can rely more on the repetitions of the program itself to build your endurance for it. Being able to play through (by yourself or with your collaborative pianist) the entire program three or four times at a sitting is a true litmus test for whether or not you are ready to go out on stage and play an hour of solo repertoire under pressure. Knowing how your body feels at every stage of fatigue while playing this music in the weeks prior to the concert will go a long way in reassuring you of your control during the concert itself.
6. Choose a mentor whose ears you can trust to help you catch the bad habits you've let slip by, and accept his or her priorities. There's a fine line between noting what's gone wrong and beating yourself up so much about these things that it paralyzes your efforts to do sustained playing—or destroys your estimate of your worth as a human being! My advanced students are evenly divided between those who, in their perfectionism, are so obsessed with detail that they forget about the big picture and “can’t see the forest for the trees” or are, conversely, so focused on playing through things that they aren’t catching the small bad habits that make all the difference between artistry and mere competence.
With or without a teacher, a tape recorder can also be a powerful tool for objectivity in this process. Record tonight; play in the car while driving to work tomorrow; try not to run off the road.
Yes, there's a certain small segment of the clarinetist population who are so gainfully employed that their rehearsals and concerts for the most part take the place of practicing. But the finest players all find time for individual work. The drive to perfection is just as effective when taken in tiny steps, listening to yourself alone for even a few minutes a day.
In part two of this article, I’ll address in more detail the issue of critical listening in short-term maintenance practice.
Copyright 2005, Margaret Thornhill. All Rights Reserved. A version of this article was originally published in the Journal of the Australian Clarinet and Saxophone Society in December, 2005, and in British Clarinet And Saxophone in Summer, 2006.
