Category Archives: Reviews
From The Savvy Musician: military gigs and the saxophonist
Dr. David Cutler’s The Savvy Musician blog is worth checking out for high-quality career tips.
In a recent post, he discusses careers as a military musician. A couple of highlights for the woodwind-inclined:
With the possible exception of saxophonists and euphoniumists, few musicians dream of a military career. Yet this path can provide a dependable income, solid benefits, and varied opportunities.
This no doubt refers to the problem of “classically-trained” saxophonists with shiny new BM degrees and no gigs. Symphony orchestras, if you haven’t noticed, don’t hire full-time saxophonists. Military bands are about the only regular “classical” saxophone performing gig out there.
The best candidates are solid and versatile players who read well and are comfortable with number of styles. Doubling on multiple instruments (i.e. a saxophonist who plays flute and clarinet) is also highly desirable.
Even in military bands, the most employable saxophonists are the ones with doubling skills and stylistic versatility (for saxophonists, read: “jazz/rock chops”).
Review and blindfold test: Légère Signature Series clarinet reeds
A few months ago, I posted about plastic reeds, and reported some of what I had read on another woodwind blog about the Légère Signature Series and Forestone clarinet reeds.
For reasons unknown to me, the post from which I originally quoted has been removed, but there are similar thoughts expressed in a more recent post.
Anyway, I got a kind offer from someone at Légère to send me a few samples.* They asked about my current cane reed preference, and sent three reeds in different strengths close to what I currently use.
Goodies via Canadian mail
Required recordings, spring 2010
As I explained back in August, I’m having my university students purchase a required recording every semester.
The purpose of this, of course, is to help the students develop good aural concepts of tone, phrasing, expression, vibrato, ensemble, and so forth. To try to learn to play an instrument well without a solid aural concept is like trying to learn a foreign language from a textbook. You might pick up a few things, but you’ll be sunk unless you get to really hear—over and over—how the words and phrases sound.
I’m discovering that it’s a challenge to make the recording selections meet all the criteria I’d like. For example, I would like for each one to:
- Be by a major soloist, preferably living
- Contain very standard literature that my students should know, without too many repeats from previous selections
- Contrast with last semester’s selection (for example, if last semester’s recording was music with piano, I tried to pick a concerto recording this time around)
- If at all possible, contribute to a sense of diversity
The last one has been a challenge. So far my two-semester tally, selecting recordings for four different instruments, is six white men and two white women. I’d like to improve on that in the future, though I do think that, ultimately, what comes through the earphones is more central to this project than the colors or genders represented on the CD covers. I’ve got a few ideas for future selections and welcome additional suggestions.
Here are this semester’s selections:
(more…)
Required recordings, fall 2009
I’m requiring each of my applied students at Delta State to purchase a recording of their instrument this semester as a sort of textbook. A number of them have confessed to me that this will be the first such recording they will own. I plan to require a different recording for each instrument each semester, so that, over the course of several semesters of study, the students will begin to build their personal libraries of great players playing great literature.
The purpose of this, of course, is to help the students develop good aural concepts of tone, phrasing, expression, vibrato, ensemble, and so forth. To try to learn to play an instrument well without a solid aural concept is like trying to learn a foreign language from a textbook. You might pick up a few things, but you’ll be sunk unless you get to really hear—over and over—how the words and phrases sound.
Here are the recordings I’ve selected for this semester. They are recordings of some of the most admired and relatively current performers (all are actively performing except for the late, great Mr. Mack), performing core solo literature. There’s no flute recording because I’m only teaching reeds, but maybe something like this would have been a good choice.
Oboe: John Mack, Oboe
Repertoire: Schumann Three Romances, Saint-Saëns Sonata, Hindemith Sonata, Poulenc Sonata, short pieces by Murgier, Berghmans, Planel, and Barraud. (more…)
Know your foreign musical terms
This is a bit of one of the excerpts that I provided for my saxophone students to play at their beginning-of-the-semester band auditions.
Excerpt from Fisher Tull, Sarabande and Gigue
I heard some very fine playing during the auditions, but many of the students were fooled by the “senza vib.,” with some going so far as to use fairly extreme vibrato at the beginning of the note.
As my blog readers already know, of course, senza vibrato means without vibrato. (more…)
The Usual Suspects – Los Angeles studio musicians
If you’re not familiar with Dr. Gio Washington-Wright’s web site, The Usual Suspects, you really ought to cancel all your plans for the next two or three days and thoroughly check it out. Dr. Washington-Wright, a reed player himself, profiles many/most/all? of the top studio musicians on the L. A. scene, with tons of bios, interviews, photos, videos, and audio clips.
Most of the major L. A. woodwind doublers get at least a mention here, but check the menu for specific instruments, as well as individual pages for especially notable players.
Don’t-miss woodwind lessons on YouTube
It’s hard to argue with free lessons from some of the finest players around. Here’s some of my favorite woodwind YouTubeage:
Tom Ridenour’s clarinet videos
Tom Ridenour is, if you ask me, an honest-to-goodness genius: a master teacher, a clarinet maker and mouthpiece maker, an author, and an inventor. His videos are entertaining and very enlightening. Some deal with playing technique, and some deal with mouthpieces, reeds, or instruments. Here’s one to get you started, but check out the whole collection here.
Review: The Woodwind Anthology
I recently got my own copy of The Woodwind Anthology, a massive two-volume collection of articles from The Instrumentalist and Flute Talk magazines. I’ve used this anthology from various university libraries throughout my long college education, and found it to be a go-to source for pedagogy classes and comprehensive exam preparation.
Inexplicably, Instrumentalist is selling these right now for $37 for the set. Check it out here. The shockingly low price makes me wonder if this has gone out of print. If you’re interested, I suggest ordering soon. (more…)
Free woodwind sheet music on the IMSLP
The Internet Music Score Library Project is an online library of public-domain sheet music. Most of the available music is in PDF format and can be freely downloaded. The files are uploaded by users, mostly scanned from published sheet music that falls into the public domain. This means mostly compositions that are old enough to be public domain, in published editions that are also old enough to be public domain.
This is a fantastic resource for finding older editions of woodwind solo pieces, chamber music, and orchestral parts. (more…)
Review: The Woodwind Player’s Cookbook
I’ve been reading The Woodwind Player’s Cookbook, published last year by Meredith Music and edited by Charles West. It’s a collection of 57 pedagogical essays by a pretty impressive roster of woodwind folks. You can download the table of contents here to see the authors and titles.
Most of the articles deal with technique fundamentals on specific instruments, which should make this book valuable to school band directors, but it also works quite well as a handbook for woodwind doublers; in fact, there are several articles that deal specifically with doubling, by Mike Duva, James Nesbit, Elsie Parker, and Albert Regni. (more…)
