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Many students are in the dark about how to practice effectively and especially how much time to spend on each aspect of  their daily practice routine. I often also b find  that many students spend too much time  daily on their pieces and not enough time daily  on what I call the basics of playing the flute…. at least that is what I have observed in many students who have come to me as “transfer” students. Many times I am actually astonished to find that the only music they have worked on are pieces( or as students nowadays  call  repertoire…. “songs”)!

In my opinion  daily practice  of  only pieces  is simply not  an efficient way to improve or to get better on the flute. I firmly believe  that repertoire should be the “dessert of our practice” and should be approached  daily only after one has spent quite a considerable amount of time working seperately first on what I call the basics of practice:  that is tone exercises . technique excercises  and etudes. Pieces simply should be practiced only after all the rest of these basics have been done!  I also believe practice should divided up into sections   because  I feel  repertoire   needs to be approached musically and  not as fodder for perfecting the technical elements of flute playing. Practincg a piece for overcoming technical elements cannot be helpful  in developing musicality  because if we have to focus on technique perfection when we pactice  a piece….. we cannot also focus on playing musically and epressively. And I firnly believe that the  technique of playing the piece  should not  get in our way  of practicing to  playi musically !

So, with this in mind below are some suggestions for how to   effectively schedule your daily  practice sessions   in a way  that I believe  will  help you end up improving faster  and  also end up helping to use  your limited practice time more efficiently so that when  you do get to your pieces ( at the end!!)  you not only  will  enjoy them more ,but you also  will  end up playing them  much better.

In general,  assuming you are planning to practice two hours a day,  the regime  described below is  how I suggest  my students   divide up  their practice  time  The first half hour should be spent on tone:Here are some suggestions for tone excercises: 

a.  start with the Moyse De La Sonorite exercise number 1  first in the low register 

b.Then add Trevor Wye’s slow melodic  tunes in the low register.

c. After that  do some harmonic exercises to get ready to move into the midlle register.

d. when your lips and embourchure are ready move into the middle register with some of the Suzuki/Takahashi exercises from the Flute Book #1.

e. Then do the entire Moyse tone exercise in threes: loud and then repeated soft from B 2 down chromatically.

f. finaly move up into the High register with the Moyse excercise #1 going up and finsih up with the Baker tone study for virbrato ( the “high tone study”)

Your second half hour of practice should move you into technical studies such as the Taffanel Gaubert Daily Excercises. (or the Reichert Studies or whatever else your teacher has you working  such as the Pares etc studies) Here are some suggestions for those of you working in the Taffanel – Gaubert Studies.

a. First do T-G Number 1 all slurred  then double tongued.

b. Then move to number 4 and play through the entire section with as many of the varied articulations listed in the beginning of the excercise. as possible.

c. Finally finish up with the  sevenths Arpeggio study from the T-G all slurred and then double tongued.

By now your lips, tone and fingers should be ready for the third half hour segment of your daily practice routine: Etudes: If you are working in Andersen studies, do them now or Altes or Berbiguier etc.  I recomend spending at least 30 minutes on this portion of your daily pracice.

And   only now  lastly should you move onto the final segment of your daily practice routine: your pieces.When practicing  your pieces a very effective way to  learn how to play more musically is  to focus on the so-called “skeleton” of each phrase.

Practicing with this method  involves  breaksing sections down into melodies based on the most important notes in each phrase. By practicing this way you can then add  notes back …. little by little…. onto each phrase so that you end up playing the entire phrase as  written but  intelligently and  don’t  end up playing  the written phrase randomly or worse…. not expressively. By the time you get all of the notes put back after only playing the most important ones in each phrase  first , the manner in which you want to perform that phrase will be totally clear to you! You will know how it should go. By practicing the skeleton first  we can therfore learn to play more musically! (BTW, If you have an orchestra concert coming up ( or band) I suggest that you can substitue your band or orchestra parts to this  “skeleton” section of your daily practice.) Notice that in order to do this, you cannot and definitely should not have to focus on any technicaly aspect of the piece. That should have been taken care of from your previous practice of tone excerciese, technical excerecises and etudes..  At this point you want to focus completely on how to play your piece expressively and musically. Nothing should interfer with that objective!

Also notice how much time I reccommend you spend on what I call these fundamentals… tone,technique and etudes…. and how little comparatively speaking time,  I reccommend you spend on your repertoire… whether it may be pieces, of orchestra/band parts. I firmly believe that we get better by practicing and perfecting our playing in these three technical aspects of the  flute daily rather than by playing peices only( or excerpts or orchestra/band parts.)

I also  firmly believe that when we practice in the manner desctibed above spending three quarters of our time on those tcchnical aspects of playing , the rest tends to fall into place. This is so because we are perfecting our control of the intrument  seperately from  our practice of the musical aspects of our playing……and  therefore  we can focus on the musical aspect of phrasing in the manner descibed above( the ‘skeleton” method  )  without worrying about the technical aspects of our pieces….since  we have already practiced that in our previous three segments of our daily pracice. So  by this point we are therefore ready to work on the music and it’s interpretation…

I know  that many teachers and students do not approach practicing in this manner. However, I personally have found that this is the most effective way to get better and I urge all of my students to approach their daily practice in this manner. I also teach all my lessons this way too; Starting each lesson with first  with tone studies , then technique , then etudes and only  lastly do I hear students playing  pieces.

I believe that this is not only the most effective way to divide our practice up daily, it is also the best way to end up playing musically and more imprtantly …….expressively….. Which is surely the point of why we do what we do…..that it to play expressively and communicate our love of music to our listeners!

 I am also …. and I am sure you …. are also ….. all for …..as Trevor Wye says repeatedly in his books…. wanting to “spend more time at the beach”……..AND at the same time  are all for  getting better at playing the flute ……. therefore we all need to be as efficient and as effective in our daily  practice as possbile .. and we cannot  not waste any time ….which none of us have in abundance for practicing….. so…..I hope these suggestions will help everyone to  be as efficient as possible wiht our limied resources for practice time daily (  and will also enable all of us to spend  more time at the beach this summer and at the same time also get better at flute playing!!)

 Judy

I have been thinking for a while about how we learn the flute and how we teach it nowadays. 

It seems to me that when I was taught I was pretty much never told “how to do anything”  but rather what the result should be. Yet, nowadays it seems to me that “Flute Pedagogy” is very different. It seems to be all about the “how todo  it”…..  and sometimes I really wonder because of that,  if the desired result…i.e the music  has been lost….. or at least diluted.

This also relates to my previous post and the discussion which followed about individual differences in anatomy affecting the results of how we hold and line up our instruments.

Specifically …..as a kid  I was pretty much handed a flute headjoint and told to get a sound. No one really told me how nor did they show me how. I remember spending several weeks before I managed to figure it out….Nowadays.. I prepare all my students for weeks  with spitting rice, practicing our horsey faces, and lip “trills” etc many times before I then show them how to get a sound. (It is much more efficient and also much more effective for sure… BUT and there is a big BUT here…… read on…..)

Added to this…..When I got to College my teachers never told me how to tongue or  what articulation syllables to use…. it was instead all about the desired result…. i.e. the music. In fact, I was encouraged to be a musician first and a flutist second… When I was finished with my Masters Degree in flute I studied for many years with Julius Baker…. and he never once told me how to do anything on the flute. I used to quipe that I learned from him by “osmosis”…… as I think all of his students did. With “Julie” as with all of  my other teachers…..it was all about the music…i.e the desired  result …. and not about the mechanics of how to play the flute.They simply expected that I was talented and musical and that playing the flute was secondary to making music….. and more to the point , that  I should be able to figure out the mechanics on my own.

Next point…..My first professional job was a union gig that I held for  years  as the second flute and piccolo player in the New Jersey State Opera Company Orchestra. We played all over the state of NJ… in the Graden State Arts Center, at the Trenton War Memorial, and at Symphony Hall in Newark. I even performed on national TV ( NBC) with them. Yet I never had had a piccolo lesson before I got that gig at all. I was simply handed a piccolo in eighth grade and told to learn how to play it.In fact, the first formal piccolo lesson I ever had was two summers ago at the Wildacres Flute Retreat when I scheduled a piccolo lesson with Brad Garner! Yet I have been a professional piccolo player for decades!

Moreover, I took piano lessons as a  child but only had a few months of formal flute lessons from a flute teacher until I was accepted at the Ithaca College School of Music as  flute major ( I was instead taught by my Middle School Band teacher … who happened to be a sax player.)….. and only took flute lessons form a real flutist as a Senior in High School   to prepare for my college auditions! If you think this was unheard of 50 years agao… think again.. None other than Wally Kujala was in the same boat. We simply taught ourselves!

But .. and it is a BIG but…. I did study MUSIC as a piano major all those years before College  and Wally Kujala had his father who was a professional musician to teach him music … even if it was  not to teach him specifially to  play  the flute.I think there is some merit in considering this for a moment. Especially if…. as it seems to me ….. that there are so many flute pedagogy”truths”  which are so different … and  they    seem to depend so much upon the particular teacher with whom you study ….for example ….as to whether you  forward tongue or not etc. ( BTW…..Julius Baker NEVER forward tongued… at least as far as I could tell he didn’t… and yet his articulation was simply amazing) or whether you hold your left hand in a “cocked” position or not etc. etc.

Yet nowadays we spend endless amounts of time on how to not just hold our flutes ….but even how to hold our bodies!

Don’t get me wrong here. I do believe that flute playing and teaching has made huge strides for the better…. and that so called “body mapping” etc and specific pedagogical techniques such as I learned in my Suzuki flute training  have not only made me (and many of my other contemporary flute teachers )  better flute teachers than many of my/our own teachers were…. but has it  made  todays’  students more musical? And isn’t THAT the point?So—here is where I begin to really wonder and really question what it is that we are trying to do.

In the  final analysis for sure… our instrument is only a means to an end which surely is the prduction of music… and more to the point… the expression of the wordless emotion which is in the sound. It really is NOT about how we hold it nor how we blow it etc etc…. but it really is about the desired result….i.e.  the music.

I don’t for a moment believe that  teaching what we think is the best way to hold our flutes or teaching  how  what we believe  is the best way  to  articulate  is not important to that end result at all… and I am not suggesting here that we should go back to the way I and perhaps many of my generation were taught….. BUT I do think that something valuable   may have been  been lost along the way and that perhaps  a re-ordering of our pirorities may be in order.

For in the end… if there is no consensus on how to do all these flute things (and there really isn’t as far as I can tell!) …  and  if that is at least partially  true because  of individual differences etc , then  why is the emphasis in flute teaching  today so focused on  the “how”  instead of the end result…  which is the music and how to play it? 

Well…. this is probably more controversial than it should be for a public Blog Post …. but honestly  it does trouble me allot.And I have been thinking about posting a Blog Entry on this subject for quite a while… so here it is.

Any thoughts/comments  out there?

Judy

Proably the most important book in your/our arsenal for developing your /our finger technique on the flute is the absolutely essential “Taffanel-Gaubert 17 Big Daily Exercises” book . Every flutist should own this book…….And in this classic flute book…. out of all of the 17 exercises which  you will find  there  … the very first  excercise  is the most important one of all. 

 I frankly find it  quite amazing that  even though about 100 years have past since this Book was first published , that this very simple but effective scale excercise  number 0ne is still the  most important and  essential  scale excercise we should do on a daily basis  to develop our finger technique!

so……although there are countless  ways to practice  this excercise. Here is the first and most basic way that I recommend ……

1. First of all….Memorize this study! It is essential  to memorize this study so that you do not have to look at the notes and can listen to yourself as you practice. ( and be able to watch your fingers in a mirror while you practice it). The pattern is really quite easy to discover: it is a five note pattern starting on low D  in D Major  repeated four times  and then it progresses to a five note pattern in Eb Major but still starting on low D…. but on the fourth repeat the pattern changes and resolves to Eb Major. This pattern continues up the entire compass of the flute into the third octave all the way to high B natural (we can extend it of course even higher).

2. Julius Baker used to make me (and all of his students )play the entire first two lines in one breath and hold the resolution note of the third line for at least four beats. Then he made us start again on the resolution note ( in this case that aforementioned Eb) and repeat this process throught out the entire study.

3. It is important to play this excercise with as big a  tone  as you can on all the notes and with with a healthy virbrato on each note.. In addition, it is also important to make every note clear and your fingers very even. You may find intially that this is quite a challenge but in time you will see results!

4.Once you can play this excercise slurred try it in the same manner but double tongued.( no virbrato in this case of course except on the very last held note.)

Now on to the second way…….

5.While slurring as you did initially try repeating the first two notes as if you are trilling them….. that makes the  pattern into D,E,D,E,… D,E,D,E, ….D,E,F#,G,….. A,G,F#,E……. and on the next line it would be D,Eb,D,Eb…  D,Eb,D,Eb,….D,Eb,F,G….Ab,G,F,Eb etc. Now you are specifically practicing the finger combinations of the third finger of your right hand  and your pinkie etc…. make sure your finger every note absolutely correctly so that you are working your fingers as much as possible while at the same time keeping your hand as relaxed as possible.

6. Next vary the top note…. in this case the A and the note which is not indicated in the music above the A  (which is a  B) …. that is play D,E,F#,G,….A,B,A,B,…..A,G,F#,E……..Now you are working a completely different set of fingering combinations!

7. Pracice these two variations as you did the intial two ways… that is first slurred as indicated in step number one and then double tongued as indicated in step number four.

8. Start at whatever metronome indication you can in which you are playing with an even finger control…. no fast fingers in places which are easy for you and slow fingers in places that are not. And all the way through the entire excercise all the way up throughout the entire compass of the instrument up to at least the high B which is indicated in the printed edition( it is claimed that Taffanel hated the high C so he left it out…. but that doesn’t mean we should!!) at the same metronome mark!  The slowly increase your tempo to at least a quarter note to 120. Later when you can do this excercise well you can increase it up to perhaps even 160 ( or at least 140-152).

This is best way I know to get your technique up to snuff and onto a virtuosity level. In fact…. believe it or not there is an added benefit to this…..because when you practice this study you are actually also developing  your tone…. because in the slurred variaitions you are also  practicing virbrato …. and you are also listening….. assuming  if it is memorized…. to every note for pitch, tone color matching between notes , even virbrato on each note and dynamics to be the absolute same on every note on the flute!! And of course you are at the same time developing finger eveness througout the entire range of the instrument.

There are many excercises we can practice and many books of scales which have been published since this little 17 excercise study excerpt of the complete Taffanel-Gaubert Method for Flute was published about 100 years ago …. but this  book and this particular study still remains the very most important one….. in my humble opinion …..for us to do on a daily basis in order to develop your/our finger technique.

Doing it daily with all the variations …. should rapidily help you improve ……. So………Have fun fluting  and enjoy  getting better at the same time while also doing your daily excercises!

Judy

So I thought some of you migth be interested in more news about the picc part to Daphnis in case any of you ever have to confront it. And I mean confront it!

Progress had been really slow for me despite many many hours of practice… so I finally realized that maybe it wasn’t actually me who was at fault. I think most of us musicians always assume that if we don’t  make  progress on a passage in an orchestra ….or any other part/piece for that matter….. that it must be US who is at fault. And surely, in fact,  most of the time it really is our fault and NOT the instrument. However……. just  as I often  ask my students in a  lesson where they are stuggling with something week after week … “when have you last had your flute looked at by a repairman”?….. sometimes it really helps to have your instrument looked at if you simply cannot make progress after significant practice on something. For…..In some cases… it may not really be you afterall….

In fact… in one of my orchestral excerpt books…. (in regard to piccoli….as opposed to “piccolos” ….often players have not just more than one piccolo head joint… they also often have more than one piccolo……) it really states that if none of these fingerings works on your instrument…. TRY A DIFFERENT PICCOLO!

So…. dear readers…. that is precisely what I just did. I tried a new headjoint.

And happily   I can now  announce… as Robert Frost so elegantly says in his famous Poem” Stopping in the Woods”… etc…. “it has made all the difference!”

My piccolo original headjoint.. though it is lovely and very good and I still like it… just doesn’t respond quickly to fast high register articulation… and consequently the famous piccolo passage which ….btw is always on orchestral auditions for piccolo at m. 183 in the Daphnis picc part …..simply was not getting any better….. to my frustration and the  conductors’…..so off I went to the piccolo factory ( which I am fortunate to live near ….as one of my former teachers once famously told me….. that living in the Boston area was like living in the center of the flute universe!) and much to my husband’s frustration…. “Oh no!!! Not yet another piece of flute equipment”!!!!! Have procured myself a second piccolo headjoint…. which DOES allow me to play that passage much ,much better.

It is of course not just the piccolo… but of course  also  me… but to be fair… the former picc headjoint simply was not helping me achiveve my goal. Perhaps another better player might have been able to work with it and make it play … but the key point here is that FOR ME… it just wasn’t right …. and I finally realized that it  was just not  working.

I think the moral of this sotry is that as we get better, our equipment needs often change… and sometimes we literally outgrow our flutes/piccolos etc. And what worked before simply doesn’t  work any more.( or we are confronted with a more difficult piece?)

Tranlated to students and student  flutes….I think this means that  if you can’t make any progress on a difficult passage after a reasonable amount of time and serious hard work… it  may be  time to take your instrument to the repairman and have it checked out for leaks or any other malfunction. Sometimes it really is NOT you( or us) but it is the instrument.

And tranlated to us professionals…. the moral for me is that this is the first time I have been confronted with a piccolo part as hard as Daphnis since I first entered the profession many years ago and had to learn   the  famous opera piccolo part  to Verdi’s “Othello” in two weeks for a performance   with  the NJ State Opera Orchestra  at Symphony Hall in Newark NJ …and thus now it seems that  my current  piccolo headjoint…. which worked fine for Mahler’s “Das Lied” two years ago simply was…. and is  not up  to  playing Daphnis.

So….Sometimes it is us….. and sometimes it actually is not! At least… that is my conculsion at this point…. so stay tuned…. we shall see if in fact I can play it better at my next rehearsal and/or the actual concert……..I will let you all know soon enough.

Judy

There are different  schools of thought on how to align your flute…..  Especially  about how to line up your headjoint with the body of the instrument. Specifically….  somewhat like my last post on articulation ….there seems to  be an “American” and a “French” way to do this. And  again there  seems to be  no consensus on how to do this  and perhaps BOTH ways are right….maybe for different players?… and  I think that it is   interesting to  describe them both   so that  you can decide which i works best for you.

Also….. I think that to some degree these diferences have to do with the diferrent ways that every flute maker makes their lip plate shapes and embouchure cuts. Bodies also differ in the best and easiest way for players to hold them….. so these elements can also affect the optimum way to align your instrument up…… (just a cautionary word to begin with!)

1. So what I perceive is the “American” way…. is to line the center of your headjoint embouchure hole with the center of the first key on the body of the flute. The footjoint should also be put together with the rods on the footjoint dissecting the middle of the D key on the body of the flute. This is the classic way I was taught many years ago.

2. The other way is what I call the “French” way. The Suzuki Method has an illustration in the beginning of the Flute Book 1 of this method. Essentially it aligns the middle of the embouchure hole on the headjoint with the far edge of the first key on the body of the flute. This effectively turns the headjoint in more than the “American” manner of aligning  the body and the headjoint does.

Interesting,I think that  these two different methods actually end up producing different kinds of sounds.

The American way ends up with a more “open” sound, usually with less harmonic overtones….. think …if  any of you out there remember William Kincaid’s or Julius Baker’s sound and you will have the classic American tone color from this alignment. On the other hand, think Moyse and (WIBB) Bennett and you will get the basic sound of the French School of playing….. more overtones and a “sweeter” tone quality rather than  what I describe as the more “masculine” American school of sound.

Amother difference which helps produce these two different tone quality results (I believe )from  a  difference in the  location  of the headjoint on your lip/chin: i.e. where  you  place the flute on your face. The French tend to put the lip plate up rather high on the lower lip while the Americans tend to advocate placing the lip plate in the indentation below the bottom lip….i.e. quite a bit lower.

Now…. how to hold the flute also affects the resulting sound. The French School emphasizes “balance”. That is the flute is  supported in three place: the right hand thunb, the left hand pointer finger knuckle and the little pinkie of the right hand. This balance is practiced so that when the flute is held up on your face, the lips are free to vibrate even if the placement is rather high on the lips/chin compared to the  ideal American placement ….for  as Moyse states the lips should be like an oboe reed…. and according to him, they need to be free to vibrate in the same manner as this double reed does on an oboe. 

Amercians on the other hand tend to talk about “balance” in another way…. they speak of using the left hand to push in on the chin and the right hand to push out so that there is a sort of leveraging between the hands which in turn creates a stable position. However, this can cause the player to actually “press” the flute rather hard against the chin…. sometimes unfortunately resulting in too much  tension,  especially if the player is not careful to remember not to allow themselves to get tense.

This issue also can affect the resulting tone the player gets from his/her instrument. Again the American manner of holding the flute usually results in an open type of sound and the French manner a much more … perhaps almost “reedy” quality of sound.

Now there are caveats for these two methods of positioning the flute. Flutes made by different makers  not only sound different, (duh!) ,  but they also play differently, and most importantly for this discussion, seem to  have to  be held differently in order to get the most optimal results from them.

Having grown up on an old scale American Haynes flute( which  were  copies  of the Louis Lots by the way) I personally have had to radically change the way I align my newer flutes and hold them. Nowadays if I align either of my  two new instruments the way I did when I played my old Haynes they simply do not sound good.  So I have found that I now have to use the “French” Method of alignment or otherwise risk not being able to play with a very desirable tone. Yet when I get a chance to play some of my students’ old Hayneses(sp?) I can immediately revert to  my old   American style of alignment.

This makes an interesting stew of thought…. so to speak…… have I changed so much…. or have flutes changed so much …that this is the case?

No matter what the answer is….. I urge all of you to experiement with these two different alignment methods…. to see which works best for your flute, your headjoint, and your body( i.e. mouth, teeth ,lips etc) Truly…. in the end  whichever produces not only the  best sound  but the sounds that you  WANT …..is the way to decide the issue….not withstanding  not the  two methods/styles which I have  described here.

And btw…. to quote my favorite musician again…. Quantz…. he advocates what I have descibed as the “French” way!(But then again….. Traversi have to be played this way!!!!)

Judy