Fake-arando is Not a Thing

Tags

Contest preparation, flute balance, flute fingering, flute pedagogy, flute technique

Sometime last school year, one of my private students was learning the Poulenc Sonata for flute and piano. If you are familiar with the piece, you know that there are at least five 32nd note runs that the flute does together with the piano in the first movement. When she got to the first run, she played the first couple notes, did some kind of faking in the middle of the run and played the last couple of notes. Inside, I was flipping out. What’s this? I never told her she could or should fake this run. It’s not that hard to play correctly, etc.

So I asked her about what she did in the most neutral way I could summon, why she wasn’t playing all the notes in this run, but in fact, faking it. Her answer elicited an even stronger reaction from me than just the fact that she was faking to begin with. She told me that her middle school band director had told her that was how to handle runs as a general rule! She had been told not to worry about the notes in the middle of the scale, just hit the bottom and top and you’re good. And this is a student who, herself wants to be a music educator.

A few thoughts about teaching kids good technique:

• It impacts the quality of the entire ensemble when you let your woodwinds fake fast runs and scale rips.
• It does kids a huge disservice to let them or even encourage them to fake their technique, both in their ensemble playing and when they begin working on solo repertoire.
• If you only ever test kids on playing scales in eighth notes at mm=80, they will never develop the ability to play rip scales that are so much a part of woodwind writing in concert band music
• Include technical work for your students both as a section and individually into your curriculum.
• There are vast resources available through traditional band methods, band technique books and online resources you can use with your students with very little effort on your part

Technique resources that I like from the band world include the huge library of scales, arpeggios and wiggles in SmartMusic. Foundations for Superior Performance and Habits of a Successful Musician both have excellent technical exercises. Then, of course in the flute realm, there are a wealth of great technique books including Trevor Wye’s Practice Books Omibus edition and Complete Daily Exercises, Patricia George’s The Flute Scale Book, and of course the venerable Taffanel and Gaubert 17 Big Daily Exercises

Personally, I’m not a fan of scales that have an 8th note followed by seven 16th notes. I don’t really think this type of scale teaches technical fluency. What I do like are five note scale patterns in every key including sharp keys, scale rips starting on each note of a scale, scales that cover the full range of the instrument (for more advanced players).

As always, if you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics, workshops and performances, click here.

Legato and Staccato Blowing

Tags

articulation, embouchure, flute pedagogy, phrasing and inflection

Somewhere in the five years of practicing between completing my master’s degree and beginning my doctorate, it dawned on me that there are two basic kinds of blowing, legato and staccato. Each type of blowing has a distinct function and infinite variability. For intermediate to advanced players, each type of blowing really should be cultivated separately, with attention to detail to make both styles readily available in a player’s palette of expressive tools.

Legato blowing – Probably the most basic type of blowing for wind players, but also an exacting discipline to master at any level of playing. It is important to understand the necessity of learning to blow between the notes and not just on them. For beginner to intermediate flute players, there is no better tool for teaching legato than playing basic Octaves. Upper intermediate to advanced players should do Moyse Long tones and use short excerpts from lyrical melodies in multiple keys to further hone their ability to play through a line rather than just on the notes.

Staccato blowing – This type of blowing, while it usually involves tonguing, is air based rather than tongue based. Most intermediate players are ready to start studying this as a distinct playing skill. There are many existing exercises that can be adapted to practicing staccato blowing. I especially like the Reichert Daily Exercises #2 because it’s not long and you can rest and evaluate between takes and keys. Here are some useful variations for practicing this type of blowing/articulation:

• Breath articulation only – ha, ha, ha. Use abdominal kicks. Compels you to be really precise in shaping the aperture to maintain good tone. You absolutely must focus on the middle of your lips and how you are gripping the air stream, otherwise the tone will be fuzzy and/or crack
• Staccato tonguing – ta, ta, ta. This is still more breath based than tongue based as with the breath articulation. The tongue merely adds some extra clarity to the ictus
• Dotted rhythms, reverse dotted rhythms and double dotted, reverse double dotted rhythms. Really challenging to maintain the 3 to 1 or 7 to 8 ratio while maintaining a clear ictus for each note.

In the context of normal playing, it is often the case that one needs to switch instantaneously between legato and staccato blowing, depending on the context of the phrase, style of articulation and interpretation of piece. These exercises can help your students get off to a good start mastering these two distinct and complementary skills.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics, workshops and performances, click here

Getting the Cart Before the Horse

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beginning flute, dynamics, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students, flute tone, vibrato

And the unintended consequences

There is no question that developing a wide dynamic palette and intelligent use of vibrato are essential skills for any aspiring flute player. Dynamics and vibrato add dimension and polish to the playing of individuals and within a flute section. However, I advocate waiting a bit before introducing these skills with your youngest players. Why? Because it is so critical for beginning flute players to master good embouchure and blowing skills first. Keep in mind that flutists don’t have a mouthpiece per se. We are relating to a simple hole that sits under our bottom lip. Our lips are our mouthpiece. Lips need to be trained to provide proper resistance, as we have discussed in other entries on this blog. And strong, supported blowing is an issue for any wind instrument beginner. Give your students the opportunity to solidify these skills before you introduce dynamics and vibrato.

When you ask your flute students to play with dynamics before they have mastered the basics of blowing and embouchure, the consequences can be quite dire, even to the point of them quitting altogether. Short of quitting, kids get into all kinds of compensating behaviors in order to do what you are asking of them. The kids resort to various kinds of constriction of the air stream, all of which sound really bad. They include pinching or biting down on the aperture (think about the sound of letting the air out a balloon while stretching the opening of the balloon), clenching of the teeth (also a tight and constrained sound, in extreme cases can lead to TMJ problems), and closing the throat. Once kids form the habit of constricting the air to play more quietly, it is a huge task (and often unsuccessful) to convince them that there is a better way to control their dynamics by controlling the amount of air and the blowing angle. Kids are smart. If it sounds bad and feels bad (which is how any kind of constriction feels), why continue? It is discouraging and frustrating for them. They will find other outlets for their creativity that are more rewarding.

There are similar problems that occur when you try to start kids playing with vibrato too soon. It has been shown that flute vibrato emanates from the epiglottis, the flap of tissue that blocks our wind pipe for us to swallow. It pulses but doesn’t completely close off the wind pipe when we play the flute. Again, it is absolutely essential for a student to develop a strong, steady, supported air column before introducing vibrato. If they don’t, the vibrato will be the most noticeable thing about their tone and it will not be possible to control the speed or amplitude of the pulse. Too heavy a vibrato is definitely worse than playing with a straight but supported air column. Teaching vibrato too soon is also a distraction and discouragement to ever learning steady blowing. Why set kids up for failure and disappointment?

Teach your students to blow and how to develop a flexible, sensitive embouchure first. This can take a year to two years of playing. Then adding in dynamic control and vibrato is a relatively simple job. In fact, there’s a good chance that these skills will just magically appear in your flute players if they are well grounded in the basics of sound production and musical phrasing.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Common Ornaments in Flute Music

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flute pedagogy

Woodwind players, but especially flutists, have to deal with a lot more ornaments earlier on in their playing experience than brass or percussion instruments. There are a number of symbols that are very useful to know about so you can help your students learn to properly execute these ornaments.

Let’s start with trills. By far the most common ornament in flute music. You will see trills in band repertoire, flute literature from all musical periods and small ensemble music. First of all, you always trill upwards, always. How do you know what note to trill to? You trill to the next note above in the key. This can be a half step or whole step. There is one big caveat. If there is an accidental next to the tr symbol, the accidental supersedes the key signature and you trill up to that note instead. In flute specific repertoire, there is another caveat for music written before approximately 1800. It is frequently correct to start the trill from the auxiliary note above the note being trilled whether or not there is a written appoggiatura (small grace note without a slash). Your students unlikely to see this in band literature, but in solos, etudes and chamber music.

Trills often use what would normally be considered cheats or fingering shortcuts. It’s important to emphasize to your students that they need to look the fingering up if they are not sure how to correctly execute it. Lots of kids think trilling is just about wiggling an adjacent finger, whether it is to the correct fingering or not. Make them look it up. With everyone having a device in their pocket these days, there is no excuse for not having the correct fingering for trills. My go-to site for all things fingering, including trills, is the Woodwind Fingering Guide. There is also now a free app for flute players that is really complete for standard, alternate and trill fingerings called Fingercharts.

This example from an Andersen etude has three very common ornaments, namely grace notes (the little notes with slashes through the stem), turns a.k.a. gruppettos (looks like a letter “S” on its side) and mordents (a short jagged line above the note). Grace notes come immediately before the note it ornaments and actually steal just a small fraction of the value of the note preceding the note with the grace note. Play them as close to the note it ornaments as possible. In music before about 1800, the graces fall on the beat and steal a small amount of value from the ornamented note. Mordents are no big deal. Essentially they are a one wiggle trill, up and back down very quickly.

Turns are the most complex of these common ornaments. At the simplest, they consist of the note being ornamented, the upper neighbor, the note and the lower neighbor before exiting to the next written note. The complexity lies in using the correct rhythm. A simple example would be:
Here is an example with a mordant and a turn in another Andersen etude. Note that when the turn falls inside a dotted rhythm, it usually is executed with a triplet. Also note that the sharp under the turn symbol means to raise the lower neighbor half a step. An accidental under the turn means alter the lower neighbor. An accidental above the turn means alter the upper neighbor.

The last ornament we are going to look at is the appoggiatura. In music especially from the Baroque and Classic Periods, there are frequently small notes that look remarkably like grace notes with one distinguishing difference. There is no slash through the stem. Especially common in the music of Mozart and Haydn, you also occasionally run across appoggiaturas in music from the 19th century. The main thing that distinguishes appoggiaturas from regular grace notes is that the appoggiatura subtracts value from the note it ornaments. In this example from the Mozart Concerto in G major, this passage is played as straight 16ths, slur two, tongue two.

Finally, in this example from an etude by Kummer, there is a turn following a dotted half note, executed as a half note with a 16th note turn, followed by a half note appoggiatura. Play the appoggiatura as a half note followed by a quarter note.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Choosing Music for Solo & Ensemble

Tags

flute pedagogy, solo and ensemble

Solo and Ensemble contests are a great way for students to learn to be responsible for the quality of their own playing, learn to play an independent part in a group and learn to play with other band instruments and with piano. Finding good repertoire, especially if you aren’t a flutist yourself, can be challenging. It goes almost without saying that there is lots of ensemble repertoire for beginning to intermediate players from the publishers of the band methods (in no particular order):

• Accent on Ensembles
• Festival Ensembles
• Classical Flex Trios
• Quartets for All
• Trios for All
• Duets for All

Here are several collections of more flute specific ensembles that I use all the time for advanced beginner through intermediate flutes:

• Rubank Flute Symphony (quartets)
• Flute Sessions (solos, duets, trios, quartets)
• 12 Bite Size Pieces – Mike Mower (duets, trios, quartets)
• Flute Trios, books 1 and 2 – Trevor Wye
• Quartet Repertoire for flute – Himie Voxman
• Flute Class Concert Album – Trevor Wye
• Selected Duets, books 1 and 2 – Himie Voxman
• Forty Progressive Duets – Ernesto Kohler
• Belwin Master Duets – Easy, Intermediate, Advanced
• and many more

Besides the band method solo collections such as the Standard of Excellence Festival Solos, there are many collections of solos for the beginner to intermediate players. These include:

• Concert & Contest Collection (Himie Voxman) – intermediate
• 40 Little Pieces (Louis Moyse) – easy to intermediate
• Solos for Flute (Donald Peck) – intermediate
• Rubank Book of Flute Solos, easy and intermediate – two books
• 24 Short Concert Pieces – intermediate to advanced
• Pearls of the Old Masters – intermediate
• Selected Flute Solos (Everybody’s Favorite) – intermediate to advanced
• and many more

I like using books that are already in SmartMusic so I can prepare the students to play with piano before they meet the accompanist. This is a huge time saver both for me and the pianist. The first four books on the list above are already in SmartMusic. With the rest, some of the repertoire is in SmartMusic as single pieces or in another collection. Some is not, however. If I have time, I create a Finale file and import it into SmartMusic.

In recent years, the biggest game changer in picking repertoire for my students at contest is the rise of the public domain sheet music websites. The best single website I know for flute repertoire in the public domain is www.flutetunes.com. There are solos, duets, trios and quartets for virtually every level of player. The typesetting is clean and accurate, though articulations have to be added for Baroque period music (I prefer this over heavily edited older editions from the 1940s and 1950s). This database is being added to daily. The other really indispensable website is IMSLP.org. This is a much bigger database of music from the Baroque period on. To benefit the most from this site, it is helpful have a working knowledge of flute literature. It can be searched by composer, instrumentation, type of ensemble, period of music history, etc. There are often multiple editions available, sometimes even including facsimiles of manuscripts.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Preparing Your Students for Solo Contest

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Contest preparation

Now that we are past the winter holidays, everyone is gearing up for contest season, both large ensemble contests and individual solo & ensemble contests. There is nothing like having your students standup in front of a judge to perform a solo that shows the individual strengths and weaknesses of our students as clearly. Here are some pointers to keep in mind so your students can have the best experience ever with their solo contests this year.

1. Make sure your students are well grounded in the fundamentals of playing the flute at every level. This means embouchure skills, breath management and control, articulation, scales and arpeggios, rhythm and note reading, and effective practice skills.
2. Pick repertoire that is appropriate for the student’s skill level rather than a hypothetical ability based on the student’s age or years of playing. There is nothing more discouraging for students than being asked to practice and perform a piece that is beyond their ability.
3. Monitor the student’s progress with their solo as much as possible.
4. Have them practice their solo with SmartMusic at different tempos, especially slower tempos
5. Help students find recordings of their pieces by advanced players for the student to listen to
6. Review practice strategy including how to learn passages correctly by chunking it down, practicing slowly, using a metronome, planning correct breathing, etc.

In general, most students don’t do nearly enough slow practice on their own, whether it is in passage work or in more expressive music. You model out good practicing habits every day by how you run your rehearsals, though I am sure there is never enough time for as much slow work, detail work as you would like. There is just too much material to cover. It is really important that you stress the importance of slow practice when your students are preparing for solo contest.

There are lots of collections of solos at the beginner and intermediate levels. The main criteria for picking appropriate solos is that it is within the range of the flute the student already knows and that they understand all the rhythms. Some of the well known ones include the Rubank Book of Flute Solos – Easy and Intermediate, Standard of Excellence Festival Solos books 1 and 2, Rubank Concert & Contest Collection, Solos for Flute ed. Donald Peck, 24 Short Concert Pieces, Selected Flute Solos (Everybody’s Favorite Series) and many others. Beyond these, there is the whole range of the flute literature including Bach Sonatas, Handel Sonatas, Mozart Concerti, French Conservatory pieces, modern sonatas and unaccompanied works.

Finally, I would like to say one of the nicest experiences I have when I judge solo & ensemble contests is when the student plays well for their level of ability and their piece challenges them without overwhelming them. The benefits for the kids are enormous, especially their feeling of accomplishment. I feel terrible for the students when they have obviously been pushed into doing a piece beyond their ability or desire to practice. And I feel exasperated with their teachers that they are putting their students onto pieces the kids clearly haven’t got the skills for, especially tonal and technical skills, yet. It is better to play an easier piece with good tone, technique, rhythm and articulation than to play the Chaminade Concertino because “you should be able to play that piece when you are 14 or 15 years old”. I think you can do some real damage to kid’s self-esteem and desire to continue playing by pushing them into repertoire for which they are not ready yet.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

A Plea for Musical Phrasing from the Start

Tags

phrasing and inflection, rehearsal technique

Though I’m not a “music educator” per se, I have worked daily with flute (and sometimes band) students of all ages and abilities for a very long time. What I can predict with a great deal of accuracy for you is where students are going to breathe, especially if their only musical experience has been in band. Where would you guess? They are going to breathe on the bar line, whether it fits the phrase or not. This is true for beginners and frequently for fairly advanced high school students. It’s been my observation over all the years I’ve spent teaching lessons in schools, that the vast majority of times, the kids are rehearsed and taught to practice measure to measure, single beat to single beat from practically the day they start playing their instrument. I genuinely would like to know why this is. As a consequence, I hear kids play everything from beat to beat and measure to measure, regardless of phrase structure. In fact, the kids seem to be completely oblivious to the idea that a musical phrase is a thing. 

We all know the melodies shown here because we use them all the time with beginners. In the first two tunes, the phrases are clearly straight two bar phrases with the correct breathing on the bar line. The implied harmony shows us this, as does the poetry of these well known songs. Where I guarantee we run into trouble is when  we start to introduce tunes that have a pick-up of some sort and/or phrases that end after the bar line. The commas show the correct breaths. The red check marks show where I predict for you that kids will breathe unless you have taken the time to explain otherwise. (Kids who sing tend to have a much better understanding of breathing and phrasing.) If you know the words to this song, it becomes immediately apparent why the red check marks are so very incorrect. Who takes a breath before the very last……word? “O give me a….home where the buffalo…..roam” Nobody talks like this nor do they sing like this. Why do we let kids play their instruments like this? Why don’t we have kids sing more? (A topic for another time.) They would develop a more intuitive sense for good phrasing.

It does take a few extra minutes to explain phrasing and correct breathing to your students in the context of whatever piece you are preparing for the next concert. I am certain that there is more phrasing that starts and ends in the middle of a measure than ends squarely on the bar line at virtually every level of playing and in every style/period of composition. We want our students to love music. I really believe it is essential to not only teach them to form an embouchure, blow with an energized air column and develop sound technique, but to teach them the language of music, i.e., phrasing and inflection. When one learns to respect and observe the phrasing, developing an emotional connection the music comes as a natural consequence.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Being the Flute Police

Tags

embouchure, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute posture, flute students, flute technique

Now that your students aren’t beginners anymore, what do they need to keep developing their flute and musical skills? The flute police! I’m joking, of course, but in a way I’m not. The interactions with and interventions by their teachers, both their band directors and private instructors (if they have one), during their first two or three years of playing are really critical for determining how long they continue playing and the level of competency they achieve.  In order to keep my own students on track, here’s what I have to be constantly vigilant about for them:

• Embouchure, embouchure, embouchure – make sure they are shaping the right size aperture, know where the flute is placed on their bottom lip, and that they understand how to change the direction of the air without changing the size of the aperture.
• Blowing – as important as embouchure. You can have a great embouchure, but it’s not of much value if you’re not putting air into the instrument. Likewise, a student can have great technique, but it is of little use if you can’t hear them due to insufficient air. Be sure to teach kids to drive the air with their abdominal muscles (often referred to as “support”).
• Balancing the flute and hand positions – turn the headjoint back and turn the mechanism more forward just a little so the weight of the mechanism is more on top, rather than dragging the flute back. Left hand and wrist under the flute to support the weight, right hand behind the flute with fingers extended. Right thumb under and more on the back side of the instrument.
• Posture – align shoulders over hips, whether sitting or standing. Turn head left about 45 degrees and bring the flute up into playing position. The plane of the body and plane of the flute intersect near the left shoulder. The end of the flute should be in line with your nose rather than in line with your right ear (you will be amazed at the difference in the sound with just this one simple adjustment).
• Technique – teach the kids the patterns of music including scales and arpeggios in all major keys. Teach your flute students to play in sharp keys. I get it! Band repertoire puts the flute parts into flat keys in order to accommodate the transposing instruments. However, you severely limit the playing options available to your flute students if they never play in any other keys besides F, Bb and Eb until they get to high school. And teach them the correct fingerings in the third octave.
• Counting and rhythm – be sure to teach kids to count for themselves rather than learning rhythm by rote. In more than 30 years of teaching lessons in schools, I have seen band teachers whose students have excellent counting skills and those whose students couldn’t count their way out of a paper bag until someone “shows them how it goes”. The student who understands rhythm and can figure out music they are learning on their own is much more likely to stick with playing long term. They will be able to benefit from your instruction about ensemble skills more readily because they will be more flexible and adaptable.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me privately on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

One Year Anniversary, Thank You!

Tags

beginning flute, flute pedagogy

It has been a year since this blog was launched. The blog is the realization of a long held desire to be of service in the world of school music education with regards to flute pedagogy. Why is being able to do this so important to me personally? It has a lot to do with my own start and journey as a flutist.

I decided I wanted to play the flute when I was four! That seems as amazing to me now as it probably sounds to you. I was taken to a summer band concert where I introduced to one of the flute players, the daughter of acquaintances of my parents. I was so impressed with that shiny flute and piccolo, I decided I had to do it too. In the third grade, I got my chance to start on flute. I never even considered another instrument as an option. I remember I was told to smile to make an embouchure.

My family moved every year or two or three because of my dad’s work. We lived all over central and southern New Jersey from the shore to the Delaware River and places in between. Every school had a different situation with regards to instrumental music. In fourth and fifth grade, my school had no instrumental music, but had a closet full of band instruments. I took lessons briefly with a college student who was a music ed major at a local state school. In sixth grade, I did get band lessons. In 7th and 8th grade there was a tiny instrumental program with a teacher coming in once a week to work with maybe 10 kids. In high school, my band teachers played trumpet, tuba and clarinet. And I had lessons for maybe a year in junior high with a woodwind doubler. There was also the community orchestra my dad found for me where I played once a week in junior high and my first year of high school.

I’m still amazed I got into a college music school at all, given my spotty musical training. I did practice a lot all through high school, and participated in the area and regional band festivals. However, I learned in the first few weeks of college that a lot of the information I had been given by my well-intentioned band teachers was just plain incorrect.

• smiling embouchure (somehow by sheer luck avoided the “kiss and roll”)
• tighter higher, looser lower
• fingerings – 1st finger on middle D and Eb, using right hand little finger, middle finger F#
• I knew nothing about phrasing, good breathing habits, correct articulation…..

With the help of great teachers, a lot of determination, and many years of hard work, I overcame these deficits and become the flutist I am today. You can hear me on SoundCloud or YouTube. As a private instructor and college professor, I have also spent many years observing band directors in their jobs and have come to appreciate what an enormous task it is to be a music director, pedagogue with all the instruments and program administrator all rolled into one. You have a huge job! My hat is off to all of you wonderfully successful school music directors out there. I admire your commitment and the passion you bring to your work. I share your passion and desire to see the students succeed.

Thank you for your readership! I’m honored that so many of you have found this blog helpful. Please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment and ask questions. What would you like to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Why Practicing is a Waste of Time

Tags

flute pedagogy, flute students, practicing

Many years ago, there was a high school student in my flute studio who reported to me that she was practicing three hours a day. Her friends that I knew also reported that she practiced a lot, several hours daily, during study halls and lunch. She was always practicing. What surprised me was that she was not a good flute player by any stretch of the imagination. Her tone seemed immature for her age and her rhythm skills were very weak. How could she be spending so much time in a practice room with so little to show for the effort?

Determined to get to the bottom of what was going on with this student, I questioned her further. She came from a family that had a lot of musicians and she felt she was expected to follow the family tradition and be a musician too. She was taught and believed that you had to put in the time to become a good musician. She also was really unhappy with what she was doing. In working with her, I discovered she had absolutely no process to her practicing. It was just playing through things over and over. It had never occurred to her that she needed to be evaluating what she was doing, identifying and solving problems, in order for her practice time to help her become better at playing the flute and learning to be a musician.

When you tell a student they need to practice, be sure you give them the tools they need to practice effectively. Virtually every day, kids demonstrate to me that they have no idea what practicing entails. My tongue-in-cheek analogy for this kind of “practice” is the “piñata approach”. Put on a blindfold and have someone spin you around until you are dizzy. You are given a big stick with which you then flail about wildly in the hopes that you hit something. Hilarious at a party, but useless as a strategy for mastering any of the skills needs to play an instrument well.

Here are practice tools that I offer my own students:

• Teach the student that they must have a plan, set goals, solve problems and implement the solutions.
• Provide flute specific exercises for tone, technique and articulation
• Help them develop their own concept of good flute playing through modeling good playing for them by my own demonstration, as well as videos and recordings available online.
• Teach them to evaluate themselves without judgement by asking themselves how they measure up to their own concept of good flute playing
• Help them devise remedies for areas of their playing with which they are dissatisfied.
• Show them how they can learn more quickly by breaking things down into bite-sized pieces, often called “chunking” in today’s parlance.
• Teach the students musical phrasing and inflection (strong and weak beats, pickup notes, so-called Curtis/Kinkaid groupings). Practice the chunks in a musical way.
• Walk the student through these concepts as many times as needed until they develop the personal habits to do this for themselves.

It takes more effort to teach this way than to teach by rote. When a student understands what they are doing and why, it fires their imagination and they start being more creative in their practicing. That is when you see them start to really make progress in their playing. This is what makes the extra effort pay off both for you and your students.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.