Building Technique

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blowing, flute fingering, flute pedagogy, practicing

There is more to technique than just moving your fingers. In fact, good technique on flute integrates a number skills and types of awareness. This includes:

• Balance of the flute and hand positions – if the flute isn’t properly balanced, then students develop all kinds of compensating behaviors to keep the flute from rolling back.
• Blowing – without steady air speed and pressure, the greatest finger technique is not of much use because we won’t hear what is being played.
• Coordinating fingers and tongue – have you ever heard a student try to play a fast passage while their fingers and tongue are out of phase? Even with decent finger technique, it isn’t very effective to be tonguing behind the ictus of the note.
• Knowledge of scales and arpeggios in all 12 keys – make it a priority that your students get beyond the keys of F, Bb and Eb. Help them learn to think in sharps for sharp keys and flats for flat keys.

Get your flute students technical exercises just for them, or at least for woodwinds rather than brass. The venerable band technique books are either more focused on brass skills like lip slurs and/or are limited in scope in their technical exercises for flute. There are many excellent technique books specifically for flute that target the developing flute player, including books by Trevor Wye (The Practice Books) and Patricia George and Phyllis Avidan Louke (The Flute Scale Book). There are also great scale and arpeggio exercises in all keys and different patterns and note values (quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes) in the PC/Mac version of Smart Music. In Smart Music, you can assign scale exercises for assessment, set it to loop through the circle of fifths and change articulation patterns.

Tone work is a vital part of technical practice. Please note that brass style lip slurs and Remington exercises may be useful in an ensemble setting, they are not particularly helpful in developing characteristic flute tone. For developing flute tone there is no better exercise than practicing octaves slowly. Students can focus on directing the air properly and pay attention filling the space between the notes with steady air. I recommend waiting until high school to introduce the Moyse long tones. The younger kids usually don’t have the maturity to understand how to explore tone, focus and continuity with the Moyse long tones.

The important thing is to help your students develop good home practice habits that include regular tone and technical work. If kids are practicing 30-40 minutes a day, 10-15 minutes focusing on technique will make a huge difference in their skill set.

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.

Why Practicing is a Waste of Time

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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.

Teaching Your Students How to Practice

Tags

flute pedagogy, practicing

We have all heard the old adage, “Give someone a fish and feed them for a day. Teach him how to fish and he can feed himself for a lifetime.” When you teach your students how to practice, they gain the ability to know how to learn and enjoy making music which can be used for a lifetime. In my years of involvement with many excellent band programs in my area, I can see that the kids rarely understand that there is a connection between how you, their school directors, organize their daily school rehearsals and how they could be structuring their personal practice. I also see a lot of kids relying on what they think they know about “how it goes” rather than being able to figure out their part on their own. It is as if they are passively riding a wave, going along with everyone else rather than taking personal responsibility for their contribution to the ensemble in terms of tone, technical skills, counting, phrasing and musicianship.

Here are some points I emphasize to my students at virtually every lesson:

• Structure your practice time. Do a warm up both for tone and technique. For young flutists, this means octaves and scales EVERY DAY. Then use the rest of the time to practice band music, solos, lesson material.
• Scales are the building blocks of music for wind instruments (and not just a Bb scale, as many scales as they know, through the range they know and especially sharp scales). Everything we do is based on scales and related patterns like arpeggios.
• Set your tempo first (even before checking the key signature) and understand how the rhythms fit into the tempo. Learn to play with a metronome.
• Learn how to break things down, isolate difficulties and solve problems. This is sometimes called chunking. There are many ways to do this. The more creative you can be with this type of problem solving, the more quickly you can assimilate new music.
• Learn to practice phrases or parts of phrases rather than measure to measure. This leads to learning musical breathing habits. (It’s a pet peeve of mine that band kids often breathe on a bar line or before the last note of a phrase because that is how they have been rehearsed in school.)

It can only help to take the time to point out to them that the way you organize their daily ensemble rehearsals is a model for how they should structure their personal practice, namely warm ups, problem solving and run throughs. It also makes a huge difference when you hold each student accountable for understanding the challenges in their parts rather than just relying on listening to everyone else.

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