Surviving Band (A Sharable Dissertation)

I am at the point in my life where I feel like I have seen about as much as I can see before issuing these edicts.  Nothing that you read here is an accusation.  I may or may not be talking about your band, the person sitting next to you, your instructors or your director.  I want you to know that I hope to God that you have wonderful and good-hearted people working with you.  I really do.  If some of the negative things you read do not apply, that is AWESOME!!!  However, I know that there a lot of shit people out there, and I have learned how to deal with them because they had stood in my path time after time.  This is just a set of observations based on my personal life experience.  I am speaking mostly from the principal bass clarinetist's chair, but these things could apply to anyone.

Rule #1

Your Band Depends On Your More Than You Think

People who sit in the bass clarinetist's chair often want to play loud so that they can be heard.  I can honestly say I only played loud for a about a year from the middle of my sophomore year to the middle of my junior year.  Ever since, I have been accused of playing loud, being able to play loud and being intentionally loud.  However, I do not play loud.  I play with a resonant tone that decks even professional brass sections.  So, when you're in band, you have to find a way to remind yourself that your band depends on you.

The bass clarinet is such a weird instrument because its parts will give you every impression that you could play and no one would notice.  It happens a lot.  I sit down to parts all the time that could be inconsequential.  They could be totally meaningless, but I have to do something with them that makes me so important to the band that it is obvious when I am not there.

You might be thinking at this point that this is an arrogant way to play.  However, I am not doing this because I want to look good.  If I wanted to look good, I would take the trumpet player route and brag about my playing ;)

Bass clarinetists need to find a way to make every single thing they play musical.  That whole note that you are holding for four thousand years has time inherent in it whether you like it or not.  Changing articulations to make your parts more musical is a must, and you need to decide if you are going to play out past the bassoons and bari sax because, let's face it, the bass clarinet sounds better than both of those instruments.  Sorry bari and bassoon players, but baris, your instrument honks unless you are freaking virtuoso (one of which I have played with) but it sounds weird when you play it too loud.  And bassoons, I'm sorry, but your instrument does not cut through the band.  It does not have the presence or gravitas that the bass clarinet has.  We can play with vibrato and not lose the essence of the power of our sound.

So, bass clarinetists, what are you doing if you are spending all your time thinking about these things?  Helping the people around you.  The baris do not have to overplay their instruments, and the bassoons do not have to kill themselves.  You are at the center of the low woodwind sound...dealing with the low brass is another story for another day.

You may think that your band director is going to tell you to shut up.  Well, that's possible, but you need to poke them with a stick until you find out exactly how much you can do.  The more you poke, the more leverage you get, trust me, it works.  You are not being rude, you are just experimenting until you find the limits of the ensemble and your conductor's ears.

You also need to experiment with the shaping of sounds, lines and phrases.  The bass line of anything has a shape if you start to insert it into the music.  You primarily figure these things out by listening, but you come up with standard things you can do over time that make the parts sound more interesting.  There is a big difference between a line of whole notes that is completely monotone (think Ben Stein) and a line of whole notes that is shaped properly (think soft ocean waves.)  There is also a major difference between moving to certain harmonic lines a certain way.  Moving a half step in a harmonic part is BIG DEAL...that movement to the note that is a half step away is serious business.  Landing on roots notes of chords is intense, and landing on the bass note in an inverted chord has a sound that you cannot describe until you figure out you're doing it...those tones are almost flattened in nature...not in pitch...in shape.

Your tone itself has to have the characteristics the bastard love child of a set of bagpipes and a cello.  There is breadth in that sound that is extremely resonate.  Imagine the constant pressure that come from the squeezing of the bag along with the pressure that a cellist must apply to the bag in order to make any sound at all.  When you put these two things together with a touch of vibrato, you get something pretty special.   Before you ask, yes, I do play like that.

You have to play single tones that make people turn to you and go "damn!"  I remember doing Frank Ticheli's rest a couple years ago, and the final note on bass is a written A (G concert, right?)  And that is the undisputed best note on the bass clarinet.  Don't even bother arguing that with me, it just is.  And I sounded like a boss every single time we played, and every single time the bassoonist sitting next to me would say  "whew" or "whoa" and at the concert he said "damn" when we got done.  I played a whole note, ya'll.  A whole note.  You cannot tell me that your part is boring when I can get that reaction out of an adult musician who knows what they are doing by playing a whole note.

Surviving in band is all about doing something other people won't do.  It starts with making real life musical decisions.  You cannot make tiny decisions that are not of much consequence.  You have to make decisions that really mean something.  If you're doing that, you are on your way to really making a difference in your own band and beyond.

PS--Any band director on the planet that disagrees with this has a very loose grasp on reality.  You have to make musical decisions if you are going to contribute to the band, and playing with a boring or bland tone is unacceptable.  It's not unacceptable because I said so.  It's unacceptable because you are capable of SO much more than that.

#soapboxdismounted