Episode Transcript
Jay: Welcome to the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. My name is Jay Hassler. As always, I'm doing my best to bring you the finest in clarinet information and entertainment. I'm starting here on my second of a series of conversations with Mr. Ron Odrich. Thanks for having me over.
Ron: My pleasure.
Jay: It's fortunate that Ron and I live in the same neighborhood, so it makes it easy. As a total aside, I was at the pediatrician right next to your son's office. Is that the one that was in the audience with you?
Ron: No, that's the younger brother. The older brother, Mark, is the one who was in the audience with me. But Steven, the ophthalmologist, is a fine clarinetist. He never plays, but he is one of those kids who, when he was four or five years old, my father got him a clarinet. My father played several instruments, my daughter was playing cello, Mark was a clarinet player, and Steven wanted to be a clarinet player. So I have a picture somewhere of Steven holding the bell with his toe. It was longer than he was, blowing with his cheeks out trying to get his fingers on. Make a long story short, he turned out to be a very, very fine clarinetist.
And this says something about the Suzuki method. Of course, he was developing his nervous system, because your nervous system is always developing until you're around 11 or 12 years old. All those synapses that he had in his brain and his spinal cord built the clarinet into him. So his fingers are automatic. It's an interesting thing to see, because problems that most clarinet players have, the hump, the throat register, the A-flat, A, G-sharp, and B-flat going over to the next clarion register, no problem. And he never plays, never practices. Picks it up and sounds better than I do.
Jay: Every once in a while when we take my daughter to the doctor, I think I should go say hi. But then I think, well, what do I say? "Hey, I know your dad." I haven't done it yet. Let's talk about something you have a unique insight into that can really help all of us, and that's considering a science-based approach to how to play the clarinet. I understand your clarinet journey in terms of who you studied with and when. What I don't know is when you actually became a periodontist.
Ron: In 1949, I got out of high school and went to Queens College for two years. In 1950, I went down to Washington D.C. and studied with Marcelus until 1953. Then I came back up to New York and studied with Bonade until 1955. In 1955, I got into dental school, which is actually a funny story.
I had a session with Tabuteau and my father. We lived at the time in Woodside, Queens. I was reprimanded by both of them. My father said, "He wants to be a dentist. Nobody in my family is a dentist." His sisters were opera singers, you know. And Tabuteau said, "Why do you want to do that?" I said I was always fascinated with the mouth. I can't really answer the question. They really reprimanded me. "You're a clarinet player, you've got to be a clarinet player." But I insisted and I persisted.
I auditioned at Juilliard and got a full scholarship, and turned it down. My father was really upset with me, and so was Tabuteau. But it had nothing to do with how much money I was going to make. It had to do with my genuine interest in the mouth.
There's a story that might have something to do with it. When I was a little kid, my father had a toothache. He went into Manhattan, saw a dentist, came back home and was fine. I said, "Dad, what happened?" He told me about this wonderful dentist who got him out of pain. That affected me. The seed was planted. I became interested in the mouth. And when I started to play clarinet, I started to feel my mouth. I got more involved in my mouth with the clarinet than anybody would expect, because I started to realize where my tongue was going, where my teeth should be. I had a mountain of questions I used to ask teachers about the mechanics of the mouth.
So I became a periodontist and went to dental school from 1955 to 1959. The minute I graduated, I had a whole bunch of musician patients. I did a lot of general dentistry for a few years and then specialized in periodontics. While doing that, I was looking in the mouths of wind instrument players and always relating what I saw to what they sounded like. And I played with them, on recordings with Phil Woods and others. These were all patients of mine who I also used to play jobs with. It was that kind of melding that took place over a period of time.
Jay: So you'd already studied with Bonade and Marcelus, and you always intended to become a dentist?
Ron: Yes. And play the clarinet. I wasn't giving anything up. By the time I got to dental school, I was about as good a clarinet player as I could be. I had been studying with Marcelus, then continued with Bonade while I was in college. But I was playing all the time, practicing all the time. My friends used to tell me, "Every time we call you up, you're playing the clarinet." I was always with the family, but I had a clarinet in my mouth most of the time. I was playing three and four jobs a week as a young dentist.
I did recordings with Phil Woods in the saxophone section. I recorded with Clark Terry. I played on the road with Clark Terry. I managed to do both, and I always felt that was normal.
Jay: Let's focus more on the science. I want to go back to something you said in our previous conversation, about the sound starting on the inside of a clarinet player's mouth, which is different from other instruments. Can we go deep on that? When I think about my own mouth, I'm never 100% convinced it's where I think it is. And I never feel confident when I'm talking to a student about where their mouth should be that they're actually interpreting it the way I mean.
Ron: That's a good question. There are certain things you have to know about the mouth. If you want to communicate to someone what to do with the mouth, which is hidden, the best thing to do is to point to the feeling of what it is in your mouth.
Right now, if you want to know how to get the soft palate to go up, try to stifle a yawn. But if you take your upper lip and curl it over your teeth and pull it back, that reflexively raises the soft palate in the back, which opens up the mouth as a resonating chamber. So if you took your first few minutes of putting the clarinet in your mouth making sure you had that large resonating chamber, just do double lips for about five minutes and hold long tones. That will give you the feeling. And then you can slip your teeth on top of the mouthpiece and rest it however firmly or non-firmly you want to, and adjust to your satisfaction.
In my experience, when we try to open up our soft palate on purpose, it adds tension.
Jay: So what I'm hearing is that this way of creating that reaction, it sort of relaxes into that position. It's reflexive.
Ron: Right. The nervous system takes over. That's a huge issue, what you're doing with your nervous system. Look at the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is phenomenal. We could have a whole course about that. But the point is, I always go back to telling people about feelings. What does it feel like?
If you tell someone to open their throat, that's meaningless. Your throat, first of all, is largely cartilage right up to your larynx. You can't do anything to open that up. What opens is your oropharynx. That's the part right behind the back of your tongue. If you say, what does it feel like when you take your lips and pull them back, that does it. The soft palate goes way up in the air. That's the thing to go after.
So if I were to tell somebody to get more of a resonating chamber in their mouth, I would tell them to see what this feels like. Replicate that feeling. Even play the clarinet that way, even though it may be uncomfortable, just for a few minutes. Then hold that position when your teeth slip down onto the top of the mouthpiece. Then you'll have the correct position that gives you that open resonating chamber.
Jay: I feel like there are a lot of people who say that double lip prevents you from biting down, which I think is true, but that's not the actual thing having the impact on the sound.
Ron: Right. And "don't bite down" is just the wrong approach. Any time we give an instruction as a teacher to not do something, we're essentially saying to do it. Our brains wire that way.
It's like the breathing thing. "Blow the candle out." The worst thing you can do. That's not how you play the clarinet. You take a deep breath, a diaphragmatic breath, which means your belly is going to push out when you take a breath instead of raising your shoulders. The apices of the lungs are up here, and you want to get the volume of the air into the bottom part of the lungs. When you do that, nothing visible happens.
If you ever watch Pavarotti when he sings, he has close-ups of him singing huge arias on and on and on. You never see anything going on that you would connect with the breath. He sings the whole aria, then takes a deep breath. Nothing moves. It's all down here. The back expands, the ribs expand. Then you sit upon what you have because all those muscles have elasticity and they're going to contract.
The minute you start to force air, you get the superior constrictor muscles going. You push yourself into the sympathetic nervous system, as opposed to the parasympathetic, which relaxes you. When you play the clarinet, you're ostensibly doing the ideal thing to get yourself into a relaxed mode: taking a deep breath and then exhaling slowly. Exhaling slowly, not blowing slowly.
The worst verb you can use for a wind instrument is "blow." I've never liked it. The better verb is "exhale." Sigh into the clarinet. An exhale into the clarinet is really the basis. And where do you get the pressure from? If you really breathe in, your belly is pushing out, and then the air comes out in a very small area. There's a lot of velocity. You don't have to push.
Play an open G that way. It sounds a lot better than if you put the open G in your mouth and just blow.
Jay: The removal of tension in one's playing is so important, but it's really hard to talk about in terms of removing tension. It's better talked about as something positive, like an exhale.
Ron: Exactly. There's no tension in what I'm talking about. But if you're thinking about blowing or pushing, that's adding tension. That's why I think it's not "don't push," it's not "don't blow." It's: exhale. It's a positive instruction. It immediately makes a difference in your playing.
Somebody I know, a wonderful player, went to a friend of his, also a wonderful player, after I told him this. He played bass clarinet, one phrase blowing and one exhaling, and asked, "Can you tell the difference?" The other player said, "Yeah, it sounds like you're playing a different horn."
It makes a big difference. It allows your body to become trained to go in that direction, so your approach is not "let me not blow, let me not bite." Your approach is "let me caress the reed, let me exhale." I don't think it's empty talk. It really is stuff that makes a difference. It certainly makes a difference in the way you feel when you play, and I'm convinced that carries over into what you sound like.
Jay: As a middle school band director, sometimes if you want a kid to blow harder just to get enough air going to make a sound on the clarinet, you say things that aren't exactly true to get a result so the concert's okay. But if that kid happens to grow up to be a clarinet player, they've had a bunch of wrong things said to them.
Ron: I understand. But actually, I think you can approach a child by having them exhale, just do an unvoiced "ha," then purse their lips without pushing any harder, and then play open G. Just do that exhale into the clarinet. Instead of biting, rest your mouthpiece against your upper teeth and draw your lower lip up to caress the reed. Don't include your teeth. That's a different instruction.
You ever watch Dan Gats play? Perfect example of what an embouchure could be. He puffs his cheeks out, but he plays with an upper lip that's curled down. And Bob Marcelus was big about this: you want everything as firmly solid as you possibly can. You're taking the only solid contact you have with the instrument, with your teeth on the mouthpiece. That's a solid contact.
The worst thing you want to do is use your head muscles, because you have to use your head muscles to lift your upper jaw. The upper jaw doesn't move by itself. For people who are audio only, we're talking about lifting your top teeth off the mouthpiece to take the breath in. Lifting the upper teeth up means you engage your cervical muscles, all the muscles that make your head go up and down. You don't want to do that. You want to keep that solid contact with the mouthpiece.
Nothing changes when you hold that position. Everything changes when you lift your head off. You can drop your jaw or breathe through the sides of your mouth, but you never take your teeth off the mouthpiece and then come back. A lot of people teach that, and it just compounds the issue. It introduces another variable you don't need.
Jay: For the past few years, I've been really focused on allowing the weight of the bell to put the clarinet on my teeth. That's how much pressure goes on my teeth.
Ron: I'm a huge proponent of this. It's another stabilizing factor. You know, if you play double lip, you can't really do it standing up. It's very hard. Bob Marcelus, when he was playing double lip, would lean over and put the bell on his knee while standing. Bill Hudgens in Boston plays with the clarinet between his knees. His knees are holding the clarinet. Everything is solid.
The last thing you want to do is disengage from the instrument, which is what you do when you lift up to breathe. What Gats does is keep his teeth on the mouthpiece, drop his jaw, and when he comes back up, his lower lip comes up and caresses the reed. He's using more of the wet part of his lip.
And it depends on the size of your lip. I have very thin lips. Some people have thicker lips. They can play with a lot of lip out and it looks like they're way out, but they're not, because they have much more lip to put against the reed. Joe Allard used to say, "You play on the rosy pink part of your lips." Very poetic, but that's not always enough, because the amount of cushion you have determines the amount of reed that's going to vibrate. And where you put that cushion in the facing of the mouthpiece and the reed is crucial, because that's where the control is.
So when you think about not biting, think of it differently. Think of the fact that your lip is going to come up and caress the reed. Your teeth are just going to sit there. They're structural. When you go up in the upper register, you may have to exert some pressure to get the upper register out and not be flat. But that's additional support, not biting.
Jay: I never had this thought before about a reed being in our mouth, which is unique to clarinet, oboe, saxophone, double reed and single reed instruments, and the sound actually coming from our mouth.
Ron: The air column is determined by the size and shape of your lungs. If the air is to come out, it has to be in continuity with the air that's in your lungs. So chances are that the vibration is happening throughout. And I maintain that there is a feeling that goes along with getting the most resonant sound on the clarinet. I don't think this is ever taught. If you latch on to what that feels like, exactly what it feels like when you're getting a very resonant sound, there is feedback you get. It's actually physically a very satisfying feeling because it's within your body.
That open, relaxed sensation of exhaling is totally different from taking an instrument and blowing into it. The approach should be a very gentle, very warm, parasympathetic nervous system approach. You should be free to increase pressure when the music demands it, the way a violinist would really dig in once in a while. But that's not the basis. That's not the approach for the Mozart concerto.
Jay: Now, in terms of where our tongue is when we play, what are some things to think about in terms of voicing? The tongue is super long, as far as I know, and has different parts that move in different ways. How do we as learners engage with it in a way that we can self-diagnose?
Ron: The word "should" is the wrong one when it comes to tongue position, because once again, you have to go for feeling. If you get somebody to exhale, you don't exhale with your tongue flat against your upper palate or in strange positions. So exhaling takes care of a lot of that on its own.
But you don't know what the size of the tongue is unless you're a dentist looking in the person's mouth. You don't know whether the palate is very arched or very flat, which really governs the amount of resonating sound you can get in your mouth. There is a very satisfying feeling in the mouth when the sound is resonating in there, and it's not just the result of forcing air into the instrument.
If you think of what it feels like to yawn, that's the feeling. Is somebody going to yawn while they're playing? No. But the feeling is what you want. If you get somebody to exhale into the instrument and caress the reed with the lower lip, the tongue position will often find its natural place.
I used to have this conversation with Ronnie Rubin. He's a genius. He was a phenomenal clarinet player, a funny guy, practically a standup comic. He was the first person who told me about the fact that the clarinet really acts as a closed-end instrument, that the sound wave goes back and forth four times before it comes out of the bell. He pointed out that some people, because of their overjet or the way their jaw is structured, will have the mouthpiece resting in very different positions, which changes exactly where the tongue tip would naturally go.
Some people tongue better with the ventral side of the tongue, the underside, at the tip. I heard that and said, "I'm going to try that, Ronnie." And in my mouth, that's the best place for me: just under the tip. Everybody says use the top of the tip, the dorsal part. But if your tongue is wide and flat, you have to bunch the tongue to get the top part to the reed, and that's not good. If your palate is flat and there's no room to arch the tongue, you're probably better off touching the reed with the underside of the tip.
Jay: What do you call the underside of the tongue?
Ron: Ventral. Dorsal is the top, ventral is the bottom. And if you want to go deeper, you can look up the names of all the facial muscles. They have wonderful diagrams online. The risorius, the orbicularis oris, the buccinator, the depressor labii, the mentalis. There's no reason why you shouldn't know them. You should know what they do, and if you use that information to understand the direction of muscle pull on the clarinet mouthpiece, then you're doing something useful.
For example, I have a very famous teacher friend of mine who used to tell his students to engage the zygomaticus, the muscle that goes from the cheekbone to the corner of the lip. That raises the corners of the lip and pulls the lips back and up. That's not what you want when you play the clarinet. The zygomaticus shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Muscles only contract and relax. If you know the angle of a muscle and the direction it pulls, it's not neuroscience. It's very simple. Once you understand the names and how they function, you can look at photos of great players like Abato, Bonade, Marcelus, and see exactly what their muscles are doing. Not one of those great players has their corners pulled back. Marcelus holds down. Tabuteau played with a kind of flute embouchure, holding the lower lip down. These are very different approaches.
Jay: So the muscles contracting and relaxing are all attached at two ends. But our tongue isn't attached at the tip.
Ron: The tongue is attached, but through the hyoglossus. The muscles are attached to different structures, sometimes only to other muscles. But the tips are free to move, contract, and relax because you have longitudinal muscles that push forward and pull back. The forward and back motion, and also side-to-side motion, come from the extrinsic muscles. The intrinsic muscles are the ones that form the shape: whether the tongue is flat or pointed or bunched up. It's a massive and fascinating muscle that can move in many, many directions. And that alone is a huge variable from one person's mouth to another.
I was always impressed by the fact that some players don't know where to put the tongue if you tell them to push it toward the left. They really don't know what to do. I was working with someone this morning who definitely didn't know where their tongue was. And they play another instrument incredibly well. But since it didn't align with how they use their tongue for that instrument, they had a very difficult time figuring out where to put it for clarinet. And there's no association with intellect or other musical ability. It's just a vacuum of proprioceptive awareness in that area.
Jay: All right. Thank you for checking out the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. If you are an adult clarinet player looking for ways to improve at a faster rate and develop better habits in a shorter amount of time, please check out the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. It's linked in the description. Feel free to reach out. You can book a free call with me. All of that is in the description and show notes. Like and subscribe if you haven't already. Leave a comment, ask a question, and I will get back to you. And if it's a question that requires Ron, I will call him and ask him. All right. We'll see you next time.
