Reinhardt Newbie Reflections

[Wayne]

I’m not sure there will be a ton to discuss from this post but allow me to think out loud for a paragraph or two.

After having adopted Reinhardt based routines as the core of my practice lately I’ve come to see a few things as essential ingredients to their usefulness even disregarding embouchure type or pivot pattern.

- an emphasis on rest and not over stressing the embouchure
- the clarity and emphasis on mundane stuff: definitely a wet embouchure, flush the horn daily, have a clean mouth and mouthpiece
- a set of exercises that very effectively cover all the bases of playing save for rhythmic figures
- the idea of practicing from a centre point and expanding up and down from there.

There is a downside to the approach. To do the stuff takes a lot of time. It’s efficient time. There is more benefit to an hour of Reinhardt studies than an hour of etude playing in terms of honing the tools needed to play any music. It’s just that it can feel a but monastic doing something like a “track routine” for 10 or 15 minutes. But the entire ethos, as far as I’ve felt it, is more of a scientific or athletic idea than an artistic one. The player needs to have everything working to be able to approach music I suppose.

However, so far I am finding that doing the stuff is leading to my body responding much more assuredly to my musical ideas when it is time to play,

[Wilktone]

Yes, Reinhardt had a knack for putting together exercises and routines that would address specific issues. They are often not very fun to play, but they do make playing music more fun because they are so good at building solid technique.

Depending on my rehearsing and performance schedule, I often just need to do some technique maintenance in the morning. I usually will run through a routine of Reinhardt's or draw from his exercises to create one of my own that will get me ready for the playing I'm doing later.

You don't have to play through the complete routines, though. We should be spending time practicing playing music too, so you can touch on each of the exercises and shorten up the routine if you need to.

However, so far I am finding that doing the stuff is leading to my body responding much more assuredly to my musical ideas when it is time to play,

That is exactly the idea here. Many people are opposed to practicing in a way where the focus is on how to play. But spending some time every day working on playing correctly means that when you move your attention off technique and put it on music the playing mechanics are already there without you needing to worry about them.

Dave

[Wayne]

Another feature of Reinhardt that is again, not THE PIVOT is the emphasis on using dynamics while working through exercises. The reason given in the material I am using (Rich Willey's Focal Point) is about indirectly training the aperture. The result, though, is that a player ends up being able to do very dramatic volume changes while maintaining a clear controlled sound.