(Editor's Note: Jean Cantwell saved as recording secretary of IDRS in its early years. She studied the oboe with Florian Mueller, Robert Mayer, Andre Andraud, Richard Nass, Lloyd Rathbun, and Francis Napolilli. She is also a saxophonist and gives recitals on both instruments. She is currently working on a series of articles, "Teaching Oboe Skills.")
The limitation of time allotted for a master class presents a different set of problems from those of teaching regular lessons.
As a professional oboist, you have probably presented enough master classes to approach a new one with built-in instincts sufficient to offer inspiration and help to the students; however it is a good idea to check yourself occasionally to see that you are making a methodical presentation to cover the needs of the students. The shorter time period for the class, the greater need to plan the time and subject matter.
On being invited to present a master class for a group of oboists, determine the make-up of the participants as accurately as possible beforehand. Will they be college students, oboe majors, or an instruments class in which the students have little familiarity with the oboe? Will they be high school students who may pursue the study of music on a college level? Have they had private instruction with a professional oboist, or are they the product of a band class? Are they elementary students on a beginning level or intermediate level? How many students can you expect to be in the class? How many in the class have had experience in making their own reeds or in trimming reeds?
When you accept the invitation, request that all the oboists come prepared to play their instruments and bring any reeds they may have worked on themselves.
Even with answers to all the above questions, it is important to realize your plan for the class will need to be flexible when you meet with the group.
Assuming you will have approximately one hour with the class, plan the subjects you expect to cover and the time which can be allotted to those subjects. If you have a longer period of time for the class, the percentage of time on each subject probably will not be the same, because you may expect to devote a larger proportion of the time dealing with making and trimming reeds. That will depend, primarily, on how advanced the students are.
As an example, we shall deal with a proposed master class for eight high school students from five different communities. Let us assume one oboist has the potential to continue playing oboe on the college level, perhaps with a major in music. Six have varying degrees of ability, and one came along for the ride..
The students' preparation for the class may have included one or two extra hours of practice, a new feather, a new skirt or shirt and freshly washed hair, but your collection of materials will require much more extensive preparation.
Perhaps you already have a kit of reed making equipment necessary for demonstrations. No doubt, it contains more than you take on the job and less than you have strewn around your work room. The shorter the time you have for the demonstration, the more examples of reeds at various stages of completion are necessary. It is like the recipe the television chef prepares on camera. All the ingredients are premeasured. One crust has already been prepared, and a complete dish is ready to be taken from the oven.
If orderliness is a forgotten commodity in your work room, assembling an orderly kit for efficient use of the reed making time segment may be your biggest challenge.
Bring a hand-out of recommended solos, duets and instruction materials as well as a list of reed making supplies and suppliers. Also, bring music for the students to play together to determine their proficiency. Select a piece of music with copies for everyone, on which they can write breathing and phrasing marks.
Your preparation of a solo to play for the class may be only a brush-up practice; however the decision of which selection to use is important. It is easy to fall in love with one's own sound and play a lengthy concerto, when a more helpful solo demonstration might include several very short selections to show the beauty of your tone, your technique and your musical sensitivity. Your performance should be designed to set a role-model example, to be an inspiration, but not to overwhelm, and surely, it can be done in three minutes or less.
If you have not had a formal introduction, do not hesitate to tell the students about yourself, briefly, and let them introduce themselves with comments about their training, experience and goals as an oboist.
To discover the level of proficiency of the individuals, ask them to play the parts, in unison, that you have brought. You may want to hear the better players perform a few phrases alone. This is the time to pinpoint the major problems and decide what proportion of time you will allot to each subject. It is possible all the plans you have made will be tossed out, and you will regroup to meet the needs of the students. If you are appalled at their low level of performance or delighted with their excellence, you may see the need to spend the entire time on correcting embouchure and tonal problems, or you might want to introduce all of them to reed making. With a mixture of talent, you may expect to proceed with the methodical approach you had planned. Try to limit the introductory period to ten minutes.
If there are no posture or hand positions that need to be corrected, demonstrate and explain the embouchure. Even those who appear to have a good embouchure and play with good tone quality need to have an understanding of what they are doing. This will aid in preventing their sliding into bad habits later. If they wish to become teachers, they will need to be able to verbalize their concepts in order to pass the information on.
Demonstrate and verbalize your concept of good breath control for the same reasons.
Embouchure, breath control and intonation cannot be separated. Correcting the first two may solve the third, but emphasis must be placed on listening to achieve consistently good intonation. Spend some time in establishing warm-up exercises of slow, scale lines to afford concentration on tone quality and intonation. Plan to spend about fifteen minutes in this area.
If the class is large, you will not be able to give much individual attention and will not be able to work miracle changes. If there is a particularly good student or a particularly bad one, you may want to ask them to spend a few minutes with you, privately, after the class is finished.
If there are evident problems in rhythm and sight reading, point them out and persuade the students to ask for help from the band directors. It would be nice to solve all the problems, but you should restrict yourself to helping with problems that require your special abilities, and leave the others for the school teachers.
Technique can be handled rather quickly. You probably have a few pet, alternate fingerings you will want to emphasize. Stress the need for relaxed but precise finger movements in the correct hand and arm positions. Outline scale and interval exercises in various articulation patterns to be practiced at gradually increasing speeds. An important aspect of the class should be to show them how to practice. Plan to complete this material on the half hour mark or shortly after.
Perhaps you will have a group of students who are founded well in the basics and will profit most from developing the tools to play musically. Caution: No matter how well they may have performed in the introductory section, do not be tempted to skip the basics. Their importance cannot be overemphasized. When a student learns them at a very young age, he can forget how and why he plays as he does, and bad habits can sneak in. Do not omit the basics of tone production, but do cover them more rapidly than you would for less advanced students.
With the students, establish three distinct levels of dynamics with good tone quality; piano, mezzo-forte and forte. Demonstrate and describe how to make a crescendo from piano to forte and back down. Play pianissimo and fortissimo for them and challenge them to extend their control to your level of expertise. Discuss attacks from strong accents to pianissimo entrances. Emphasize the need to observe all the composer's and editor's marks. (Only after he can accomplish all that is asked can he be allowed to make the decision on which can be omitted or changed to improve the musical quality.) Touch on the importance of being able to play well in the extremes of staccato to legato with all the variations in between as the background to being able to perform all styles of music.
Help them in planning the breath marks in a familiar orchestra solo or the solo composition you have selected to close the session. Tell them how an artist must go beyond the marks on the page to perform the composition as a piece of music rather than a string of sounds. Find the focus of the composition, its point of climax, the points of relaxation. Find the focus of each phrase. Find the relationship of the phrases. Discover, with them, which notes lead to another, which can anticipate a leap or a resolution. Introduce the concept of undulation.
It would be impossible to develop all the tools for playing musically in such a short period of time, but it can be the greatest time in inspiring the class, or perhaps just one of them, to take the leap into becoming a musician rather than a technician or a chair warmer. It is also possible to overwhelm the students and convince them there is more to be learned than they will be able to handle. Being attuned to their response, and your own good sense, are important factors.
Do not expect to be able to do a complete presentation on reeds and playing the oboe musically in a one hour session, but do plan to talk about reeds according to the level of the students' experience. Encourage all of them to buy the tools to trim reeds if they are old enough to handle a knife. At the least, have an almost completed reed which you can finish in a short period of time, to show them which areas of the cane control the stiffness of the response and intonation. Your time and the proficiency of the students will determine how thoroughly you can go into reed making. You may need to go over each item on your prepared hand-out of supplies and suppliers. Have a reed blank ready in case there is time to scrape the reed from the beginning.
Although it would be a surprise to find the time in a one hour session with high school students to demonstrate tying a reed, it would be wise to have wet cane in case one or two motivated students could remain after the class for more instruction.
A master class on reed making, obviously, includes a complete reed session, unless you know all the students have worked with a professional oboist.
Leave a few minutes for a question and answer period. A student may be at the point of decision as to whether he should become an oboe major on the college level. You might talk with him after the class rather than take the time to discuss his career with everyone.
Save two or three minutes to play another solo. You might consider using the orchestra excerpt for which the breathing marks and phrase interpretation were planned.
Now that you have the material you want to cover and the time you expect to allot to each subject, be prepared to toss the entire plan to the winds when you meet and hear the students. This is not to say the planning stage is not worthwhile. It is. You will meet the group knowing you are prepared to present a methodical, logical master class, but the needs of the students should be uppermost. The better prepared you are, the more easily you can make the adjustment to change the proportion of time to help them where their needs are greatest. With one class, you might not get past breath control, embouchure and intonation. With the next class, you might cover all the basics in fifteen minutes and spend forty-five on reed making.
The two most important aspects of the class are your flexibility and your ability to be inspirational. The introductory diagnosis will determine how flexible you must be in handling the rest of the session. Your ability to be inspirational depends as much on your assessing how positive and complimentary you need to be in judging their good points and how firmly you can correct their faults and encourage practice, as much as it depends on your professional performance.
No matter how good their high school or private teacher may be, or how well they play, most high school students need to be encouraged to practice more. They need a positive appreciation of what they have accomplished. They need positive statements to have confidence in their regular instructors. They need a heroic role-model.
Although none of us can pretend to be anything we are not, the master class can be inspirational when the teacher applies himself to discovering the students' greatest needs, offering a method to overcome that need and showing how those students, in a positive manner, can learn to play, as you play, the oboe.