<![CDATA[Alice Gallagher, Clarinet - Blog]]>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:31:39 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The Best Way to Apply Cork Grease]]>Sat, 25 Mar 2017 20:50:48 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/the-best-way-to-apply-cork-greaseIt has come to my knowledge that I have neglected to instruct my students, in some cases, in some of the most basic aspects of clarinet care and maintenence. Probably the most useful tip I can leave with you is the best way to apply cork grease.
First, you must understand that cork is a natural substance and needs to be conditioned and cared for on a regular basis so that the corks provide an airtight seal under the tenons of the joints of the clarinet.
Cork grease should do this job: often it does not! Many times, a cheap and slippery, goopy substance, cork grease gets applied to the corks superficially. 
One of the best cork greases on the market today is The Doctor Slick cork grease, which you can gick up at the San Diego County Music Exchange for around $3 or $4.
It conditions the cork very well and lasts a very long time.

Now, how to apply it? When to apply it? 
It's good to have an old rag to wipe your fingers off, or a paper towel. You should dab a generous glob of cork grease onto the tenon cork and rub it into the cork with your fingers until it is worked in and the cork is smooth, but not too slick.
Repeat this step often if your clarinet is brand new, the corks have been replaced, or the clarinet sticks together. 
One of the best things to do for your corks is to grease them lightly after you are done playing so that they remain conditioned, and will not crumble in disrepair. 
​]]><![CDATA[Olivier Messaien's QUATUOR POUR LE FIN DU TEMPS ]]>Sat, 25 Mar 2017 03:22:01 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/olivier-messaiens-quatuor-pour-le-fin-du-tempsA Study in the Charm of Impossibility
There is not a single note or structure in Olivier Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time without deep spiritual significance. Even the scherzo-type Intermède, composed expressly for the washrooms of Stalag VIIIA, is meaningful insofar as one may infer that it is an expression of the fight of the human spirit to rise up against the horrors of the Second World War.

The other movements all have intrinsic gematriatic connection to his Catholic faith; a faith that believed in the mystery of the divine redemption of humankind by Jesus Christ and of the mystery of Time itself, and how the eternal God, being outside of space and time as we understand it, as well as having entered into space and time, will bring us into eternity where he dwells, thus ending Time.

​Nonretrogradable rhythms, notes with added values, and Messaien's Modes of Limited Transposition all point to the infinite. Messaien sought to bring the listener toward "eternity in space." A kind of surrealism pervades the Quartet;  Messaien himself stated that ". . .its musical language is essentially immaterial, spiritual, and Catholic. . . special rhythms, beyond meter, contribute powerfully in dismissing the temporal." 

What is a nonretrogradable rhythm? 
First, let's talk about what a retrogradable rhythm might be: A rhythm that is retrogradable, if played both forward (as normal) and backward, results in two different but related patterns. A simple example of this, using letters to signify segments of rhythm, would be:



ABCDEFGH
​HGFEDCBA

A nonretrogradable rhythm, if played both backwards and forward, results in the same order of segments:
​

ABCDCBA

It is sort of a musical palindrome.

The use of techniques such as nonretrogradable rhythms in the Quartet for the End of Time reveals Meassaien's fascination with the impossible nature, in his Catholic faith, of humankind to understand God; he called it "The Charm of Impossibility-" the translation into English of "charm" might more accurately be "mesmerism."

Alice Bradley Gallagher
Literature and Materials of Music IV, 2003.
]]><![CDATA[To My Students: How to be a Great Musician]]>Mon, 13 Mar 2017 02:44:42 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/to-my-students-how-to-be-a-great-musicianHow I wish that I could tell you how to be a great musician in a blog post, or in a lesson. The very most that I can do is to inspire you to be sensitive to the meaning of what the composer has written on the page, and how to interpret black squiggles, slashes, and dots into music: artful sound.
What I can tell you is to listen. Listen carefully to everything around you, and most of all, listen voraciously to the great musicians of the past and present. In this age of the internet, so much is available at your fingertips, but even so, nothing is as exciting as a live performance.
The most important thing to do, of course, is to practice, but to never practice without listening. As soon as you start practicing without listening to what you are doing, your work starts to become a waste of time. 
​AG

]]><![CDATA[Set-Up]]>Sun, 28 Feb 2016 18:10:03 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/set-upThere are a plethora of clarinet mouthpieces, reeds, and ligatures being made nowadays, and as many musicians who swear by their particular "setup."
Some sponsored professionals give props to their setup (instrument, custom barrels or bells, mouthpiece, reeds, ligature) at the end of their biographies in concert programs. By no means should one ever, after enjoying a great performance by a clarinetist, run out and buy whatever they were playing on.
You won't magically sound like them. It's not how it works. In fact, many clarinetists change their setup several times over the course of their careers, and often alter the reed/ligature combination depending on the venue they are playing.

Confusion over the best "setup" to play on increases with the ability to afford various mouthpieces other custom clarinet parts. When you can afford to have (or afford to buy for your child) the best, the search for "the best" can become, frankly, stressful.

I am not going to make any specific endorsements here for particular brands or models or makers.

What I do recommend is that you keep in mind the Objective from the Subjective.

Objectively, there are 4 necessities for a mouthpiece/reed/ligature setup:
1. Intonation
2. Core of tone color
3. Ease of articulation/response
4. Ability to maintain the above three at various dynamic levels

Subjectively, there are a number of considerations. To name just one, some players prefer mouthpieces that have great flexibility in tone color, while others would perceive the same properties as too unstable.

The most important thing to keep in mind when considering changing your playing setup is to change only one thing at a time, and to not change anything very close to a concert or audition.

It is also imperative that one always have other people with good ears hear the setup and help you make a good decision. A common error in picking equipment out on one's own is choosing a mouthpiece that seems brilliant and full, but upon longer trial, the mouthpiece plays horribly out of tune or has some other fatal flaw.

Finally, especially at the student/amateur level, there is no magical setup that will make you first chair.
Whatever your budget, wherever you are, you are the one who must make it work. ]]><![CDATA[Welcome to the Twentieth Century: Serialism]]>Fri, 12 Feb 2016 16:31:25 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/welcome-to-the-twentieth-century-serialismHey Millenials! You clarinetists who were born in the 1990's or later! You are growing up as musicians in the age of the Emancipated Dissonance!

Whaaaaat?

That's what your ears seem to say when you hear some music. For example, Donald Martino's A Set for Clarinet.
Where's the melody? That's a melody? 
Why does this sound so crazy? It sounds like horror movie music. . . or something. 

This is a blog post introducing the concept of dissonance as not dissonant, not ugly, and in fact, learning to hear beyond the Major and minor tonality of what we call the Common Practice Period, (which extended itself through to rock and roll- which has very simple harmonic structure most of the time), 

In the early twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) started to work not with scales as you know and practice them (Major and minor) but using a "row" or "set" of twelve tones.
In an article that he wrote entitled "My Evolution" he wrote:

"Let us not forget that I came to [harmonic organization of a twelve tone row] gradually, as a result of a convincing development which enabled me to establish the law of the emancipation of the dissonance, according to which the comprehensibility of the dissonance is considered as important as the comprehensibility of the consonance. Thus dissonances need not be a spicy addition to dull sounds. They are natural and logical outgrowths of an organism. And this organism lives as vitally in its phrases, rhythms, motifs and melodies as ever before."

To him, this new manner of composition was as natural an unfolding of advancement in musical thought as the revolutionary Third Symphony of Beethoven, of which a critic wrote, "If Beethoven continues on his present path, his music will reach the point where no one will find any pleasure in it." Of Beethoven's so-called revolutionary Third Symphony Schoenberg wrote, ". . .this music was distinctly a product of evolution, and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music."
He saw the Classical and Romantic periods (and later composers who remained in those practices) as a standstill to the progress made by Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers that took tonality to new extremes; to Schoenberg, it was a two-hundred year filibuster of ineffective composition! 
Schoenberg shifted away from the organization of classical tonality to a tonality where the dissonance is not simply something to be resolved, but instead serves equal importance in the expression of musical ideas as the consonance. Schoenberg asserted that it is this equal treatment of the dissonance with the consonance that allows for a greater flexibility of expression in composition.

The presence of dissonant tones within a 'tonal' context existing only to be resolved instead of serving as an absolutely integral part of the melodic and harmonic structure, insofar as that if the dissonances are removed from a tonal composition, although the music loses much of its substance, there still exists the skeleton of a musical idea whereas it is impossible to subtract dissonances from a twelve-tone work without completely destroying it: as wordy as it is, this may actually serve as a kind of thorough definition of Twelve-Tone, or Post-Tonal music.





]]><![CDATA[Writing a Biography]]>Sun, 07 Feb 2016 16:30:47 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/writing-a-biographyWriting a Program Biography: A Few Tips
by Alice Gallagher
Auditions Committee, Musical Merit Foundation of Greater San Diego
​

    The purpose of this little article is to help someone write their first artistic biography. 
    The best writing is always engaging regardless of its purpose. An artistic biography should reflect you as a person and not be just a list of teachers you have had or rewards you have won. The artistic biography is part of the program, and ultimately, the program is part of the concert. Usually, audiences read through the program as they wait for the concert to begin, and it should be an “appetizer,” an amuse-bouche, for the concert. With that said, there are certain conventions that should be followed unless you are planning a comedy act. So your biography should be not too long, highlight the very best of your hereunto career, and perhaps end with future plans and intentions, especially as a student.

   Start writing your biography by assembling  your raw material. On a separate piece of paper (or word processing document), list all of your musical accomplishments and experiences. You might not use all of them in the biography, but it is good to keep a Curriculum Vitae, or CV, throughout your carer.
Include your high school band experience if you are in high school, and if you are in college, include your school ensembles. Make sure to keep this document updated on a monthly basis. Include non-competitive experiences as well, and even non-music accomplishments such as scholarships.
Make categories:
1.Education and private teachers
           2.Performance experience
           3. Awards, music-related/High-status experiences, music related (festivals, camps,    honor bands)
    4. Information about yourself (where you are from, an interesting hobby, future dreams)

Once you have that information, it’s time to make that list into a one or two paragraph biography.

Tips!
-Biographies are written in the third person. Don’t write “I. . .” Write your biography as if someone else is talking about you. Alternate using your full name with using just your last name with “Miss” or “Mr.” if you are eighteen or under; if you are a female, once you turn age 18, you may use “Ms.” if you prefer. Don’t begin every section the same way. Examples can be seen in the sample biography.
- For college age musicians: Don’t include every single educational experience, masterclass, or long lists of teachers- who you have studied with is not what you have accomplished; at the same time, it is very nice to include, as a tribute your most important teachers; as a rule, include anyone you studied with for at least four months, but try to keep the list to five teachers. If you took one lesson with a famous teacher, good for you, but they really are not part of your biography.
-Include second- or third-place awards of high-profile competitions if you don’t have a lot of experience.
-The more you do, the more you are able to put in your biography. Include your teacher’s  studio recitals as experience even though they were not competitive.
-Don’t include adjectives such as “prestigious” and never call yourself accomplished, even if you clearly are. Let your accomplishments simply speak for themselves without adding pretense or unneeded words.
-Do include adjectives (only one or two) that describe who you really are. You can describe yourself as ambitious rather than accomplished- it is a more humble way of saying “I’m a serious young musician” without pretension.
- Never “pad” your biography. If your high school band played at Carnegie Hall, it doesn’t mean you earned anything special, and you shouldn’t include it in your biography. However, if you played a big solo, such as a concerto movement in that concert at Carnegie Hall, you may include that.

Submit your biography to your English teacher as well as an experienced musician for editing. Use all available resources to make your biography readable and best reflect who you are and your accomplishments. A well-written biography can add professionalism to how you present yourself and help you establish a positive and realistic self-perception as you develop as a musician. ]]><![CDATA[How to Practice- College and College-Prep Edition. ]]>Fri, 21 Aug 2015 05:22:38 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/how-to-practice-college-and-college-prep-editionI. Getting Started:

• Give yourself 15 minutes to prepare to practice: • Assemble instrument.

• Select/soak reeds.
• Make sure you have: music, metronome, pencil, notebook.
• Decide what you will practice, and for how long. Use a practice notebook to organize your time and make notes on progress, including metronome markings. Here is a suggestion for format:

March 1, 2009 5 hours
8:30-9:30am long tones/Kroepsch, Baermann Scales 9:30-10&12:30-1pm Rose Etudes 32 No.s 6&7
1pm-2pm Mozart Concerto
2pm-3pm Excerpts
3pm-4pm Brahms Sonata
notes:
scales and arpeggios: E-flat/c min scales
Rose etude 7:under tempo 5x, 1x up to tempo quarter note=120 Mozart concerto- concentrate on coda of expo. also mvt II. Excerpts today: Beeth 4 mvt IV at quarter note= 120. Rach 2. Brahms: watch legato mvt I!! stacatto needs more ping.

TIPS:

• Routine is essential. It will be helpful if you are able to practice at the same time of day and same place every day.
• The hardest part of practicing is taking the instrument out of the case. Therefore it is good to start as early as possible, even if you do not have enough time to do anything besides long tones before a 9AM class.

• Do not let others to distract you from practicing. Make your practice room a socialization-free zone.
• Encourage each other to practice...don’t distract others!
• Plan out your breaks. This will help you stay on track with your schedule. In general, take five minutes every hour. For example, practice 8:00-8:55AM, then take a break till 9AM. If you are practicing a number of hours straight (six or seven), take a couple of fifteen minute breaks.

• Set an alarm (maybe on your cell phone) for the exact time you plan to stop to take a break, so that you don’t cheat and start rounding up, or practicing from 8:00-8:52AM instead of 8:55- a surprising amount of progress can be made in three minutes!

II. Long tones

• Select a harder reed than you plan to use for the majority of your practice.
• Metronome quarter note= 60. Hold each note for eight beats.
• Play your long tones with lots of air, and a full sound. At both soft and strong dynamics.
• Concentrate on correct air support including the way you are breathing and embouchure.
• Practice these double lip and without register key.
• Use breath builder before and in between groups of four long tones.
• FOR THE REST OF THE PRACTICE DAY, PRACTICE LONG TONES FOR TWO MINUTES (time it) AT THE TOP OF EVERY HOUR. This gives your brain and lungs a “fresh palate.”
• Articulation practice is in the same category as long tones, as proper air use is imperative for excellent staccato. Alternate a few long tones with some articulation practice. A very effective technique for working on staccato speed is at the end of the book; however, remember that quality is paramount to speed.

III. Scales and Etudes: Your Meat and Potatoes

• Practice these slow, slow slow!
• Concentrate on finger movement, air support, sound.
• Accept nothing less than perfection even for scales. Imagine that your scales are the most beautiful piece you have ever heard. Same thing goes for studies/etudes.
• Practice slowly!
• Even slower than you think is enough.
• Over, and over, and over...
• Checklist:

• Is it perfectly smooth from note to note?
• Can I hear any sloppiness in the fingers?
• Is the tone uniform from note to note?
• Any grunting or cracking over intervals in arpeggios? Stop! Fix it! Don’t accept less than perfect!

• Is it completely rhythmically even? (Always practice scales with metronome.)

IV. Pieces

• First, sort out the rhythms and notes. Mark your music if needed to figure out the rhythms.
• Calibrate your metronome so you can increase the speed one notch at a time (eg. 40, 41, 42 etc. instead of 40, 44, 46...)
• Now set your metronome to a speed as slow as you need to go to play the piece perfectly.
• Play the movement through at that speed. Are there any particularly tricky spots? Go back and sort them out by practicing small sections very slowly and repeating them twenty times.
• Now play the whole thing again at the same speed.

• If it is perfect, set the metronome two notches higher, and repeat.
• If you can play it perfectly at that speed, then set the metronome two notches higher, and repeat.
• If you can’t play through the movement perfectly at any point in this progression of speed, set the metronome back three clicks and repeat.
• Repeat, turning up the metronome one click at a time until you have reached the speed that at first was too fast.

• For especially tricky fast spots, a good rule is to start with the metronome as slow as you need to go to play it perfectly. Increase the speed by one notch until you have played it twenty times. Then try playing it at tempo. Then slow it back down to the tempo you started at, and play it five times. Then play it at tempo. Then slow it down again to a few notches higher than the tempo you started at, and play it five times. Then up to tempo. Et cetera. Keep in mind that sometimes it takes more than twenty times, perhaps up to two hundred, to get it exactly right.

• If you can’t play something, it is just because you haven’t practiced it enough yet, or haven’t practiced it slowly enough, or haven’t practiced it slowly enough enough. Simply follow the above directions, with patience and discipline, and you will be able to play anything!
• Practice every part of each piece every day, but rotate the order in which you practice them so that you don’t practice the same piece at the end of the day when you are more tired. Rotate, as well, spending extra time on each movement.

• Slow practice of pieces is essential, even when you have learned the piece well, as it allows you to hear the contours, make musical decisions and note the phrasing.
•Play a phrase at a time. Reflect on it. What should it sound like? Where is it going? What did your teacher say about the passage in your lesson or studio class? Then apply your reflection, make markings if needed, and repeat.

V. Reality Checks

Once you have practiced a piece for several hours over a few days, and you feel that you have made significant improvement and are ready to move on to other things because you are happy with how it sounds, then record yourself, and listen back with a critical ear. Parts of it that you thought were fantastic are probably so-so and could still use a lot of work. On the other hand, sections that you thought were sounding horrible really might be pretty darn good. Determine exactly what needs more work, reflect, and repeat.

There is no canyon of disconnect between “quality time” and “quantity time” in practicing. Practice from five to seven hours a day, and you will hear improvement.

Think of your practice sessions as lessons that you are giving yourself. Be very deliberate with every repetition, with every note that you play.

VI. Additional Recommendations:

• Get in shape. Exercise will help with your playing in many ways.
• Drink plenty of water.
• Get enough sleep!
• Eat well, but eat small amounts at a time while you are practicing hard for hours upon end. It is hard to concentrate while you are hungry, but you don’t want all your blood going to your stomach while you are working.

• Record your clarinet lessons, then find a way to put them on your iPod. Listen to your lessons at least once a week.
• Take frequent 30-second breaks during your practice session.

To the Practicing Musician:

This little book focuses on practicing the clarinet. However, most of its recommendations can be adapted and applied to the practice of any wind instrument. It is simply a layout of a meticulous practice technique. The story of where this practicing technique starts in 1994...

I was fortunate enough to have a teacher as a freshman in high school who gave me the big wake up call: “You think you are so great? You want to play with the Boston Pops when you grow up? Then you’ve got to practice a lot more than two hours a day. You don’t even know all your scales! I don’t know if you are talented enough to think about a career like that anyways.” I responded with the attitude, “Well, I’ll show him!!!”

However, when I realized that I had to fit in four or five hours of practicing a day with a busy high school schedule, I felt incredibly overwhelmed, until my mother (who, by the way, played clarinet herself in high school!) calmly sat down with me to help me figure out how to fit in and organize my time with the same arrangement as I suggested in part I.

What are the results of following a practice routine so intense? First, let’s define “results.” “Results” are not winning auditions. “Results” are not getting into Juilliard, although these are often good consequences of “results.” “Results,” when we are talking about practicing, include slow, steady, personal progress, and growth as a musician.

This is just one perspective on how to approach practicing. I think it is effective, but it might not work for everyone. Also, your professor may have additional or alternate suggestions, which is why I left blank space on some of the pages, to write down these other (perhaps even better) ideas and approaches to practicing. 


]]><![CDATA[The Art of Slurring by Daniel Bonade]]>Wed, 19 Aug 2015 09:30:39 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/the-art-of-slurring-by-daniel-bonadeDaniel Bonade is one of the foundational clarinet teachers and players of the twentieth century. Heed his words!
http://dansr.com/vandoren/articles/222/the-art-of-slurring-by-daniel-bonade/]]><![CDATA[Clarinetist of the Week:Introducing. . . Andres!]]>Fri, 27 Feb 2015 22:46:03 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/clarinetist-of-the-weekintroducing-andresPicture
Andres Maldonado is a student at San Elijo Middle School. He will be playing "The Banana Boat Song" at our upcoming recital on March 7th at the Museum of Making Music. He is always outstandingly well-prepared for his lessons! His strength in his progress of his playing is good air support! Andres shares an interest with his teacher- running!

]]><![CDATA[Notes from a Practice Notebook: ]]>Thu, 29 Jan 2015 06:07:53 GMThttps://www.alicegallagherclarinet.com/blog/notes-from-a-practice-notebookOver the lifetime of playing the clarinet I have been keeping practicing journals. I keep track of what I am working on, things I need to work on, I plan out my time, and especially, summarize my lessons!
After I stopped taking lessons after I graduated with a Master's degree, it was my turn to take the responsibility of being my own teacher!
So I write down inspirations for myself and remind myself of what I have learned from my own teachers.
Here are some of the lines from my summer practicing notebook from a couple years ago (I just found them!):

Notes from Gallagher Practicing Notebook, Summer 2011

Nuance is key.

Isolate, repeat, reflect for developing nuance of expression.

Adjectives for how I want this practice session and my playing in general to be:
thoughtful
personal, meaning involvement, sensitive to the music’s expression.
Don’t let yourself go through anything not a measure, passage or movement- without intention, interpretation, thought, as well as making it clean and brilliant.

Also, name each day what you want to accomplish, both technically and musically.

Remember, relaxed, “rounded” jaw and lips. Angle slightly more out??
Air solves all problems.

For every minute of practice be able to give a reason. Engage mentally. Reflect often.

Don’t just listen! HEAR!

Be a “little theater.” Each note cared for, each not counts as part of the whole. Sensitive,but controlled and with intention.

Listen!
Sing in the shower! Sing alone! Make the pieces your own!

Music comes from within, without force, or even trying.

CONTROL, nobility of presentation, sound, sophistication.

“Polish” comes in a bottle. Music is organic. It grows.

Think about the notes you don’t like, hear them the way you DO want them to sound before you play them, instead of playing them- and hating them.

Spend time every day at music without the clarinet. but with a pencil. Because music truly happen from within, not without.
More music can be made in someone’s own mind than in a big concert hall in from of hundreds.

No mindless practicing! No deaf repetition!

The air= the bow.

Stop worrying about the time it takes to prepare- the technique, be patient - it WILL be ready.

The point is to put the music first, it will guide you through the forest of developing technique, the style will make you not worry about the difficulties as they present themselves.

Beauty. Poise, calm.

Find more active ways of listening.
Eliminate the feeling of competition.
Make sure what you play is something you would like to hear.

Fix problem sections. Never settle.

Inspiration:
it is east to get inspired. It is difficult to stay  inspired. Look for inspiration!

PROTECT the music while you practice!

Every day’s practice- what is the purpose?
Concert preparation, technical/artistic growth? Just because I love it? All of those.


There are basically 3 aspects to remember in making music
1. tempo and pulse

2. sound: intonation, color, dynamic range, articulation,

3. rubato [phrasing]

]]>