What is your favorite Etude book?
We’ve all probably spent our fair share of hours playing etudes. Is there a book – old or new – that stands out to you? It could be one of the old reliable books, or it could be something few people have heard of. Tell us why you like it, and what interesting musical challenges it presented!
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Hi everyone! I thought I'd get us started on this discussion, but I'm looking forward to reading about your favorites...
There are a few study books I come back to regularly. The Jean Jean, for example (which we're going to have a workshop on in a live session in a few weeks!), is something I come back to almost every week, just to check in with my left and right hand finger technique. This one feels to me a bit like yoga for my clarinet fingers - I know these studies so well they're a great way just to see where I'm at, how fluent things are feeling, and they really help me to calm down if I'm having a stressful concert week.Another one is the Kell staccato studies. My teacher recommended #6 to me more than 20 years ago and I still play it regularly to work on getting a nice, light, bouncy staccato!
For beauty and virtuosity I also love the Cavallini Cappriocos - they're practically solo performance-worthy (in fact, there's a beautiful recording of some of them by Nicola Bulfone)!
Anyway, let us know your favorites - especially if they don't appear in the image above. I took this photo of some of the books from my shelf here at home - I had to be very careful when making this collage not to show you how many of these books have coffee stains on their covers - a hazard of their being the thing I most often work on first thing in the morning! ☕️ -
I do really enjoy the Rubank method book. The elementary book does have a lot of great fundamentals and I recommend it for anyone looking to get cobwebs out of their clarinet. There are some lovely little passages in it that I just like to play for fun. I’m going to probably get the intermediate level book. As for etudes, I’m looking forward to the challenges of Jean Jean soon, and I’m considering the Rose etudes. Rose wrote such a lovely variety of etudes.