Methodology on the orchestral excerpts praxis

featuring the oboe and english horn

Llus Calm Vidal
















1.Introduction


The orchestra audition training is a tough period on any musicians life who wants to get into an
orchestra. Sometimes this achievement it can take years which, at the end, can get to a dead end if
you dont know how to get the best results on your daily practice. This project is meant to be a
helpful tool for the practice of orchestral excerpts with the oboe and english horn to get the best
results for the audition training, working on the different parameters that compound an orchestral
excerpt regarding the rhythm and tempo, intonation, articulation, phrasing and breathing, Analysing
the general scores of the excerpts to be treated to get a better overview as well as recordings to find
out the evolution of the orchestral excerpts to know what is the future direction of the orchestra
practice.

2. Research question

How can I optimise my time to get the best result on my orchestral excerpts practice? Does practice
and experience inevitably lead to a maximum performance? This is the question any musician
would like to get an answer, as myself being a musician whose final achievement would be to win
an audition in an orchestra, this goes through my mind every day.
What matters is not the quantity but quality, we are used to study countless hours hoping our
playing will improve more as more hours are spent, but at the end what matters, is how will you
spend the time you practice to get the best of it. On the accomplishment of this goal different
parameters are going to be in consideration, starting with the rhythm and the tempo which it is an
essential part, trying to keep them stable all the way through, unless a change is indicated in the
music. Another point to be studied is the intonation which is the musician sense of pitch, the tuning
between intervals as well as the vibrato which helps to add expression to the music.
The next following points are closely related which are the phrasing and breathing, trying to find
the best places to breath during the performance of an excerpt it will help us not just to get to the
end of it without big problems but also it will help us to get a sense of structure and phrasing.
Trying to fulfill all these parameters, the aim is to design different exercises for each of them so the
player will have an overview of the whole excerpt.



3. Background of the project

Through the history of the music the oboe has been used in countless occasions as a leading voice
for its unique expressive potential, as Mr. Heinz Holliger said The oboe, for me, is the instrument
that is closest to the human voice - it has that same direct, expressive power of declamation, and the
entire spectrum of the oboe's sound resembles that of a soprano. In fact, if you study Bach closely,
you will see that he wrote for soprano and oboe in very similar ways with regard to range and
phrase structure. And the oboe's tone is characteristically a very intense one that projects easily in
the biggest halls, unlike the softer, more elegant tone of the flute. I always try to play the oboe and
project the tone as if I were a singer.

With those words in mind, it is not hard to imagine why

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most of the composers wrote those cantabile solos for the oboe and it has been present in most of
the big literature of the classical music like, Johannes Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major op.77 or
Don Juan op.20 by Richard Strauss for instance.
Even though orchestral excerpts have been part of the process of the orchestra audition for the last
century, it is hard to find literature written to get prepared to be successful on your audition. In other
fields it is easy to find books, courses and an endless materials to be ready; but it seems on the
music field it still, some kind of mystical or upper level which it can not be written down; and this
lack of methods is what makes the process of learning the orchestral excerpts extremely hard.
Some similar projects are already available, like the one from Shen Wang

from the Miami

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University, which it has some samples of exercises to practice the rhythm on some excerpts, but the
information is too general and is more like an overview on how you could practice rather than a
routine, also there is a CD with John Mack

, where he gives some tips about how to play the excerpt

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but not focusing on the technical aspect, how to practice it to make it sound properly, but just on
how it should sound.
This project is intended to be the way to achieve the optimal results on the excerpts practice, by
using different exercises to get the best result in each of the parameters.
#
Peter G. Davis, Heinz Holliger refutes thesis that the oboe is an ill wind, NY Times, April 10,
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1981.
#
Shen Wang, Basic Preparation for Oboe Auditions by Using Selected Oboe Excerpts, http://
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scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1313&context=oa_dissertations
(2009-12-02)
#
John Mack, Cleveland principal oboe, Orchestral excerpts for oboe, Summit records
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To get the best set of exercises for each excerpt is essential to get the advice of top professional
oboe and english horn which are playing in professional orchestras and also teaching in well-known
music academies, and afterwards create a method which will work on the main aspects of each
excerpt.
One of the strength of this project, besides de fact it could make the audition training a more
effective work, knowing that if you follow the steps written on the method you will achieve a high
result at the end, is the fact that this project could be applied in all the other instruments, which it
makes it great in terms of business on a future, being the best ally for all of those people who are
fighting to get good results with their excerpts.

4. Theoretical framework

Although musicians are included in the arts performance, is not difficult to make an analogy with
elite athletes, whom they train for several years on a highly daily training performance which makes
them to get skills whom are not reachable to the rest of the society. On the music field it happens
the same, musicians are trained since the early age to gain skills not intrinsic in the human being.
At this point is necessarily to find out, what are the facts that make a musician successful in the
performance of their instrument.
The importance on the balance between the gens and the good practice as well as the preparation
time required to achieve an exceptional performance. Stable levels of performance can be improved
by deliberate efforts; top performance is gained slowly over the years as a result of a highly
performance practice.
Any kind of practice needs a precondition and the wish of improvement so he or she will notice
improvements and will avoid errors. Practice without concentration is even counterproductive to
improvement of performance. The secret of attaining excellence is to always maintain close
attention to every detail of performance each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in
every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit

.
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K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, The Role of Deliberate Practice
in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, pg 371.
5. Materials and methods

This project is divided in different sections to be accomplished, the first section is the selection of
the excerpts it will be under consideration, these excerpts will be the ones most demanded on the
audition process.
It will be bounded from ten up to fifteen oboe orchestral excerpts and five to ten english horn
orchestral excerpts. These excerpts will be a combination of different characteristics, some of those
are demanded for their expressiveness and others for their technique difficulty.
The first step of the process will be the analysis of the general score to have an overview of the
excerpt and find the best way to present it during an audition taking in consideration the different
parameters mentioned before. After this analysis, the conclusions will be discussed with
professional musicians which will contribute with their own experiences on the stage.
Once the general idea of how the excerpt should be presented is cleared, the second section of the
project will begin, which it will be the creation of a programme to achieve this idea, creating
optimal exercises to reach all the parameters involved in the performance of the orchestral excerpt,
which at the end should be used in a daily routine exercises, like an elite athlete has their daily
routine to get the best results, musicians should be trained the same way.
The third section will start once the programme is created it will be time to be tested on fellows in a
one month test, which the first two weeks will be intended to study the improvement made by
themselves on a list of five oboe orchestral excerpts and one english horn orchestral excerpt which
be selected from the Orchester Probespiel book.

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Afterwards there will be an intern audition which the excerpts will be played in accordance of the
fellows ideas, the performance will be valued by a professional jury, paying attention on the
different parameters to be improved. After this first approach to the excerpt the students will be
given five more oboe orchestral excerpts and one english horn orchestral excerpt with the same
difficulty, but this time a programme made specially for the orchestral excerpts will be given to the
fellows together with the orchestrals excerpts to be played.
After a two weeks training with the programme design for these orchestral excerpts, the same jury
will value the improvement of the fellows and will be contrasted with the previous results obtained.
This study should be done with different levels from first years of bachelor until last years of master
programmes to see how different groups react on the same programme.
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Orchester Probespiel. Test pieces for orchestral auditions (Oboe - Englisch Horn - Oboe d
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Amore), Editoral Peters