heather roche

Sometimes clarinetists ask me where I’m teaching, and I just wanted to write a quick blog post to let you know that you can now come and study with me at Goldsmiths.

Based in the heart of vibrant south-east London, Goldsmiths offers a number of fantastic programmes for music performance students, led by staff including Pete Furniss and Mira Benjamin (both of them incredible performers and pedagogues!).

For Masters students, for example, there are two interesting pathways, either in performance or in creative practice (links are directly to the Goldsmiths website). The programme covers a broad spectrum of musics from classical, to experimental, jazz, popular music, generative and electronic musics, etc.

Practice-led PhDs are also an option!

If you’re at all interested, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, or with the department itself: you are more than welcome to contact Pete directly at P.Furniss(at)gold.ac.uk.

I also live locally and love this area of London, so I’m happy to give you an idea of what it’s like to live here if you’re thinking of coming from abroad. Goldsmiths is in zone 2 – which means you can be in the centre of London in 20 minutes. But the area has it’s own vibrancy, full as it is with nice pubs, good cinemas, a few great venues, etc.

(Have more or less just nicked these photos from around the Internet of the area, so don’t know who they belong to – except the last one (which is of a sunset from the top of Telegraph Hill, just around the corner from the university), which is by Sam Walton).

I mentioned this technique many years ago when I wrote my post on clarinet articulations. However, I didn’t go into too many details in terms of how it works, what pitches are available, etc.

Basically, by removing the mouthpiece and the barrel, tilting the clarinet slightly and blowing across the opening, one can produce a charming set of flute-like pitches.

There are a few things to keep in mind: this does actually take some practice. The lower you go in the first register, and the higher in the second register, the harder the notes are to produce. In the low register, these tend to go very airy for me – perhaps someone with more flute-playing experience might be able to do a better job of this. It also uses a different kind of endurance: the most time I’ve ever spent on this technique has been in making this blog post, and after about half an hour of doing the technique, the right hand side of my face started to turn numb and I had to take a significant break before I could carry on. So it might not make sense to use this technique for the entirety of your piece, or your clarinetist may struggle with rehearsing it.

(Remember that everything on the blog is written in transposed pitches!)

So that you can see what this looks like when I do it, here’s a video I put on Instagram earlier:

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There is definitely an easy range, and I would say that this lies between these pitches, using chromatic fingerings only:

The bottom pitches are the resulting sounds, and the top line shows the fingered pitches (everything is transposed for Bb clarinet here!). You should always show both, by the way. No clarinetist should be expected to work out what fingering to play, but if you just treat this as a kind of scordatura, and show both the fingered pitches and the resultant sounds, everything should work out splendidly.

In this range, I can get a nice strong tone here (as in the example from Instagram), and the pitches are more or less stable. Below that, it gets increasingly airy as the pitches gradually become more and more difficult to produce. So I would generally recommend sticking to this easy set of pitches.

The entirety of what’s possible I’ve split into two ranges, one for the low register, and another for a second set of pitches possible by overblowing. Here are the pitches (again, bottom set are the resulting sounds of the fingered pitches on the top line).

This sounds as follows (I’ve tried to play the line as slowly as possible, which as you can hear does affect my ability to get as clear and singing a sound as in the Instagram example):

The high register has some overlapping, but I think the sound quality is slightly different:

And sounds thus:

Some clarinetists can only achieve this technique by keeping the barrel on. I, however, can’t manage to do it at all with the barrel attached, so I’ve had to rely on another composer-clarinetist team (in this case Matthias Krüger and the excellent Gilad Harel from Meiter Ensemble) for sending me the resulting pitches of my easy reduced range – so if you’re writing a piece for someone specific, do make sure you ask if they can do this, and in what format!

Because the clarinet only has odd harmonics in its spectrum, octaves in multiphonics are impossible. But there are a few that come very close, in a way that I find interesting and rather beautiful. These aren’t perfect octaves by any means. But the ways in which they come close produce some totally unique multiphonic sounds. They are close, beating multiphonics that vibrate in the mouth of the player and sounds almost sung.

They aren’t easy to play, but they aren’t as difficult either (I think). There are definitely dyad multiphonics that are far trickier.

The notes inside () represent pitches that you cannot separate in the multiphonic. Pitches are, as ever, transposed.

Enjoy them!

#	Pitch	Fingering	Audio	Notes
30				This one is quite complex, and the top note bends really easily, so it needs to be controlled for the octave effect
31
64
67				You can either have the F# or the C quarter sharp here (I demonstrate the F# second in the recording)
90
104
142				The octave is buried inside this complex multiphonic…
172
176				Rather unstable.
177				Getting rather far from our octaves with this one, but I find it so beautiful… a little tricky to keep both pitches even, as you can hear.
241				Again you can either have the D or the G quarter flat here – I demonstrate both
265				Once again the octave is buried within the multiphonic
324
330				And last but not least — actually this one may well be my favourite.

Hello all,

It is a big priority for me to keep the content of this blog free, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. Setting aside the time to create new content is one issue, and the blog also costs rather a lot to keep online because of all the space required to upload audiovisual content.

I’m dependant on Patreon in order to be able to continue my work on the blog. It so far hasn’t generated as much interest as I’d like, though I’m regularly assured that this is simply because people don’t know about it. So here I am saying…it exists! Please help!

And it’s also because you don’t necessarily get anything special by being a patron. Until now: from now on, new blog content will go to patrons first. Four weeks later, it will appear on this site. So to get all those tasty multiphonics and interesting new techniques as and when I finish the content, you need to be a patron.

You can sign up for as little as $1 per post. Think of it like buying me a coffee to thank me each time I write something. I do drink a lot of coffee while I’m blogging.