James Campbell

Studies

‘’HM: Where did you study, and who were your teachers?’’ JC: When I was in high school, I studied with Ernest Dalwood, who was English and came to Canada in a military band and played in the orchestra near where I lived. He had studied with Frederick Thurston and was, in a way, very English. At that time he played Boosey and Hawks clarinets but didn't make me play them, I played a Selmer clarinet. He was my first teacher and got me started on the right path. Out of high school, I entered a competition in Canada, where Robert Marcellus was one of the jury members. After the competition, he gave me a lesson, and I remember him talking a lot about the air column and other basic things. I then went to the University of Toronto. I studied for four years with Avrahm Galper, who was then solo clarinet with the Toronto Symphony, and who had also studied with Frederick Thurston in London. But I think more importantly more for him; he studied with Simeon Bellison in New York. So a different kind of idea coming came from there, the Russian school.
I spent a summer with Daniel Bonade and a couple of summers with Michell Lurie and George Silfies, all quite different, but from the same French tradition. Looking back, Bonade was the most influential. Mitchell Lurie, who I enjoyed, taught me a lot about the importance of the clarinet as a melodic instrument and George Silfies was one of the most rounded musicians I have ever met. Then I heard Yona Ettlinger, a good friend of Avrahm Galper, and I knew I needed to work with him, so I went to Paris, where he was based at the time. I took private lessons in his flat. On my way to Paris to study, I entered the Jeunesse Musicale Clarinet Competition in Belgrade and ended up winning it. This led to me getting offers for quite a few concerts and, being immature, I must have thought that I was really something ( laughs), But I will always remember my first lesson with Yona Etlinger, who was known to be tough. Still, at that lesson, he was very friendly. ==Learning and teaching==JC: At that first lesson, Yona Ettlinger congratulated me on winning the competition and then talked about embouchure muscles. He gave me four notes: F, E, Eb and D to play as long tones and spoke about strengthening the lip muscles, particularly the upper lip, and how to see that it looks good. He then said not to play anything other than those four notes until the next lesson. Which was to be in three weeks!!

HM: And you were still very young???

Learning and teaching

JC: At that first lesson, Yona Ettlinger congratulated me on winning the competition and then talked about embouchure muscles. He gave me four notes: F, E, Eb and D to play as long tones and spoke about strengthening the lip muscles, particularly the upper lip, and how to see that it looks good. He then said not to play anything other than those four notes until the next lesson. Which was to be in three weeks!!

HM: And you were still very young?

JC: I was twenty-one. I almost did it. (laughs) I stuck to it for 95 % of my practice time. I realized later what Yona was doing with me as a young kid who had just won a competition and must have been full of himself. He was getting me ready to learn. That was such a wise thing to do. I was alone in Paris. I didn't know anybody. I just stayed in my little room and played those four notes(laughs). And of course, exploring the streets of that beautiful city. When I came back to the next lesson, I was once again a student, and I was ready to learn.

HM: But you really did it, you played only these exercises?

JC: Yes, and to this day, long tones help give me solidity in sound production.

HM: Three weeks in a whole life is not that long time. ==When you're ready to learn, the master appears==



JC: I was learning all that time, I was learning discipline, and learning that there are no short cuts, no jumping ahead. And I finally realized, what Avraham Galper had been teaching all along, and what Daniel Bonade and Mitchell Lurie had been talking about: that it takes small, consistent steps at a time to build a strong base. Ave Galper used to say: do this, it will keep you in business. Now, 50 years later, I am still playing (laughs)!

HM: And you still do your tone studies every day? Long notes, and so on?

JC: Yes, every day! [mimes the embouchure forming: upper lip down, flat chin, corners of the mouth inwards]. And I have told the story about playing those four long notes many, many times to my students.

HM: And with your students, did you also make them play only four notes, for two weeks?

JC: No, nothing quite as severe as that, but they do many tone studies. They also have to prepare repertoire for competitions and auditions, you know.
There is a Zen saying: "When you're ready to learn, the master appears." And boy, is it true! When you are teaching, you can be talking to somebody, and you know they're just not hearing what you are saying. And then later on, sometimes a few years later on, they may finally understand"! That's how we all learn, and it's just normal. I make them take notes and ask them to contact me when they finally understand what I am saying to them. Sometimes I get an email several years later saying that they now "get it!" Playing for other teachers is also very valuable. I had a student, and we were working for a long time on breath control. One day she went to a masterclass with one of my colleagues and came back saying: "Oh, you should hear what I learned, "and went on to repeat what we had been working on for the past year. That's the value of masterclasses.

Toolbox

JC: I try to fill a student's "toolbox" with technical and musical tools they can use to fix any problems that may come up. If they have the right tool, hopefully, they can fix the issue.

HM: The principle is to mention or write a small word in their notes, which triggers a more complicated chain of thoughts and the correct automatic muscle activations necessary for a particular passage?

JC: Yes. My class calls them Campbellisms; I call them tools. For example, GAB is an exercise that helps voicing, (G is open G, A is throat A and B is long B). Done correctly many times, the tongue will eventually find its correct position when these notes are only heard in our inner ear.

HM: Did you write them down?

JC: The students should! (laughs). Ultimately, our goal as teachers is to make ourselves not needed anymore.

HM: And I think these tools can be interacting: a breathing tool can improve the articulation or the finger technique.

JC: Yes, everything influences everything. But it all takes time. And when one day when the students are teaching, they hopefully will use these tools and develop them even further. I find that very exciting.

Practicing

Warmup for athletes with small muscles

JC: The idea behind a warmup is: we play with muscles. Athletes warm up their muscles. Musicians are called "athletes of the small muscles." So, what muscles? Embouchure, tongue, lungs, ears, brain, fingers. I use Avraham Galper's (2001) book "Tone, Technique & Staccato" It covers everything, starting with the air, then fingers and tongue. When I feel that each is ok, I leave to move on. Some days it seems to happen immediately, other days can be a struggle, but it is crucial to cover each muscle every day. I remember what Yona Ettlinger said and how he made me focus and concentrate because the essential part of the warmup is the brain. Students are busy the whole day, as are we. If your time is limited, the exercises in Mr. Galper's book are wonderful.

Keep the brain going when practicing

JC: It's possible to practice and get worse - you can be practicing the wrong way, not concentrating and examining what's right and wrong. Every time we do an action, we make an electrical connection, and myelin wraps around the nerves, strengthening that connection. Every time you do something incorrectly, you are making a faulty connection. I don't know about you, but when I was young and stupid, I did some things the wrong way, and to this day it bothers me. Other things I happened to do right and to this day, I feel confident approaching them. If anybody dreams of spending their life in an orchestra, they absolutely must practice in the right way, especially the solos. They are going to come up again and again, for their whole life. So if they have practiced in the right way they can have a happy life, if not, they will struggle. And all that happens in the early stages of learning. So, the teachers have the responsibility to make sure that their students learn how to practice correctly. It can be a real challenge!

HM: I see this in my work. When I have to learn a difficult contemporary piece, it is still challenging to find the right techniques to work on it. That I don't ride off carelessly, overlook mistakes. Maybe, when we are learning something, combining the movements with tasks on different levels, like standing on one leg and making an eight tour with the other, while playing difficult passages?

JC: It keeps the brain going; it's excellent. If we are working correctly, the mind should be tired before the embouchure.

Fun and work

JC: Having fun is a part of practicing that I think students miss sometimes. There are two parts that I ask them to explore. One is realizing they are a professional student whose job is to practice. For example, I say look at the person working at the check-out counter in a store. They are working and may not be enjoying their job. But it is a job, and their role as a student is to practice, it may not be fun, but some things have to be done. They are professional students!
But we also PLAY music, and we play the clarinet. So make some time to play. Relax, play pieces they enjoy, improvise and explore. It's a fact, if they want just to play, even make funny noises( laughs), but are not concentrating on it, they will not teach themselves any bad habits. But building serious connections between the brain and muscles takes tremendous discipline. And again, I return to those four notes (laughs) [F, E, Eb, D] I had no clue at the time, but the wisdom of that discipline stays with me always.

Building up the embouchure

JC: Yona Ettlinger and Abe Galper taught the strengthening of the upper lip, bringing the corners of the mouth in and pointing the chin. The regular clarinet embouchure. It is imperative to have the time to think about and focus on the embouchure. Abe Galper (2001) wrote a book called "Tone, Technique & Staccato," and it is just that. It's just solid exercises, nothing fancy. All my students play out of that book, and I tell them: "If you can play everything in this book, you can play the clarinet." and you will stay in business for a long time. It follows the theory that the richer the low register, the better the upper register sounds. You first learn to produce a good, full sound in the chalumeau register, then transition to the clarion, and finally to the top, all the while incorporating the staccato, legato and correct fingerings.

HM: Coming back to the embouchure and Yona Ettlinger: he was a student of Louis Cahuzac, who was a double lip player and represented the old French School. He played differently than Ulisses Delecluse.

Different playing in the 1970s

JC: Oh, yes, at that time, Delecluse was at the Paris Conservatoire. He represented the French style, much like Jacques Lancelot and others. In 1970, while a student at the University of Toronto, I entered a clarinet competition in Budapest. Mostly to play, but also I listen to everybody. At that time, as you may remember, there were significant national differences in playing. The French, Germans, British, American and eastern Europeans all had very different concepts of how to play the clarinet.

HM: Some players used a vibrato, fast and always with the same frequency. Some used to play also very loud; the Czech style at that time was very loud.

JC: Yes, brilliant clarinet playing!. The German sound was round and dense, and the French quite compact. What a lesson that experience was!

HM: Today, there are less different styles; worldwide, you can hear more or less the same sound.

JC: I would call it "MidAtlantic," a sort of international sound. The differences are there, but less noticeable, and the technical level of playing has gone way up.

Double lip, the perfect embouchure

HM: Do you use, maybe only as an exercise, to play with double lip embouchure?

JC: I think that the double lip is the perfect clarinet embouchure. I get my students to do it in practice. I want them to develop what I call "a double lip embouchure without the pain." Everything is the same, and you just don't have the upper lip under the teeth. It's a fantastic way to build up the embouchure with the lips and find the right form inside the mouth. Yona Ettlinger was teaching this when I worked with him.

HM: A good friend of mine, Michael Read, clarinet solo in the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, was a student of Yona. He also told me that he had to do exercises with double lip embouchure. Both our teachers, Hans-Rudolf Stalder and Yona Ettlinger, went in the summertime to have lessons with Louis Cahuzac, where they were taught this embouchure technique. We had to play long notes with double lip embouchure, to learn not to bite and to learn to vocalize.

JC: Yes, it raises the tongue and lifts the back of the palate.

HM: The most difficult note to play with double lip is the high c, there is a pivot, pressing the mouthpiece against the upper lip.

JC: Yes, it moves [there is no stability holding the clarinet]. I never performed with double lip; I just use it as a tool. But it is the perfect embouchure.

HM: Did you take lessons with Kalmen Opperman? He wanted all his students to play with double lip.

JC: No, I didn't.

HM: It is in the tradition of the old French school, the old methods (Hyacinthe Klosé, Pierre Lefèbvre Prosper Mimard) taught a double lip embouchure.

JC: They played with double lip, yes.

HM: I wonder why this has been changed in the French school.

JC: When I was with Daniel Bonade for a while, we didn't do any double lip. He talked more about the high tongue placement and using fast air. We covered everything that is in his books. Lots of Rose studies for fingerings, staccato exercises, legato practice. It was great!