Steve Hartman

References

Vorlage:Reflist The interview with Steve Hartman was held the 8th of June 2019 in New York and has been edited by Heinrich Mätzener.

Sound quality and the essence of Music

HM: Which requirements, would you say, a clarinetist should meet with his sound quality?

SH: The essence of this, you know, it’s all about the musicality, the ears, rhythm, that’s what is really important. Ultimately, you know, a good sound all by itself, it’s completely boring!
HM: I agree.

SH: No direction, no shape in the phrasing, this is just - so what? When it’s in tune, that’s great! Nice, that’s great to play and blend with other instruments, but you have a solo, do something!

I mean the vibrato is illegal on the clarinet, right? This is internationally forbidden; Interpol comes and arrests you if you play with vibrato. However, do you know anything about baseball?

HM: A littel...

The idea of shape, of saying, of phrasing

SH: In baseball, if a pitcher throws a nice, really fast, straight fast ball, it’s going to be hit, no matter how fast it is, it has to have some movement, it has to do something. The sound has to have some movement, so it’ll have direction in terms of dynamic, or a little of this, a little of that, you know what I mean?
The only time that you play a flat line, it’s when it says “senza espressione” and then you purposely go (daa, imitates in sound), you know, play like a machine, and then you go back to normal. As far as the tone, it’s what pleases your ear and what pleases other people’s ears. Then again, you could have someone who would play a non-pleasing tone and would be very successful. As performers, as virtuosos, as whatever, they have something fantastic about their playing.
They have the gift of grabbing the audience’s attention and holding it. That’s phenomenal! Nobody can teach that! There is no way to quantify, to verbalize what they do that has that effect. You can hear the most flawless player with a beautiful sound and perfect intonation and rhythm...but somehow you are missing something.

HM: A clarinetist should have technical possibilities that enables him to move with the sound, to do something with the sound.

SH: For sure! Hopefully, you start with a basic concept of evenness, or equalizing notes, so you can play a line. The way I look at it is that the purpose of evenness, is that you “call the shots” (expression of billiard playing). If you have a series of notes and let’s say there’s no meter: it’s just 12 notes in some kind of order, then, the composer hasn’t told you what he wants you to do in terms of emphasis, unless it’s says “senza espressione”. For 12 equal notes, you decide where it goes and where it comes back from. Obviously, if there’s meter that’s a pretty good clue to start with. And the idea of saying: if you have like Stravinsky Three Pieces or something like that, he wants you to play a 2/4 bar like a 2/4 bar. a 3/8 like a 3/8. There’s a reason for it, and so the meter dictates the shape, the phrasing. Every time he writes that, he means something, because otherwise, why would he bother?

In the tradition of Robert Marcellus?

HM: I took some lessons with Robert Marcellus.

SH: No kidding, I never met him!

HM. It was very impressive. Unfortunately, Robert Marcellus has gone blind. He could tell me without seeing: “I think you should change the position of your tongue, to get more focused sound, to get a clear staccato.” He could make the connection between the sound he heard and the specific way a student produced that sound. He trained me before I made the audition in the Zurich Opera and really helped me to be successful there. Later, Ramon Wodkowski told me, that young students today were mainly looking for a big, dark sound. There is a fear to be too bright.
Would you say that today, there does exist is a typical American clarinet sound?

SH: You know, I don’t hear that many players, to be honest with you. We had an audition at the ballet recently, for second clarinet and bass clarinet. I don’t know what to say. There was a period of time where there were really rough sounds out there. A lot of them ironically were sort of Marcellus students, or at least thinking they were of Marcellus’ school. But they misunderstood his playing. His sound had a tremendous ring, but he could also blend. What they picked up is the ability to blend. They picked up the dark, without the ring and without the center. So, a lot of players play admiring the great dark sound. The thing about the Cleveland orchestra that was groundbreaking is how well in tune they played and how well they blended. But Marcellus also had a great sound, and he was a great clarinetist and musician. I never thought of him as an expressive player or as singer on the instrument, but certainly, he had a very good sound. It’s easy to understand why he was a model for so many players.

Play with the intensity of the different registers

SH: Often, the high register doesn’t sound like high register. It sounds so smooth and dark, but you’re a clarinet, not a piccolo. The high register is supposed to sound like a tenor going for high notes, not a soprano in the same octave. There is supposed to be an intensity to the register. Obviously, a high C on a tenor is not a high C on a soprano but it’s thrilling to hear, because of what’s happening inside to get there. If it sounds too easy in the high registers, you lose the whole effect.

HM: Today, the pressure young people are exposed to get a job, the pressure before and during the auditions is very high. Nobody wants to risk having only a little bit of sharpness in his sound. Evenness of sound through all registers gets high priority.

Musical education or training for tests?

SH: Yes. I think all of that has to do with the fact that it’s all auditions now. Musical education is not music school, it’s audition school. It’s being trained to play a good audition. It’s not about ensemble, it’s not about expressivity, about styles of music, it’s about accurate and winning and good pitch, non-aggressive and inoffensive sound or tone quality. One of the ways to be good is to not be bad! I mean in the sense that you have to have the least offensive sound, the least undesirable sound, so blend and lack of anything bad is considered good. And it is! Let’s face it: not bad is better than bad. Still, there are many very well-trained and well-rounded musicians coming out of conservatories these days.

HM: And maybe control of the nerves also. That’s may be the positive side, that also in the schools of music Timothy Gallwey’s ideas seem to be standard in the curricula (see his book The inner game of tennis, 2015). But there must be a foundation of musical formation.

SH: People who win auditions and have no experience of playing in an orchestra might catch on, but following a conductor is not something so easy to teach, you have to play with lots of conductors every kind of music, opera, concerts, ballet, Broadway shows, so you understand how to anticipate, how to follow, how to lead, when to lead, when to stay away. Also, you might win in an audition with a certain sound, but it might not work in your orchestra, whatever the context is in terms of the other sounds and the acoustics as well. You might have a brilliant technique, but when the sound is too dark is not enough projection. You may have amazing high registers, flute-like, not a typical clarinet high register, and that can be kind of cool, but I think you can go too far.

HM: Do you think it’s more a concept of playing heavier reeds with more strength in the embouchure, and maybe less a concept that pays attention to a specifically voicing of the different registers?

SH: I honestly don’t know. I think it’s a concept of sound and, I can’t speak for other people.

Steve Hartman’s teachers

HM: Can you tell me about your teachers and your study years?

SH: I remember, my first teacher, Earl O. Bates , in elementary school. I guess I played double lip and he switched me to single lip. He said no, no, don’t play that way. And I remember the vibration of the mouthpiece feeling weird for a couple of days. When I first started, my music teacher played the piano, my mom chose the clarinet for me. My teacher in school thought I should take private lessons. But my parents couldn’t afford the $6 US that Earl O. Bates s charged for the 45 minute lesson. He agreed to teach me for $4 for ½ hour. But he scheduled 45 min. When I was in the 6th grade, he asked my mom to drive me and he would have me “practice” with him for an extra ½ hour on Wednesday for no charge. Then, in 1963 Mr. Bates went to Indiana University, where he taught until he passed away in 1990. I’ve always regretted that I never thanked him personally for his extraordinary generosity. I guess I was too young but I’m sure my parents did thank him. My next teacher was Charles R. Hoffer. He was a very good player, he played double lip, wrote a book on music education in the secondary schools, which became a widely used textbook. He studied with Keith Stein [1] at Michigan State University. Keith Stein brought in an Italian clarinetist named Josef Siniscalchi from Chicago one day per week and gave him his best students. One of them was Charles Hoffer. Dr. Hoffer played double lip but didn’t convert me to playing double lip. After my Junior year of high school, he was hired to be Professor of Music Education at Indiana University.
In my senior year of high school my teacher was Les Scott, who had been the bass clarinetist of the St. Louis Symphony and was an extraordinary saxophonist and flutist as well. A few years later he moved to New York and had a great career as a recording and Broadway musician. He gave me the idea that I might consider going to the East Coast for school. I travelled to New York to auditioned for Juilliard. The night before the audition I was more worried about how to get there on the subway… not than the audition itself. I also auditioned for Indiana; they had a fantastic faculty, a great school of music but Mr. Bates was out of town that day, so I never saw him again. My first teacher in Juilliard was Bernard Portnoy, a Bonade student, who also ended up going to teach at, of all places, Indiana. Then I was student of Augustin Duquès. Augustin 'Gus' Duquès was my teacher in Juilliard from 1968 to 1972. He was born in Toulouse, France in 1899 and died in New York in the summer of 1972. He won first prizes at the Paris Conservatory in 1917 in Clarinet (the solo work that year was the Messager 'Solo de Concours') and in Solfège. He could solfège faster than any of his students could play! He was a wonderfully charming man and a very fine musician. Teachers of the other woodwind instruments at Juilliard when I was there felt that his students played the most musically of the clarinet students at that time. He played the world premieres of the Trio version of Stravinsky's l’Histoire du Soldat' and the Poulenc Duo, among many others. When he was a student, he once played the Debussy 'Premiere Rapsodie' in the presence of the composer! He was brought to New York by Walter Damrosch to play Principal Clarinet with the New York Symphony, before it merged with the New York Philharmonic to become the Philharmonic-Symphony of New York. He began teaching at the Institute of Musical Art in 1923, before it merged with the Juilliard Graduate School to become the Juilliard School of Music. At some point, he left the faculty, to return in the late forties or early fifties. His playing career was illustrious. In addition to the New York Symphony, he played in theaters and was on the staff of NBC from 1931 and principal clarinetist of the NBC Symphony under Toscanini from 1937 to 1949, when he left to join the WOR Symphony under Alfred Wallenstein. He opened the famed Radio City Music Hall in 1932 (or '33) and married one of the original Rockettes. He was a member of the Goldman Band for nearly fifty years. He recorded the Mozart Quintet, but I don't believe that he ever recorded the Concerto.

HM: You have met so many clarinet personalities, so you really must have an overview of the history of clarinet playing in the USA. Were you also student of Kalmen Opperman?
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SH: I heard of Kal when I was in a music camp at the University of Kansas when I was 16. One of the other students was talking about reed making and Kal had written a book on single reeds . He was quite famous for that, did a lot of clinics. He didn’t just write a book, he could actually make a reed that would play in a matter of minutes, very short time with just a knife. He would do it in a masterclass, that kind of situations. He would take a blank and make a reed as he was talking to the audience, just slap it on his mouthpiece and play.