A Reference Guide to Beginning Clarinet Methods

This reference guide will allow the teacher of beginning clarinet students to quickly see differences among many beginning clarinet method books in an objective manner, thereby helping the teacher to select the appropriate method book for each student. Even though most music teachers are, by definition, advanced musicians themselves, the task of teaching the beginning clarinetist can still be a serious challenge. Inexperienced teachers are routinely confronted with problems in their students' techniques that the instructor may have long since corrected in their own performance, and they often do not remember the exact manner in which these wrong techniques were resolved. An appropriate method book can solve this problem. Currently, most knowledge of method books is obtained via subjective and cursory advice from fellow teachers or from publishers' marketing catalogs sent to band directors. There exists no comprehensive compendium of method books for clarinet instruction. This treatise endeavors to fill that void. Its purpose is to be an objective comparative guide to the many method books available to the private clarinet instructor, an easily accessible reference for researching method books for beginning clarinetists.