The Educator's Guide to the Clarinet

The Educator's Guide to the Clarinet is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to better understand the clarinet, covering topics from tone to technique to reed adjustment and mouthpieces.

From the author Thomas Ridenour: The Educator's Guide to the Clarinet was written in order to meet what I perceived to be a lack of both completeness and clarity on virtually every level of clarinet pedagogy, from middle school classes to the university studio. In other words, there's a lot of confusion out there! The Educator's Guide to the Clarinet is my response to this confusion and is, in fact, the first complete pedagogy in the entire history of the clarinet. In it I tried to supply the teacher/performer with a completely unified method of teaching playing techniques, with a stress on understanding, not just what these techniques are and how to teach them, but also upon how and why they work, and how they relate to one another and to the whole. In this way, the reader comes to have an "inside" understanding of the clarinet and develops a truly complete and comprehensive understanding of all that is involved in teaching the clarinet both correctly and confidently. I have been gratified to! find many teachers tell me how easy the text is to understand and how complicated subjects were presented in ways that made them easy to understand. It is my hope that the textural changes done for the second edition will make the subject matter even more accessible and easy to grasp for the reader.