Clément Lefèvre is a French flautist based in Versailles. Primarily a baroque, renaissance, and classical flute player, he is also interested in medieval counterpoint.
He is a regular performer in concerts and modern world premieres resulting from the musicological researches of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. He has collaborated with various chamber ensembles, and has played in the ranks of several internationally renowned orchestras, such as Les Ambassadeurs, Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, Il Caravaggio, Orfeo Orchestra, Collegium Marianum, Drottningholm Theatre Orchestra, etc. He has contributed to over twenty recordings (CDs of operas, sacred music, and other orchestral works by Lully, Rameau, Mondonville, Gervais, Leclair, Dauvergne, Francœur, Mozart, Mademoiselle Duval…). His most memorable concert experiences have taken place at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (Paris), Opéra Royal (Versailles), Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Sanssouci (Potsdam), Musiikkitalo (Helsinki), Drottningholm Palace Theatre (Sweden), and other concert halls. He graduated from Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) and Conservatoire de Versailles. Clément on Facebook |
The first thing you do when you pick up your traverso to start the practice day, and why?
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It depends on the instrument and varies according to the style I am about to work on. When I pick up my flutes, it comes naturally to me to improvise a little (preludes in air de cour style on my Hotteterre flute, caprices on my Rottenburgh and Palanca, diminutions on my renaissance flute, etc.). Sometimes I just replay by heart my favourite tunes or dances of the moment. If I am satisfied with the sound, the intonation, and the flexibility of my lips, I skip the embouchure warm-up (see below).
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Any recurring piece to play every day, and why?
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Personally, I am not in the habit of returning to the same pieces or exercises every day, but that does not mean I disapprove of having one’s own “ritual”, especially since this practice seems to have proved its worth throughout history. Tromlitz, to perfect his double tongue (did’ll), set a routine of practising the same pieces (three solos and a concerto) for two hours every day for six months. Or let us take the case of Frederick II, king of Prussia. In the music room of every one of his palaces, he had four notebooks containing a total of 46 pages ‘composed of difficult divisions and passages for the exercise of the hand’ (see Ch. Burney (1773), The Present State of Music in Germany…). According to Gerber’s Lexikon (1790), the king ‘practised these passages, repeating them every day for thirty years’. Although these notebooks were among the cultural goods lost during the war, a selection of a hundred of these etudes was fortunately published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1934 under the title King Frederick the Great’s Flute Book – 100 Daily Exercises. However, in the absence of the original manuscripts, I question the accuracy of this edition, since the selection is not particularly difficult to play; furthermore, it contains a low C, yet this note was certainly missing on Frederick II’s instrument…
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Do you have a daily routine?
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The recipe I choose depends on the reason for the need, and on the ingredients at my disposal (time, energy). So I adapt it to the circumstances. Nevertheless, it is definitely important to have a daily routine when setting a long-term goal. Some things may take longer to achieve than others, in which case it becomes necessary to establish a pedagogical daily routine.
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What kind of goals do you set for your practice?
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My goal consists in keeping my flute playing in good condition with new pieces. It is also useful to regularly review examples from treatises, particularly the carefully notated and annotated ones: Quantz’s Solfeggi, Millet’s L’Art de bien chanter (1666), Ganassi’s Fontegara (1535)… Or even, among countless others, Atys’ duos from opus 4 (1760) and from Clef facile et méthodique (1763), in which phrasing is indicated by punctuation marks (. , ; : ? !), apart from a few obvious mistakes. This allows me to nourish my interpretation: my palette of musical and technical tools as well as my vision and understanding of early music.
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Do you do any systematic warm-up?
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As proposed by Devienne (ca. 1792) and Vanderhagen (ca. 1790) in their respective Méthodes, slow scales of long messa di voce work marvellously. Experience teaches that this exercise puts everything in place. It is extremely useful for intonation, flexibility of the lips and the jaw, relaxation of the larynx, and thus for the sound. As for the latter, I like sound that resonates, that “tickles” my fingertips. Broadly speaking, I refer to Quantz’s ideal: clear, penetrating, thick, round, masculine, and withal pleasing. However, I never use the same sound colour to express two different characters; otherwise, neither could convince or touch, but only please, at most.
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Do you have a specific structure for warm-up and practice sessions?
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I do not really have a structure to follow. It depends on both the goal and the length of the session. I think it is a good idea to always include a bit of sight-reading at some point, as far as possible, to broaden your repertoire and acquire automatic skills.
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Any distinctive characteristics of baroque flute daily practice vs. modern flute or other instruments?
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Playing the baroque musette has given me a lot in terms of finger flexibility. On this instrument, where the tongue is not there to stop the air, all articulation is done with the fingers, which the so-called closed fingering makes perfectly possible.
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What are the key elements and unmissable points of daily practice?
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Repeating difficult passages of a piece over and over again without giving them any meaning is not only pointless but also painful. This is what I call the “etude reflex” (in the worst sense of the word) that kicks in as soon as you see sixteenth notes – a surefire way of wasting time and inculcating bad automatisms that are harmful to musical sense. It is not by working like this for hours on end that you become virtuoso (i.e. “virtuous”). You must always practise intelligently, in other words, by preserving the intentions of the composition (the right information with the suitable characters, phrasing, articulations, nuances, suspensions, etc.). Similarly, whether we are preparing chamber music or an orchestral part, it is essential to know what the others are going to play. Therefore, it is necessary to spot every dissonance and the slightest phrasing, either by reading the continuo line (if it is included in our score) at the same time as the flute part, or by taking the time during our individual practice to compare our part with the others. In everyday life, we often lack rehearsal time, especially in orchestras, so we cannot afford the luxury of discovering the other parts when we arrive at the rehearsal room. Even before the first tutti session, we need to know exactly where to take breath and place micro-phrasings, which note to accentuate to create dissonance with another musician, and so forth. Practising is impossible if you only use an individual part, because your role only makes sense in the light of the full score that completes the speech.
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How long and distributed should warm-up and practice be?
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Balance between warm-up and practice varies according to personal needs and levels, within reasonable limits. Regarding the full length of a session, even Quantz expresses himself with caution. For a beginner, he recommends two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, with small breaks, while he thinks that one hour a day may be enough for some of the more advanced players. At any rate, Saint Augustine reminds us that ‘sloth pretends to long for rest’.
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Any specific tip to address difficult technical passages during daily practice?
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When playing a series of difficult fingerings, I usually concentrate on the fingers I am lifting rather than on the ones I am putting down. In this way, somehow, the fingers run more easily over the holes, without slowing down the movement by pressing too hard on the flute.
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Are there any tools that are particularly useful for practicing?
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Although the following “tools” are not necessarily within our physical reach, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of talking about them: I strongly recommend listening to barrel organs (mechanical instruments that comprise a pipe-organ with a rotating cylinder) and serinettes (small hand-cranked bird organs) made in the eighteenth century. Tonotechnie or barrel notation is an invention that allows reproducing human interpretation just as if it were performed by the best hands. For a historically informed musician, these “recordings” have the same importance as written sources. In addition, some are also found in score form: I know of nothing more precise than the musical notation of Father Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle in his treatise La Tonotechnie (1775), and a romance by Claude Balbastre which Engramelle wrote down as played by the composer himself, published in the monumental work of the monk Dom Bédos de Celles, L’Art du facteur d’orgues. I will limit myself to mentioning two workshops from which we have still functional barrel organs of remarkable quality. Firstly, the instruments of John Langshaw and John Christopher Smith (the latter was a pupil and assistant of Handel, and pinned a great deal of the composer’s works on cylinder, as well as popular tunes of the period); and secondly, the workshop of Joseph Niemecz (he notated on cylinder several pieces composed by Haydn, of whom he was a colleague and friend). Many of these sounding treasures are available on the internet. A must-listen repertoire to be emulated: ornaments, inégalité, articulation silences separating the notes – it is all there, and this ought to be our goal.
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Any other general advice, suggestion, tip?
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Yes, I have one, mainly for novices. Virtue is the summit above two opposing vices. Avoid idleness – but you cannot necessarily make everything perfect at once in a sonata (not to mention in a concert programme). If you jump from piece to piece without really working on them, you are actually not practising. ‘The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short’, wrote Montaigne. Once you have set a work project, do not let yourself be distracted. Otherwise, pointless work is neither fruitful nor encouraging. For ideal progress, you have to practice methodically and regularly in order to achieve a specific goal. Unlike those who, by doing a hundred things without perfecting any of them, do not make any considerable progress, and end up complaining about not having more time (in reality, it is just that they do not use it wisely). To borrow a perceptive phrase from a Bernanos novel, there are those ‘who think they’re working harder than anybody because they never get anything done’. As for you, complete your practice because the true virtue consists in finishing properly each small task we undertake, and above all in sanctifying ordinary work.
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Are there any specific pieces particularly beneficial to be played regularly in daily practice?
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Let me come back to ornamentation. Adding ornamental notes is not an end in itself, but a means among others to express a character or an emotion. Of course, it is all very well to work on ornate adagios, doubles of airs de cour, or diminutions, and it is even more commendable to write and improvise ornaments by yourself, but you should not stop there, because the work is far from finished. For an ornamentation to be complete and in good taste, you still have to take into account the micro-dynamics suggested by Quantz in his Versuch (1752): in his famous Adagio, he marks forte, piano, crescendo, decrescendo, messa di voce… for every single note of his ornamentation. In this way, he gives his speech a new dimension of sensibility. Let us take the trouble to do the same. Let us play and analyse the language of this reference (Why such a crescendo, such a forte on this note? What does it have to do with the melodic and harmonic progression?), and then we can write the suitable dynamics in the same manner in our other ornamented pieces. There is hardly any other way to adopt this interpretive finesse.
On occasion, similar precision can be found in other composers. Such is the case with Marin Marais’s suites: the letter “e” (for enfler or crescendo) above a note means that the sound must be swelled. Marais explains that ‘in this manner one gives soul to the pieces, which, without this, would be too monotonous’. In L’Art du chant (1755), Jean-Antoine Bérard uses Hebrew letters to denote two kinds of nuance: son filé entier or messa di voce, designated by the letter “כ” (kaf), and son demi-filé or crescendo, designated by “ד” (dalet). Last but not least, Geminiani’s publications are also worth mentioning, as they are no less rich in indications of micro-dynamics (small crescendos and diminuendos placed on the notes as ‘ornaments of expression’): Rules for Playing in a True Taste, A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick, and The Art of Playing on the Violin. |