This is the third interview of a series of interviews conducted by Andrew Kohn. Andrew is the Professor of String Bass at West Virginia University, is a member of the Pittsburgh Opera and Ballet Theatre Orchestras, and is an active soloist.
Lawrence Hurst began his musical studies on the piano accordion at the age of four. At 13, he started studying the double bass through the public school system of his hometown, Norfolk, Virginia. After serving two years with the Seventh Army Symphony, he started his professional career as principal basist with the Dallas Symphony under Sir Georg Solti. He joined the music faculty at the University of Michigan School of Music in 1964. During his tenure at Michigan, he chaired the String Department and was Associate Dean and Director of the University Division of the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan.
In 1986 he joined the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana Universtiy and was the chair of the String Department from 1987 until 2012. In 1967, he joined the summer faculty of the famed National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp) and has taught there every summer since. His students can be found in orchestras and musical venues all over the world, including the orchestras of Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Indianapolis, Atlanta, The Metropolitan Opera, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, to name a few. In 2005 he was given the American String Teacher’s Association Artist/Teacher of the Year Award, and, in 2006, the International Society of Bassists (of which he is past president) gave him the Distinguished Teaching Award. In JUne, 2013, the ISB also awarded him the Distinguished Achievement Award. He retired from the Jacobs School of Music in June 2012, whereupon his former students initiated an endowment scholarship and medal for double bassists in his name.
Each of these interviews explores the application of etudes into one’s development as a bassist. Enjoy!
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Lawrence Hurst interviewed by Andrew Kohn, August 9, 2005
AK. What pedagogical use do you make of etudes?
LH. Quite a few. The fad now, at least in bass teaching, is not to use etudes at all, and I’ve been countering that fad for a long time, because I think they’re essential.
There are basically three kinds of etudes. The first type I call the generic etude, which can be used in the student’s studies to focus on certain aspects of his playing that are deficient, or that you want to improve, such as bowing or shifting—whatever. These etudes can be used for a number of things—I’m thinking specifically of the Kreutzer violin etudes that have been transcribed; there are also several of these types of etudes that I use out of the Nanny book, some out of the Petracchi book, some even from the Rabbath book and so forth, wherever I might find them, as they might apply to specific items that we’re working on. There are plenty of them out there, and any of them might just be the right one. But, again, I classify these as generic because they can be used several different ways for several different aspects of technique.
The second type of etude that I use is what I call the musical etude, which really studies all aspects of music, not just the technical ones. For us those would be Storch-Hrabe, or even the Mengoli exercises, some Bille material, the more melodic etudes. Simandl has some. But they need to be selected carefully by the teacher.
I don’t think we’re in the era of the method book any more. It’s very rare that you’ll run across a student these days that’s gone through both books of Simandl, for instance, in any way, cursory or otherwise. They’ll play through about three to four positions in the book, maybe five, and then it’s so boring that it’s hard to keep interest. And this can be said, I think, for a number of the method books. Just not the way to go these days. Bille, for instance, covers what, five or six volumes? It’s very hard to keep students’ interest in one approach for that long. So I’ve given up on methods, but I do continue the etudes as they apply. So the second area is the musical training that the etude could provide.
The third kind of exercise or etude that I use is what I call the expander. These are contrived etudes that are not expected to be perfected, but, as Simandl put it, Gradus ad Parnassum—studies to perfection. These are a lot like Scriabin’s etudes for piano. He really contrived those to be outrageously difficult, so that everything else that you play gets that much easier. The Findeisen studies are a good example of contrived etudes. Also the Nanny Ten Caprices: etudes of this difficulty are expanders, where the student is called on to come up with all kinds of solutions to enormous problems of technique and musicianship.
Of course then you get into the study of solos, which, in a way, is the same thing.
AK. In what sense is it the same thing?
LH. By that I mean they’re technically demanding and expansive in terms of technique. The difference is, of course, it’s usually not just you, there’s an accompanist or some other part of the music that has to be looked into, whereas usually an etude is just between you and the notation. It’s one on a part. That’s how I use etudes pedagogically.
AK. Is there anything else that you use as a sort of technical equivalent to etudes in addition to solos (which you said you use as expanders)?
LH. I have routines. For instance, if you want finger speed, there are certain routines of scale work, much like pianists use, where you go up, say, three notes, and back two, and up three, and so forth. I also emphasize intervallic work a great deal. When my students work a scale, I have them not only work a scale: the scale is just the beginning. In fact, as they get more advanced, the scale is relegated to relatively secondary status, with much more involvement with thirds, fourths, fifths, even sixths, because that’s where bass players live. If you look in a bass part, by and large it’s intervallic, not scalar. So I have my students do a lot of intervallic work.
AK. You mentioned some etudes that you use—you mentioned quite a few: Kreutzer, Nanny, Petracchi, Rabbath, Storch-Hrabe, Mengoli, Bille, Simandl, Findeisen. Any others?
LH. Well, Kayser…. These are all valid books. The choice depends entirely on what you’re trying to bring home to the student. I mean, you could go on and on. I like the Fred Zimmermann Contemporary Bowing book, for instance, for string crossing.
AK. Are there any that you think are being underused these days? You said, in a sense, they all are, but are there any particular ones?
LH. Well, yes. You know, the reason Simandl is so pervasive is the fact that it got an international copyright a long time ago, and became available in many languages—I mean, you see it in Japanese (in Lucas Drew’s edition). And this is wonderful, but in terms of a study book that’s really comprehensive, I think the Kurt Möchel book is probably the most outstanding study book I’ve ever seen. But it just happened to be published in Germany in the 30’s. Talk about wrong place and wrong time. That was about the worst place in the world at that time to have stuff published. And yet it’s still in print. It’s very expensive and hard to get—you can only get it from Schott & Sons, and you know how expensive that stuff is—and nobody knows it. It’s unfortunate, because if Möchel had the popularity of Simandl, we would see an incredibly impressive array of technical prowess with the instrument, because the book is set up so well, in my opinion. And it has so much going for it, and it’s not that big: there are two volumes and a compendium, and almost every aspect of technique is investigated, including artificial harmonics and double trills, for instance—things that normally only violinists would look at.
AK. I don’t know that method.
LH Not many people do. As I said, it was published in the late 30’s, before the war, and it’s still around. I used it several times, but it’s so hard for the students to get, and unless you have a lot of time to spend going through this book—it’s so condensed, and there are so many things you can do with it—so it’s just not popular. It would take somebody to really promote it. And besides, we have others now that are taking up some of that slack. But for what it is, it’s the best book I know of.
AK. What do you think are the characteristics of a good etude?
LH. That depends entirely on what it’s being used for. For instance, a good characteristic of a contrived etude, say, is range demands—shifting demands, fingering demands, bowing demands. If that’s the intent. But if the purpose is to learn speed, does the etude promote that? If you’re dealing, for instance, with double stops, there are certain etudes that would obviously lend themselves to that. Number five of the Nanny Etude-Caprices, for instance: the whole etude is double stops.
You see, in this Möchel book, he deals with double stops not so much as an etude, where you go from the beginning to the end, but he deals with the double stops as a fingering pattern, and makes it clear the areas of the bass in which these patterns change, and how they change, and what the variations and new fingerings could be. It’s a much different and a much more pedagogical approach, I feel, than just playing through two pages of etudes, which might well get you to the same place, but only if you’re perceptive enough to figure it out.
AK. It could, though I remember playing double stop etudes as a youngster, and it didn’t occur to me that I should be certain that I was practicing all the various possible fingering combinations. I might have even tried to think of some special fingering where I could avoid a fingering combination that seemed to me to be terribly awkward.
LH. Yes, exactly. Well, you see, Möchel explains all of that, what all the possibilities are, although he doesn’t take an etude and just run it through. For instance, he has double stop trills. It’s a great exercise for the hand, because all your fingers become—or at least are exercised to become—independent. And independence of the fingers, of course, is one of the problems all instrumentalists have. This really goes at it in a very, very specific way.
AK. Are there any etudes that you wish had been written that haven’t been? Anything that should be covered that hasn’t been?
LH. Well, it would be nice to get them all in one place, wouldn’t it?
AK. Sort of the best etudes of the twenty books?
LH. You know, Lucas Drew has tried that. There’s probably twenty, twenty-five etudes from many of the people we just talked about. The best of the best I guess (in his opinion). They’re all for different things, but he has collected them in a book, and I think it’s interesting that he did that. I think it speaks to exactly what we’re talking about: the desire to get all these things in one place. I don’t know if that’s really possible. The violinists have been trying to do it for a long time, and they don’t seem to be able to do it either.
AK. Yes, with the differences of what a student needs and the differences of what a teacher thinks is an appropriate technical approach to the instrument, it would be very hard to have a single collection that would satisfy anyone other than the compiler.
LH. That’s exactly right. And therefore I think the teacher in a way is sort of like a doctor. You know, basically there are only two treatments: you cut somebody up or you dose them. With dosing, the doctor has an array of drugs that he can call into play. I think that’s the art of medicine, to examine the person thoroughly and say, “What does he or she need?” and then prescribe something. In a way, that’s what a teacher is doing. They can see problems or deficiencies in technique or in musical approach, and then have all those etudes at their command. I think that’s what a good teacher does. He has a repertory, as it were, of etudes that are appropriate for the student. So I don’t think one size will fit all, in this case. Fortunately, we’re not all the same. My experience has been that even the hand size can pose a great deal of problems.
AK. Certainly someone with a small hand doesn’t need extension exercises.
LH. Or double trills in the low register. But on the other hand, people with large hands have the same problem in the upper range, in a way. What to do with the hand under the extreme tension of the upper range—how you bend that knuckle, for instance: do you bend it at all? and how arched can it really be if your fingers are very very long? So it’s an enormous problem in range, I think, in dealing with some of these technical problems.
AK. I agree. There’s no one size that’ll fit all.
LH. But we’ve got plenty of sizes out there. There’s much more now than when I first started playing the instrument. Montag has a whole raft of method books. And of course Rabbath came along in the seventies with his books.
There are a lot of books, little known. For instance, there was a guy named Eugene Cruft out of England. His approach was that you learned the bass through the orchestral licks. And he took you through the positions basically by playing tunes out of the orchestral repertory. It certainly wasn’t a concept that was original with him, but I think the idea of learning how to play the instrument by doing it was his.
AK. Montag certainly includes excerpts.
LH. As did Nanny, and Simandl. Nanny had a whole book, too.
AK. And Barry Green used a lot of orchestral excerpts in his method book.
LH. Yes, that’s another fine set of books. I use them for various things, too. I think Barry was on the right track with those books. He’s very intelligent and had a great approach to the instrument. He produced good students, too. A lot of good students came out of the Cincinnati Conservatory.
Reprinted with permission from American String Teacher, Vol. 57, No. 2, © 2007 by American String Teachers Association.
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