Roger Greenberg
Interview by Debra Jean McKim
13 March 1998
Greeley, Colorado

From: McKim, Debra Jean. Joseph Allard: His Contributions to Saxophone Pedagogy and Performance.
Published Doctor of Arts Dissertation, University of Colorado, 2000.

Used with permission of both Debra Jean McKim and Roger Greenberg
Copyright 2000, Debra Jean McKim

McKim: Lets start with your background of study with Joe. When and where did you study?

Greenberg: I started with Joe in 1964 as a freshman at Juilliard and went there really not knowing anything about Joe Allard. I knew about Juilliard and I wound up there. When I went to do my audition I played the Glazounov Concerto and Joe Allard was so nice to me at the audition that I couldn't believe that this guy was the illustrious saxophone professor. Everybody else was very cold and professional; they just sat there, and he was warm and came to greet me and walked me out after the audition was over. So, I knew who he was after the audition. I was there two years before I was drafted into the Army. I enlisted for a three-year stint in order to guarantee that I would be playing for a band. I auditioned for the West Point band and I was accepted there. So I spent three years at West Point, which is only 50 miles north of New York City. During that three-year stint in the army I was able to continue taking classes part-time and study with Joe, and I was able to finish one year of classes, so by the time I finished the army in 1969, 1 had only one year to do at Juilliard. I finished that from 1969 to 1970, graduated in 1970. 1 was able to study with Joe the whole time I was in the Army, so I essentially studied with him from `64 to `70.

DM: Would you consider Joe to be your primary teacher?

RG: My first teacher was very influential, that was Sam Correnti. He was an old big-band sideman in Reading, Pennsylvania. My second teacher was J. Carl Borelli who was a junior high school band director, he was also very influential. Both of them were wonderful motivators. After that, when I left Reading and went to Philadelphia, I studied with Michael Guerra. who was again a very influential teacher. He didn't play at all, but he had a lot of great things to say. When I started studying with Joe, I think I met the first teacher who was on a level that I didn't know existed. Joe was an amazing teacher; he had a gift of knowing by instinct what you needed. Even the psychological approach - he individualized, and he was able to help most people. So your question is, was he the most influential teacher? Yes, without a doubt, but put it in perspective of being the most influential teacher among many influential teachers.

DM: When you first started studying, your very first lesson, was he able to pinpoint what you needed and follow that individualized approach you mentioned?

RG: I will never forget that first lesson. In fact, I talked about this in one of the magazine articles that was written about Joe. I walked into the lesson with no idea of what to expect and I played one note. And he said, "Put your saxophone down." So I did, and he talked the rest of the lesson. He talked about things that I really hadn't thought about. I had been complemented on my sound, but I never really thought about it. I didn't know what I was doing. And he talked about sound for the whole lesson. He talked about brightness and darkness and edge, everything that could be used to describe a sound. He asked me about what I thought; `what is bright, what is dark?' It was all geared to make me think about sound. I can't remember if he started me on overtone exercises at that first lesson - I don't think so. It was a talking lesson. I walked out of there with so much to think about. There were four new saxophone players at Juilliard that year, and one of them was standing out in the hall when I came out of my lesson. He asked how the lesson was, and I said, "I played only one note, but it was the most amazing< lesson I'd ever had."

DM: When he talked to you about sound, did he tell you what to do with it?

RG: Not yet. We started working on overtones. We started with what Joe called the 2 to I exercise (2:1). And that's a case where you produce the overtone by fingering the fundamental and then allow the overtone to become the fundamental by relaxing the upper lip without dropping the jaw. So, the key is relaxing the upper lip. I was using a very tight, squeezing embouchure and he was trying to get it much more relaxed. The change should be as smooth as possible. You go F to F, E to E, Eb, D, Db, C, B, Bb. It's extremely effective, although the first problem I had with it was that I had trouble relaxing my upper lip, because I was so used to playing tight. So he gave me other exercises to do. For instance, he said, "Just play with your left hand and take your right hand, while you're sustaining a B; lift the lip on the right side, so that air leaks out." At first, I couldn't even do that, because I would fight it so hard. After a while, it got to the point where I could do it and then he'd have me do the same on the left. Then he'd say "try to play and lift that lip without using your finger; both sides."

It was a real struggle for me. When I got into it, these exercises, this was only the first one - I'll get to the others in a minute, but for me the first several months, the first six months, the first year was undoubtedly a step back for me. because prior to this, I wasn't inhibited about sound. Ignorance is bliss and I didn't think about it so it never bothered me. But in retrospect, it's something that should have bothered me and I really couldn't have gotten very much farther because it catches up to somebody the more advanced you get. I see that a lot with the students who come in as freshmen. They may have been the best person in their high school, but they get here and all of a sudden they're not the best any more and it hurts. But, Joe was extremely gifted, as I said before about dealing with those kinds of things and he'd be able to keep somebody feeling good about themselves while they were going through major changes, so... oh, letting the air leak. Then the next thing he said was if you're still having trouble with that, let's do the Bucky Beaver exercise.

DM: Did he call it that?

DM: When you first started doing overtones, did Joe explain what they were going to do for you? Was the 2:1 exclusively at that point to get the upper lip relaxed?

RG: Yes at that point.

RG: It was all relating to sound, but at the time I couldn't even think about sound because I was thinking more about just being able to relax. It's not as much of a problem for people today as it was for me, because I came out of an approach to the saxophone that was so highly influenced by clarinet teaching - the old school of clarinet teaching was a real tight approach. Today, a lot of the modern clarinetists and clarinet teachers don't teach that old way anymore. So. it's a little bit easier for today's saxophonists. And most of the saxophone teachers don't teach that tight. They may be tight. but not to an extreme.

In any case, going on with the overtones, the 3:2 exercise; this is getting into something that was really different because here he was trying to show how you can use different kinds of pressure on the reed and pressure from the teeth and the jaw - you have to keep in mind that the teeth and the jaw are the same - or pressure from the lip, or a combination of these. We got into a discussion of anatomy. Joe was a student of anatomy; he loved to talk about this. He'd pull out Gray's Anatomy and turn to a page and show you the names of the muscles. He knew the names of the muscles before he even opened the page. He'd say, "There are 11 muscles involved in" this or that. It was amazing how he could talk about that.

In any case, coming back to the lip and the jaw in relation to the 3:2 exercise, in order to get the third partial, you would use more jaw pressure and what he would do is take the mouthpiece and slowly pull it out of your mouth as you were sustaining that third partial. Because of the taper of the mouthpiece as you come out on it, your teeth still remain in contact on the top of the mouthpiece, and because it gets narrower you actually end up moving from jaw pressure to lip pressure. The lip fills in that space just very naturally. Also, your lower lip rolls out as the mouthpiece pulls out. So you wind up doing what Joe referred to as `covering' the reed. Starting from a more uncovered approach, more lip rolled over the teeth, the less lip in contact with the reed. Less red part of the lip.

DM: Those were his terms, covered and uncovered?

RG: Yes, as you pull out, you cover. And he wanted people to see how you can approach things differently with differences in jaw pressure or lip pressure and the amount of lip in or out, covered or uncovered. And you can use combinations of these. I think what he left to the student, at least to me, was how it actually tied into the sound. He didn't spend a whole lot of time telling me "this is what you need to do here, this is what you need to do there." He didn't say that, he just left that up to me. In hindsight, I think I needed a little bit more of that. I was still battling the idea that I didn't know what kind of sound I was looking for.

DM: But you weren't just looking for one sound ...

RG: Joe didn't have one sound in mind. He would say, "Look, you can listen to things and learn from things but you don't want to sound like Joe Allard. You want to sound hike Roger Greenberg." And he would say that over and over again. From week to week. He didn't want to turn out a bunch of clones. He turned out a lot of individuals. I think if you want to turn out clones, you can grind out a lot of pretty successful students. But there's something not quite right there. I guess you could argue it - I don't want to get into examples of people, but there are a lot of people who teach that way. But when you look at those who have been the real successful people, they are for the most part, the individuals. Even some of the more successful people who are teaching in this country now still became individuals in spite of where they came from. That's what Joe wanted - he wanted you to be an individual and have individual characteristics in your sound

DM: The principles that he taught, there were some that remained the same?

RG: Absolutely. But these are only a means of affecting your tone production. The tone production is variable depending on what you're looking for in the tone, so that you can play with a very mellow quality in some cases, or you can play with a very bright edgy quality in another case.

Going on with the overtones though, the 3:2:1 exercise then is just a combination of the 3:2 and the 2:1, and from there the other exercise that he would do was with matching, but that came later. I have these notes; these notes are in Joe's handwriting. I can read these to you and we can talk about them.

[Note: words in italics indicate notes in Allard's hand, passages in single quotes are notes in Greenberg's hand]

This is playing a third space C#. Play the top side of tone an octave higher (no octave key). So, at the time I didn't have any idea what he was trying to make me do. But now, I can look back and see you have to use jaw pressure in order to do that. And then he took a high C# above the staff and said play the underside of the tone, getting the middle C# with the octave key on. Well how can you do that? Only by using lip pressure.

This is something completely different now: flow of air into the lungs is due to an enlargement of the (thoracic cavity) chest cavity. The enlargement is due to: a) the raising of the ribs `intercostals'. The ribs though attached to the spine can move a little around their sternal ends forming an acute angle towards a right angle. He gave me an example of this opera star, [Franco] Corelli, whose chest at rest was 47 inches; after inhalation, it was 50 inches. That's a three-inch difference just from taking in air. b) the contraction, lowering of the diaphragm. When the diaphragm contracts it lowers and exerts an inner pressure on the abdominal organs and because of the relaxed abdominal wall, raises the abdominal wall and seeks to make a line shorter. Now here's his diagram. The diaphragm is attached to the 10th rib - there's his anatomy. Exhalation is due to the hydraulic pull of the abdominals. He would always get into issues like hydraulics and the forward coning thing. He'd have terms for all these things.

If you learn or teach to inhale and hold the breath without pinching the glottis, you yourself learn the inhaling and exhaling process. What he was saying is try to teach it to somebody else, because you learn by teaching. Something you may not totally understand yourself, you have to understand it in order to teach it. You think about things differently. He would use a French expression that translated meant "to teach is to learn." I think he was very proud of his approach to teaching. He felt confident, he looked at it as an art form and I think that's why so many of his students turned out to be very good teachers. They were teachers because they wanted to be teachers; they loved it. And he loved teaching.

The larynx is below the threshold of human consciousness. I think that's a heavy way of saying you don't think about what your larynx does while you're breathing, you just don't think about it. Here at the bottom he talked about vibrato a little bit - he's talking about types of vibrato. One is a change of pitch, two is a change of intensity, and three is a change of timbre. He gives examples of how vibrato can relate to pitch. It can start on pitch and go above it. It can start on pitch and go below or its can start on pitch and then surround it. I used to approach it where I went below the pitch only. And that, especially for playing classical. sounds out-of-tune. He told me to think about going above. When he explained that, he said in reality it's still going to go a little bit below, but it won't sound out-of-tune.

`Tongue should hit just under the tip of the reed.' Talking about this being the tongue, the blade, the edge. And he would say you tongue up to the reed, not down. It should not be pointed, it should move in one motion, up to the reed and back and he would have exercises for that. For instance, one of the exercises is that he would start everyone out trying to make the tongue wide and relaxed, which is its normal position. If you just let yourself daydream, you can actually feel your tongue wide and relaxed, kind of in-between your teeth. You can also feel that the tip if your tongue goes up really high. In fact the tip, while you're daydreaming, touches the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth. He said the fact that you can also feel your lower teeth doesn't mean your tongue is low in the mouth. It means your jaw is closed, and your lower teeth go up behind your upper teeth.

So, your tongue in its natural relaxed state is high in the mouth. It's high, wide and relaxed. When you go to a doctor to have your throat checked what does he say? He says, "say ah." Why does he want you to say "ah?" Because he wants to look down your throat. So what does that do? It lowers the tongue. What else does it do? It blocks the windpipe. So coming back to the exercise of making your tongue high wide and relaxed, he'd say, "Just relax." Let your tongue go where it wants to go. Then he'd say, "Now open your mouth and let's look in the mirror and he'd say see if you can't bring that tip into the middle and keep the rest of the tongue in what seems like a natural position." The back part of that tongue will actually touch your upper molars, keeping it so wide that you can actually still feel your cheeks. I couldn't do that right away, and I really bad to practice on that. Once you got to the point where you could do that, he said, "Stick your tongue out like you're making fun of me." I could do that. He said, "Get to the point where you can go back and forth between the two positions." What happens when you stick your tongue out? It gets pointy. Then he'd say "now don't think of it as sticking your tongue out, just think of it as making your tongue as narrow as you can possibly make it." What happens? It goes out. "Now take that narrow pointy tongue and make it wide." What happens now? It goes back in my mouth. When your tongue is wide and relaxed it's in a perfect place for tonguing. And when you go to tongue, you think of tonguing with the of the tongue and you think of one motion forward and up to the reed and back. And that's the tonguing process. That exercise is simply a coordination exercise. You need to be sure you understand, that's not how you tongue.

`Don't move jaw forward especially when tonguing. Use tongue only. Use fingers to hold the jaw as an exercise.' That was something that was specifically for me. `Keep sides of lower lip over the teeth.' He said that a lot of times because he wanted me to get away from pinching the reed at the sides. `Don't pinch reed at the sides. Keep tongue up out of the cavity,' keep it up out of the basement, `touching the lower lip at all times.' That was a temporary thing, I'm sure of that. `Touch back of teeth' at the upper molars. 'Keep cavity closed.' That refers to the lower part of the mouth below the tongue. `Take more mouthpiece in mouth. Keep jaw in natural position,' what he called the centric position, which is a dental term meaning the natural axis of the jaw, the natural bite wherever that is. It could be different - most people's bite has the lower teeth coming in back of the upper, but some people have an overbite, etc. Wherever the natural bite is is the centric position. `When tonguing, think of tongue coming off reed.' `Practice breathing exercises everyday.' `Tongue a low G'-try to think of it as 'teu' -the French 'tu.' 'Then sing A, then play A again. Then do two notes and on to three, etc.' That was for sound.

`Do not push down with the head', the upper teeth are a receiving body. That's still something I have a little bit of a problem with - I tend to push down a little bit when I play and the way he described that, he said 'keep the neck loose.' He said, "Put your thumb here and push your head down with your thumb." When you push your head down like that, you can feel your throat tighten up and it's going to affect the air flow. I can still remember the exercise he had me do for that. He said, "When I was a kid and I used to walk to school. I had to walk past this meat market and I'd see these big sides of beef hanging on hooks. The hooks were vicious." He'd say, "Stand up against the wall with your head touching the wall. We're going to put one of those meat hooks under your chin. Now play a scale." He had me visualize that meat hook while I practiced so I wouldn't put my head down.

'When playing overtones, take saxophone off hook and use no vibrato.' I think that was related to... if I took it off the strap I'd be much less likely to pinch. I'd forgotten about that. `While keeping sides of bottom lip over the teeth, bring the top lip down' and he struck that out and said wait for the upper lip to learn (by itself) to close mouth - the air space.

`Overtones - get tone and finger note (back and forth). Get tone and shake to side and back.' Shake to side; I think that was to be sure you were loose, so you could move the mouthpiece while you were playing. `Play legato lines without stopping between notes. Play with long steady crescendo.' These are scale exercises to practice.

`Play a note and flatten it a half tone with same fingering - then whole tone, etc.' That's the pitch bend exercise and that was mainly to get a feeling of doing different things with your larynx; controlling pitch and quality of sound by changing your throat position. That's a great exercise, and he did that two ways. He did it with just the mouthpiece - play a scale on the mouthpiece - and also by taking a high F and bending it down. He did it to a fifth. Depending on the mouthpiece you're using you can go to an octave. In fact, Dave Liebman carries it to an octave on a jazz mouthpiece. I personally find that after I've done those two exercises - the scale on the mouthpiece and the pitch bend -1 can immediately play better even if I didn't like the reed to begin with. I sound better after I've done them.

`When you play high the reed is vibrating faster. When you play low, it is slower because of the distance between the mouthpiece and reed - this is controlled by the teeth.' I think what he's referring to here is that generally speaking - this is a general statement - there's more jaw pressure when you're playing high and a tittle less jaw pressure when you're playing low to the extremes. You can't use exactly the same pressure for a high F that you use on a low Bb. So you wind up using a little bit more lip. So what he's referring to is the amount of pressure against the reed controls how close that reed is to the mouthpiece.

This is in Joe's handwriting again. I" step: this is the mouthpiece, this is the reed [referring to diagram on notes] Lip placement on the reed. Now that's on the edge, that's in the middle and that's way in. He's just showing variations. 2) lip and teeth; this funny looking thing is the lip and then the arrow is the teeth. So this is with very little lip over the teeth, this is in the middle and this is with a lot.

DM: Did he say what was best?

RG: No, it changes according to the situation. Here he says overtones above F; as you get into the really high screeching overtones, the real high ones, you have to have almost no lip over the teeth, but it's not really covered either. That was kind of a funny thing that you rarely use. The one thing that Joe said a lot is that you just cover as much as the pitch allows. So if you can play high with more lip turned out, then that's what you should do. But it's only as much as the pitch allows. It's not going to allow as much high as it is for the lower notes. Now, this is referring to articulation: Chew all the letters in the alphabet (starting low notes) A, B, C, D... This is because my tendency was to drop my jaw when I articulated, to jut out my jaw. And so this might have been a very individual thing. But it's like you are chewing.

You should be able to start any note forte or mezzo forte without tongue. Finger Bb (low) flute trick, F open and closing it... He would use that. I don't always like to use that, because some people use that as a crutch. What they're not doing is they're not coordinating the tongue, the embouchure and the air. Tongue; when you talk about tongue you are skating on very thin ice. 1st ask one to pronounce to ke, da ga. Roll the 'r' Spanish, Italian. Upper teeth and upper lip are a pair (opposing, receiving). Lower teeth (covered by lip) are a pair (exerting, chewing, pushing). The tension necessary to bring sides of lower lip to cover teeth is what makes it possible to be flexible at the reed (center of lip automatically covers teeth). Lip feel at reed should be soft; tension is at the sides. You have to be careful there because it's just slight tension, it's not much.

'Generally, the mixture of overtones influences the width of the vibrato, involves both tessitura and tone quality. Speed of vibrato, generally will be slightly faster high.' I think what this is saying is when you're playing low. because the overtones are far apart, vibrato has to be wide; otherwise it's not ever heard. Because the vibrato is closely associated with pitch. When you're playing high because the overtones are so close together, if you play a very wide vibrato, it sounds out-of-tune. So it has to be narrow. Generally to create excitement, vibrato is faster. To create relaxation, vibrato is slower. Vibrato can be slowed down narrow or wide. Variations of vibrato: width - amplitude, speed - frequency^-, all combinations possible.'

What are some of the other things that Joe taught? He used the Ferling book and he used the Karg-Elert Caprices, among other things. That's what I used. Those are the only two etude books I wound up working out of. He used a variety of solo literature. Joe was not especially knowledgeable about solo literature. He knew certain core literature and he wasn't particularly interested, at least with me - I think part of that was because he felt that my needs were in fundamentals at that time, which he did with a lot of people, probably most people. So a lot of times, he'd give me an assignment out of a book, but we never ever came back to it, because he'd go on to something else. We'd be talking about tonguing - I'd start playing the assignment and he'd say, "We've got to talk about tonguing."

DM: So he didn't pick etudes or literature to work on particular problems?

RG: I think sometimes he did that but he didn't bring your attention to that.

DM: Did he choose literature for you?

RG: Sometimes, but there were a couple of times where I brought things in and asked if I could work on them; he'd say "sure." There were also a couple of times, I can't remember which pieces, but he'd say, "Ah, this is a piece of garbage!"

DM: You've alluded to this already, but was there a certain structure to the lessons? Was it mostly conceptual?

RG: It was mostly conceptual, but he'd get into specific exercises to do to accomplish this conceptual approach. In general, there wasn't a structure, but he would react to whatever was happening at the time and once he reacted to something, then he was very focused. He had obviously dealt with these things with numerous people. He'd teach a lot of things the same.

DM: How much of what Joe taught you are you passing on to your students?

RG: Quite a bit, I think. Not only his specific approaches to things like the overtones and embouchure and throat and glottis, tonguing and breathing; all those, but also his approach to teaching in general. It had a huge influence on me and to treat people as individuals and make each person feel important was something that Joe did with everybody. I use a lot that I got from him I know that had I not studied with Joe Allard, I would not be nearly as effective as I have been as a teacher. I often mention Joe Allard in lessons. I tell all my students that virtually everything they're getting about embouchure, about the fundamentals, is the influence of Joe Allard. Over the years I find things that I've re-defined in a way that I'm comfortable with. In some cases I've made changes and I let the students know that too. I say the underlying influence is from Allard.

DM: He was teaching classical saxophonists, jazz saxophonists, clarinet players. Do you know how his approach differed between all these styles?

RG: His approach differed very little because he felt that whether you played jazz or classical there were characteristics of sound that had to be there. He couldn't stand certain approaches - it would make his face shake. I can still see this - if he didn't like something I was doing I would see his face contort. He would talk about sound a lot - he'd say that nobody wants to hear thin sounds. He was influenced in regard to sound by the people he played with in the NBC Symphony and later with the Bell Telephone Symphony. Some of these were the greatest woodwind players of all time and he would talk to them. Bob Bloom was mentioned often. He listened to these people play and he'd ask them questions all the time. That's where he formulated a lot of his ideas about teaching. It was in listening to these people play that he got all of his ideas, and that's what he passed on to his students.

In regard to the classical and jazz thing, he didn't have any pretensions that he was going to turn out a bunch of Marcel Mules. Actually everybody played some classical, we had to for our juries, but there was no one at Juilliard who was thinking they were going to be a classical saxophonist exclusively. I think when I got out of the Army after playing with Harvey and Emmet and Marshall Taylor, I came back with more knowledge of the classical side than anybody he had been dealing with. He kind of liked it actually. Up until that time, I had used a Brillhardt mouthpiece and Marshall Taylor got me to experiment with a Selmer. I don't remember which jury it was, but I played a jury on the Selmer mouthpiece and Joe told me that the members of the jury really liked my sound. He was non-committal about it; I think it was different than what he had been used to. Harvey was also studying with him at that time and Harvey used a Selmer mouthpiece. But most of the students were playing in jazz saxophone sections. Anyway, there was very little difference in approach between jazz players and classical players.

DM: Did you play jazz in your lessons?

RG: Sometimes. He would ask me to play a jazz ballad. He didn't really care as much about the music as he'd use that to talk about sound.

DM: You've talked a lot about his approach to sound, what about his approach to musicality? You deal a lot with musical line and phrasing in your own teaching; is that from Allard?

RG: I don't remember his talking very much about that at all. What he would tell me is to express myself as Roger Greenberg. He was very complimentary to me about my musicality, so maybe he just felt I didn't need to be working on that. When I look back on it, I probably needed it, but as a teacher you have to prioritize.

DM: You've answered this throughout this interview, but what would you consider Joe's greatest contribution? What makes all of this important?

RG: When you look at the influence of the French school of saxophone teaching on certain teachers in America, and you look at the influence of Joe Allard - not so much on the classical world because that's relatively little. It's gotten much bigger because of a few teachers passing it on to students, but it will never be as big as the French school. When you consider his influence on jazz, and look at some of the great jazz players who studied with Joe. In some cases they may have only taken a couple of lessons, but those couple of lessons made all the difference in what they're doing. And those people then taught other people and so on - it just keeps getting bigger. If I just think about my own graduates who are teaching in universities, you just start to multiply the influence of all their students. The interesting thing about this is when you see who's getting the teaching jobs, there are more people who have a jazz background as well as classical who are getting jobs than those who are purely classical players. The other significance of all this is his whole approach to sound.

I'd say his influence as a teacher is getting people to think about a big approach to sound, using a lot of overtones in the sound, a balanced mixture of those overtones in that sound, in getting people to control the instrument from high to low. I think the influence is extensive.