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When I came to Rotterdam in September of 2014 to do my Masters in bass clarinet with Henri Bok, I really didn‘t know what I was going to find in this school and which kind of education I was going to receive. I had a new subject called Artistic Research and I did not know what I was supposed to do. In these lessons I had to think of a topic for my Artistic Resarch and how I would like to develop it. After these two year I have to say that I am really happy about the coaches we have in Codarts because they help opening the students‘ mind with a really big range of possibilities and ideas. The first assignment was to think about something I really wanted to improve in my playing. Due to me not being a theorist, I decided that I wanted to focus my research in the contemporary music for bass clarinet, given that this is something very new for me. After that decision I had to focus my topic, as contemporary music is a topic too wide to fit into a Research which lead me to one piece: Monolog for Bass Clarinet by the Korean composer Isang Yun. I chose this piece because it is one of the most technically difficult and musically acclaimed pieces in the bass clarinet repertory and I wanted to be able to play it at the end of my masters. The first idea for my research was to focus in the learning process of such a piece because when I started my masters I felt that my technical level was not high enough to play this piece and the moment when I could play it seemed to be very far. After a hard first year with Henri Bok I grew really fast in my playing and then I realized that the piece was still difficult but not as difficult as I thought, and then the process of learning became something not too different from the normal practice of any difficult piece. It was at this point that I decided to change the focus of my research from "How to practice this piece?" to something that would help me develop the piece, interpretation wise. To do this I decided to explore the influences and background of the piece: Korean traditional music.
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