Klarinet Archive - Posting 000733.txt from 2000/11

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Feedback please. Article: Breathing/Relaxation.
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 14:22:22 -0500

Neil Leupold wrote,
>I received an email question recently from somebody who was having
>difficulty sustaining breath support while playing.
[snip]
>The primary reason that most clarinetists never reach their
>full technical potential on the instrument is that they never devel-
>op the ability to invoke and sustain physical relaxation on command.
>If you can develop the ability to relax your muscles and allow them to
>*remain* relaxed while you play, all other difficulties (embouchure,
>air, tongue, fingers, etc.) become much easier to resolve and refine.
>With the presence of physical tension, you will never reach the point
>where playing the clarinet is effortless. It is my philosophy that
>all players should strive for the point where playing the clarinet
>is a relaxing, effortless activity. You will meet very few clarinet
>players who claim to have achieved this -- even among profession-
>als.

As an amatuer, I haven't achieved it and probably never will. I'm skeptical
that "playing the clarinet is effortless" for even the top players, but it's
interesting to watch their faces and see exactly where the points of stress
and relaxation occur. The player I'm most often able to observe up close is
Stanley Drucker, on the New York Philharmonic TV broadcasts.

Drucker is sometimes described as having "no embouchure" (someone, not Neil,
used that term on this list a few months ago) -- a bit of hyperbole, surely.
Drucker folds his lower lip under more than most professional clarinetists,
it seems to me, and consequently he "points" his chin less obviously, but he
hasn't got "no embouchure." (If you want to see "no embouchure," look at a
nine-year-old beginner.) I notice that the muscles around his mouth stay
quite tight when he plays -- not *stressed* in the negative sense of "stress
and strain," but *firm*, especially at the corners of his mouth. No air
leaks there, and the taut muscles give him fine control of pressure on the
reed. But look at his face from the nose up: The muscles around his eyes
and forehead remain relaxed -- no squint, no furrowed brow, even when he's
playing fiendish fast notes or stratospheric altissimo. His face expresses
intelligent *interest* -- he's alert, playing attention, but he looks calm.
That's a pattern of stress and relaxation I've seen in other fine wind
players, too. They know *where* to put the muscle power and they don't waste
energy on tightening up things that don't need to be tightened.

Watching Drucker made me think more about my own embouchure. I watched
myself play in the mirror and realized my whole face was tightening up.
Paying attention to my breathing, I realized I'd taken the "breathe from the
diaphragm" concept too far to the extreme as well, and was tensing far more
of my body than I needed to put to work in order to fill my lungs. In fact,
the extra expense of energy probably made my breathing *less* efficient, by
draining off power to muscles I don't need for playing the clarinet. I won't
claim I've corrected these problems -- I frequently catch myself in the act
of playing in a state of general body tension, particularly if I imagine
anybody listening to me. At least now that I know I'm doing it, I can work
on improving.

Neil, IMHO you opened up an interesting line of discussion here. I'm curious
to see what other people think. I can't put any of this stuff into practice
at the moment, alas -- too busy watching a swirl of starlings in the sky on
Tuesday, tripped over my own inattention and took a classic, sprawling,
arms-and-legs-every-whichway header, straight out of a screwball comedy,
except I had a concrete sidewalk instead of a mattress to land on! Didn't
break anything, but bruised my ribs pretty badly. It feels as if I pulled
just about every muscle in the left side of my body. Taking a deep breath
hurts like hell, so I'm laying off practice until I heal up a little.

Lelia

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