Klarinet Archive - Posting 000423.txt from 2001/03

From: stewart kiritz <kiritz@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] embouchure woes
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 14:52:26 -0500

Bill,

I think the issue may be related to (A) on your note, namely, with age the
muscles don't build up as fast. That is why in the past I could pick up the
instrument and be playing normally after a few weeks. Now it seems more
like it will be a year or so of steady broken up practice sessions each day
before I'll be somewhere.

Regarding excessive tension or squeezing, I don't think this is the case,
because I am doing nothing different with my embouchure than I ever did
before, and it was quite stable and worked well for me in the past.

Stewart
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Wright" <Bilwright@-----.net>
Subject: Re: [kl] embouchure woes

<><> Stewart Kiritz wrote:
However, I suppose that with aging the muscles require more
conditioning.

From the biological and neurological point of view:

(A) The human body's ability to build new muscle tissue decays
after a certain age because we lose some or all of our ability to
produce a certain hormone.

(B) "Strength" is controlled by neurology as much as by amount of
muscle tissue. Repetitive nerve impulses are required to keep a muscle
contracted continuously. Even a trained athlete can force a particular
nerve to fire only (I forget the exact number) 80% of the time, or
something like that. Thus one of the purposes of exercise is to train
your total set of nerves to distribute the burden evenly among
individual neurons and to train each neuron to fire as often as
possible.

(C) Efficiency is important also. Is some of your strength misdirected
into opposing muscles that fight each other unnecessarily? into
squeezing the reed or mouthpiece in ways that don't contribute to the
tone or intonation that you want? Etc?

Cheers,
Bill

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