Klarinet Archive - Posting 000215.txt from 2003/08

From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Tony=20Pay?= <tony_pay@-----.uk>
Subj: [kl] Biting
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2003 14:53:45 -0400

OK, let's talk about this business of 'biting'. It surfaces here often enough
to be worth sorting out.

There seems to be a notion around that if you use any muscles other than your
lip muscles in the process of exerting pressure on the reed, you automatically
produce a sound that is defective. That notion is mistaken, and I want to
correct it.

Still, teachers (myself included) have always wanted their students to avoid
'biting' in general, and I need to explain that too.

So, to simplify slightly, there are two basic embouchure parameters that affect
the sound of a note played on the clarinet. The first is the amount of
pressure exerted by the lip on the reed. The second is the area of contact
over which that pressure is exerted. And for a given note, there is a quite
small range within which those parameters can vary without producing an
unacceptable result.

Yet, how you vary those parameters, which constitute all the behaviour of the
lip that the reed 'notices' directly, is up to you.

Making a rough analogy between the lip/reed contacto and the contact of the
tire of a bicycle with the ground is perhaps a helpful way to think about these
parameters at a given moment. A 'well-pumped-up' tire will have a smaller area
of contact with the ground for a given weight of rider. But of course, the
analogy breaks down as soon as we include the progression of time, because then
we have to imagine a rider whose weight changes from moment to moment.

Nevertheless, to play the clarinet well, you need to be able to control these
two parameters -- pressure and area -- independently. Anything that limits
your ability to control them independently limits your ability to play the
clarinet well.

So, on a very basic level, 'counterproductive biting' corresponds in the
analogy to 'a rider too heavy for the current tire pressure'. On a particular
note, it *is* possible to have the ratio of lip pressure to area of contact too
large to produce a successful sound.

But that is not the main reason why teachers, myself included, argue against
what we call, 'biting'. The main reason is that biting *works against
flexibility*, because it prevents you from doing what, in the analogy,
corresponds to 'changing the weight of the rider' and 'changing the tire
pressure' *from moment to moment*. It reduces your lip to the role of a piece
of meat covering your teeth, instead of being an infinitely sensitive and
flexible aid to performance.

Music, after all, is not so much about 'a' note, but about *groups of notes*.
Playing music well involves the ability to control the joins between notes that
respond differently on the instrument. And to do that, we need something much
more subtle than mere 'jaw pressure'.

But notice -- all that's necessary is that your lip muscles are involved to the
extent that they can modulate the 'pressure' and 'area' variables. No-one said
that they have to do *all the work*.

That's just silly.

Tony

Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo!
Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is supported by Woodwind.Org, http://www.woodwind.org/