Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-09-16 10:53
I think this manages to be a very confusing thread.
Whilst I applaud the idea of a band director engaging in technical exploration in order to further the abilities of his band, it should be realised that talk of slow air and fast air is just one of at least two metaphors designed to help a student in difficulties. It's not something that you NEED OBEY when you play.
To see this, recall that the clarinet tube is a column of air that is excited by the vibrating reed. That air passes down the tube is actually INCIDENTAL to the process, because THE AIR THAT VIBRATES IS ALREADY IN THE TUBE. All that is necessary is that the air-column be coupled to a driven oscillator -- in normal cases, the reed.
In support of this, I can report that I have a horn-playing friend who has mastered the trick of having his lips vibrate when he SUCKS as well as when he blows. He can produce a quite respectable note on his horn doing this, even though the air is moving in the opposite direction.
Now, given a steady air supply, you produce air at varying speeds at the reed by having a large or a small mouth cavity -- which is equivalent to having a low or a high tongue -- which is equivalent in turn to 'saying' AW or EE. Thinking of your mouth as a continuation of your wind pipe, you can see that if your tongue is high, the tube doesn't change diameter as it reaches your mouth as much as it does if your tongue is low. And obviously, increase in diameter lowers the speed, decrease in diameter raises the speed.
But, equivalently, 'high' tongue raises the resonance frequency of your mouth cavity (EE) and 'low' tongue lowers the resonance frequency of your mouth cavity (AW). So you can consider the vibrating reed as lying between two cavities: your mouth cavity and your instrument. Here we have an immediate explanation of why a throat G on the A clarinet can 'stick out' so much -- its frequency matches the resonance frequency of your mouth. But if you put your tongue high, you make your mouth cavity smaller, and the G behaves much more like the notes on either side of it.
It's not such a surprise -- we know that we can distinctly change the character of a throat note by using a resonance fingering that effectively 'hangs' a small length of clarinet tube (roughly corresponding in length to the length of the bit of the instrument from the mouthpiece to the first open tonehole of the throat note in question) WELL DISTANT down the instrument. It's rather like the resonance you get from a marimbaphone as compared to a xylophone. Small wonder that we can affect the vibration of the reed by altering the cavity it's vibrating in.
So what that means is that you can describe the action of the tongue using either of two metaphors, which are equivalent. You can talk about airspeed, or you can talk about vowels and resonating cavities. Some people respond intuitively to the one, others to the other.
And, there's no SHOULD about any of this. It's all designed to help out someone who isn't playing the instrument as they want.
Here is a short conversation between myself and Margaret Thornhill, on the Klarinet mailing list this year, that touches on 'fast' and 'slow' air, as well as more general considerations:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2008/01/000048.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2008/01/000091.txt
Tony
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