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Re: Biting/Lip Movement

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-10-03 13:59

I had a look at Michelle Gingras's video (and incidentally, learned that she pronounces her name (s)Jingra, ie with a soft 'g' and no 's', which was news to me.)

I thought that something like Gingras's exercise (GE) might well help with separating out the action of the tongue from movement of the jaw. However, GE is unnecessarily demanding on a student with your problem, and might even be confusing in some cases. (You notice that she herself moves her jaw slightly as she demonstrates.)

The exercise would be significantly improved, in my view, if it were done without the clarinet, but with your mouth shut, and WITH VARYING DEGREES OF 'BITE', starting from medium force and reducing to the point where you're only just keeping your jaws together. (This would be the smallest degree of 'bite'; the one corresponding to the situation in which you could pick up an egg between your teeth without breaking it.)

Horror of horrors! I just USED THE 'B' WORD!!!!!

But unthinking application of the mantra that you should 'avoid biting' has its own dangers. Deeper understanding is required.

I've commented elsewhere on the 'Ridenour Technique' (RT) of setting jaw aperture and then sliding the mouthpiece into the mouth until it's 'snug'. It's a psychologically good way of making sure that you don't overcompress the lower lip to the point where it has no freedom to vary the three variables it controls, namely:

(1) pressure exerted on the reed
(2) position of contact and area of contact with the reed
(3) the lip's own vibrational characteristics as a more or less flexed muscle

...all of which need to be variable in real time.

On the other hand, you shouldn't kid yourself that that RT means that you aren't exerting more pressure with lower jaw via your teeth on the inside of your lip in order to keep the aperture constant as you move the instrument in. Otherwise the clarinet would push on your lip, your lip would push your lower jaw down, and the instrument would CONTINUE to move in.

What RT does is underline the notion that (2) is variable, and more variable than we may think if our approach is the alternative one -- namely, to put the instrument on our lower lip and THEN shut the mouth. The effect of RT is to bring the variability of (2) into consciousness, and to produce a fundamentally gentle embouchure address to the instrument by its clever use of the word 'snug'.

But if you go further, and try to deny the idea that there are forces acting between lip and teeth -- forces that need to be counterbalanced by equivalently small forces exerted by the jaw muscles -- then you are at odds with physical reality. Trying to achieve the impossible, you may make your situation worse.

Going back to GE plus my modification, we see that VARYING the work of the jaw muscles while we move the tongue has the effect of bringing that variation, AND THEREFORE THE JAW ITSELF, into our consciousness.

We may then more easily dissociate the behaviour of the jaw from the behaviour of the tongue in actual playing.

After all, the experience of moving the tongue while playing the clarinet is much closer to the 'shut mouth' version than it is to the 'slack jaw' version.

NOBODY plays the clarinet with a SLACK jaw.

Tony

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