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Re: How to Play a nice piano and tapering?

Author: tims
Date: 2014-10-24 02:53

"Paul Aviles"

When you draw the clarinet closer to your body, you are in fact pushing the lower jaw back and not just moving your teeth higher on the mouthpiece. The natural response to this is to push back with the lower jaw. This was not my point nor do I advocate pulling the horn in as a general practice. My point was simply to indicate that your jaw has more than one degree of freedom in its motion and that we can choose the direction in which we apply pressure to the reed. I believe we all eventually learn to apply pressure directly into the reed, but that we do so unconsciously because we do not naturally think of our jaws moving any way but up and down. I have found it helpful to ask students to think of pressing slightly forward rather than simply biting up with their lower jaw. Actually we naturally do this we we are asked to flatten our chin. Although you are pulling back the exterior lip and cheek muscles around the chin, unless you consciously try to not do so, you will also move you lower jaw forward in relation to your upper jaw.

It really comes down to physics. If we press against the reed at a 45 degree angle, half the pressure we apply is useful in making the reed flex, but the other half is wasted trying to pull the reed out of the ligature. This means we are working twice as hard as we need to and applying twice as much pressure to our lower lips. This effort is tiring, and distorts the lower lip and makes controlling all the other muscles more difficult. Simply because the mouthpiece is inserted into the mouth at a 45 degree angle doesn't mean we have no control over the direction which we apply pressure. If you aren't working very hard to control your sound, then you have probably already figured out how to direct the pressure in the right direction even if you are not fully aware of exactly what it is you are doing. This is eventually discovered unconsciously by everyone, I've just found that students tend to discover it more quickly with this kind of visualization and begin to produce better sounds with less effort and little tendency to "bite" when playing high or soft.

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