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Re: Tongue Position

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-02-08 08:15

bmcgar wrote:

> To clarify, in essence, move your tongue and your embouchure
> changes. The embouchure is the key, not the tongue.
>

Two things:

First, I have to disagree that embouchure and tongue position are so mutually dependent. Embouchure is essentially the position of your lips with respect to the mouthpiece. The tongue certainly moves independent of the embouchure when used for articulation. Why should changing the vowel the tongue forms inside the mouth necessarily cause the embouchure to change?

Related to this, I can say from first-hand experience as a voice student back in my college days, that one important exercise was to change the vowel while sustaining a tone without moving the mouth. One very characteristic difference between French (and German) and English pronunciation is the sound created when you form an o-o-o with your lips and an e-e-e with your tongue, which forms one variety of French 'u' and the umlauted 'u' in German (open the lips a little and you get 'o' with an umlaut). We simply don't have that sound in American English (though I've noticed it occasionally in some British accents).

Second, most of the time we don't really know what our tongues or throats or uvulas or epiglottises are doing. Most of the time we produce vocal sounds - speech - by imitating at a very young age what we hear others around us producing without anyone's explaining that you have to raise the back of your tongue for this or the middle for that or curl the tip up for something. As with many other elements of technique, we sometimes make up explanations in order to explain why we do things that, in reality, we have simply learned to do by imitation through aural trial and error. So "teaching tongue position" may be a little oxymoronic since most of us don't really know what we're actually doing physically. You can try to describe the vowel you *think* you're producing with your arrangement of things in the air stream, but to try to go much (if at all) beyond that seems almost pointless.

Karl

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Tongue Position new

Agomongo

2016-02-08 04:51