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Re: Air support exercises

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2017-06-04 18:22

Tony Pay wrote:

> It's worth reiterating – though I have to say, I'd rather it
> didn't seem ONLY to be me saying it over and over for the last
> 20 years or so – that keeping your abdominal muscles more
> flexed whilst continuing to play at the same dynamic as you do
> when they are less flexed is EVIDENCE of the use of support
> rather than a complete description of support.
>

Your past contributions about this have been enormously useful and instructive, and I wouldn't argue against your analysis in any way. The OP would do well to use the search function here to look up "magic diminuendo" and then follow any links in those posts to the other comments you've made about breathing and "support."

I'm not sure, though, I understand why you say that the deliberate action of flexing the abdominal muscles is only EVIDENCE rather than an active part of the process. Agreed, it isn't the complete process, and further description is possible (you've supplied much of it elsewhere on the BB), but it's hard to know from the OP's original question how much of that explanation he's ready to process because it's hard to tell what problem he's trying to solve.

> The trouble with understanding that is that we can't FEEL our
> diaphragm being used, because there are no sensory nerves
> running from it to the brain. We can nevertheless learn to
> modulate its use effectively with attentive practice.
> Hence, the 'magic diminuendo', which counts, I would say, as an
> excellent 'air support exercise'.
>

At some point, though, the inability to feel the diaphragm's action means that we have to rely on controlling the action we *can* feel in our abdominal area. The "magic diminuendo" is an indicator in that we can hear that *something* somewhat counterintuitive is happening - we can push steadily with our abdominals and yet the sound can diminish [I]al niente[/I]. And we somehow learn to control it without really knowing how because we can't feel the diaphragm's contribution to the process.

We can't feel the diaphragm's contribution, but we hear it. The diminuendo itself is the evidence. But I'm not sure whether "magic diminuendo" is an indicator of support or of control, which at a practical level may not be the same thing, at least not in the sense that I think the OP may have meant it.

An aside - maybe interestingly (or not), when I took voice lessons for two years as a college student, my teacher - the chairman of the voice department - insisted on an image of emptying a tube of toothpaste. The abdominal area would in effect contract from the bottom, squeezing the air out as it did so. I've already described how in the clarinet studio I was being instructed to keep the abdomen expanded as fully as possible - to actively resist the natural tendency to let the abdominal wall collapse inward as I exhaled. I've read the tooth paste tube image in other articles by low brass players. I think some of this difference can be explained by the volume of air needed to support vocal production or to move the air in a tuba compared to what can be pushed through the narrow aperture between the reed and the tip rail. And I suspect that in reality different members of the muscle group we lump together as "the abdominals" are involved in each approach. But the point for me was that ideas for the use of the abdominal muscles in supporting a musical tone is apparently dependent on the nature of the instrument. Neither image in any case really addresses what the diaphragm itself is doing, since the player can't deal directly with it.

Karl

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