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Re: top lip callus

Author: triplereed
Date: 2008-11-26 11:06

This is a curious issue... But Jaysne's not the only oboist in the world to experience such an apparent oddity.

My upper lip, too, always showed a tendency to develop calluses. It first happened when I took my early oboe lessons and still happens nowadays everytime I put myself into an intensive schedule of exercises, even if that happens only occasionally. Yet everytime I find myself playing double reeds (oboe, shawm, chalemie and the like) more than a couple of hours in a row in a three to five days span, I know that the next morning I'll invariably wake up with this small, round, stiff 'button' of desensitized flesh which appears exactly at the center of my upper lip where the two halves meet in a tiny dimple, just a shade below where the labial mucosa blends into proper skin.

In the beginning I thought it might have been due to my still-undeveloped embouchure, since the callus itself disappeared and reformed more or less in time with my bouts of practice; but I think that it might be due to the different embouchures I use since I also play flute and clarinet (i. e. respectively lips alone or a huge, beak-shaped mouthpiece where only the lower lip is called into exercise).

Add to this that I always had a tendency to bite hard into the reed since I started out on folk shawms before oboe, and there're no speakers to them; one must learn to overblow octaves and fifths with great restraint in order to keep an expressive tone at the same time on an instrument that otherwise is likely to squeal and play out of joint if not severely kept in line; not that I disregarded the speaker key, but I never really put the uppermost trust on it alone for my very first handmade reeds were of antique strain, coarse and too-strong, so that they wouldn't respond at all if not given a good bite. Back then I simply couldn't coax a decent tone out of supple, long-scrape reeds.

So it might as well be a residual of an old bad habit, subsequently corrected yet never totally suppressed, that still surfaces from time to time in my playing. It doesn't annoy me anymore; it even relieves a bit of lip fatigue when I revert to the oboe after a hiatus, at least until I kick in into high gear. After that, presto my lip regains its usual shape and suppleness.

If music was an apple, I'd be the snake

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