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Re: Circular Breathing

Author: jhoyla
Date: 2011-12-13 11:53

Here is that great article from Malcolm Messiter - he gave me permission to post, and asked that you all go and visit his website: http://www.messiter.com/

Highly recommended to read to the end!

Breathe with your ears.

Continuing to breathe, often, while still playing is a very good idea. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Do it all the time. Your body works much better with lots of oxygen in the blood.

There’s been a lot of misunderstanding and a fair bit of rubbish talked about what is sometimes called “circular breathing” probably because there’s nothing remotely circular about it.

I learned to do it at school by mistake. My school (Bryanston) put on a chamber music concert every Wednesday night. I was responsible for getting people to play. Naturally, few were willing. So on most Wednesdays, I ended up playing in much of the concert myself, often at sight.

We played just about every trio sonata Telemann ever wrote, and hardly ever did we practise beforehand (which might have ruined the fun). Planning where to breathe was never done. I soon found myself in the middle of a tune, running out of air, and unlikely to make it to the end. In panic, I breathed through the nose without stopping playing.

I didn’t want to make a big hole in the phrase simply because I needed air. That’s why I think of this as breathing with your ears. Breathing through your ears is rather harder. Your ears tell you when a hole in a phase is OK and when it’s not. If it’s not, then for goodness sake keep blowing. No amount of “tasteful phrasing” can compensate for a fragmented phrase that should have been in one piece.

At first, it’s hard to control the sound when breathing. That’s probably why many use it only in moments of real desperation, if ever. But it was hard to control the sound when playing “normally” as a complete beginner. Control came with practice then, and control while breathing also comes with practice – lots of practice. That’s one good reason to do it a lot.

Another reason to do it a lot is the avoiding of oxygen deprivation. You may just be able to get to the end of the second movement of the Bach Double, or the Marcello concerto in one breath; but you’d probably be hanging on by a fingernail, bursting to breathe, feeling as if you’d swum ten lengths underwater. Why suffer like that? When survival takes priority, it’s not possible to be a relaxed, still less create great music. Breathe all the time. Then you can take your time over that last diminuendo, and into the bargain astonish those who didn’t realise how you managed it.

If you’ve never tried this, then begin with a banana milk shake and a straw. Drink two thirds of the milk shake first, or you’ll make a terrible mess. Then blow bubbles when no one’s looking. While blowing bubbles, allow your cheeks to inflate with air. Then empty your cheeks of air down the straw to continue the bubbles while you breathe out and then in through your nose, which you weren’t using at the time anyway.

It does have to be banana milk shake, as the viscosity of the liquid simulates the resistance of an oboe far better than would, say, a large gin and tonic.

When you can do this, try to keep the stream of bubbles constant. That’s hard. It’s the beginning of control.

Another good way to begin is to use one of those Christmas rolled-up blower-tickler things the correct term for which eludes me just at the moment. You know the things. You blow, and they un-curl to about 18” long usually with a feather on the end and a silly squeaking noise. Children usually find and blow them incessantly just before 5.00 A.M. on Christmas morning. Blow one of these, and see if you can keep the thing un-twitchingly erect for a full three minutes. Amaze your entire family over Christmas lunch. Then try breathing with it only halfway uncurled. Don’t let it move up or down. That takes real control.

Eventually you’ll have to reach for the oboe. At first control is difficult. To hide the odd momentary loss of control, practise breathing in and out during trills or rapidly moving legato passages such as the cadenzas in Pasculli’s “La Favorita”, most or all of “Le Api” and so on. Eventually you’ll be able to do it during a long note with no detectable loss of control. Do it early – before you need to. For reasons I’ve never really understood it becomes much more difficult if you leave it too late.

Because much of the air goes out into the instrument without having spent any significant time in contact with the alveoli in the lungs, it occurred to me that it might collect less alcohol too, should there be any in the system. I once had an unexpected opportunity to test this idea. The police stopped me one night as I drove home after a party. They asked to blow into the tube. It was dark. I could tell almost immediately that neither of these policemen was an oboe player, luckily. So, leaning against the car for support and choosing only easy-to-pronounce words, I blew into the bag as if playing Bach’s Ich habe genug. It worked. They politely wished me a very good night and I drove away slowly, trying not to grin too obviously.

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