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Re: Facial-Flex for toning Orbicularis oris muscle

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2022-05-24 21:32

"Strength" is a slippery term as applied to embouchure function. Tony said you don't want a dead piece of meat under the reed. But he didn't say you need a strong lip. You need a lively and nerve-responsive one. Clarinet playing is more like badminton than power lifting. Ninety-pound badminton players can easily beat 300-pound shot putters in badminton; it takes quite average strength to hit the little flying object but enormous speed adaptation and coordination (trained reflexes) just to know when to swing the racket. The clarinet is much the same. You want lips that can instantly adjust to the changing pitches as they fly by. Isometric exercises with Facial-Flex may have some therapeutic value for lips that have clinical weakness or injury but once you've restored normal strength, you're going to have to look elsewhere for further embouchure fitness.

To make your lip--nerve--and--muscle apparatus supple and able to catch those notes just right as the moving fingers fly by, you will need to practice INTERVALS.
Playing intervals on the fly is like hitting the little flying bird projectiles in badminton. Concentration on the moving notes is of the essence. You cannot practice this while typing or watching a video. Your whole mind and body has to be leveraged on the notes-lip synchrony itself. The more boring and tedious the interval succession, the better because it disciplines you to play exactly what the composer has put on the page rather than cliches that come easy--a very useful skill for any musician.

Wonkak Kim, a skilled and musically sensitive player who teaches at the University of Oregon, has a warm-up routine that shows exactly the kind of practice that will develop this suppleness, and responsiveness in the lip that you need to play moving notes accurately. Too much strength in the lips (as opposed to automatic sensitivity) will just close the reed against the mouthpiece lay and silence the tone!

Here's Wonkak illustrating the routine. Of course most players will have to start playing these as quarter notes or even half notes at a slow tempo. But both the slow tempo practice and the gradual speeding up of the tempo over time will exercise the lips exactly as they need to be exercised, not mostly for strength but for accuracy and speed, so the player can "hit" the notes just right as they come flying out. This exercise will not only train the lips to be more than just a "piece of dead meat on the reed," it will make the lips more intelligent and able to provide exactly the right amount of force at exactly the right time. The object is not to give the lips strength but to give them an active brain! (A SHOW MORE link is also provided to download the intervallic warm up for free).

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=international+clarinet+wonkak+kim+warm-up.

In the video after this, this Kim performs the suite In a Victorian Kitchen Garden.

Post Edited (2022-05-25 16:44)

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