A recent topic on the Trumpet Herald Forum reminded me of the below video of Allen Vizzutti playing some extremely impressive double tongued octaves. Check it out.
What I wanted to comment on here is Vizzutti’s noticeable horn angle changes as he changes octaves. You can clearly see that as he ascends he brings the bell of his horn down slightly and to his left and does the reverse to descend. It seems like a lot of motion, but considering the overall range he’s playing it’s really not all that much change. This change isn’t quite so noticeable when he’s playing music that doesn’t have such large interval leaps. In the below video you can see some good shots of him not only playing large interval changes but also playing phrases where his horn angle changes aren’t that noticeable.
It’s worth noting here that the specific angle changes Vizzutti is making here aren’t going to be the same for all players. Many players, myself included, find that bringing your jaw slightly forward and angle slightly up works best to ascend. Some players may find the general direction of the horn angle change to be more or less straight up and down while many players will find some angular deviation, like Vizzutti’s. The important part here is that it moves pretty much in a straight line and more or less the same amount between octaves. What works for one player isn’t going to be the same for another, and what works for a single individual can also change over time as the player develops.
I’d also like to point out that while many (perhaps most) brass players look at these horn angle changes and call this a “pivot,” this is not what Donald Reinhardt, who coined the term, meant by it. Reinhardt used this term to refer to the way that players will slide the mouthpiece and lips together as a single unit up and down along the teeth and gums to change registers. I prefer to use Doug Elliott’s term “embouchure motion” instead, because it’s less likely to be confused. Two players with the same direction of embouchure motion may end up making the opposite changes in horn angle. It can be very personal to the player and isn’t an easy thing to generalize.
You can get a very clear look at Vizzutti’s chops in these videos, enough to take a guess at his embouchure type. I’ll put my guess after the break.
My guess is “medium high placement” embouchure type. His mouthpiece placement has more upper lip inside, which makes him one of the two basic downstream embouchure types. You can get some pretty good looks at his embouchure motion as well, which is generally down to ascend and up to descend. The general position of his horn angle is also slightly down, which is also typical for the medium high placement type (although not universal).
What did you guess? Did you get a different type?
Nice write up. Thanks!