Trumpet Physics Masterclasses

Professor John Harbaugh of Central Washington University has a couple of videos up on YouTube of a trumpet master class. I liked his demonstration using a glass tube and a torch to produce a sound, although the discussion of physics are actually pretty light. Here are the two parts.

Personally, I think that he makes too much about the sympathetic vibrations of the lips to have the lips “relaxed” so that you’re not “fighting the horn.” He’s really discussing playing sensations there, which are notoriously difficult to pin down universally. Some players may benefit from thinking of their lips being relaxed, but others will want to work more on firming the lips. His isometric physics demonstration is a red herring, as I don’t see how it directly relates to the brass embouchure. Squeezing your fingers together for a long time is tiring, of course, but so is playing a brass instrument for long periods of time. If you’ve built the strength and endurance to do this, I feel that it is better to actively firm the embouchure formation (at the mouth corners, primarily) rather than focusing on “kinesthetic response.”

Ultimately Harbaugh wants to advocate a “subconscious or intuitive way of playing,” but the acoustical principles he discusses don’t support this argument. Again, this is a red herring because the point of doing any analysis (embouchure or acoustics or whatever) is to do the active thinking about it while drilling so that you can be intuitive later when it counts. It’s not an either/or issue, just do the proper thing at the proper time. In the practice room you can afford to think about how your are playing and whether your mechanics are correct. On the stage you must concentrate on making good music (which you must also practice doing too).

A much better discussion of trumpet physics (in my opinion) is by Nick Drozdoff, who is not only a very fine trumpet player but also a high school physics teacher.