Another Wycliffe Gordon Video

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been posting a lot about Wycliffe Gordon lately, partly because I recently had the opportunity to back him up in concert, but mostly because he’s a great trombonist.  I got emailed the link to this video and was asked about what I thought of what’s happening with Wycliffe’s chops at 4:10 into it.

You get a few good looks at his embouchure in this video.  His setting is very stable, with very little excess motion.  This makes it hard to spot his embouchure motion, but I think I can see some examples of it in there (could be my confirmation bias, but I’ve noted his embouchure motion in person close up, so I’m pretty certain it’s down to ascend, up to descend).  One interesting exception happens around 4:00 into the video.  About 4:07 he takes the mouthpiece off to lick his lips and then resets just before he pastes a double Eb!  The rest that follows is only speculation.

I don’t think Wycliffe is using this to reset his mouthpiece placement to a different position on the lips here.  Some players do that for extreme ranges, sometimes to just a slightly different setting and sometimes completely switching embouchure types.  While the placement does look a bit lower for the Eb, I suspect that this is just his downward embouchure motion pulling his lips down.  First, he descends down from there and his timbre is consistently the same as before.  Usually a change in setting has a noticeable effect on the tone, which I don’t hear (although it could be the recording isn’t enough to bring it out).  Secondly, Wycliffe plays into that extreme upper register all the time, often going from very low notes very quickly.  If he was resetting the mouthpiece to a different placement for the high notes in this video, he doesn’t seem to need to usually.

Thanks to Paul for spotting this video and sending me the link.  It’s got a nice look at a trombonist’s embouchure and is some great playing too.

Teaching Embouchure to Beginners

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Another question from the internet.

I’ve begun teaching beginning trombone students and I find myself somewhat… stunted in terms of discussing embouchure placement, how to play higher or lower, etc. with them, especially as I’m not versed well enough in the Reinhardt system to diagnose their embouchure types (nor am I sure that their embouchure type has ‘stabilized’ even for the short term anyway, given how young people tend to ‘sprout’).

Can you offer me any guidance on how to teach these students? I suppose I could look at Arban or another beginning trombone book to see, but because I find myself confused by the ‘mirror effect’, I’ve avoided the topic for the most part, instead focusing on holistic results of “OK, that’s a good tone quality. That’s a good articulation. Try to keep the air moving more smoothly” etc.

There are plenty of teachers who are much more experienced starting beginners than me, although I do get to teach middle school and high school students private lessons and through summer music camps frequently.  Depending on the circumstances, I may offer some embouchure instruction, but in general I take somewhat of a “hands-off” approach unless I happen to see a problem.  Because younger beginners are often still growing and they have some embouchure strength building to do, trying to type their embouchure is almost pointless.  Left to their own experimentation, most student will figure out where they need to place the mouthpiece on their own.

Here are some of the issues I do address with beginners that can help them develop well functioning embouchure technique without resorting to unnecessary and confusing instructions or expert knowledge on the part of the teacher.

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Embouchure Questions

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I’ll be getting around to answering some of the emailed embouchure questions starting today, taking them in the order I’ve gotten them.  Here’s today’s.

I’m a high school trombone player and I’ve been reading a lot of your articles on embouchures and have decided I’m probably one of the Type IVs (that’s how I’ve been playing for the last few years at least). However, when I play in the upper register, my lower lip seems to hide behind the upper lip and looks very similar to the “jelly roll” embouchure type, except that the mouthpiece placement is low as opposed to high. Is this okay or would you recommend trying to change that (or do you think I would actually be a standard type III)?

Since I haven’t seen you play, I don’t know if you’re typing yourself accurately.  First of all, I prefer to not use Donald Reinhardt’s embouchure nomenclature, simply because it gets confusing for people who are unfamiliar with it. Instead of Type IV I use Low Placement embouchure type and the Type III I use Medium High Placement type.  These types were coined by Doug Elliott, a former student of Reinhardt’s, and I feel better help communicating how brass embouchures actually function.

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“Horsin’ Around”

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My first composition for 2011 is done.  Well, I still have to finish the copy work, but unless I make some minor changes the composing part of it is done.  It’s another big band chart for the Asheville Jazz Orchestra and also the folks at White Horse Black Mountain, who have had the AJO play a monthly show there since October.  It’s called Horsin’ Around.

I always caution my composition students to not overly rely on MIDI realizations like this one to give an accurate depiction of what the composition will sound like.  For one thing, a computer can play back parts that are impossible for real musicians to play.  On the other hand, real people perform with much more expression and some things that sound unsatisfying on a computer will be very effective with live musicians.  In my MIDI example above I don’t have fall offs and other effects setup to play back.  The rhythm section parts and improvised solos are computer generated, so you have to use your imagination.  Still, you should be able to get an idea what the chart will hopefully sound like.

The “head” tune and form are pretty standard, as are the chord progressions.  I went for a quirky feel by playing around with some rhythmic ideas and using some bitonal triad effects (for example, using a lot of C major triads in the melodies over the Bb7 chords).

If you’re near Black Mountain, NC this Friday you can hear the AJO premier this chart.  Assuming I get the parts printed out in time.

By the way, I promise to get to all the emails and comments that some of you have sent in the past month this week too.  Thanks for the topic suggestions, keep them coming.  For those of you asking for embouchure advice, please remember that I need to be able to see how you play to really have any chance of making an accurate guess, but I’ll do my best if you can’t post videos or photos.

Arnold Jacobs On Embouchure: A Criticism, Part 2

~ wilktone ~ 4 Comments

A few months ago I posted a criticism of Arnold Jacobs pedagogy, specifically related to his dismissal of embouchure as an important factor of brass playing.  I recently got a comment on that article that has some very common misconceptions to my brass embouchure research.  I wanted to take a moment and address some of those now, using this comment as a launching point for further discussion.  I hope that my commenter, Kaj Fagerberg, doesn’t feel singled out here, as his points echo many made by Jacobs himself.  Due in part to Jacobs’ pervasive influence, these misconceptions are widespread among brass players.

Kaj writes:

I think what Jacobs is saying is that the embouchure must vibrate, that’s all it does. There is not a magic setting that one must find, it just produces vibration to produce sound. Our teachers spend so much time trying to get us produce a perfect textbook example of the embouchure, that they forget it’s goal is to vibrate. Yes, a functioning embouchure vibrates, just as a distorted one can. There is no difference. That is the point he is making.

I think it’s a pretty simplistic view that all the embouchure does is merely vibrate.  The lip vibrations must be controlled perfectly in order to play the correct pitch and with a focused and resonant tone.  It’s true that a distorted embouchure vibrates too, as demonstrated by Jacobs’ infamous embouchure trick, but a distorted embouchure formation is inefficient and causes problems we want to avoid.  Jacobs probably never actually performed with his lips twisted up like this because it would not be an optimal way to play and I think he’d probably help students avoid winding up the lips with the mouthpiece rim.

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Advice For Students Writing Music Papers

~ wilktone ~ 6 Comments

The last semester of 2010 just wrapped up.  Due to the nature of two of the lecture courses I just taught, I ended up with a lot of papers to grade during the last 3 weeks of the semester.  While reading them I made note of some of the common traps that my students run into when writing about music.  Even when I go over these mistakes in class, some of them are easy to make.

There are plenty of common writing issues that crop up regardless of the topic of the paper, such as grammar and proper form and style.  Different teachers will have their own policies.  Personally, I don’t care too much if the paper is done in MLA, APA, or Chicago style, as long as it is consistent (although I’m speaking here for mostly non-music majors taking elective courses).  Don’t make up your own system of citing and such.  Find out what your teacher wants you to use and make sure that you’re following it.

Here then are some common traps to avoid when writing papers about music.

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A Visit From St. Nick

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Last Friday’s annual Christmas Concert fundraiser was well attended and we managed to raise some good money on top of having a good time.  I was particularly excited about this concert because I had written a brand new composition for last year’s show, but winter weather forced us to cancel it.  We finally got to premier my composition for narrator and big band, music set to the poem A Visit From St. Nick.  Rodney Hagans is the narrator, but unfortunately he’s out of the camera frame for the whole video.  Still, you can get a good idea of how the chart sounds.

Changing Education Paradigms

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I’ve seen some of these RSA works before.  They create neat animations set to public speeches and other events.  This particular one’s soundtrack is a talk about education by Sir Ken Robinson on our standard education model.  Some very interesting food for thought, as well as being a slick animation to boot.

I just spent a couple minutes poking around Sir Robinson’s web site and it looks like there’s some interesting things to explore, plus lots of bells and whistles (it might load poorly on slow connections).

How To Mark Your Music

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Yesterday I mentioned Bruce Childester’s The Trumpet Blog as one of my recommendations for online brass resources.  A short time ago he had a great post on “How to Mark Your Trumpet Music” that I wanted to recommend.  He offers examples of several standard practices and other suggestions about how to mark music appropriately.

Some of his points I’d like to reiterate include only marking your music in pencil, so it can be erased.  Also, circled music means “tacet” (lay out), not look carefully at this.  Many music students will circle things they want to remember, but I encourage everyone to get used to only using circles to mean tacet.  You never know when you’ll need a sub last minute.  Your substitute may need to sight read a performance and might assume that circled parts mean lay out.  On the flip side, you don’t want to be the only one barreling through something you were supposed to lay out on because you didn’t know what that circle means.

One piece of advice I’d like to add to Bruce’s is the use of a dash and number (e.g. “-2”) over notes to indicate exactly when the note is released.  It’s common for students to release notes too early, so I often have them mark a whole note, for example, with a “-1” to remind them to release the note after all 4 beats (on the downbeat of the next measure, or off on 1).  It’s also useful for effects like “doits” and  fall offs (“-3” to mean fall until the 3rd beat, etc.).

While you’re at it, poke around a little at The Trumpet Blog.  There’s lots of good stuff in there.