Actually not really....

I have often had the impression that people think of their embouchures as a kind of binary thing: working or broken, right or wrong.

My experience is that I could use practically any combination of mouthpiece, position of the lips on the mouthpiece, tongue position, aperture, and get this combination to "work" to some extent, although its limitations might be immediately obvious: Like using my bass trombone MP on my large-bore tenor - feels great, but the sound completely dead.

In other words, there's always some compromise going on with any particular combination, and your embouchure - in most cases, barring some kind of physical issue - <I>isn't going to break</I> because you did something different, but the combination might be 'sub-optimal."

If it's not something that you can break, then you should be open to the possibIlity of changing some aspect of the whole mouthpiece/embouchure combination, if you run up against some kind of wall. What's the virtue in continuing to hit your head against it?

[quote="JTeagarden"]In other words, there's always some compromise going on with any particular combination, and your embouchure - in most cases, barring some kind of physical issue - <I>isn't going to break</I> because you did something different, but the combination might be 'sub-optimal."[/quote]

We can get better at playing wrong. When what we're doing is suboptimal there is a risk of injury or just a breakdown of playing the longer we go playing wrong for our face. You can "break" your embouchure playing for too long with inefficient technique. Some sorts of wrong playing are worse than others, but it all makes for doing the work in the wrong way. Like lifting heavy objects with your back, you can get away with it for a while but if you keep doing it you're going to hurt yourself.

So while, in principle, I agree that there is usually some sort for "compromise" going on, I feel it's better to make as few compromises as possible and work on playing with the most efficient embouchure technique we can.

Dave

I agree, it's just the language often used to describe embouchures suggests people think of them as something you better not mess with if it's working OK, like something horrible will happen, and you'll never get your embouchure back.

Gotcha.

I do find working with brass embouchures to be quite situational. Sometimes messing around with something does more harm than good, if you don't know what you're doing. When I was an undgrad I checked Philip Farkas's "The Art of Brass Playing" out of my school library and read it over week long break. I dutifully tried to practice what Farkas recommended in the book, but by the time I got back to my first lesson with my teacher it was clearly working worse. My teacher wisely suggested I forget about Farkas and return to how I was playing before.

The trouble was that I still wasn't playing correctly for my face, and I continued to have troubles for the next several years. Eventually I got things sorted out, with the help of Doug Elliott.

Many teachers don't want to mess with their students' embouchures, perhaps because of situations like mine. When you see so many students messing around with their chops and getting worse it becomes easy to think it's better to leave it alone. It's not the act of analysis itself that's causing the trouble, it's because it's being done wrong.

Yep, dissecting things into components doesn't really help if you don't know how those components relate to each other in the first place, "paralysis by analysis" is inevitable when you don't even really know what it is you are analyzing.

Given the normal distribution of musical talents, it is quite easy for a teacher to confuse a student hitting his or her "natural limits" with their using a sub-optimal embouchure.

It's good to have you and Doug and other Reinhardt disciples who can actually make some sense of these things.

I dunno about 'breaking your embouchure' - but, as I understand it, what creates the embouchure is the muscles in the lips adopting a certain position / tension / whatever, so as to get the lip surface vibrating. Any muscle can be damaged. In some cases, it may be just a short term thing which will heal itself, or respond to medical treatment - in other cases, it may be permanently weakened, and or stiffened, and always liable to tear again (as with the muscles in my lumbar region, damaged when I worked for a farrier, 50 years ago, and STILL giving me grief, despite the best efforts of a damn fine osteopath!).

I do know of one case, a lady who played cornet very successfully until in her late 20s, when she became incapable of forming the embouchure required by a cornet. Even after a lengthy complete lay-off, she never got it to work for cornet again - but she did successfully transition to playing trombone.

I do agree with JTeagarden that it's not like a light bulb - either working or broken - and wouldn't be the case even if it was just down to the muscles. The other aspect is the motor neurones which trigger the muscles into working. If they are damaged, or their functioning is compromised - at any point from the brain right through to the muscle - it can still mess you up, even if the muscles are in full working order.

As a measure of the complexity of this interaction; in the 1980s, I was a lab technician in the medical physics department of a hospital in Aberdeen. One of the PhD students was working on the possibility of using a computer to trigger muscles into working when a patient's motor neurones were not working. As a pilot study, she chose the brain / neurone / muscle operation used to clench a fist. She analysed the various commands, strengths, timing and sequencing of the signals - and before she was anywhere near complete, she ran out of space on the computer's RAM, even though she was writing the program in machine code!

Now, granted, the RAM size available in desk-tops in 1980 was a fraction of the size of what we have now - even for what was, at the time, a top of the range job. But the student calculated that even for clenching a fist, it might well push a mainframe to its limits. If what I've read about the mass of muscles and nerves crammed into the lips is anything to go by, accurate control of that small part of our bodies might be just as complex as controlling our hands when we play piano.

With best regards,

Jack