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From David Krehbiel: Through the Door
David Krehbiel was principal horn of the San Francisco Symphony from 1972-1998. He is legendary for his artistry and his willingness to take musical risks. Philip Farkas [Former principal horn of the Chicago Symphony and Krehbiel's teacher] and I had our differences. His teaching and performing were intellectual, and he felt he played better after playing to the point of fatigue. So he would warm up 45 minutes to an hour before each rehearsal and concert. He would practice his solos over and over until he felt ready, sometimes as many as eight or ten times. He once told me that he stayed up all night before a recording session in the morning because he had a good lip the night before and didn't want to lose it. I asked him how that worked out. He said, "Not very well." Though I learned a lot sitting next to him in the orchestra as his assistant, the answer, as I saw it, was not to practice and practice on difficult passages trying to get better and better. That wasn't working well enough for me. It only reinforced old habits and inconsistent performance, not ease of playing. It seemed to me that the ease of playing I was searching for had a lot to do with the balance between three fundamental variables that I had identified when I first picked up a horn quite a few years back: air (motivation), lips (vibration), and resonance. If my playing was off, one of the three variables was probably out of balance for what I was trying to do. If one of the fundamentals is not optimal for the register and the dynamic, the other two have to work harder to compensate. When they are balanced, the body takes over and you are free to use your mind and energy to concentrate on the emotion and purpose of the piece you are playing. It's like riding a bicycle — you can't enjoy the bike ride if you are worried about the balance. The difficulty is that, initially at least, you can't have ease of playing while you are thinking about the physicality of playing, but you have to think about the physicality of playing in order to have ease of playing. However, as in riding a bicycle, your body eventually takes over and automatically does what it needs to do. I often imagined the three fundamentals of producing sound from the horn to be like how we produce sound from stringed instruments. It's simpler to visualize how a string plays than to visualize what's happening behind the mouthpiece of the horn. You stretch the string with the bow and it snaps back like the embouchure does when the air rubs across the lips while playing the horn. The resonant length of the string changes like the resonant volume inside the mouth changes for different pitches. Try whistling the harmonic series and notice what happens inside your mouth. Therefore, good brass playing (playing efficiently) is only possible when the three fundamentals — air, lips, and resonance like bow, string, and string length — are ideal for the pitch and volume desired. Each of these fundamentals are quite variable, so the right balance of each for the whole range of playing is not easy. This is where the effort comes in. When they are balanced, like riding a bicycle, you can use your mind and energy for other things, such as concentrating on the emotion and intent of the piece you are playing. Motivation In motivation, the motion of the bow as it is drawn across the strings serves the same function as air moving across the embouchure for horn players. Much has been written about breathing and the use of air in brass playing. In my experience, it is again a question of balancing the body tension required for breath support and the relaxation necessary for free and resonant sound production. If the air is brought up to the embouchure under too much pressure, this pressure must be controlled by resistance which in turn creates tension. To help find the balance between relaxation and supporting the breath, I think of the body as a U-shaped magnet where all the positive, relaxed energy is at the point of vibration, and the negative, tensed energy is focused on the muscle group that we use for support. Imagine the air stream at the lips as the positive pole, the diaphragm as the negative pole, and the space between the two poles — the shoulders, throat, torso, etc. — is relaxed and inert. I achieve this feeling of balance by pushing out gently on the front of the belly and dropping the shoulders. Try it and see if it works for you. Vibration In vibration, the violin string is like the embouchure (the thing that does the vibration). The bow catches the strings, pulling and stretching, until they snap back, causing the vibration. The embouchure does the same when it is stretched by the airstream, a puff of air is released causing a vibration. With the string, as with the embouchure, tension and thickness affect the vibration rate. One exercise I suggest is opening your eyes as wide as you can while playing, just to make yourself aware both mentally and physically of the unwanted tension you might be using. The release of that excess, unnecessary tension can dramatically open up your sound. Resonance Resonance is like the string length, which is like the resonating volume inside the mouth and inside the body. String length is analogous to the resonant volume inside the mouth. The pitch of a given string is changed by changing its length on the fingerboard. We don't change the pitch of a given string by changing its tension. We would need to tighten the string four times as tight to raise the vibration level an octave or double this vibration. The string needs to be the ideal length thickness, and tension for the pitch. String length is analogous to the diameter of the mouthpiece in brass playing. Just as the pitch results from the thickness and tension of the string, in brass playing the pitch is the function of the embouchure. So how do we as brass players change our resonant length? The resonant length change must take place behind the mouthpiece. Whistling different pitches is essentially changing the resonant length. You might say that the length of the tube changes the pitch, which is somewhat true. However, we as horn players are able to play up to 16 different pitches of the harmonic series on one length of tube. Lip tension does not change the pitch of the whistle. The best sound and the greatest ease of playing comes from an ideal motivation (air), and ideal embouchure (string), and the resonant volumeinside the mouth and body. The perfect balance of these three factors for the pitch and volume I call "ease of playing". Think of a violin bow when changing oral resonance. Imagine the bow placement, pressure and speed to be like airstream. When visualizing how the airstream rubbing across the embouchure creates a vibration, try thinking of the many variables of the way a bow catches a string. First, there is the placement of the bow for maximum efficiency, not too close to the bridge and not too far from the center. Then there is bow speed and bow pressure along with the amount of hair on the string. And again, all these factors are variable, depending upon string thickness, tension, volume, and register. Keeping a motivating air stream focused on the embouchure while changing resonance inside the mouth is a bit like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. Aiming and focusing the air stream is essential for maximum efficiency. We have all had the experience of trying to play a high note and nothing comes out. If there is too much pressure and too much embouchure tension, there is no vibration. We give away most of our efficiency going from one partial to the next one above. Learning to do glisses through the partial series without stopping the air and creating excess tension is the key. Of the three variables, the resonant volume in the chamber of the mouth requires the least physical effort. It is my go-to principal for ease of playing. In general, we talk about changing resonance in the mouth by "dropping the jaw" in the low register or using a shallow vowel sound in the high register, such as "e" instead of "o." Whistling is a more intuitive and specific way of understanding how we change the volume in the mouth to produce different pitches. When we whistle, our whistling "embouchure" remains quite still as we whistle through the different registers. The tongue and jaw are most active and responsible for manipulating volume in the mouth. As the pitch goes higher, the tongue rises in the mouth, directing the air through a narrower channel near the soft palate and then forward in the mouth behind the aperture. In the high register, it's ideal to feel the air moving forward and into "the mask" or the sinus cavity with the same sensation we have when singing in a loud falsetto voice. Like a perfectly smooth glissando on a stringed instrument, it is a great exercise to create that uninterrupted siren like sound and flow of air while whistling, buzzing the lips independently or through the mouthpiece. Once we put all this wonderful, natural vibration into the brass amplifier that is our instrument, we have even more fun blowing up and down through the harmonic series. We can feel the "pop" of notes as they lock in at the moment our gliss hits their organic frequencies. Another way to think about resonance as a means to efficiency is to consider the principle of sympathetic vibration. We have all experienced this at some point, intentionally or not, by having the snare drum rattle on certain notes or, for example, playing a piano with the dampers off. One can set specific strings in a piano to motion by producing a sound of the same frequency in proximity to the strings. The standing string will respond sympathetically to the motion of your sound wave as the vibrations push against it at the same beats per second. Instead of strings, the horn has a set of standing nodes at different points in the horn where the sound waves break into the next partial of the harmonic series for that length of tubing. We can force these sound waves to break by intensifying the pressure or volume of the air through the aperture as we play, putting the payload almost entirely on the embouchure, or, we can set up the sympathetic resonance in our mouth and move up and down between the nodal points with less pressure on the embouchure, less strain on soft tissue vibrating inside the mouthpiece and a freer, more open, and more natural sound. Each note "tastes" different from the next and has a different feel inside the mouth. If we isolate this variable in our playing by exhaling (no air), moving the mouthpiece to the side of our mouth where the aperture has no support (no embouchure) and discover that we can still get around the horn quite flexibly with an untrained, air-starved lip, albeit with no sound quality, projection, or accuracy. The point is, we can initiate the desired frequency in the horn by producing the same frequency in our mouth, in the same way we can produce a tight, muscle-bound note by using just the embouchure (no resonance or projection), or by forcing the air through the aperture which we must hold in place by pressing on the mouthpiece (no dynamics, no nuance, accuracy, or endurance). Therefore, ease of playing is only possible when the three principles — air, lips, and resonance — are ideally balanced for the pitch and volume desired. If just one of these variables is not optimal, the other two have to work harder to compensate, and effort comes into our playing. Ease isn't easy. We have to let go of our tendency to exert ourselves at these moments and find the easy way, trust that it is there, and not give into the idea of working harder. It takes awareness to play with ease, curiosity, and patience to find this balance and focused practice to stay in it once we find it. Helpful Hints
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Jeff GarzaPrincipal Horn, Oregon Symphony |