Schuller: Mouthpieces

from Gunther Schuller: Horn Technique

The choice of a mouthpiece is a difficult and vital matter, and the young student is strongly urged to seek the advice at the earliest possible stage of the most competent professional available. In many years of teaching, I have often had to witness the frustrations of young players who originally  started on a poor mouthpiece and whose embouchure developed certain unnatural aspects because of an unsuitable mouthpiece. In such cases the damage to the embouchure was acquired unwittingly and unnecessarily; and while such damage is not always permanent, it may take months of painstaking practice and readjusting to correct it. The 'ideal' mouthpiece is something so closely connected with personal tastes and personal physical needs, that it is practically impossible to generalize. What may be ideal for
one player may be impossible for another. A high horn player will certainly have different mouthpiece requirements than a low horn player. If anything can be said at all in a general way, it is that a mouthpiece should be of moderate dimensions and, in a sense, should be a compromise, if it is to enable the player to render with authenticity the many styles required of the modern player, from the lightest Mozart to the heaviest Mahler and Strauss.


While many players and teachers approach the choice of a mouthpiece from a purely physical point of view, I would like to suggest that this is not enough if we are to consider the playing of the horn as a fine art, not merely as a means of making a living. Since we are dealing with music, the physical requirements of a mouthpiece must be balanced against certain musical requirements. The average horn player aspires to playing eventually in some first-rate orchestra; and it goes without saying that such orchestras play a broad literature encompassing roughly two centuries and an infinite variety of styles. A mouthpiece or a horn must give the player sufficient flexibility to cope with the demands of such a repertoire. For a mouthpiece or a horn that gives the player either too lean or too fat a tone will undoubtedly do injustice to some area of this repertoire. I think it is basically unmusical and a fallacy to pursue a specific tone per se, without considering the musical requirements to which end the tone should be only a means. In certain quarters in America and in certain countries in Europe, there are definite ideas on this subject which, while they may satisfy certain personal short-range viewpoints, in my opinion violate the fundamentals of artistic music-making. A large or a fat tone that remains inexorably the same is of very little musical value in a performance of a Debussy or Mozart piece, when that tone relentlessly penetrates the light- textured orchestral fabric. It is absolutely demonstrable that such playing, while perhaps satisfying to the player's ego, is diametrically opposed to the intentions of the composer. Similarly, an overly light transparent tone will not fulfill the tonal requirements of a Brahms or Mahler symphony. A truly artistic and imaginative player will not only learn to subjugate his 'tonal' personality to the style of the piece which he is performing, but will know how to vary the tonal properties of his playing even within a single composition, blending at times with the leaner sounds of a woodwind section, at others with the heavier sounds of the brass, and at still others with the mellower texture of strings. Moreover, a mouthpiece or a horn that limits the player to one type of sound is not only musically limiting but ultimately boring.


While these are artistic issues, I feel they must be mentioned early in the discussion, since very often the choice of mouthpiece (and horn) is so extreme that, after a short while, a more moderate and flexible middle course is no longer physically and psychologically possible. Early habits and training are notoriously tenacious. This is fine when the habits are good ones; it is dangerous when they are not.


In view of the above, the most sensible course, it would seem to me, is to find a mouthpiece which does nothing in extremes, but does almost everything relatively and equally well. Such a suggestion of compromise is probably disappointing to someone already subjectively committed to one school of playing or another, but it is the only practical solution. Such a person might do well to remember that the modern double horn is in itself an instrument based on an absolutely inseparable maze of compromises compared to the pure hand horn of, let us say, Mozart's day. A mouthpiece has five areas which seriously affect the sound spectrum of the tone. They are the rim, the cup, the throat, the bore, and the backbore. The rim should be of moderate width and not too flat. Too wide and flat, the rim will provide the player with greater endurance, but will give him a dull tone, not too much sensitivity, and probably less accuracy in the high register. On the other hand, a rim that is too narrow and curved will cut into the lips unduly, thus impairing endurance; however, it will at the same time increase embouchure selectivity by giving the player a better 'grip' on the mouthpiece. The inner edge of the rim should be neither too sharp nor too smoothly rounded off, the former characteristic especially impairing smooth slurs. The depth and width of the cup affect the tone even more
directly. A 'shallow' cup will produce a brighter sound and make the high register easier; while the 'deep' cup tends to produce the opposite results.

Large and small bore affect the tone similarly. The former makes for a fatter tuba-like sound that easily loses concentration, tonal purity, and therefore projection. A bore that is too small will produce a thin, penetrating, trumpet-like sound. Neither approach, obviously, gives us the mellow, round, ringing tone which, it seems to me, is the uniquely special quality of the horn.

The reader will have noticed by now that the advantages of a particular approach automatically bring with them inherent disadvantages. It is for this reason that the middle-of-the-road compromise approach is the only practical one.

The only other advice I should like to add on the subject of mouthpieces is: pick a good one and stay with it. Anyone who has ever experimented with different mouthpieces knows that...

1) After trying two or three different ones, it is often difficult to retain definite objective opinions about any of them-indeed at times it becomes difficult to retain one's sanity.


2) One generally comes back to the original instinctively chosen mouthpiece. The truth of the matter is that there is no mouthpiece that is going to solve all of one's problems. Only practice and perseverance can accomplish that.