Teacher as Student, Student as Teacher
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
It’s amazing how, when you put something on the back burner for a while with the intention of returning to it, it can take quite some time before you actually follow through. As I have found with this blog.
I have to thank the person who e-mailed me wondering why there hadn’t been any updates to my site in months. I have to reply that it’s a very good question that can only be partially answered by the presence of a precocious two-year-old. The rest of the answer is in parts timing, busy-ness, and the aforementioned placing this on the back burner. So, I apologize.
However, I do have much to write about, and will start with what is on my mind at the moment. To begin, this year marks the first year in which I am teaching at the Conservatory at Purchase College. I have been deriving much enjoyment from working with the students at Purchase, and I often find teaching to be a time for me to learn, oddly enough. I often find myself asking myself whether I should follow my own advice more closely.
Most often times, practice time means slogging away at an issue until it slowly gets better; I regularly find this with articulations, high register, and others. However, this year I addressed the subject of embouchure with a number of students. After several weeks of discussing this topic with them, I decided to take a plunge into it myself. I find that every so often – it may be years in between – whatever I’ve been doing related to my embouchure begins to work less effectively than it did in the past. Whether it’s a bad habit which finally surfaces, or a generally good approach to something which needs some revision because of basic body or muscle mechanics, I have found some tweaking here and there to be helpful.
But this year, beginning towards the end of October, I began setting my mouthpiece much higher on my bottom lip, and using it as an anchor point for mouthpiece placement. For years, I had used my upper lip, and placed my bottom lip where it felt comfortable. But after some consideration, I figured that I had nothing to lose, so why not try something different, in order to help improve my playing. As I have always felt, we never stop being students – we just need to find the right time to make more significant changes.
Back to the topic, I have found this change to be remarkable. While things don’t necessarily feel as “comfortable” as they have (playing with the same embouchure for years makes anything different feel less comfortable), I am infinitely more pleased with the results. We are all intimately aware of our own strengths and weaknesses, and I am quite excited that this change helps me to address my own.
What’s so remarkable is that while it may seem there are many different opinions on embouchure and placement, those opinions boil down to the similar desire to improve one’s foundation. My approach of setting my mouthpiece on the bottom lip first, then the top, might yield the exact same result as someone else setting the mouthpiece on the top lip, then the bottom. Yet our anatomies require us to figure out which is the right call.
So what I have learned from this is: don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty! If you’ve learned to play with a bad embouchure from the beginning, you can learn to play with a good one – probably with (eventually) significant improvements in the results.
Happy practicing!
It’s amazing how, when you put something on the back burner for a while with the intention of returning to it, it can take quite some time before you actually follow through. As I have found with this blog.
I have to thank the person who e-mailed me wondering why there hadn’t been any updates to my site in months. I have to reply that it’s a very good question that can only be partially answered by the presence of a precocious two-year-old. The rest of the answer is in parts timing, busy-ness, and the aforementioned placing this on the back burner. So, I apologize.
However, I do have much to write about, and will start with what is on my mind at the moment. To begin, this year marks the first year in which I am teaching at the Conservatory at Purchase College. I have been deriving much enjoyment from working with the students at Purchase, and I often find teaching to be a time for me to learn, oddly enough. I often find myself asking myself whether I should follow my own advice more closely.
Most often times, practice time means slogging away at an issue until it slowly gets better; I regularly find this with articulations, high register, and others. However, this year I addressed the subject of embouchure with a number of students. After several weeks of discussing this topic with them, I decided to take a plunge into it myself. I find that every so often – it may be years in between – whatever I’ve been doing related to my embouchure begins to work less effectively than it did in the past. Whether it’s a bad habit which finally surfaces, or a generally good approach to something which needs some revision because of basic body or muscle mechanics, I have found some tweaking here and there to be helpful.
But this year, beginning towards the end of October, I began setting my mouthpiece much higher on my bottom lip, and using it as an anchor point for mouthpiece placement. For years, I had used my upper lip, and placed my bottom lip where it felt comfortable. But after some consideration, I figured that I had nothing to lose, so why not try something different, in order to help improve my playing. As I have always felt, we never stop being students – we just need to find the right time to make more significant changes.
Back to the topic, I have found this change to be remarkable. While things don’t necessarily feel as “comfortable” as they have (playing with the same embouchure for years makes anything different feel less comfortable), I am infinitely more pleased with the results. We are all intimately aware of our own strengths and weaknesses, and I am quite excited that this change helps me to address my own.
What’s so remarkable is that while it may seem there are many different opinions on embouchure and placement, those opinions boil down to the similar desire to improve one’s foundation. My approach of setting my mouthpiece on the bottom lip first, then the top, might yield the exact same result as someone else setting the mouthpiece on the top lip, then the bottom. Yet our anatomies require us to figure out which is the right call.
So what I have learned from this is: don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty! If you’ve learned to play with a bad embouchure from the beginning, you can learn to play with a good one – probably with (eventually) significant improvements in the results.
Happy practicing!
posted by Jim Markey at 9:41 PM
