Your Fingers And Tongue Sculpt Your Sound

The radiating sound column appears as the material to be worked out, and actually sculpted by the articulation between your fingers and your tongue, which materialize the link between

• your body / transmitter
• and your instrument / amplifier.

As A Chatty Player With Skillful Fingers

down to your fingertips

Your fingers interact with the instrument from the initial emission, for the note pitch, and are driven by your musical intent, as Dominique Hoppenot recalls it in Le violon intérieur.

« (…) fingers transmit the expression of what is decided elsewhere, and the difficulty in developing a gesture is more often due to the confusion of a mental image than to a mechanical inability. »

Dominique Hoppenot, Le violon intérieur (Translated by Guy Robert)

Your fingers get positionned before your tongue interacts, without disturbing this first note.

let your tongue take language

« The first note is played without the tongue, thanks to your back muscles ; the following one extends it by letting the tongue go back down. »

Robert Pichaureau, Expressions favorites (Translated by Guy Robert)

Then, only the light tip of your tongue (Joe Allard would rather talk about the « edge ») is sufficient to detach notes, withdrawing backwards and aligned with the reed : the tongue edge lets the reed vibrate, which you must still feel and visualize deep in your belly bottom.

We would begin the tone with no tongue, get very loud and while the note was still going on, he’d have us barely articulate. We would touch the reed as lightly as possible, so that the tongue would interrupt the vibration of the reed without stopping it, teaching us to barely tongue. He’d have us practice it loud so that we’d learn to use a light articulation even though we were playing loud.

Lots of students tongue hard when they play loud ; Joe’s exercise separated that. 

Kenneth Radnofsky about Joe Allard

« Allard preferred the nomenclature “edge“ rather than tip, because “tip means an extreme point“. He purported that speech books with which he was familiar described the tongue as having an edge and a blade, the blade being the surface of the tongue.  »

Debra Jean McKim about Joe Allard

« The actual sounding of the articulation comes with the release of the reed. Conceptually, the tongue can be seen as an extension of the reed. »

David Liebman, Developing A Personal Saxophone Sound

Finding Your Personal Style

The dynamics of this musical sculpture stems from the speech consistency built on your musical idea (being the mental driver, as George Kochevitsky explains it in The Art Of Piano Playing), carried on by the sound vibration, your fingering, and finally the tongue acuteness of the wind player.

following your fingers and ears

As seen in other topics (the instrument, highs & lows, the sensations, the convergence), your proprioceptive sensations drive the instrument, following the path :

• brain > internal vibration > fingers & embouchure > instrument.

At the last step, your fingers stay close to the instrument keys, your mouth behaves as an extension of the mouthpiece, and the tongue as an extension of the reed.

Thinking your sensations first (from your natural breathing), while forgetting your connections with your instrument (i.e. your fingers – and embouchure), make your fingers work out your musical idea and not disturb it. In other words, your musical intent drives your expression, through your technique.

{ Ludwig Deppe (1828-1890) wrote that tone must be produced, not by finger stroke (…) but by coordinated action of all parts of the arm. }

Ludwig Deppe was opposed to hammering the keys, saying that one should not strike but should caress the keys. (…) Each finger had to work under the conscious direction of the will.

He spoke of a mental map of the entire route from brain to fingertips and stressed that, together with fingers and hands, the mind should practice also.

(…) Training the ear went hand in hand with technical training.

« { Amid all the noise made by those who came after Deppe, a pianist and teacher by the name of Oscar Raif made some extremely interesting experiments. }

Raif concluded that it would be worthless in developing piano technique to attempt to augment the agility of each individual finger.

The difficulty lies not in the movement itself, but in the precise timing of the successive movements of the fingers. Since timing is the product of perception and will, it should be clear that technique is initiated in the central nervous system. From there, movements must be coordinated as part of one action and governed bv our will.

(…) The finished performance must be preceded by frequently repeated, consciously willed primary movements. »

« Any normal bone-muscle apparatus is sufficient for the development of a high degree of technique because of the brain behind the hands.« 

« (…) first, fingers are prepared on the keys to be pressed. Each finger then presses with a light downward movement only, never leaving its key. (Thus the size of finger movement is equal to the depth of the key). And playing proceeds very slowly, pianissimo, with the whole attention concentrated on fingertips.« 

« The musical idea, always going slightly ahead, should stimulate technical development. If technical aspects take the leading role, there is the danger of degradation into superficial virtuosity.« 

George Kochevitsky, The Art Of Piano Playing

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The Soundwise Embouchure

The instrument of the woodwind player really appears to behave as his megaphone, thanks to his embouchure.

Get Your Mask Down !

Your mouth / mouthpiece / reed / ligature set defines your global embouchure : this configuration may vary between players, closely associating your morphology and the gear you use.

Your inner resonance propagates to the reed, which should easily vibrate, opposing a low resistance, hence a not too hard reed is recommended in order to be able to master the depth of the sound, shaped up at the bottom of the air column (Peter King had told me once how he had bee surprised to see that Cannonball Adderley was playing a really weak reed, when he substituted him in England in the 70’s).

This way, you define the best mouthpiece/reed combination for your sound control : this compromise depend on several factors, but you must know how to adjust it, mainly by selecting an appropriate reed, with your usual mouthpiece. And if you need a softer reed to ease out your playing, then you would be able to modulate your reed strength later on, bringing full balance and self-confidence : through your mentally visualizing that your emission remains centered on the sound source, you avoid unnecessary contractions above your diaphragm (which would be triggered by a harder reed), following the recommendations of Alfred Tomatis in The Ear And The Voice.

deep throat

« The objective for both the pharynx and the larynx is to keep the throat open and supple, avoiding closure by the constrictor muscles. The regulation of the pharynx under the organizing control of the ear consists of achieving what is famous in singing as the open throat with the help of the dilator muscles and the tongue.»

Alfred Tomatis, The Ear And The Voice

Think Your Sound, But Do Not Pinch It

The wind player sets up his vibrating attitude by rooting his sound column in his heels, and mentally pictures his embouchure at the sound source, down to the bottom of his diaphragm : then, letting the relaxation down, his inner vibration gently takes off on the « ah » vowel, to feed the instrument through his embouchure.

Dominique Hoppenot describes how the violon player lets his vibration propagate to the violon body through his clavicle.

« The most important of all is to listen to the sound that will come and not just to the sound already achieved. »

Dominique Hoppenot, Le violon intérieur (Translated by Guy Robert)

Une fois sa posture installée, l’instrumentiste amène naturellement son instrument en mains (et en bouche pour un soufflant) pour amplifier le son préparé à l’avance ; alors entre en jeu l’embouchure, souple et décontractée, et même oubliée, car son attention est concentrée sur la base de la colonne de son : là se réalise la liaison entre l’émetteur (le corps de l’instrumentiste) et l’amplificateur (le corps de l’instrument), dont la projection sonore est ensuite travaillée par les doigts, puis par la langue.

Once your posture is set up and stabilized, your hands naturally seize your instrument (entering your mouth if you are a wind player), to amplify the anticipated sound ; then your flexible and relaxed embouchure, which you actually forget, since you are focussed on the bottom of the sound column, comes into play : it links you, as the sender (the player’s body), to the amplifier (the instrument body). The projected sound gets then sculpted out by your fingers, and your tongue.

« The goal is to be as relax as possible in the embouchure area, so that the delicate mechanisms at the reed can be free to occur without exerting a strain on its vibrational capacity. By the time the air stream reaches the mouthpiece, the major portion of the work for a personal sound has already been completed.« 

David Liebman, Developing A Personal Saxophone Sound

When you let your mouthpiece come to your mouth, enjoyment also enters as an intruding momentum. The same way as when you take momentum to jump over an obstacle, boom ! there it goes, you are played by your instrument, so you should not play yourself, this is not a wordplay.

As little as your embouchure takes off, then you nail your mouthpiece pinch, without looking for it, playing means then sitting on the air, this is fantastic !

Robert Pichaureau, A tous vents (Translated by Guy Robert)

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