Archived under: Embouchure, Teaching | Gunther Schuller, Philip Farkas
The Two Approaches to the Horn Embouchure
The description of the embouchure as described by Philip Farkas is well known.
However, one fact, little spoken in the horn community, is there are essentially two approaches to the embouchure, one that Farkas describes and another described by Gunther Schuller and others. Read the two books back to back, they are pretty different approaches. Besides that fact, most players lie in reality somewhere between these two extremes of approach.
Myself, I know I lie in the middle slightly over toward the Farkas end of the scale as to approach. I know as well that I have students that lie well over toward the Schuller end of the spectrum, with most more in the middle. Few players are as “square” as Farkas described.
Which is to say as you consider studies on the horn you have to be careful about suggestions made about your embouchure and, as teachers, we need to also be careful about suggestions. It is a natural mistake and one I used to make; we want our students embouchures to look like our own. But the fact is I am fairly comfortable teaching both systems. The goal has to be toward developing the best result, not toward making you look like me.
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