Fluffs and Aperture Shape

As noted in a very recent post, there are many types of clams and words to describe them. One type of clam I have long called a fluff. We all know what it is; you try to start a note, most often a soft note, and it does not speak right away.

I was reminded of fluffs when in our horn pedagogy class a student recently reviewed The Art of Brass Playing by Philip Farkas. In chapter 5 on the topic of the lip aperture Farkas describes a cause for fluffs pretty clearly on pages 38-39; his view was the culprit was poor aperture shape. He does not call them fluffs, he calls them “pianissimo attacks which fail to speak.” They were he felt related to the aperture having “too flat an opening,” which causes the air to have “trouble getting through the lips.” [Myself, I would be inclined to think at least a good bit of it is needing to tongue better, in a more forward position. It is pretty individualized, however.]

Reading down a little further, a closely related problem is “inability to carry a dimineuendo down to nothing.” This is also caused “because the lip opening is too flat…. When the lip aperture is correctly shaped it is formed and not blown into this shape. In other words, the correct opening is so formed that even when air is not passing through it, the shape is maintained by the correct use of the muscles involved.”

I read this book closely a number of times as a student, and while there are topics that could be examined more broadly (Farkas is often on one end of the spectrum in his pedagogy, such as on this topic; I know there are teachers that disagree with almost everything in the book!) this is certainly a book that should be read critically by every advanced horn student. Farkas in this volume goes far beyond the information in The Art of French Horn Playing. The Art of Brass Playing is available from Wind Music.