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I have been thinking quite a bit about tonguing and how the body works lately, and had two most interesting experiences yesterday, seeing the X-ray video of a trumpet player and hearing a session by David Vining at AMEA.
First, the video, which was posted as a link from YouTube yesterday morning by Bruce Hembd on the Horndog Blog:
Wild, huh? What it is is a type of video that I don’t believe can be ethically made today, an X-ray of a trumpet player playing high and low and articulating notes, including double tonguing. The video is old and slighty out of sync with the audio but you can get the gist of it really easy. Several first question to ponder:
- Is the tongue the shape you thought it was?
- Is it moving in the direction and to the place you thought it was?
- What does the tongue do in different registers?
- How about that double tonguing?
Then, in the afternoon I went to the AMEA In-Service conference and attended the session “Breathing for Musicians” by David Vining, who is the trombone professor at Northern Arizona University. The focus was on gaining a physiologically accurate picture of how breathing works. The experience was again very much like seeing the X-ray video, as a major point was many if not most of us have only a vague notion of where exactly our lungs and diaphragm are and how they work. To go through all the points of his presentation would be beyond what I can post in the blog but a few bullets I carried away:
- Breathing is a composite movement
- Good breathing involves rib movement
- All movements are connected
- Air drives the tongue
Want to know more? Vining recently published a book that I purchased from him yesterday, What Every Trombonist Needs To Know About the Body. Covers it all and much more with many great illustrations, I am finding this publication most interesting, would be very worthwhile for every hornist to read.
