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A major project for me over roughly the past six months has been a rethinking of how the embouchure works. Thus, I would offer a major hat tip to Bruce Hembd of the Horndog Blog, he just posted a great video link that clarifies some elements of how the embouchure really works.
The video from roughly thirty years ago by H. Lloyd Leno shows the trombone embouchure as seen by high speed cameras and see-through mouthpieces, compiled and edited by David Wilken. Slowed down the video confirms that the type of down stream embouchure employed by most trombone players requires a downward direction of the air stream, especially so in the high range.
This is the type of embouchure set up used by almost all accomplished horn players, which makes this video Bruce linked extremely valuable. It is in three parts, check it out.
Traditionally a Farkas oriented embouchure aims the air stream more to the center of the mouthpiece and “the other” school of thought (espoused by Gunther Schuller and many others) advocates for the air stream having a more downward direction. It appears that the latter approach is correct. Farkas in his 1970 publication A Photographic Study of 40 Virtuoso Horn Players’ Embouchures (Bloomington, IN: Wind Music) actually presents further evidence to this way of thinking, as the top of the three photos of each embouchure is of a high C and he shows the air stream direction of most being more downward than in other ranges.
This is a great topic, one that it is great to see addressed so clearly on video.
