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To close this series on mouthpiece pressure we have notes from four more recent sources. As in parts I and II, there are some different takes on the topic to sort out.
A deeper reason to not use excessive pressure
David Kaslow does not favor excessive mouthpiece pressure in Living Dangerously with the Horn, as he sees it at least in part as a means to induce courage.
Among these inappropriate efforts to gain courage is the use of excessive mouthpiece pressure. Although inordinate mouthpiece pressure does help, in the short term, to reduce unevenness in horn tone and to play notes in the high register, it also reduces the ability of the lips to vibrate and restricts the blood supply to the lips, thus inhibiting the tone and hastening fatigue by increasing lactic acid build-up in the lip tissue. Perhaps more undesirable is the failure to address problems of tone and range which could—with application—be solved.
A method to find the correct level of mouthpiece pressure
Verne Reynolds in The Horn Handbook goes deeper into the issue of pressure and gives a method to use to find the correct amount of pressure.
The warm-up long tones provide an opportunity to investigate how mouthpiece pressure relates to intonation, range, tone quality, and volume. Too little pressure as a way of life results in a small, dull, unfocused tone quality, a middle register only, and minimum embouchure strength and endurance. Too much pressure produces a hard, bright sound, a choked-off high register, and little endurance on notes above the staff….
Excessive pressure often is the result of the young player’s attempts to play the high register before the embouchure is strong enough to do so. For a player at age thirteen, it might take three or four years to develop this strength properly….
The relaxed long tones, played in the middle register for the daily warm-up, must not be done without specific purposes in mind. One day each week might be devoted to experimenting with pressure. The extremes of too much or too little pressure are easily identified, as described above. We should remind ourselves occasionally of how these extremes feel and what they produce. We should then work away from these extremes to find the amount of pressure that produces a centered, ringing tone quality, since it is beauty of sound that suffers most from errant pressure. By applying small amounts of more or less pressure during long tones, we can accumulate a fund of information concerning the effects of pressure, for good or evil, on each note, each volume level, each register. This approach takes time and thought, as all practice should. Teachers can be very helpful through their observations on the effects of pressure, but only the player can find the right amount. Each player can evolve a very personal understanding of this important matter, rather than having a stern method imposed from without.
More than one place I have heard or seen this general principle referred to as the Goldilocks principle. Neither too much nor too little pressure; aim for just right.
More on anchoring pressure on the lower lip, and on being patient with your range development
To close, two shorter quotes. First up is Randy Gardner in Mastering the Horn’s Low Register:
Many people are taught to anchor their mouthpiece into the bottom lip and lighten pressure on the top lip when playing in the high register. This is essential in the upper tessitura to ensure that the top lip remains free to vibrate.
And finally Douglas Hill in Collected Thoughts on Teaching and Learning, Creativity, and Horn Performance:
When young students try too hard for too long to force out higher and higher notes before their mid-range is strong, the tensions form, the mouthpiece pressure increases, the lips must overflex to protect themselves, the sound pinches off, and it becomes obvious that these notes are out of reach. That feeling of desperation then becomes the high range paradigm for those students. Such a scenario is common, unfortunately, and the undoing takes more time and energy than the doing would if the student had been patient in the beginning.
The big picture, made clearer by a study of trumpet players
In short, looking at the big picture of all of this, some mouthpiece pressure is certainly appropriate. Speaking personally, my embouchure formation with my somewhat heavy lips seems to require more mouthpiece pressure than that seen in some of the descriptions above, which seem to me at least to be more suited to a different general setup than I use.
Cousins may sound somewhat out of the mainstream, but actually I suspect a lot of fine players use similar, heavier pressure without being aware of it or admitting it in print. The 1986 study of trumpet players by Joe Barbenel, John Booth Davies, and Patrick Kenny, “Science proves musical myths wrong,” published in New Scientist, April 3, 1986 (article linked at end of this post) is an interesting case study on that point. From the article,
From these experiments, we can make several guarded statements. First, it is simply not true that professional players of the highest calibre use low levels of force on the mouthpiece. We could not differentiate amateur players from professionals in terms of the amount of force they used to perform a given task. Secondly, skilled players were no better than other groups at ranking photographs of players for the amount of force the subjects were using on the mouthpiece. The experts appeared to base their judgments of force on the general appearance of effort rather than on any specific cues. When asked to judge between different players, experts could not reliably tell who used the most force and who used the least.
In short, the study showed that many fine professionals used much more mouthpiece pressure than the researchers expected. Where you actually fit in the spectrum of mouthpiece pressure will become clear as you above all listen for the very best sound.
Continue in Hornmasters Series
