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A new blog I am following is at Julia Rose’s Horn Page, the site of Julia Rose, third hornist of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. This site, like mine, has been around for ten years! It is great to see this new addition to the site.
The post I have been thinking about for several days is “My Crazy Embouchure,” which I highly recommend reading in full. In it Julia relates the story of her embouchure,
I have had my share of embouchure struggles throughout my career, including a major embouchure change in college. I played with a very einsetzen embouchure (almost all upper lip) until I was a sophomore in college. …
Somehow I did very well using that embouchure in high school. I had a very good tone for a high school student, a good low range, but I pretty much pressured the high range into existence. I was able to get around the limitations of my embouchure through sheer hard work and practice, as I really wanted to play the horn for a living eventually. But in my sophomore year of college I hit the proverbial wall, especially in the high range, and realized I needed to make a change. When I was in middle/high school, various people (who were in positions to know better) told me that I should never change my embouchure, as it resembled Dennis Brain’s and how could that be wrong, and that they had gone through embouchure changes themselves and that it “ruined” them.
So I was quite afraid of the change, but luckily I was studying with “Mr. Embouchure” in college, Douglas Hill. He is quite an amazing teacher- in my opinion his knowledge of embouchure is second to none in the teaching profession, and he has had an amazing success rate among many his students who are now playing and teaching professionally. He has turned many students who appeared at first hearing to have limited talent into fine players. He has changed many students’ embouchures successfully, which gave me confidence that it would all end up well for me. So I attempted the change.
Myself, I can relate to her story very well as I changed my embouchure not once but twice, in the middle of my undergraduate program and also at the beginning of my Doctoral studies. My original embouchure coming out of high school was 2/3 lower lip! I made all-state as a senior in high school but my low range was terrible and I was no super hot prospect for a performance program. I started college in fact as a music business major. But I got serious about playing and, in short, made a lot of progress working with good teachers. But I hit a bit of a wall after my MM studies and made another fairly big adjustment. It was needed and frankly got me where I am today.
My first embouchure change especially was not at all easy. I can really relate to Julia where she shares,
Little did I know that I was in for 6 months of sheer agony! He gave me the information I needed to make the change- what constitutes a good embouchure, his philosophies on embouchure, and told me to study the photos in Farkas’ 40 Virtuoso Horn Players’ Embouchures. So I began; I couldn’t play a C major scale for a week. I struggled in front of a mirror in a little practice room with a window on it, embarrassed by the pathetic sounds coming out of my horn. I’m sure more than a couple horn students strolled down that hallway, heard those awful sounds and wondered, “Who in the #&*$ is that?!” and peeked in the window. But eventually something clicked over Winter Break for me involving something with my lower lip, I was able to move the mouthpiece down, and my playing took off very quickly from there.
The mistake I see students make out of high school especially is that they are trying too hard to study with the wrong kind of teacher, one that is actually not capable of working with a student to work out their playing problems. Typically these are very natural players that may even have limited interest in teaching, they are “players” and their teaching is more along the lines of coaching. Their teaching success is based on teaching students who are also very natural players with few problems out of high school.
But plenty of other hornists have potential for success given hard work and good teachers. Really, in auditions at ASU, we are trying above all to estimate potential, we don’t expect finished products but players who we feel are capable of making progress. Julia certainly found in Doug Hill a teacher that took the time to work things out with a student that he felt had potential.
No teacher relishes embouchure work with students. It takes a lot of effort from both teacher and student. But the practical fact is virtually every horn student needs some embouchure adjustment to get the extreme ranges sorted out to a very high level, which may include an embouchure change. Be aware of that as you consider teachers and programs and your horn playing.
UPDATE 2012: The site is no longer online, but the quotes above remain very relevant.
