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Clean articulations using tongue-stopping.
With my very first baby steps on the French horn, my big brother gave me the Dennis Brain Mozart concertos album as a Christmas present. I wore out the vinyl on the record in a short period from repeated plays and ended up going through 3 or 4 more copies after that. I listened to Brain’s playing over and over again, and loved every note of it.
In the liner notes, I remember the author writing about Brain’s preference for the distinctive “tut” articulation. I remember noticing this especially on all his 6/8 pickup notes in the Rondos.
I naturally adopted this tongue-stopping technique through high school and until college. My college mentor insisted that this was bad form – “never end the note with the tongue!” – and so I stopped using it.
The beautiful Cleveland staccato
A few years later I studied with a teacher in Cleveland who called this technique the “beautiful Cleveland staccato.” He advocated using this articulation for almost everything.
While up close it can sound very brutish and coarse, from the audience perspective it comes across as a clean, nicely tapered articulation. The hall’s reverberation blurs the coarseness that is heard up close, giving the notes a nice teardrop shape.
He made a convincing argument. Because the horn points backwards, the otherwise blunt ending to a “tutted” note gets rounded by ambient acoustics.
As a student in Chicago, I noticed that players there also used this technique but with less frequency than my teachers in Cleveland. Nevertheless, there seemed to be something to this technique that made sense and I was convinced of its validity.
To tut or not to tut?
Today I do not use the “tut” articulation for everything of course – it is a bit rough – but in certain circumstances it is the right sound for the occasion. Done in a relaxed manner, I feel that it makes playing staccatos and marcatos much easier (and with fewer clams) when compared to producing the same effect with the breath alone.
Pip Eastop has written an excellent article on this technique that sums up the concept very well.
- http://www.pyp.f2s.com/html/ttco.htm
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/75466425@N00/189818456/sizes/s/
