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Sometimes too much is – well duh! – too much
Looking back at my student years, I think that I might have been an over-practicer. I was perhaps a little too obsessed with perfection.
As a result – duh! – my chops generally did not feel right or perform well, most of the time. Fortunately I have since learned to be wary of idealized perfection, and how it causes more harm than good.
Famed musician Roger Bobo remarks:
Our embouchures; that meeting place where the moving air meets the lips (embouchure is a verb), is made up of blood and muscle and like all the other parts of the body, it can easily be overworked and stressed.
Like a ballet dancer, who’s body is trained to be facile and fluid, our embouchures need that same fluidity and if, by over training, the embouchure becomes more like the rigid and stiff musculature of a body builder lifting weights, this stiffness in brass instrument performance simply translates a sounding bad.
The similarities of playing a brass instrument to the voice are many. Singers, however, cannot practice long hours like some brass players are tempted to do; they have the advantage of pain, which tells them it’s time to stop, the larynx just won’t allow the voice to let enthusiasm rule over reason.
[Extracted from a “Random Monday” post, 2021, JE]
