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Another topic I want to address in this series is mouthpiece pressure. We have all seen the page in the Farkas book where he has the horn on the shelf in an exercise to reduce mouthpiece pressure.
First, I would mention that I personally heard Farkas himself in masterclasses more than once state that he regretted putting that photo in the book. Partially a safety issue, you could lose the horn on the floor (!), but also he I think realized that this exercise, while perhaps creating extra awareness, was advocating for too little pressure.
I have concluded after years of teaching that good students trying to play with too little pressure is the bigger problem. As mentioned earlier in this series, there are different setups, and certainly, some players need differing basic amounts of mouthpiece pressure. Remember the story of Goldilocks and her porridge. The ideal mouthpiece pressure is not too little, not too much, but “just right.”
It is not just a range thing either. You will find that at different dynamics you will need differing amounts of pressure to produce a good tone. Do what you need to do! Focus on the good sound, and you will be in an OK place for pressure.
In short, looking at the big picture of all of this, some mouthpiece pressure is certainly appropriate. I suspect many fine players use heavier pressure without being aware of it or admitting it in print.
Speaking personally, my embouchure formation with my slightly heavy lips seems to require more mouthpiece pressure than what Farkas advocated, and my guess is that the very light pressure described might only work for people with very thin lips. It would be interesting to see this aspect studied specifically.
There have been a few studies on mouthpiece pressure by the way. Most notably, I like to point people to the 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. It is an interesting case study. 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.
The bad conventional wisdom result they expected was that professionals used less pressure and amateurs used more, but that was not the case at all. There was also little ability to look at a photo and tell if a player was using heavy or light pressure. One take away is that some fine professional players, while looking all relaxed, are actually using vastly more pressure than you would ever guess.
Where you actually fit in the spectrum of mouthpiece pressure will become clear as you above all listen and look for the very best sound. Pressure takes care of itself, especially if you have a friendly mouthpiece rim that is not too round or narrow.
When the series continues the topic is the low range.
