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ABSTRACT
Books about how to play wind instruments often talk rather vaguely about
the diaphragm, and teachers of wind instruments seem to be agreed about
its importance in playing. However, in my view it is not so often
related to a player's actual experience, nor indeed explained to a
student's satisfaction. This essay suggests a reason why this is so,
and makes a connection between the action of the muscle and our
experience of playing, via the ideas of 'opposition' and 'support'.
But we can get a bit closer to it if we flex our abdominal muscles and
try taking a breath whilst keeping them flexed. (By the expression
'flex the abdominal muscles' I mean the act of making the lower front of
the body hard, as if to protect ourselves against a gentle punch in the
middle -- but without pulling our bellies in.)
Normally, when we flex our abdominal muscles, we prevent the air in our
lungs from escaping outwards by a blocking action somewhere in the
throat. In order to breathe in with our abdominal muscles flexed, we
have first to lift this block. When we do so, we may find (as my friend
and colleague Phillip Eastop recently pointed out to me) that the
experience of breathing in is very close to the experience of yawning.
We are breathing in against the resistance of our abdominal muscles, so
the diaphragm has to work a bit harder than usual in order to overcome
the resistance. It still isn't quite true to say that we can *feel* the
diaphragm working -- we can feel *working*, and a bit of discomfort
perhaps, but this is mostly the sensation of the flexed abdominal
muscles and the solar plexus being pushed downwards and outwards; the
diaphragm, which is what is doing the pushing, is still not directly
accessible to our experience. Anyway, the anatomists tell us it can't
be.
Breath control doesn't quite come into this category, you might think.
We simply have to learn how to blow the instrument effectively. Although
we use our diaphragm to breathe in, we don't need to experience it, and
anyway we only know about it in the first place because we've been told
about it, so -- why not just forget it? Indeed many excellent teachers
and performers you speak to would say just that. And so would I have
done, until recently.
METAPHORS
Good teachers have always been aware that the transmission of subtle
skills involves the creation of suitable metaphors for a student, even
if only as an interim device. These metaphors work better than explicit
instruction. In fact, fully explicit instruction is actually
impossible, because even the best teacher cannot say in detail exactly
what he or she does. Indeed, usually the teacher too is operating out of
a personal metaphor. It is a question of leading the student into a
successful experience by describing the situation in such a way as to
help with a particular difficulty.
In fact, I believe that there are some people who talk about the
diaphragm in their teaching both inaccurately and unhelpfully. The
central fact that must not be obscured is that the diaphragm is a muscle
that can only exert force *downwards*, i.e. to draw air into the lungs.
As a passive membrane dividing the abdomen from the thoracic cavity it
is pushed up by the abdominal muscles in the usual action of blowing an
instrument (as contrasted with the universally condemned method of
pulling down the previously raised ribcage), and perhaps this is what is
meant when many people speak of 'playing from the diaphragm'. But this
is not the same as using your diaphragm as a muscle in order to blow,
which is a physical impossibility.
What I want to bring out in this essay is one aspect of breathing and
blowing which does have surprising and unusual experiential
characteristics when we compare it to most of the rest of our actions as
we play an instrument. The technique itself is mentioned in wind
instrument methods, and certainly employed by able players, who
communicate it with varying success in their teaching, but it is rarely
discussed in such a way as to make the situation usefully clear, at any
rate to me; and it hasn't been approached exactly from the position I
propose to take, as far as I know. Moreover I think the 'surprise'
connected with it has been almost universally overlooked.
OPPOSITIONS
Precise and controlled movements are of course central to any art, just
as much as freely expressive ones. A perfectly executed trill, a fine
piece of handwriting, an elegant pirouette -- all these require the
delicate balance of pairs of opposing forces, each supporting its
counterpart, under the overall orchestration of a guiding intelligence
and expressive impulse. And the word 'support' is crucial, both for
precision of adjustment and speed of response. It's why we push our
hand against a surface when we write on it (or use a special
signwriter's support stick), and why we poise ourselves ready to spring
when we wait for the serve at tennis.
Here's the point I never noticed, and which I now find makes such a
difference, not to begin with to what I do, but to how I imagine what I
do (i.e. to my personal metaphor), and therefore, in the end, to almost
everything. It is that the crescendo, and perhaps even more clearly,
the diminuendo, can occur in this situation without anything else at all
happening in your experience. You imagine a diminuendo -- hey presto, a
diminuendo. You want a faster diminuendo? -- no problem.
I don't just mean that the process of doing it has been submerged, in
the same way that the actions of driving a car, say, in the end become
automatic. In this case you can call up the experience into
consciousness by paying attention, even though you weren't aware of it
before. No, I mean that you can't call up any physical experience
corresponding to the change in dynamic. Everything stays the same.
Perhaps you can feel a slightly different movement of air in the mouth
as the dynamic changes, or a different embouchure. But nothing in the
blowing process.
You don't do anything -- you just imagine it. The only change is in the
sound. You shouldn't take my word for this -- you have to try it
yourself. Play about with it for a bit. Convince yourself that you
really are keeping everything else the same in your experience.
How did I (we?) miss this? I suppose, like most things, by not paying
close enough attention at the crucial moment. Also, it's very much not
what you'd expect, and you have to be very careful to hold everything
constant to appreciate it. But, as I shall spell out in a bit more
detail later, it explains lots, like how passagework becomes even by
itself, if we listen to it, and why we can play fast dotted rhythms
seemingly without effort if we *support* -- and here's the magic word!
Have you been confused, like me, by the way different people use this
term? Doesn't it help to know it means the exact opposite of blowing?
or rather that it's an opposition or complement to blowing -- part of a
magic technique which works by your setting the only variable you leave
available to yourself (the flexion in your abdomen), at one strength and
then allowing the result to change according to your whim? -- a sort of
black box that you can't fiddle with, only use? -- dealer only service?
Isn't that wonderful? (Doesn't it make you want to sing and shout?)
You can see that looking at it this way is a reversal of how support is
normally envisaged. Normally, support is what stays constant while
action varies. If we assign the role of support to the diaphragm, then
here it's the support that varies, whilst the action stays constant. We
could of course say that you support with your abdomen and act with your
diaphragm outside your experience, in the opposite direction, and people
who are really clear about all this already (perhaps there are lots, I
don't know) may speak about it that way round.
VIBRATO
When your abdominal muscles are flexed more than is required simply to
play at the dynamic you are delivering, you're using diaphragm support.
Your diaphragm is resisting your blowing, but you have the advantage of
very precise control over dynamics. However, you still have to judge
whether the effect is what the music requires. The rather 'careful'
quality of such dynamic control has a way of spilling over into other
aspects of one's playing, and this can need guarding against. I am
thinking in particular of the sort of restrictions we can make in the
air column, limiting the resonance of our playing by, for example,
closing the throat. It is easier to do this by mistake if we are
already committed to the diaphragm/abdomen opposition. So it's worth
while practising keeping the air column as open as possible with maximum
support, rather as we sometimes practise playing fortissimo with a most
delicate finger action, and vice-versa.
But it has to be said that a very valid musical effect can be obtained
by precisely controlled resistance all along the line. Debussy's 'doux
et penetrant' in the Rhapsodie, for example, can be played in this way.
And I've always felt that it isn't enough to play the solo in
Tschaikovsky's Pathetique merely beautifully. It must represent the
loneliness that comes from expression through reluctance to express,
which reluctance has also to find expression.
Of course, you don't have to play with support. Often, playing without
it has a light quality in low dynamics, suitable for short, floaty
phrases, and a grand, gestural quality when loud. All the other
variables of tone-colour, resonance are still available. The
appropriateness in the context of the music is always what counts.
I mentioned before that tennis players use opposition when they are
waiting for the serve. Another way of describing what they are doing is
to say that they are storing energy so that it can be delivered fast,
and in the required direction, immediately they find out what that
direction is. It is as though they are springing both to the left and
to the right at the moment the other player serves, but because the
muscles that would drive them to the left exactly balance the muscles
that would drive them to the right, there is no overall effect. When it
turns out that the serve goes to the right, they simultaneously relax
the muscles driving them to the left, and begin to work harder with the
opposing set. But they have a flying start, because of the initial
working of the muscles driving them to the right.
There is a useful analogy between the bent bow, which embodies a bow/arm
opposition, and playing with support, which embodies an
abdomen/diaphragm opposition.
In this analogy, the abdominal muscles correspond to the bow, and the
diaphragm to the arm. The sudden delivery of energy common to both
would in the case of playing a wind instrument be what is required
either for a sudden change of dynamic between an adjacent pair of notes
(a sforzando or subito piano); or for a precisely controlled change of
air pressure to equalise the dynamic of an adjacent pair of notes with
different responses on the instrument. Support enables us to do both of
these things easily and elegantly, and moreover *without knowing
precisely how*, so that it seems an automatic and natural ability.
FINALLY
The usefulness of this little discovery for me is that I find I'm now
much more able to accept and trust as rational what I often did before
instinctively, and to simplify my actions so that they have more chance
of success. The support mechanism can be calibrated at the beginning of
a difficulty (translated: you decide how hard your abdomen should be)
and the calibration then changed until the setting that produces the
best effect is reached. After practising in this way I find I often
need to do, and compute, less than I'd thought. When teaching, it's
still difficult to stop people sticking to one way of playing which
isn't working, and now some of them think you should flex your abdomen
all the time, but -- 'twas ever thus.
A few more things to try: what we mostly did already for an upward leap
-- support on the low note -- then, imagine the upper note as clearly as
possible, but concentrate on keeping the support constant.
I hope this little essay may stimulate some people to make discoveries
for themselves. As I said before, I think the subject hasn't been well
served. I've outlined one particular metaphor for playing that I find
useful, but anyone who wants to extend that metaphor is welcome to do
so, with the proviso that it should be a helpful extension. There are
many connections to be made with other aspects of playing, and the
possibility of technical detachment going hand in hand with expressive
involvement is an ongoing project for all of us.
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339
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