The Importance of Tone

I often compare tone of voice to the quality of tone made by music makers with their instrument. The most frequent example of this is to say to a student, "Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone, or listening to a teacher in the classroom, and realizing they have wonderful things to say, but that their tone of voice makes it hard to pay attention to them?" I've never had this point not understood. I then go on to say that if the tone they're creating with their instrument isn't appealing - no amount of work on articulation or dynamics is going to make a real difference in how their music is perceived. 

This article points out that the decision we make about how we feel about someone's voice tone happens in milliseconds, and there is great agreement among people on what the tone of voice can signal about the person.

. . . Although it's not clear how accurate such snap judgements are, what is apparent is that we all make them, and very quickly. "We were surprised by just how similar people's ratings were," says McAleer. Using a scale in which 0 represents no agreement on a perceived trait and 1 reflects complete agreement, all 10 traits scored on average 0.92 – meaning most people agreed very closely to what extent each voice represented each trait. . . 

 . . . The impression that our voices convey – even from an audio clip lasting just 390 milliseconds – appears to be down to several factors, for example, the pitch of a person's voice influenced how trustworthy they seemed. "A guy who raises his pitch becomes more trustworthy," says McAleer. "Whereas a girl who glides from a high to a low pitch is seen as more trustworthy than a girl whose voice goes up at the end of the word." . . .

What the researchers in this article are calling "tone" and what musicians call "tone" is not exactly the same, since the researchers are including pitch in their definition - but for me this is a very validating bit of research.

I've always been baffled by music educators talking so little about tone. In my years in the community band, except for one director saying "You can't be in tune without good tone", the only other mention of tone was that lame joke about someone having good tone on a note played at the wrong time - which was told over and over and over by multiple directors - and to me, after the umpteenth repetition, had the effect of mocking the concept of good tone. 

The Eckhart Ensemble

Yesterday I had the great good fortune of attending a concert by the Eckhart Ensemble in St. Thomas Episcopal Church here in Orange, VA., a gift to the community from the Orange Music Society. In trying to remember a classical concert of comparable power, I have to go back nearly 40 years to hearing Sviatoslav Richter in Constitution Hall as a schoolboy. The fact that the conductor last night, Victor Yampolsky, is also a Russian may or may not be coincidental. 

In any event, the effect of the music making was as transcendent (for me) as it can be as a listener, in that it felt like the few "flow" experiences I've had making music. I'm going to list a number of things that caught my attention - but it was the gestalt - the whole being greater than the sum of the parts - that made for such a memorable evening. 

One way of explaining the power of the music making is to say what it wasn't. There was nothing rote about it - these people were not reading through something the umpteenth time to get through a mandated "service". There was a feeling of spontaneity in every single measure they played, and they were obviously having a splendid time - they moved - they smiled - they showed all kinds of expressions on their faces and in their postures as they imbued the music with a rainbow of emotions. They were playing the music and were letting the music play them. 

The word "players" also gets across the idea they made the music sound like a play, or a story being told. This was especially the case on one number when the two soloists, an oboe and violin stood next to each other and let each other's gestures inform their playing, while the rest of the ensemble was something of a Greek chorus providing context and comment on their dialog. (J.S. Bach Concerto for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060)

Maestro Yampolsky was amazing, both as a conductor and animateur . Just like a Tibetan lama giving a dharma talk, he began by giving his lineage, in which David Oistrakh loomed large and Vladimir Horowitz was mentioned. Then for each piece he gave a brief but incisive bit of its history and context - and how strongly he felt about its power.

His conducting was a marvel. I was in the front pew, just a couple of feet from the closest violinist, and could look up and see what a wonderful conductor he is and why the players were having such a good time. When called for, his gestures included an ictus, that slight bounce and change from going down to up indicating where the beat is. When I was in conservatory conducting class that was drilled into me, but it's amazing how many conductors get so caught up in swoops they leave it out. 

Instead of giving players "the hand" when he wanted them softer, he covered his mouth with his hand as if muting his voice. Overall, the use of dynamics was part of what gave the music such freshness in that he was always shaping phrases with great dynamic and gestural color. Not only did he get the group to play louder and softer, but the gestures they used in playing the different dynamics gave the music an expressive intensity and color beyond being simply louder and softer.

For me, one of the most striking things about his conducting were the starts and finishes of each piece. Before beginning a piece he would almost imperceptibly gesture the beat, then slowly amplify and intensify it - and only then begin to conduct the opening notes. Every time it sounded like a mountain stream bursting forth - or almost like a firework. And then at the end of each piece, the cutoff was subtly different - and the silence that followed was that deep silence that can only come after great music.

Maestro Yampolsky's resume in the program includes a lot of teaching and master classes, and watching him conduct it was clear how much he cares for the players and so enjoys bringing them to a higher level of musicianship. Part of the excitement of the evening was feeling the joy of the players in working with him. 

And the players! Only later did it occur to me what technique they must have to play with such musicality that I never noticed their technique. Beautiful tone, astonishing intonation, gorgeous phrasing and wonderful balance. All I heard was the music - though I did keep noticing what a terrific job the double bass player did in always giving just the right amount of bottom to the sound - and that the 1st oboist on his solo was either doing circular breathing or had an oxygen tank hidden under his coat or has astonishing lung capacity.

In closing, a couple of caveats. First, St. Thomas was my childhood church. Thomas Jefferson had a hand in its design and Robert E. Lee often tied Traveler to a tree that was still there when I was a child. The stained glass windows have a Proustian effect on me. And this past Lent I did the music for a Lenten lunch there (alto flute and guitar/singing) and between the wonderful acoustics and childhood memories it's a very special place for me - and to hear this concert in that venue was an over-the-top experience.

Also, just last weekend, one of the members of the ensemble, Kelly Peral, who's just moving back to Orange after growing up here, came to play soprano and sopranino recorder with me (on alto flute for Handel and then banjo/guitar for jazz standards and movie tunes) and Dr. Andy on cello. Hearing and playing with her tone, intonation and phrasing was a revelation - and I think prepared me to better appreciate what I heard last evening.

Yoga and Calisthenics

Practicing yoga and performing calisthenics are two different ways of approaching physical exercise, and thinking about their differences can offer some insights into the therapeutic and educational ways of teaching music.

The first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on yoga reads:

Yoga is a commonly known generic term for the physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India with a view to attain a state of permanent peace.

The Wikipedia entry for calisthenics begins with:

Calisthenics are a form of exercise consisting of a variety of simple, often rhythmical, movements, generally without using equipment or apparatus. They are intended to increase body strength and flexibility with movements such as bending, jumping, swinging, twisting or kicking, using only one's body weight for resistance. . . . Calisthenics when performed vigorously and with variety can benefit both muscular and cardiovascular fitness, in addition to improving psychomotor skills such as balance, agility and coordination.

Groups such as sports teams and military units often perform leader-directed group calisthenics as a form of synchronized physical training (often including a customized "call and response" routine) to increase group cohesion and discipline.

While yoga is seen and taught as a combination of the physical, the mental and the spiritual, calisthenics is mostly physical, with the addition of group cohesion as a goal. 

In the yoga classes I took back in the 70's, the idea was that the teacher was training us to be more aware of our bodies and to move through the poses in ways that suited us individually, and to always be mindful, centered and grounded.

In calisthenics, moving just like others with the same timing and motions is much more important.

In teaching music as a music therapist, what works and doesn't work for any particular client is always of paramount importance. In yoga different people doing different poses can look very different, especially for beginners, and that's OK. In music therapy what's important is that the clients feel the joys of music making, become engaged in the activity, and over time are better able to express themselves musically.

It seems to me music educators take more of the calisthenics approach to teaching, for some very good reasons. For one, only students with a skill set that might allow them to succeed are allowed into band, and because of those skills, will probably find on their own what does and doesn't work for them as individuals. For another, group cohesion is of paramount importance in bands (and symphonies), so the subordination of the individual to the group, as personified by the conductor, is the only way to go.

I think this is at least part of the explanation as to why, for the most part, none if the community band conductors we've had over the years has ever talked about tone, other than that tired old joke when someone plays when they shouldn't that, "At least it had good tone quality!"

For me as a music therapist, from the get go with any client I'm always including the importance of tone in the conversation. I'll often ask if they've ever come across someone who has wonderfully interesting things to say, but that the sound of their voice is so off-putting it's hard to pay attention, which usually triggers a look of recognition.

Understanding your musical sound as your voice is fundamental to successful musical self-expression. 

I think that music educators don't talk much about it because the skill set their students present with mean they'll probably develop their tone and appreciation of it's importance on their own.

Music(al) Stretches

Sound and time are the two primal ingredients of music, and a word we use for each is rooted in the act of physically stretching something. 

Tone comes from Middle English: from Old French ton, from Latin tonus, from Greek tonos 'tension, tone, from teinein 'to stretch" -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Pace comes from Middle English: from Old French pas, from Latin passus "stretch (of the leg)', from pandere "to stretch'. -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Stretching is something the human body does all the time, from waking in the morning to standing on tiptoes reaching for a top shelf, so we all have a built in somatic sense of some stretches being easy and others being extreme and everything in between. 

The most deep seated stretching we do is extending and relaxing the diaphragm with every breath. We do it one way when we're relaxed, and another when we're anxious. 

Since it's my contention that a lot of music's power to move us is due it its encoding physical gestures (and associated feelings), I feel the ways in which music can mimic physical stretches (and associated feelings) has a lot to do with the feelings a piece of music might evoke. It's so easy to get caught up in the surface issues of music making, we can sometimes forget there's this deeper gestural substrate that's communicating to an audience in a mostly non-conscious way.

A key component of physical stretches is that they always have an arc from not being stretched to being fully stretched and back again. You can't make yourself stop breathing and you can't hold a body stretch forever. So besides the degree of a stretch at it's fullest, from barely stretched to full or over extension, there's the way each stretch builds to a peak and then relaxes.

"Tension and release" is a phrase often used in talking about music, and for me, understanding that in the context just laid out gives it a richer meaning. 

"Balance" is another word often used in talking about music making, but I've never really liked it because I always get the extremely two dimensional image of scales tipping one way or another, whereas stretching is complex and our sense of it springs directly from our proprioception.

I often ask students if they've ever been around someone who has lots of interesting things to say, but whose voice is so off putting it's hard to pay full attention, -  that's the substrate I'm talking about. If their voice tone suggests either a string stretched to the breaking point or barely tuned up to pitch, and if the pacing is either to fast or too slow, the words they say will may not register as well as they might. 

On the other hand, if the gestural substrate of your music making matches up well with what you're trying to express, there's a much better chance of connecting with an audience.

Horn Diary

I've been playing the horn for coming on to seven years now and it still pulls me in like no other instrument I've ever played. There are things I can do on other instruments (piano, guitar, banjo, alto flute/flute, and cello) that I can't do on the horn, but none of them as consistently have me exploring how to make music.

Part of it is probably the fact that when I started the horn in my mid 50's, I already knew a lot about the generality of music making, which allows me to bring all that to bear in learning the horn.

Increasingly, though, I think it's the very tactile nature of playing the horn that has taken me so much deeper into the experience of music making. My hands, arms, and torso all vibrate in resonance with the tones I primarily feel in my embouchure. I love the feel of the resonance of the guitar/banjo, cello and flutes, but with the horn there's just more of it.

There's also more of a one to one relationship between breathing and phrasing than on the flute that I think has to do with all of the air going into the horn as opposed to being split by the embouchure plate and only some going into the flute. 

For me the tone of the horn is simply larger and more malleable than that of other instruments, and somehow I feel more inside the tone experiencing it than being outside the tone and manipulating it.

String Tone

Here is a terrific post by Elaine Fine, with great illustrations, talking about how various harmonics can create different tone qualities. A snip from the first paragraph:

Violinist-composers tend to load up their music with sixths because the sixth is such a harmonically rich interval. It is simply loaded with overtones, some that can be heard, and some that can't really be heard distinctly. They can be felt though, by the person playing and the people who are listening. It is rare that a microphone can pick up the full array of overtones and difference tones. These are the things that give texture to the music and contribute to the personal quality of an individual player's sound.

Flute Diary

This summer I spent a lot of time on the alto flute after something like seven years of hardly touching it and it was great to play it again. I recruited Hayley from the Orange community band to join me and Dr. Andy to work up music I'd arranged back in the 90's for flute, alto flute, and cello, along with some things I'd written for keyboard with those instruments.

Jumping around from instrument over the years has its drawbacks, but there are wonderful advantages as well. All the work with the horn and the regular flute meant I was able to get much better tone and volume on the alto flute than I did in the past. There's also sometimes a complete absence of the hissing, tire leaking air sound that used to be a regular feature.

I think the work with BE, Jeff Smiley's embouchure method for trumpet and horn, helped me better understand the way all the breathing and muscles work together to produce the embouchure, and that the better you "get" that, the easier it is to have a comfortably open throat and jaw, which in turn allows for creating centered, full tone. 

With both flute and horn my tendency was to obsess over what the lips were doing. I've never particularly liked buzz words, but that 60's hip term gestalt really fits the bill for explaining the true nature of embouchure. Embouchure is how everything else you're doing manifests in the lips. I realize this is one of those commonplaces of teaching wind instruments, but it's also one of those things where you have to experience what the words are talking about. Just because the words make sense to you doesn't mean you have a full understanding of their import. 

The other thing that has struck me (all over again) is what a perfect trio the flute, alto flute and cello make. There's the wonderful balance of treble, midrange and bass sounds, and the flutes have that difference tone ghost of an extra instrument from time to time, and all three are agile instruments.

Horn Diary

This summer has been the best I've ever had on the horn. During the hiatus of the community band I successfully got back the Farkas  Very Deep Cup mouthpiece I started with years ago, but moved away from when I had the embouchure crisis and the callus a while back, when I switched to a Medium Cup and then the Deep Cup for a while. I love the tone of the VDC mouthpiece and that its thin rim allows for so much embouchure movement inside the rim. While it might be marginally better for me to stick with a smaller mouthpiece for band music, and to match the first horn player's tone, I'm going with what I like more in the music I'm doing away from band.

One set of pieces I've been working on are the 12 Duos Mozart wrote for horn. I got the music years ago, but the gauntlet of preparing band music drew me away from it, and it's been wonderful music to come back to. Like some of the Handel pieces, they combine simplicity with musicality, with every note perfectly placed. One thing I've really enjoyed has been the detailed articulation, which seems to be the original intent of Mozart. They're making for great exercises as well as pleasing pieces for both me and the brass group. I'm putting them in keys that allow the trumpet and horn play 1st and 2nd voice up and then horn/trombone and Eb tuba down an octave.

Now that I seem to have some basic horn technique to work with I keep noticing an issue of brain rewiring. Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line. And I keep being caught off guard by how an interval, of say a fourth, feels different up and down the range of the horn, whereas on the piano it feels the same everywhere.

Something else I've had since I got the horn and got back to this summer are books of the hunting horn calls. I can finally play all the high F's and occasional G's called for. The blend of signaling and music is both fun and interesting. One thing I'm trying to arrange for the brass group is the old hunting song "Do you ken John Peel at the break of day" with some of the hunting calls between the verses.

As for community band, having a 1st horn player has made it a much more pleasant experience in that I'm not in the position of having to play music that's really too hard for me. Not playing the higher note in harmonies is a challenge after years of doing so, as is trying to be in tune with the 1st horn more than the band as a whole. But all of that seems to be coming along, and simply hearing how a good player plays band music is a continuing revelation. It's sort of like a dialect I've never gotten the hang of because I'd never heard it spoken.

Performance Pix

Here are some photos the activity director at Gordon House took of our performance there last Friday, which I posted on here.

In this one, from left to right, is my second cousin Steve, Dick & Maggie S, Crawford H, Bill C and Bill B. The Sony recorder is on the camera tripod in front of Bill C.

Here's a shot of me on banjo and Dave F on trap set on the right side of the flattened semi-circle. Dave is following the music closely because for a couple of numbers it was the first time he'd ever played them with us. Pro level reading skills really do come in handy.

Here's a nice close up of Crawford and the Bills:

That's all the current Kenwood Players except for Judy P who plays percussion for us in church and other settings where a full trap set would be too much. 

Cousin Steve (trombone), Dick (trumpet) and Dave (trap set) are pro level players and play in a number of different groups. Steve joined the Fredericksburg Big Band several decades ago and now runs it. They've raised millions of dollars for charity over the years. Dick is a retired army colonel and he and Maggie have lived all over, seemingly starting Dixieland groups wherever they've been. Dave was a drummer in the Army Band.

On a genetic note, Steve and I are second cousins because our grandfathers were brothers. He has several dozen Sanford cousins and I think at least half are very musical. I have just over two dozen Sanford cousins and am the only one doing music, other than one or two who took piano lessons as a child and dropped it.

Another thing to mention, which relates to tone quality is that from time to time in rehearsals and performances, Dick and/or Steve will play with such gorgeous tone it's all I can do not to stop playing and just listen. Hearing such great brass tone up close and personal has been a boon to my horn playing.

Your Tone Is You

It's my feeling that tone is the most primal of the elements of music making, just as one's tone of voice is the most primal element of speech. 

During my 20's I worked as an attendant and group therapist on locked psychiatric units. My primary responsibility was to insure the physical safety of the patients, which meant closely monitoring the emotional state of patients who might become violent with themselves or others. Over time I learned to pay close attention to tone of voice as an indicator of mood, more so than the verbal content of speech. Listening closely to tone of voice was also very important in understanding what was going on under the surface in group therapy sessions.

The flip side of all that attention paid to the voice tone of others was trying to always insure my own tone of voice was not accelerating a volatile situation, but rather helping to keep things relatively calm.

Those experiences led me to be more conscious of something I think we all do on a mostly unconscious level, i.e. make judgments about the personality and state of mind of others based in part on their tone of voice, and that we use our own tone of voice as an underpinning to expressing ourselves through speech.

It's my idea that when the neuroscience gets sophisticated enough, we'll see that the tone quality of your music springs from, and affects the listener in, deeper and more primal parts of the brain than the rhythm, melody and harmony. When you make music, your tone sets the stage for whatever else you do. 

(As a side bar to this discussion, there's the question of the tone of piano players. It would seem that, more than wind and string instruments, the tone of a piano resides more in the piano than the player. That's largely true, but the hammer action means that strings can be hit with different amounts of force and at different rates of acceleration (see correction below), exciting the strings in subtlely different ways. Along with that, high level players can control the dynamics and the temporal sequence of every single note to such a high degree that individual styles can be developed and appreciated.)

UPDATE - Jonathan West corrects me in the comments:

By the way, you're wrong about the piano. By the time the hammer hits the string, it is no longer attached to the key and so it is in free movement and has no acceleration due to the key. Being in free movement, the the sound made by the hammer's action on the string varies from one note to the next solely on the speed with which the hammer hits.

What pianists and others think of as tone on a piano is derived from timing and use of pedals, and also from different degrees of force (and hence loudness) applied to different notes of the same chord. To a great extent, the idea of varied tone on the piano is a cognitive illusion fostered by the player - one which the player himself may be unaware of and honestly believe in.

All of what Jonathan says is very well put, especially that last sentence. During my time as a keyboard major in the late 70's I convinced myself that there was something more than simply the speed of the hammer affecting the tone of the note, and had come up with my faulty explanation involving acceleration. There is the acceleration created by gravity as it works to pull the hammer back to its resting position, but that's a constant rate involving the number 32. So maybe what I'm feeling is how that interplay between gravity and the force of the keystroke allows for super fine tuning of the hammer speed. 

Jonathan is also absolutely right to mention pedaling, which I'd not included and which has immense effect on a player's tone. Oftentimes a hammer is hitting a string still vibrating anywhere from a little to a lot from a previous hammer stroke, and pedaling controls the amount of that vibration. 

Flute Diary

On my Vermont trip I got to hear Susan play the flute. Simply hearing her tone made me a better player. 

Back when she was here in Virginia I played either alto flute or keyboard with her on flute and Dr. Andy on cello, and I never got my soprano flute out of its case. Here in the past year or so I have played that exclusively and not the alto. Putting in all those hours made me a better player, but they also set me up to better appreciate Susan's tone in the sense of having a better proprioceptive insight into what she's doing. 

All the neuroscience talks about how making music tickles a lot of parts of the brain at the same time and in coordination with each other. What I'm talking about here is the interface between the part of the brain that appreciates hearing good tone and the part that tells the muscles what to do to get it. 

Susan's tone, especially in the low and mid registers can have a tactile, Dionysian power to it. A lot of flute players are more Apollonian in tone, and Susan can do that if need be, but that feeling she can generate that the flute's tone is getting traction on the listeners' emotions is what amazes me.

All that's not as well expressed as I'd like, but the point is, immediately upon hearing her for the first time in years, doors opened in my mind and muscles that are leading me to do all kinds of proprioceptive things I can't begin to explain, but which improve my playing.

Dave Wilken has a great post that got me thinking more about all this here. 

Horn Diary

The hiatus of the community band ends with the first rehearsal of the new semester tomorrow. From 7/6 until now have been playing only what I want, and that meant spending most of my time on the F horn in the octaves below and above middle C. In band music notes in that lower octave are rarely called for (for first horn) and I'd never gotten them as well as I felt I could. I did a lot of etude like improvisation, always going for the best tone and intonation I could muster, and never stressing the sound, going for full and big tone as opposed to loud. What music I played was a hunting horn tune transposed around the easy keys and the lines of arrangements I've done that fell into that range.

The results have been wonderful. All those notes come easily and well now, though the low octave C and the D above it are not as good as the rest. I really do like the F horn, and I think part of it has to do with simply feeling its reverberations in my upper body and head better than the Bb. From what I've been reading on the horn blogs, they simply are not making decent F horns any more. If they were I'd look into getting one because I'd love a lighter instrument that would be less burdensome to hold and would speak more easily as there would be less metal to set vibrating, and I'm not really interested in going above high F or G.

I helped sort the band music into folders and brought home the first and second horn folders and have looked through them. For the first time, with the exception of a piece that has a section in five sharps going up to high G sharp, all the first horn music looks playable to me. The issue is going to be endurance. I'm still the only horn, though we may get ringers for concerts. Right now I feel I have the endurance needed, but having to shift back up to higher notes in piece after piece in rehearsal is going to be wearing.

The next time Dr. Andy comes for some music I want to spend some time with him on cello and me on horn and play around with how those two instruments could work in a duet. I may have a large enough range on the horn now that something along those lines could be worth pursuing.

Flute Diary

Did pretty well with the Presbyterian Ensemble yesterday. Somewhere between "a gentleman's C" and a B+. Got lots of phrases just right with full tone. Got the high F's and Eb's. Garbled enough notes here and there to keep things out of the "A" range, though.

Came to realize the fingering insecurity stemmed from the fact that on the alto flute, which I played a lot in the 90's between our Vermont readership on regular flute and Dr. Andy on cello, the mid-range Eb has better tone and intonation with the left index finger down, rather than up as on the soprano flute. Once I realized that bit of brain wiring was what was setting off cascades of fingering errors and bad intonation and poor tone, drilling all the little sections where that cropped up really helped.

The other thing was realizing I needed to stop playing horn for a couple of days to let my lips have the ability to finesse the aperture to fine tune the tone and intonation. 

One of the great things about the flute is that you can play as long as you want, as opposed to the horn where your practice time is limited by how long you can buzz your lips well enough for good tone. With the flute, the more you play the more flexible and enabling your embouchure becomes.

This was the most intense wood shedding I've done in a while, and it was very helpful drilling down into technique issues and figuring them out. One thing that revealed problems was to use the metronome on a variety of speeds right around the one indicated. Slightly expanding or contracting the length of the beat helped me learn the essential rhythms of the phrases. I may well have it wrong mathematically, but adjusting the rhythms to slightly varied beat lengths felt more logarithmical than arithmetic. Once I got the feel for the flow and patterns of the rhythm, could pull off the phrases at the various tempi.

One thing that really helped was that the Presbyterian Church is a wonderfully large open space with mostly exposed brick walls. Playing the flute into that space is a joy because the sound comes back at you so easily and clearly, it's almost like having another flute doubling the part. In a great acoustical space like that it's easier to refine your tone, because better tone gets a better acoustic response.

photo - early spring crocus 

Reed Embouchure

We have a sax player in the Friday group, who has wonderful tone and intonation on the tenor sax. He also plays the alto sax in the Presbyterian Ensemble. It's the soprano sax, though, that he's really keen on, having only recently given it a lot of time. His sound reminds me strongly of my sound on the horn. The higher I go, the more tentative and unsure it gets, but with the soprano sax I think you have even less room for error with both tone and intonation. It may well be the least forgiving instrument in the band. To my ear, only the piccolo can come close in sounding as flat out wrong.

He's mentioned a couple of times how he realizes he needs to "loosen up" his embouchure as he goes higher. Makes me think of BE. Just wrote him this in an e-mail and hope to pursue it with him:

I've been using a book/method for horn called "The Balanced Embouchure", which was written by a trumpet player and there's a horn player who has adapted the exercises for horn. Turned me around.

Here's the basic idea as it affected my playing. We tend to think the embouchure is just the muscles right at where the mouth meets the instrument. I had ended up super stressing those muscles to the point of collapse one day in rehearsal (turns out this is not unknown among the horn players I'm in touch with via the net).

The method is for brass embouchure, but I'm thinking the deep principle might help other embouchures as well.

Here's the deal - whatever you can vary in your embouchure - do it in extremes. Get used to the feeling of doing it really wrong in one direction, and then go do it just as wrong in the other direction. Doing this shows you how much deeper into your musculature your embouchure goes. If you get all of it going just right somewhere between the two extremes, not just the bit closest to and touching the instrument, your control will be much firmer, and your ability to fine tune tone and intonation much enhanced.

There is, of course, way more to the Balanced Embouchure than this, but this idea of exploring extremes to better understand and feel the middle is one of the underlying notions of BE that I want to try using in realms of music making beyond trumpet and horn embouchure.

Timbre

Timbre and tone are closely related, but not usually thought of as the same thing. When using the word "tone", we're usually referring to a specific instrument and/or player. "Timbre" (which is italicized because it's taken from the French) usually refers to the characteristic sound of a family of instruments, and then further to individual members of a particular family. 

There are the strings, which can be bowed orchestral instruments or guitar, banjos, and mandolins and such which are plucked or strummed. There are the brass instruments, some of which have conical tubing and others with cylindrical tubing. There are the single reeds - the clarinets and the saxophones - and the double reeds - the oboe and bassoon. The percussion family has a wide range of individual members with unique sounds.

One way we identify an instrument's timbre is by what audio people call the envelope of the sound (how the sound starts, sustains and then ends). Strings, brass, reeds and percussion have characteristic ways of creating their sounds that our brains process quickly and easily.

Another way we identify an instrument's timbre is by the nature of the vibration creating the sound. In this animation I linked down in the post on tone, you can add or subtract individual parts of the vibration and thereby change the overall vibration.

We use this way of changing the components of a vibration to alter its sound all the time when we speak. If you sing a long held note on a particular pitch and go through all the vowel sounds while doing so, it's your making subtle changes to the various components of the overall vibration creating the sound that makes "a's" sound like "a's" and "u's" sound like "u's". 

The specifics of what's going on with the components of the overall vibration are explained by something called the harmonic series, which gets pretty mathematical pretty quickly. At some point in the materials, the harmonic series needs to be explained for those interested. My hope is, though, to help people understand the broad outlines of all this well enough to inform their music making, without inducing math phobia.

Horn Diary

In the past week four horns from the Charlottesville Municipal Band sat in with our community band for two rehearsals and two concerts. I continued to play 2nd horn and sat with 1 and 2 on my left and 3 and 4 on my right. It was even more fun than the last time this happened. 

For one thing, having an idea of what to expect left me in a better position for more critical listening. Before when this happened, experiencing for the first time what being in a horn section sounds like had such a powerful effect, details got lost. I also had more opportunities for conversation and all four of the players were gracious and very informative in their responses, and were very good about letting me look closely at their instruments and mouthpieces.

My main takeaway was just how good they are. I was extremely knowledgeable about the music, having struggled for two months trying to play my part close to adequately. On their first read through they didn't make any real errors, but some of the bits I'd had trouble with weren't as smooth as the rest. What amazed me was how quickly they improved. We went through the program four times, and every time their playing was significantly improved and more musical. For them, the technique is there, it's just a question of mentally inhabiting what the score and the conductor want. Made me realize just how rudimentary my technique is.

What I enjoyed most was hearing them interpret all the expression and articulation markings in the music. Having grown up playing piano I don't fully appreciate what those marks can mean, especially on the horn. I kept having the thought that they were sculpting shapes in the sound of the music. So much of music making is the mental space you have of what's possible, and anything you can do to increase that is beneficial. I may not be able to be as expressive as they are, but hearing what they did shows me the way.

Something else that I kept noticing was a quality to the tone that I'd missed previously. I could hear 1 and 2 a lot better, and 1 had a new instrument and that might be part of it. Words are going to fail me here, but what I heard from time to time was that point midway between brassy and mellow, an amazing urgency within glorious tone. I had an involuntary emotional response to the "call" of the horn. I can't ever remember having such a visceral response to a musical tone quality. 

They all had mouthpieces with nicely rounded rims - none approaching the thinness of the Farkas VDC. One player loaned me a Schilke 31, which is close to a 32, which I think I'm going to get one of. Big cup, large diameter opening, and comfortable rim. 

It still amazes me how unsettled the horn is as a physical instrument. They all had different wraps and ways of draining condensation.

I've seen occasional mentions of a sort of stereotype for horn players - very nice people with a bit of eccentricity thrown in. These four players certainly have the being nice people aspect down - they drove something like a total of 200 miles without remuneration to play with a group far less accomplished than their band. They could not have been more helpful to me with my questions. As to the eccentricity, if that is the case, for me that's not a bug but a feature, being a somewhat biased observer on that issue.

Horn Diary

The intonation issues I wrote about in the last entry had several causes.

One was the position of the right hand. I had decided it was too far out of the horn and ended up having it too far in. To my ear it seems that having the hand too far in affects intonation of the different valve positions differently.

That problem was exacerbated by not using my embouchure well for that final tweak on intonation. A year ago, when I began incorporating Balanced Embouchure principles in my horn practice, I also switched to a different mouthpiece with a thicker, more pillowy, rim. ( A Farkas/Holton MC instead of a VDC.) I was less happy with the tone, as it was brassier, but that's what the band directors seem to want, and it made playing easier.

What it also did was to increase the amount of lips being pressed against the mouthpiece and unable to have an effect on the intonation.

At the same time, I also pushed all the tuning slides all the way in, thinking to reset them over time, but didn't, because just pulling out the primary slides of each horn worked.

So now I'm back to the VDC mouthpiece, all tuning slides pulled out various lengths, and my right hand seems to be in closer to the right place.

For the first time, here in the past six months I can hit the high F with no problem. Before that I could occasionally, but never with both good tone and intonation. The F# and G above that are passable most of the time and the Ab and A are like the F used to be. 

I seem to be in the minority on preferring the less brassy tone of the VDC mouthpiece, but have decided to go with it most of the time as I so much prefer it.

Also have switched back to the normal sitting position for playing the horn. The other one was a bit easier on the back muscles and made it easier to play with the volume needed to make the one horn sound more like a section. Our new director is really working on the band playing with less volume overall, which I'm realizing is one way to improve the tone quality of the group.

Recently my cello and fret-less bass friend Andy was here for an afternoon of music and we recorded some things on the Sony. I was just as close to it as he was, but with the bell pointed away, and even though he was unamplified, the cello is louder in the mix that the horn. With the flute the balance was much better.

More on Tone

Back down on this post on tone, Jonathan West made some excellent comments and then went on to post three times at his blog on tone here, here, and here. 

It's very validating that such a high level player agrees with the notion of the centrality of tone to your music making. A number of other things Jonathan says are grist for future posts. For now, though, a few points.

In lots of ways, making music is an extension and an elaboration of your voice. Just as the tone of your voice conveys the emotional content of your speech, tone is a primal element of your music making. 

One aspect of Jeff Smiley's BE method of helping people find their best embouchure is having them exaggerate various muscle movements so as to better be able to find that nicely working balanced spot between the extremes. Trying to create the infinite variety of your voice tones on your instrument, with lots of exaggeration thrown in, can help you expand the envelope of tonal possibilities and give you an idea of which sorts of tone you'd like to develop to better make the music you want to make.

A great frustration of mine in community band over the years has been that pretty much all the pieces we've worked on tend to sound at least as much like etudes as they do enjoyable music. They offer all sorts of opportunities to work on rhythm, intonation, dynamics and articulation, but tone quality gets left off the list. 

photo - first warm toned sunset we've had in a while. Taken with the new camera.

Tone

Organ and electric keyboard players select what tone they want by pulling stops or pushing buttons and then by depressing keys that tone is turned on and off for various pitches. How they go about depressing the keys has no effect on the tone quality. For just about everybody else making music, how they physically go about playing has a lot to do with the quality of the tones they create.

To my mind, your tone is the most primal aspect of your music making. It's how whatever you have to say musically is made manifest in sound. If you play in perfect rhythm with perfect intonation and get all the articulations right, but with a tone that is off-putting, your music will be off-putting as well. In some ways it's similar to the way we tend to form opinions about people by the sounds of their voices.

Good instruments have better tone than not so good instruments, but a good player can usually make a poor instrument sound pretty good, and a poor player can be unable to get good tone out of a great instrument. 

Musical sounds are very complex, and one way of thinking about good tone is that it is a sound which is in tune with itself. A vibrating string or air column is vibrating in many different ways at the same time as the simple animation at this link begins to show. In the real world things are much more complicated as this slow motion video of a bowed string illustrates. It's not humanly possible to physically create a vibration as perfect as the one in the animation, but vibrations creating beautiful tone are closer to that end of the spectrum than the various squeaks, honks and hisses at the other end.

Different tone qualities are called for in different styles of music, and there can be various opinions as to what kind of tone is called for when. All I want to stake out in this post is the fundamental importance of tone in music making and to have this general definition to build on in future posts

Horn Diary

Community Band has started up again, and I'm back on the Bb horn. Don't know how long it's going to last, but things are going very well and want to list some of the factors I think are helping.

Jeff Smiley's Balanced Embouchure book has been invaluable, mainly for giving me a mental construct for what's going on with the whole embouchure mechanism. Unless you're a pure natural player, the better the notion you have about how your instrument works, and more importantly, how on the physical level you make your instrument work, the better chance you have of finding your path to more fulfilling music making. Having something like that Catholic monk in China (Ricci?) called his "memory palace" for your music making is better than flailing away hoping something good is going to happen.

I've been carrying around a mouthpiece to buzz in free moments. Before I'd done some of it right before practicing, but it's different knowing that's all that's going to happen, that it's not just a preliminary. The best thing about it for me is that it allows for just the right amount of pressure for the seal, and without the distraction of actually trying to hit notes, that pressure can be calibrated very finely.

The work on the F horn this summer was a game changer for me. I'd actually gotten to where it was a toss up between frustration and enjoyment. Being able to get deeply into good tone has brought back my love of the instrument. There were times the good tone and intonation just flowed naturally without constant adjustment and I felt more like I was inside the tone than making it.

I'm using a Farkas medium cup mouthpiece, and the wide, rounded rim feels pillowed against my lips. That feels good in itself, but it also allows for me to better feel and adjust the various embouchure muscles. For my lips, this mouthpiece of the ones I've tried, provides for the most, and the most evenly distributed, surface contact.

I'm using a playing position that has trade offs, but really suits me. Back some time ago John Ericson (I think) put up a video of a horn player's audition tape of a Mozart piece and he had what's called a pip stick to hold the instrument. The instant I saw that guy's fingers effortlessly flipping the keys because his left hand wasn't having to hold any of the weight of the horn, I realized where a lot of my problems were coming from. 

Pip sticks are expensive and apparently only available in the UK. Plus, the idea of stressing the horn where it rests on the stick would make me nervous (I can imagine it loosening braces). So I just raised the guitar footrest to it's highest level to raise my right leg and rest the horn there on a folded hand towel used for drying water in the bell. Not having all the muscle involvement holding the horn in position more than makes up for having to pay attention to not letting that leg position trigger bad posture and breathing.(If you're thinking of trying this non-standard position, please see what Jonathan West has said in the comments.)
 

And speaking of trigger, back earlier this spring I redid the trigger so doing nothing means I'm on the Bb side. There's enough tightening up going on for the higher horn without having to squeeze the thumb as well.

Photo - at John and Kate's in Echo Valley