Posted by Andy on February 19, 2004 at 10:25:26:
In Reply to: An interesting lesson posted by Mary Ann on February 18, 2004 at 12:52:46:
While I am happy that you are having a good experience with your new teacher, I want to give you a word of caution. Please make obtaining the best possible tone quality the focus of your embouchure development. You can run into trouble by focusing on what the musculature is doing, rather than working on producing the musical product.
I studied with Arnold Jacobs, who always said "embouchure is not a study of meat, embouchure is a study of sound; have the worst looking embouchure in the world, but sound better than everybody else and they will copy what you do."
Now, this is separating shades of gray into black and white, because there are obviously aspects of mouthpiece placement that must be adhered to, or one's playing will suffer. However, because we are all different, we will have different embouchures.
Mr. Jacobs comments also point to the issue that the level of the brain that controls the embouchure is best activated by focusing on how you want to sound. The brain will then manipulate the lips, through a trial and error process, to find the best shapes required to produce the sounds you are trying to acvhieve. This can be quickly accomplished by playing simple tunes in the middle register at a moderate dynamic on the mouthpiece alone.
Good luck with your studies, and feel free to contact me via e-mail if you wish to discuss this further.