Embouchures.com

What's in Embouchure Rehabilitation? Here are a few excerpts.

Chapter 1  In the Beginning

When a woodwind or brass instrumentalist is in top form, it is difficult for him to imagine that his embouchure could ever be in peril.  Most of us believe that chop problems happen to other players of lesser talent and experience. After all, the best, most talented musicians have perfect physical technique, right?  Great physical technique (meaning:  the highly trained physical mechanisms which a woodwind or brass player engages to set and stabilize his embouchure for playing) not only fuel great control and artistry, they also protect a player’s lips and face from the normal physical stresses of playing.  There is one thing, however, that can undermine even the best embouchure and cause playing to become painful and musically disabled—performance overuse.   

It begins innocently enough.  You’ve been doing a heavy week of orchestral playing or had a demanding, all-day cast album recording of your Broadway show.  You’ve been practicing for a very important audition or spending long hours preparing for the premiere of a concerto.  Your lips have felt great throughout. Your playing has been free and easy—until one day, you pick up the horn, and nothing feels right.  Your lips feel thick and dead, and your chops seem completely out of shape.  You have no endurance.  You struggle to play in the high range, and you have lost your pinpoint control.  So you practice harder, but with each passing day, playing becomes more and more of a challenge, and the troublesome problems that now inhabit your playing respond to no amount of effort to overcome them.  A couple of weeks of this decline go by, and things just keep getting worse and worse.  Now you’re in a real quandary. “I can’t play,” you say to yourself.  “How am I going to get through the next performance?”  You finally take a therapeutic holiday from playing for a week or two or three, but when you start playing again, nothing has changed.  It is just as difficult as it was when you stopped.  Welcome to the world of embouchure overuse syndrome. 

Professional woodwind and brass instrumentalists can't always choose when and how much they play.  Unfortunately, that pushes a lot of us onto the slippery slope of overuse.   The initial symptoms of overuse are often mistaken for normal fatigue, and most players simply don't know they are in trouble until well into it.

While most embouchure problems begin with a physical predicate—when something like overuse, traumatic injury, or a change to one's equipment or physical setup has altered or compromised the way his embouchure instinctively functions in playing—what gradually begins to exert a more powerful influence over a player’s embouchure control and ultimately becomes the driving factor protracting his embouchure dilemma is his growing anxiety, frustration, and self-doubt. ...

Chapter 2 Lip Trauma and Playing Recovery 

The vast majority of the embouchure and playing problems developed by professional wind players 
are the result of overuse; however, a traumatic lip or facial injury, oral surgery, or even a dental 
procedure can cause the very same kind of long-term physical mischief to an embouchure as overuse. 
Regardless of the severity of the physical damage, sometimes the biggest hurdle in recovering from a
lip, face, or dental injury is just navigating the psychological impact.  

Many years ago, a French horn player related a story to me about her experience with a severe laceration to her upper lip after being kicked in the mouth by a horse.   The wound had to be closed with stitches.  When her surgeon removed the sutures several days later, he told her there was no physical reason she could not resume her career—that only if she believed she couldn't play again would she not.  She says she is now playing better than ever. 

A British horn player told me about the severe facial injuries he sustained during a mugging.  His doctors predicted he would likely never play again.  One day, while drinking a Coke, he noticed that the mouth of the glass bottle was just about the same size as his horn mouthpiece.  On a lark, he put it up to his lips and blew into the bottle until he was blowing against pure resistance (like blocked buzzing).  When his face responded positively, he began doing this every day, and eventually, he was able to rebuild his playing and his career.  Each of these stories teaches us that even the most serious traumatic injury can be overcome.

An injury doesn't have to be extensive to evolve into a long-term chop problem.  A cut to a lip which had to be closed with stitches will certainly recover full function for normal use--eating, drinking, speaking--but might change the surface contour or the sensation of a lip just enough to disrupt the way a player’s embouchure feels and functions in playing.  With that said, sometimes a lip heals completely from an injury, but a player still has difficulty getting his playing back on track.  That is often the psychology of the injury creating worry and self-doubt. ...

 

Chapter 4  The Glitch

Understanding Embouchure Dysfunction 

If your car breaks down on a dark remote country road, and you know nothing about automobile engines, poking around under the hood won’t get you going again.  On the other hand, if you actually know how an engine works, your chances of getting back on the road are greatly improved.  A brass player knows when his embouchure has stopped feeling normal and working efficiently; however, feeling its impact on playing isn’t quite the same as being able to detect the source all the mischief. 

Because the performance disability one experiences in an embouchure problem is rife with disturbing 
physical symptoms and facial weakness, it is easy to conclude that something extraordinary has to be 
 at work—a muscle injury, a medical condition, built-up scar tissue, a metal allergy, a dental issue.  
The fact that most brass players report playing at their peak ability just before they began experiencing 
problems only intensifies the belief that their lip discomforts and sudden loss of embouchure control 
have to be caused by something significant—something major.  

It stands to reason that a player’s embouchure would not be able to operate normally when he is faced 
with persistent, daily chop discomfort and has lost all confidence in his playing. A player's 
embouchure gradually becomes more and more deferential and reactive to the ever-present lip 
complaints, weird facial sensations, performance disability, anxiety, and intense career concerns.  
The longer he continues to play in this state, the more confused and panicked he becomes.  

The challenge I have in explaining to very accomplished, professional brass players why their embouchures no longer feel or work comfortably is that the malfunction they have developed in their playing is so subtle, it is almost impossible to see or feel specifically. It isn’t some sort of inherent "flaw" a player has always had. It’s just a little reactive, stealthy behavior which evolves out of something like overuse or injury and is then intensified by anxiety. This reactive habit destabilizes a player’s embouchure just enough to undermine playing. It’s why stamina disappears, the high range becomes such a struggle, and soft attacks in the middle range are next to impossible to execute cleanly, to mention only a few of the artistic challenges a player is presented with.  During the last 35 years, I’ve seen hundreds of professional players who were disabled by a chop problem. Every player had a perfect embouchure, but every embouchure had developed the same reactive habit.  ...