Flute Punch

Posts Tagged ‘tongue








Tone is influenced primarily by three factors:

  1. Embouchure, particularly the lower lip
  2. Tongue placement
  3. Oral space/open throat



Two concepts I use to achieve this:




I’m discovering right now that my fingers are not as close to the keys as they should be, which means my technique is not as efficient as it should be. By efficient, I mean fast and clean. In particular, my right index finger wants to fly up a bit, which means that Bb fingering is sloppy. Seems a bit silly, since we all learned that fingering in the first few weeks of beginning band!

To build awareness, I’m practicing slow enough to be conscious of whether or not I can feel my finger pads touching the keys at all. I’m aiming for just the slightest feeling that they are touching. This reminds me of the years I spent in non-contact tae kwon-do: By the time we reached black belt level, we were expected to be able to hit the uniform but not the body of our opponent.

I also notice with my students and myself that sloppy technique is frequently a roadblock to being able to double tongue a passage. Tension is probably the biggest inhibitor of fingers lying loose and low to the keys; the more tense a person is, the more the fingers want to fly up. Beginners often have tension because they are assimilating so much new information, so I think it is important, as a teacher, to be aware of tension from the very beginning, and move the student away from tense positions in the early stages of learning.

Speaking specifically of finger position, I think I will become more aware of the significant role it really does play in being able to advance one’s technique.

Finally, some clarification is coming for me on the subject of tonguing, thanks to the flute listserv I belong to. I was taught “too” or “tu” as Americans say it, and my experience is that students who were taught something else — usually some form of tonguing between the teeth — have sluggish, unclear tonguing. I had always thought that this was French tonguing, but it is not. The French style is “teu,” which has the benefit of keeping the tongue high in the mouth, which is also something I teach my students (or at least try to!).

A helpful member of the listserv directed me to this fantastic article on the Joseph Allard website. The “thi” tonguing is something different from “teu” and “tu/too” (I’m not sure where “thi” fits in; more on that to come, I hope). Even though Allard was a sax player, this article does a great job of describing effective tongue and throat position. Basically, the French “teu” causes the air to flow more quickly over the top of the tongue, because the tongue is close to the roof of the mouth — an effect similar to that created by putting your thumb over the end of hose, causing the water to spray out.

I may have to rethink my position on the open throat, or at least how I teach it. With students, I usually ask them to hold their hand up and breathe on it as though it is a mirror and they are going to fog it up. I think that this in itself does not create throat tension, but when the “teu” style tongue position is added to it, it certainly may, as it is hard to do both of those things at the same time. So it could be that if the tongue is functioning in the “teu” position, then it is out of the way of the throat, and the throat is therefore “open” and needs no further attention.

I came across this on Larry Krantz’s website — really wonderful. I’m always interested in anatomical explanations of how we produce sound on the flute.

Here are 4 short videos of Patricia George playing various things while under a fluoroscope. In particular, I noticed placement of the tongue as being fairly high in the mouth, and you can also see the soft palate in the back of the mouth lift to provide an open and resonant oral cavity.

I thought it was also interesting to note movements of the larynx, particularly as it relates to vibrato. We know that this happens because we can observe it during normal playing, and it also seems that the abdominal muscles do not tend to move. But we also know that often, if vibrato is taught from the throat instead of from the abdominal area, it tends to produce the infamous “billy goat” vibrato.

It was suggested to me by a medical professional that the larynx affects vibrato because as it closes, the air is forced to move faster, thus raising the pitch, and conversely, as it opens, the air moves more slowly and the pitch lowers. This makes sense to me according to my understanding of vibrato as modifications of the pitch (sharpening and flattening around the center of the pitch).

It would still be nice to have a better understanding of why, if the above is true, vibrato is still more successfully taught as a series of “ha ha ha” breath surges. The most I can figure is that teaching vibrato with the breath trains the ear to understand vibrato as variations of the pitch center, and as the ear becomes accustomed to this, the flutist automatically begins to transition to making these modifications with the larynx, as they would when varying pitch during speaking or singing.

It would be great to see a laryngoscope of a flutist while playing so we could further examine the action of the larynx.


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