I recently finished playing a two-week run of Anastasia, my first Broadway musical in several years. While the book isn’t particularly heavy or high, it does contain quite a bit of underscore and as a result the orchestra is playing throughout most of the show’s 2.5-hour run time. At the end of our third performance, I noticed that my face felt more tired than usual. Fortunately for me, we were headed into a two-day reprieve. Unfortunately for me, after that reprieve we had a double-header: a 2:00pm matinée followed by the regular 7:30pm performance. Make it through that day, though, and I figured I’d be set for the rest of the run.
Wrong.
The back-to-back shows went well, so I came into the following night feeling relaxed and confident. Until, somewhere in the last handful of numbers, something went wrong. I can’t tell you what happened: did I play something too loudly? Did the resistance from a mute hit my face in the wrong way? Did I let my corners get lazy at the wrong moment? I can’t be sure. What I do know is that I left the pit with a stinging upper lip and three shows left on my docket.
When I was in school, our studio had a strict policy about this kind of situation: don’t play. Find a sub. Nothing is more important than your long-term health. This policy is great when you’re attending a nationally-respected university with a deep pool of highly-qualified trumpet players who have nothing better to do than play the trumpet.
Or is it?
As I’ve moved into the professional world, I’ve run up against a handful of situations in which handing off my part to a sub just hasn’t been practical. What do you do when the gig is on Easter Sunday and what’s injured is your left foot, but you’re booked to play fanfares at a Renaissance festival while wearing a period costume that does not include an ankle boot? What if you get up in the middle of the night that precedes your orchestra concert, only to walk your mouth into a bedpost in your host family’s spare bedroom? What if you have a broken car and an injured horse and an injured lip but it’s the middle of July so your ability to foot the unexpected household expenses depends upon collecting this check?
Sometimes, you’re just going to have to find a way to play.
Alongside Anastasia, I’ve also been running sectionals for various high school marching bands. These juxtaposed experiences have given me an excellent opportunity to reflect upon how my 40-year-old professionally-trained embouchure responds to stress versus how my teenaged students’ embouchures respond to it. The most noticeable difference has been this: even when hurt, I can access my full range. More than that, it turns out that I can play my last three shows without dropping octaves or omitting notes and still walk away after the last one with freshly-healed chops. Most students can’t pull that off.
The crux of this issue boils down to endurance versus efficiency. Endurance deals with strength: how long you can play, and how powerfully. Efficiency asks how much of that reservoir you need to draw upon in order to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. In physical terms, efficiency has a lot to do with the body’s ability to circulate waste (i.e. lactic acid) away from the muscles of the embouchure. In trumpet terms, we facilitate that process by complementing the work of the embouchure with effective use of the airstream, which we manipulate to a greater or lesser extent by adjusting the shape inside the oral cavity. A player who doesn’t have an effective embouchure to begin with or who doesn’t ever manipulate the airstream with the tongue and soft palate is going to work harder in the upper register. That player may complain of “endurance” problems, but the real root of the issue is an efficiency problem: if raw strength is your only means of hitting a particular note, well, you’re not likely to be able to hit very many of those notes.
For the listener, efficiency translates into sound quality. As a sectionals coach, I’ve heard a lot of double buzzes, pinched sounds, and high notes that really want to be low notes. It’s easy to attribute these flaws to “summer chops”—and, indeed, after a week or two of band camp the cacophony tends to settle and the high notes tend to come out. But, band directors, don’t be deceived: while your students have almost certainly improved their endurance (muscle tone) through the long hours of rehearsal, efficiency can really only be developed in a practice room. This is because efficiency is all about precision, and it’s very difficult to figure out how, precisely, to get the best sound/pitch/shape on individual notes when you’re playing them alongside several other trumpet students who are all playing fortissimo. Instead, efficiency emerges through dedicated, patient hours spent on fundamentals. As a coach, I can suggest exercises and demonstrate proper technique and offer feedback on someone’s results, but unfortunately, efficiency will still boil down to individual commitment—and without it, there’s always going to be a limit on endurance.
But what about the would-be professionals who do spend long hours in the practice room and yet continue to struggle with the types of injuries that force them to choose between playing the gig (and getting the check) versus canceling the gig (and risking the contractor’s ire)? This was me for at least the first ten years of my career. The spot that flared up on my lip this past week is, in fact, a residual weak point from a decades-old injury that I attribute to practicing the Brandenburg concerto at a time when I was lacking in—you guessed it—efficiency. So what to do to prevent such injuries from occurring—and, equally critical, what to do when they arise?
While I can’t speak to the mechanics of how everyone’s embouchure does or should work in a blog post, I’ll make a few general observations here:
- Embouchures are different. They are contingent upon dental structure and lip shape. Don’t copy someone else’s just because that person has a job you wish you had.
- That said, effective brass embouchures do share certain characteristics which are more or less non-negotiable. Importantly, the top lip has to be free to vibrate—which means that the mouthpiece can’t sit in the fleshy part of that lip. Since the lips have to be allowed to vibrate against one another, the mouthpiece also can’t be allowed to push one lip away from the other. Finally, the embouchure results from a balance of tension between the muscles of the orbicularis oris—which is the circular muscle around the mouth that contracts and pulls the lips in (as a smooch)—versus the muscles of the cheeks and jaw, which pull the corners back when they contract (as a smile). Neither of these muscle groups should dominate the other, which means that if your mouth is making either a fish face or a smile when you play, you are probably not on an optimal track. If you sense that your embouchure is violating one of these principles, it’s a good idea to seek out a teacher who has studied embouchure and who is qualified to evaluate yours. Be aware that addressing it will almost certainly take time.
- When you play a brass instrument, you are proposing to send a pressurized airstream from a human body into a metal tube. Somehow, you must ensure that this airstream makes it to the trumpet, as opposed to leaking out the sides of the mouthpiece and dissipating into the atmosphere. There are really only two ways to accomplish this feat: you can use some degree of pressure to seal the mouthpiece against the embouchure, or you can ask the embouchure to pucker itself into such a tight, tiny shape that the air really has no hope of going anywhere else. Given that practically every working professional in the world uses Method 1, I highly suggest that you do as well. Mouthpiece pressure is not harmful when used in proper balance with the embouchure; on the contrary, establishing this balance relieves the embouchure of all the extra work it would have to be doing if Method 2 were employed.
- Certain exercises require efficiency without a lot of micro-managing, and I recommend these to everyone whose embouchure doesn’t have an obvious reason for failure because they are almost impossible to execute unless you are using excellent technique. Such exercises include flutter tonguing instead of slurring across flow studies (Clarke, Concone, etc.); double tonguing (octaves, or above the staff); pedal tones fingered with “true” fingerings (1st valve for pedal F, 1-2 for pedal E, etc.); and octave slurs that diminuendo in the upper register. Today, I also use piccolo trumpet for efficiency, but as you can gather from my Brandenburg injury, this should not be your first stop. (For more information about my own use of the piccolo trumpet, please see YouTube.) Once you have mastered these sorts of exercises and established an efficiency baseline, the Schlossberg book is an excellent way to go looking for new challenges.
Once I started paying attention to the principles above, injuries became few and far between. Now that they’re less common, I’ve adopted the following protocols to deal with them if and when they still occur:
- Drink water, eat protein, use lip balm, and get sleep. Personally, I like Robinson’s Remedies for emergency situations; I credit their product with enabling me to play the concert (and the sound check!) the day after the bedpost incident.
- Use outstanding technique. Because I’ve invested a lot of time into developing an efficient setup, I know how to double down on it when I need to. The day after hurting myself, I played my show with a laser focus on correct execution. It is also important to note that as soon as I was feeling better, I made a conscious choice to stop paying close attention to my face. There is some evidence to suggest that hyper-focus on micro- muscle motions can set off focal distonia, and I’m not interested in dealing with that problem.
- Do not “baby” your chops. There are times when it is necessary to say, “This isn’t going to feel great, but it will be safe because I know my technique is solid.” We can do significant damage by trying to manipulate the embouchure in a quest to feel “good”. Sometimes, especially if you’re dealing with a habitual weak spot, it just won’t.
- Know your tendencies. By now, I have a very clear idea of what I can handle and what I can’t. I know what requires a day of rest and what doesn’t. You only gain this insight by testing your limits in the practice room and being smart about what else you have going on at the time when you choose to test them.
- When in doubt, incorporate pedal tones. Rafael Méndez famously used pedals to recover from two dramatic injuries, and for good reason: they encourage blood circulation, which promotes healing. I had my mouthpiece out and was buzzing well below the range of my instrument on my way home after I got hurt.
At the end of the day, sometimes we do need to rest. Not every injury can or should be tackled without taking a break. In particular, it’s important to recognize the situations in which the risks outweigh the benefits. I already know that my top lip has a weak spot that sometimes flares up, so that’s one thing. But if the ache is deep inside the tissue, as though I’ve hit myself in the face, that’s a very different thing and potentially far more serious. Likewise, I would be very alarmed if I felt a stinging sensation somewhere new, such as the opposite side of my embouchure. The key is to pay attention to your own body, keep track of how it recovers, learn what sorts of actions push it too far, and do what you can in your own time to develop a way of playing that reduces your risk of injury altogether. Ultimately, I was able to make it through this particular incident because my way of playing now is highly efficient, and that efficiency meant that I had plenty of endurance left to draw on when I really needed it. Without that foundation, I would never have been able to finish out my contract.
