The Clarinet BBoard

RE: Tounging

Author: Ken Shaw  Date:   1999-07-01 22:25 Allison Rose wrote: ------------------------------- I am tounging with the wrong part of my tounge. I am doing it too low on my tounge. That is the reason I can't toung fast enough at all. I am taking private lessons, thta is how I found out that I was doing it wrong. Thanks for your help! Allie Allie - What you are doing is called "anchor tonguing." I did this for years, broke the habit and posted a long piece about a year ago. Here it is again. Anchor tonguing is when you lock the tip of your tongue behind your lower teeth and push forward with the back of your tongue to make it hit the reed. The spot on your tongue that hits the reed is maybe 3/8 inch back from the tip. Anchor tonguing has some definite advantages. First of all, it's a strong stroke that stops the vibration of the reed quickly. You can also do strong accents easily. The anchoring of the tongue also means that you don't have to worry about missing the tip of the reed with the tip of your tongue. The area of the tongue just below where it touches the reed also pushes on the lower lip, and helps cut off the air flow and can be used without touching the reed at all to give a more subtle tongue stroke. Finally, the support for the lower lip from the tongue makes control easier, particularly in the high register. Some fine players use anchor tonguing, including, I believe, Mitchell Laurie and, I have read, Karl Leister. Nevertheless, anchor tonguing is anathema to most teachers. There are three big problems: speed, lightness and embouchure/tone. SPEED: It's hard to go really fast with anchor tonguing. I used it for years, and got pretty good -- say, sixteenths at 136 -- but that's pretty much the limit. The problem is that you're moving more of the tongue than with the other style of tonguing ("tip to tip"). LIGHTNESS: The ability to make a strong accent means you pay the price when you want to play lightly. It's possible but very difficult to play the licks from the Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo, which are on 100% of audition lists. Similarly, the final rising scale in Shepherd on the Rock is problematic, and forget about the little solo in the finale of the Beethoven 4th. When you tongue tip to tip, only the very tip of the tongue moves, meaning that the necessary effort is smaller and repetition is quicker. EMBOUCHURE and TONE: Supporting the lower lip with your tongue means that you don't build up strength in your embouchure. Also, pushing up the back part of the lip with your tongue means that more lip is in contact with the reed, which dulls the tone. To project, you need to have only a very small amount of lip over your lower teeth -- only half of the red part of your lip. Until I stopped anchor tonguing, I could never get a centered, resonant tone. The big problem is that anchor tonguing bunches up your tongue at the front of your mouth, which blocks the use of your oral cavity to add resonance and control tone color. The ideal tongue position is high in the back and low in the front. Many method books describe this as a "ski jump" shape, which makes the air go faster. I'm not sure about that and think it's mostly the reed setting the air in vibration in the open space produced when the tongue is low in front. Anchor tonguing involves moving the back of the tongue as well as the tip. Involvement of more and larger muscles inevitably slows you down. Also, moving the back of your tongue often leads you to move your jaw as you tongue. This means that even larger muscles than the tongue are in motion. I've never seen anyone move their jaw and also have even minimally acceptable tonguing. Finally, moving the back of the tongue, as you do in anchor tonguing, makes it more likely that you will tighten your throat, since without the security and resistance of anchor tonguing, it's tempting to try to find them elsewhere. Tightening your throat is deadly to breath support and radiates tension to the rest of your body. Lawrie Bloom (bass clarinet in Chicago) has a great exercise for this. Take a spare clarinet barrel and wrap your lips around the top as if you were smoking a cigar. Breath in and out to get the feel of moving lots of air at low pressure and with no obstruction between your mouth and the bottom of your lungs. Then move to the clarinet and work for the same feel. You're looking for the sensation of the breath stream flowing from your belly up through your lungs, throat and mouth and being engaged directly with the reed and the tone, as if these were an extension of your body. Bob Lowrey, who was an excellent player and a well known clinician when I was in high school, has a great exercise. Play a secure note (say, D below the staff), starting it mezzo forte with the breath. Then, move the tip of your tongue up and slightly forward as if saying the syllable LA, but do not let your tongue touch the reed. You want to just barely miss. Move the syllable forward gradually, so that you touch the reed only for an instant, producing the smallest possible "tic" in the sound. Work on this until you can do it consistently and evenly. Then move to scales, beginning slowly and working the speed up gradually. The feeling should be that of your tongue sweeping - almost bouncing - across the reed, but never stopping. Also, the sound never stops. Once you get this extremely light action under control, it's easy to make it more forceful. Equally important, you teach yourself to play with a continuous tone, which is interrupted by the tongue, without interrupting the effort of moving the air stream. This avoids the problems that come when you thing of the tongue as what starts the tone, rather than stopping it. As to strengthening your embouchure, I put an old mouthpiece with a split reed in the glove compartment of my car and held it in my mouth as I was driving. Fairly soon, I got to where I could do that with a barrel attached. I got some pretty odd stares, but built up embouchure strength quite a bit over several months. You could also do it at home while watching TV. The moral of the story is to make the change. The hardest part is having the tip of the tongue free and having to search for the tip of the reed, rather than having the reliability of the anchor. Believe me, it can be done. All it takes is keeping at it. Good luck. Ken Shaw

Topics	Author	Date
Tounging  new	Allison Rose	1999-07-01 18:10
RE: Tounging  new	Dee	1999-07-01 19:12
RE: Tounging  new	Allison Rose	1999-07-01 20:09
RE: Tounging  new	Ken Shaw	1999-07-01 22:25
RE: Tounging  new	William Rappaport	2024-03-10 20:32
RE: Tounging  new	kdk	2024-03-11 03:58
RE: Tounging  new	Tim2	1999-07-04 04:00
Re: Tounging  new	Jarmo Hyvakko	2024-03-12 15:33
Re: Tounging  new	moma4faith	2024-03-13 03:23

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