A question came in about a young horn player with an extremely tight sound. They had started on trumpet, played it for a year, and recently switched to the horn.
You would think that by now I’ve written about everything in Horn Matters, but I have not written about tension and the embouchure at all. It’s at least partly because I don’t often teach such young students, and it’s not a topic traditionally addressed in horn method books either. Although, thinking about it now, maybe that’s what Farkas was trying to address with the whole “smiling embouchure” discussion in The Art of French Horn Playing.
Embouchure tension kills tone
Too much tension is a big problem. Especially so if you are very tense when you play what should be easy, mid-range notes. How do you add more tension for yet higher notes?
Which speaks to the thought that if you absolutely start someone playing, if you can start them with correct setup that doesn’t involve lots of tension, it will produce better results and save a lot of trouble later.
Solutions are not easy
Using the young student in the original question as an example, I think the hardest thing to address is that what they are doing now is likely what they have always done, it feels completely normal to them. Somehow, you will have to come up with a way to demonstrate that you can play easy notes with little tension and a better tone. It will require problem solving skills for sure.
Retraining to play with less tension
In the case of the student mentioned earlier, I think the solution involves trying to start brand new habits. I would certainly try to have them buzz on a mouthpiece and see just now lightly they can buzz notes, with the thought that horn playing should not be much more work than that.
A brief tension story
To close, I’ll offer this somewhat related personal story. Some years ago, I played in a master class for a famous horn player. One thing she really was concerned about was my posture and all the tension across my shoulders. Which I’m sure I had, but at the time I was like, uhm, how do I hold a horn with less tension? Dropping the horn was not an option, there must be some tension in the body to hold a horn up.
I tried to adjust at the time. Eventually I made some significant adjustments to my posture due to problems with my left arm when I was playing in the Nashville Symphony and have had some physical therapy as well more recently. What she told me at the time was certainly correct, but I could not do much with it in a one-time master class setting.
