In his practice book Vol. 1 "Tone", Trevor Wye includes two studies which he calls Flexibility Exercises. After cutting my upper lip (very foolishly), I found these exercises very helpful for strengthening the embouchure muscles and getting my chops back together. I highly recommend these exercises to the dedicated flutist. Yet, playing the same exercises over and over again becomes tedious after a while, so I decided to write a few similar studies myself. I thought that a good place to start would be to write a study in the form of variations on a basic musical form. The old "La Folia" harmonic progression immediately came to mind. This is what I came up with:
- La Folia Embouchure Flexibility Study
As in Trevor Wye's original exercises, this study is based on open chord voicing with large intervals:
To develop embouchure flexibility these intervals should be produced with gentle motion of the embouchure rather than by simply blowing harder. A good way to approach this, as Wye suggests, is to practice playing diminuendo in ascending intervals. This forces the embouchure to be more active in the production of higher notes. Another key factor to consider is that higher notes on the flute are typically produced by eliminating lower partials, or in other words as overtones. This means that the overall harmonic spectrum of high notes is narrower than that of low notes. In more musical terms, higher notes are inherently less rich in tone color, and tend to sound thinner and less warm than lower notes. Hence, the big challenge in these flexibility exercises is to play the higher notes softer while not letting them sound dull and lifeless. I suggest that this should be the guiding principle when practicing these exercises. Always try to make the higher notes more expressive and richer in color than the lower notes, while at the same time reducing air volume and playing them softer:
On each chord, play the top note softer than the bottom note, but at the same time aim to add more life and presence to it. Look for a richer and more vibrant tone on the higher notes. Among other things, this is achieved by increasing the vibration of the inner and wetter tissues of the upper and lower lips against each other. To do this, you must keep the lips very soft and supple, while at the same time keep the aperture between them very small and narrow. This may be the most difficult skill in flute playing, which takes a lot of time and patience to master, but it may also be the most worthwhile.
Following Trevor Wye, I list a few variations to the basic pattern of the study, some of which are more straightforward and other more advanced:
Finally, I have this study written in two keys - E minor and D minor, each with its own peculiarities.
I hope you find the study useful and enjoyable. I will try to write a few more soon. For a more technical elaboration on embouchure flexibility and control read on, otherwise thank you for reading so far.
More technical observations: Some suggest puckering the lips (as if pronouncing the vowel 'u') when playing ascending intervals. In general, I find this to be a very unproductive method for playing the flute. Puckering the lips pushes the lips forward, and while this may help reaching the higher notes it forms a rounded aperture which has less contact area between the soft tissues of the lips, thus allowing for less vibration between them. For a start, this gives the higher notes a rather dull and breathy sound. More crucially, though, a rounded lip aperture provides very little control on the release of the air between lips. This can be demonstrated by a simple experiment each of you can do at home using a balloon:
1. Blow up a balloon until it’s full with air.
2. Pinch the opening with from both sides and stretch it to form an elliptic and elongated narrow slit. An almost unbearably loud high pitched sound is produced:
3. Notice how much control you have on this sound. By controlling the sides of the opening you can sustain the sound for a very long time and even change its pitch and volume.
4. Next, do the same but let the opening form a rounded shape. All air is released instantaneously. No consistent sound is produced:
5. See if you can find a way to control the release of the air through the rounded opening. I cannot find any.
An even simpler experiment can be done using a drinking straw. Take a drinking straw and blow through it. Next, flatten one of its edges to form an elliptical narrow slit. Blow from the other side of the straw while keeping the other end in this narrow shape. Notice how much more resistance the straw has now to the air stream flowing through it. This resistance makes the sound more vibrant, and gives you more control over it. In its normal round shape, there is hardly any control on the air flowing through the straw.
Note that in other wind instruments that have an actual embouchure (rather than just an embouchure hole), such as the oboe, the shape of the embouchure aperture can never be made round. Observe the oboe mouthpiece aperture in the image below:
It has the form of an elongated, narrow elliptical slit, similar to the one you formed with the balloon and the straw. This aperture can only be reduced vertically by bringing the reeds closer together. Up to a point, the closer they get, a more buzzy and resonant sound will be heard, until too much contact kills the vibration. On the flute, the soft tissues of the lips function like the vibrating reeds of the oboe. For a more resonant tone on the we should create more contact between these tissues by reducing the height of the aperture, but not its width. This involves very delicate movement of the lips and jaw that can only be learned by careful and patient experimentation to figure out what works best for you. The key word here is experimentation. In the practice room, there are no bad sounds. Every sound you play on the flute is a sound you can learn from.
Finally, while puckering is generally not recommended, it can be useful for expanding your palate of tone colors to more hollow, airy and "dreamy" kind of sounds. After all, the great difficulty in playing the flute, which is having no fixed embouchure shape, is also its greatest virtue, as this provides us with infinite sonic nuances created solely by the vibration of our own body.