Posted by Rick Denney on October 30, 2001 at 10:24:48:
In Reply to: any exercise can help air support?? posted by Gozillatuba on October 28, 2001 at 22:53:04:
I've now seen a lot of posts advocating aerobic exercise as a direct contributor to good breath control for tuba playing. As both a tuba player and an endurance athlete, I am not sure I can completely agree.
Here's what I can say from my own experience: Being aerobically fit improves nearly every aspect of your life. You feel better, you move better, your heart beats slower when you are resting, and your heart and lungs work much more efficiently. You also enjoy direct benefits from exercise, including a raised level of endorphins that will improve your mood. To the extent that these general improvements make music-making easier and better, then aerobic fitness helps tuba playing.
But I don't think that they improve our ability to control our airstream while playing the tuba. When we work out aerobically, our lungs go into automatic mode. We tend not to breathe deeply, and we also tend to block air passages to prevent the air from rushing out of the lungs too quickly, before the oxygen transfer is complete. The objective of breathing while exercising is to increase the oxygen going into the blood, which is a very different objective than moving air for tuba playing.
Also, though nobody was suggesting this, endurance athletes spend a lot of time training, and that time is taken away from practice for people who have day jobs and family responsibilities. A full-time pro tuba player can have endurance sports as a hobby and still get in enough practice, but I have to divide my limited hobby time between these and other activities. One of the several reasons that I bagged my efforts to run the Richmond Marathon in November was that the Tchaikovsky on our band's concert program the following week compelled me more. (The other reason was the melt-down in several long runs, particularly at the end of a 20-miler, that told me I'd not put enough miles in my legs this year to do a race that long.)
Breath control while playing tuba is almost exactly analagous to bow control for a string bassist. It would be exact if the string bassist could only move the bow in one direction, and had to lift the bow and move it back to the other end before continuing the note. If we want loud, we move the bow faster, but without pressing it harder against the string (i.e. we allow more air to flow out of our lungs, but without increasing the pressure). Of course, the louder a bassist plays, the quicker he gets to the end of the bow.
It seems to me that we have two objectives for our breathing, capacity and flow management. We have only marginal control over capacity in the absolute sense. But we often limit our own capacity artifically by not taking full breaths. This is a problem I have been working on for years, but I must emphasize that aerobic exercise will not help with this, and may indeed hurt. When we are exercising with enough intensity to have an aerobic benefit, we breath with the top half of our supply, or perhaps the top two-thirds. A tuba player, on the other hand, needs to work with the bottom two-thirds of the air supply, which requires a completely different approach. Mr. Jacobs (as recorded by Brian) has said the same thing.
Flow management is the ability to modulate the air flow without ruining it to control the volume of our sound. This seems to me essentially a musical skill rather than a physical skill, and might therefore be best achieved by playing music musically, rather than jogging 15 or 20 miles a week. I saw Patrick Sheridan demonstrate this in a master class, where he asked a test subject to breathe through the first part of the Vaughan Williams, modulating the air flow as if he was phrasing the music, but without a buzz and without the horn to his lips. This, as much as anything I've ever witnessed, allowed the player to think about bowing as distinct from note-making, but it was a musical rather than physical exercise.
In summary, it seems to me that the breath exercises presented by Brian, attributed to Arnold Jacobs, will improve our ability to control our air movement to achieve musical objectives, and to make good use of what capacity we have. These skills are not directly taught by aerobic exercise, though I would be the first to insist that aerobic fitness helps us lead our lives with overall higher quality.
Rick "aerobically fit but still a mediocre tuba player" Denney