Breathing (book excerpt)

The following text is extracted from “The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments”

Edited by Trevor Herbert

The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1997

John Wallace

(ISBN-13: 9780521565226 | ISBN-10: 0521565227)

Reproduced here with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Breathing (page 201)

Although the acquisition of good breathing technique is essential to brass playing, and bad habits which are acquired early are difficult and time-consuming to overcome later, very few teachers speak about it in an exact way and many teach it and describe it using only blurred imagery. One of the reasons for the persistence of what might be called folk-theories about breathing is that in practice they often work, simply in terms of learning to play something better, or at least differently. However, because these theories are mostly based on incorrect physiology, they are not often not useful outside the specific context for which they were contrived and can cause difficulties and confusion when applied elsewhere. In any discussion of breathing, the word diaphragm will occur, and along with embouchure is one of the most common words used by brass players.