How Not to Breathe

I may be dating myself, but I used lo love watching a reality show called “What Not to Wear.” Each episode, Clinton and Stacy, the tough-love, unfailingly stylish hosts, would attempt to wreak a fashion transformation on some poor fashion disaster who’d been nominated by their nearest and dearest.

Each makeover was different, but there were thematic through lines. Effort spent on one’s appearance was to be reinterpreted as self-love (since I watched most episodes in ratty sweatpants, I’m not sure this lesson stuck). Cargo shorts were unacceptable at all times. And one directive graced nearly every episode: “Dress for the body you have, not the body you want.”

I think about Clinton and Stacy sometimes when a student tells me they yet haven’t developed a plan for breathing in a particular piece because they want to wait until they’re able to play the piece faster. Usually, this means the student still doing what I call “freelancing–” breathing whenever they run out of breath and damn the musical consequences!

So often, in my best fashionista voice, I bust out my What Not to Wear line: “Breathe for the tempo you have, not the tempo you want!”

It’s a simple concept, but it’s important. Breathing does so much more than simply replenish your oxygen stores. Breathing, for a wind player, is musical punctuation, as vital to your musical message as periods and commas are to your words. When you postpone integrating your breathing into your piece, you are jettisoning a vital piece of the musical puzzle, something that should always be a part of your playing, no matter how fast you’re going– or want to go in the future.

And to be frank, when you do speed the piece up, a lot the breathing work you’ve already done will carry over. It’s possible you may ultimately omit some breaths, but you’re unlikely to change their location, and it may just be a matter of keeping the same number of breaths but recalibrating how much air you take in on each.

The time to think about breathing isn’t some distant musical future when your fingers are flying over the holes.

It’s not the day you click the metronome up to the magic number. The time to think about breathing is now.

It is always, always now.