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.

Three Top Breathing Mistakes....and How to Avoid Them

Ah, breathing! Breathing is literally the one activity we are all doing all the time….so you’d think breathing as we play would be simple, right?

Alas, breathing for recorder playing is a more complex process than breathing for, say, Great British Bake Off reruns. And as with any complex process, it can go awry in multiple ways.

Fortunately or unfortunately, these ways tend to be fairly predictable. (As an aside, I can almost always tell if another wind instrument lurks in a student’s past by observing them breathe- and a good chunk of the time, I can even tell which one!)

So what can go wrong? Here are three of the patterns I see most often in the wild.

1) Nose breathing In a world of near-infinite complexity, sometimes it’s nice to be able to give a nice, straightforward answer to a question.

So: Should breathe through your nose to play recorder?

No.

No nose.

Your nose, for the duration of your playing, is dead to you.

Why? A couple of excellent reasons. First, your nasal passages are a heck of a lot smaller than your oral passage, which means that moving air through them is much less efficient. if you breathe through your nose, you are resigning yourself to taking in less air in more time- never a great idea.

The second reason is less intuitive, but also important: It has to do with your velum (otherwise known as the soft palate). In order to achieve a resonant tone, you want to raise your velum as you play. Want to know how to raise it? Yawn- you’ll feel how your velum lifts to close off the nasal cavity from the oral cavity, increasing the size of your resonating chamber and preventing the movement of air between your mouth and nose. If velum is raised, as it should be, nose breathing is not possible.

Instead of breathing through your nose, gently release your top lip from the instrument to take in air through your mouth.

2) Assuming less is more. Repeat after me: There is no trophy for fewest breaths taken.

I feel like many of us carry around the unspoken idea, perhaps formed in the bowels of 7th grade band, that the longer you can go without taking a breath, the cooler you are. Alas, not so! Striving, consciously or subconsciously, to take as few breaths as possible can get have many unfortunate consequences, from inhaling so deeply the air becomes difficult to control, to squeezing out uncomfortable-sounding notes at the ends of breaths, to “hoarding” breath and consequently producing a weak tone, to skipping over important musical phrase breaks.

Breathing is an integral part of playing a wind instrument- embrace it!

3) Doing too much. All sorts of breathing woes fall into this category, but they boil down to this: Breathing for recorder should feel relatively easy. If it feels arduous or effortful, chances are you are overfunctioning, doing more muscular work than you need - or should- do.

Instead, try to find a way of breathing that allows for the minimum of muscular effort to meet your needs. I promise you’ll be happier.

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(Want to go more into depth on breathing? I loooveve this topic, and have a whole webinar on breathing for sale here.)

(Bonus tip: fire does not improve things.)