Wednesday, May 30th - 5:00 p.m.

(Photos below)

In their interesting and informative talk, Dave Sheetz and Richard Hanks took us through the story of Dr Donald S. Reinhardt and his work on airstream direction, the pivot, and the track.

Dave Sheetz, whose biography makes impressive reading, was a student, friend, and colleague of Reinhardt for over forty years; co-presenter Richard Hanks is a trombone student at UMass and a Reinhardt advocate. They made an engaging and convincing team.

After introductory material on Reinhardt the presenters got down to the basics of airstream direction, explaining that we all blow either downward or upward into the mouthpiece: apparently no-one blows right into the center even if they think they do! It's vital to know which you are, they tell us; the way the trumpet points does not give the game away (I hope I was not the only listener to be surprised by this); and the only sure diagnostic test is to be observed using a clear mouthpiece. Embouchure visualizers won't, apparently, deliver the goods as they don't reproduce the whole playing environment and it is this that's needed. The direction you blow in is mostly determined by how much of the upper and lower lips are in the mouthpiece.

We next heard about the pivot, one key thing for the presenters being to overcome the misconception that it's about tilting the instrument, or the head, or shifting the mouthpiece to a different place on your lips: they define it, rather, as "The lips and mouthpiece 'as one unit' must move vertically on the track of the inner embouchure (the teeth ...) and whether or not this movement is to be in an upward or downward direction to ascend or descend is strictly based on the performer's particular physical type." We were encouraged to place the index and middle fingers on the lips as if they were the mouthpiece, and practice pushing them up and down slightly. You can't do this with a dry embouchure, and Sheetz was at pains to point out that he felt that quite a lot of missed notes, under- and over-shot slurs and so on, were down to a failure or restriction of movement at this point. They then went on to define two categories of pivot, one where to ascend you need to push up and the other the opposite. This was quite hard for some of us (or maybe just me!) to grasp but the presenters offered individual advice to players after the session, to get to grips with the concept. It was certainly the case that when Sheetz demonstrated the pivot, you had to be very close indeed to see any movement at all: the up-and-down movements of the instrument that you might have expected, prior to the talk, were of course not present.

Reinhardt developed a complex system of diagnostic classification for embouchure types, featuring five types and four subtypes: however, Sheetz talked today about a simplified system in which mouthpiece placement and airstream direction are combined to categorize most players into one type or another out of three main categories. Players who have identified where they stand in these categories will be better placed to further develop their embouchure setups.

In the latter part of the talk, the presenters concentrated on Reinhardt's "Warm-up #57" which they used to illustrate a number of points about his teachings. You'd have needed to be there to follow this in detail but one thing which struck me was the emphasis on using tonguing, as well as slurring, in practising flexibilities. Sheetz stated that by only practising slurs you can damage your sound, since you end up with everything moving around so much that the embouchure isn't really anchored properly. He strongly advocated practising these patterns tongued as well as slurred in order to counter this tendency.

If you want to know more in detail then you should probably be talking to the incredibly knowledgeable Sheetz and visiting his Airstream Dynamics website, but this thought-provoking session gave a clear introduction and led to some interesting questions from the floor.