Start with a passage a few seconds long. Put your thoughts together for the same amount of time. Release the tension built up by your focusing by playing in a short burst. Scales in stop-and-go mode are good training.
Technical difficulties are of two sorts. One is pure reading. The other is finger antagonism, when two fingers or sets of fingers work in opposite directions.
Concentration is identifying at a glance the problem and knowing how to fix it.
Sight-reading is also excellent concentration training. Decide that you are not going to stop. Force yourself to look ahead instead of reminiscing about the mis-takes you just made. Keep your mind on the road ahead, not on the rear view mirror.
Difficulty in a flute lick is usually confined to two or three awkward notes.
Practice this passage slowly, but even when you are up to tempo, feel those notes come and go under your fingers, sing them, and live with them for a fleeting moment.
In a nutshell:
Stability
The thought process of relaxation starts with conscious-ness of every aspect of playing. Then a conscious loosen-ing of the obstacles to a free flow of air: tight throat, un-steady chin, pinched lips, grasping fingers.
Please refer also to:
Appoggio Posture
Fulcrums Sight-Reading
Muscles, Strong and Weak
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Navel Cough point
Diaphragm Figure 1
First rib
Lung
Tenth rib
Diaphragm Figure 2. The diaphragm is placed quite high relative to the cough point (x). A sketch of the thorax shows diaphragmatic contraction (inhalation — unshaded
down) and relaxation (exhalation — shaded up).1
The term “diaphragm” is often used as a catchall for the mechanisms of breathing and playing. Who has not heard, or even said: “Support with your aphragm” or “Breathe with your diaphragm” or “Position yourself on your di-aphragm” or even “Vibrate with your diaphragm?”
1. From Cunningham’s Manual of Practical Anatomy, qtd. in Richard Miller, The Structure of Singing: System and Art in Vocal Techniques (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986).
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The diaphragm is a reflex muscle. It does not respond to willpower, try as we may. Its cycles, like those of most of the vital organs that operate when we sleep, dream, or play the flute, are beyond our control. Basically, it goes down upon breathing (inhaling) and up while blowing (exhaling). Should it do otherwise, flute playing and all other activities would just stop: death would ensue in short order.
Since there is no sensory perception of the movements or position of the di-aphragm, at any time, there is no way that we can control them. I remember very well feeling dumb and insensitive, as a student almost as much as now, when I could neither feel nor respond to professors’ commands regarding my friend the diaphragm. Only when studying medicine, a project quickly aborted by my acceptance to the Paris Conservatory, did I understand that the playing concept of diaphragmatic technique was scientifically incorrect. It was a well-meaning approach to the phenomena of breathing and blowing.
Involuntary, the movements of the diaphragm are conditioned, freed, or hin-dered by all the muscles, lower or upper, surrounding it. Inhalation on a tucked-in tummy has the abdomtucked-inal muscles compresstucked-ing the viscera. They will pre-vent the diaphragm from its full normal downward movement. Efficient breathing should actually imply the release of all tension in the abdomen. A purely thoracic inhalation will result in high shoulders and constricted throat and airway. An overly extended rib cage will tend to collapse under its own grav-ity and elasticgrav-ity. The act of yawning gives a good feeling for correct breathing procedure: wide-open throat, abdominal relaxation, fullness of air, and a per-ception of pleasure.
Upon blowing, the technique of appoggio,2 meaning “the act of leaning” in Italian, is the process that would come closest to the common meaning of di-aphragm. Appoggio is a technique for breath management used by singers of the Italian school. It is not accurately translated in English by the words “breath sup-port.” It is a system of combining and balancing the action of the abdominal and chest muscles in the inhaling procedure as well as the dual phenomena of exhal-ing and sound production. The support of the abdominal muscles, without op-position, would lead to a rapid deflation of the lungs. The intercostal muscles (between the ribs) must counterbalance it. They actually prevent the collapse of the chest. Schematically, the singer or flutist’s effort is to not exhale, in order to achieve this inner balance. Once mastered, this equilibrium opens new horizons to the sound and a feeling of bliss.
Appoggio implies conscious muscular actions, as opposed to the unconscious play of the diaphragm.
2. Miller, The Structure of Singing.
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In a nutshell:
, Sostenuto, Ritenuto Do not mistake the diaphragm for the muscles that help or hinder it. You can act on the latter, not on the former.
Yawning is not polite, but it feels so good!
Please refer also to:
Appoggio Tenuto Blowing Yawning Breathing
Do not judge your dynamics by your efforts but by what you are hearing. You might think you are playing pianissimo because you’ve stopped supporting, but you hear an approximate sound with a doubtful intonation. Or you are blowing like mad but your sound is narrow and forced.
Teachers rarely explain their request to play louder or softer. Hence flutists have a tendency to do what is evident: push to play loud and disintegrate to play soft. For once, our natural reflexes are totally deceptive.
The problem with dynamics is that they never exist by themselves. They are like the painter’s palette. They are useless if they don’t relate to the musical con-tent as much as to objective conditions of instrumental playing. What to make of an orchestral instrumentalist who plays so softly that we can’t hear him or her?
Or of another who blasts so loud (acoustically or electronically) that he or she drowns out all the rest?
When a crooner whispers a tender ballad to a crowd, ten thousand listeners perceive him as sweet and intimate. His amplifiers are anything but that. In con-trast, in the middle of a hundred-strong orchestra, a lonely nonamplified flute plays the first phrase of Ravel’s Bolero. As the first step of a seemingly endless crescendo, it must start very, very softly and still be heard at the back of the hall.
The listener’s impression should be: “How can the flutist play pp so mysteri-ously and magically and still project?” The listener’s reaction should not be: “I can’t hear the flute. The flutist must be playing pp!”
Soft dynamics cannot project and stay in tune if a half-inflated carnival balloon, without support or energy, plays them. On the contrary, a forced tone and an air volume big enough to bend a tree will not always produce a “big sound.” What I call “turbo-sound” is precisely that: an enormous quantity of air without timbre or focus.
Our concern here is not to determine where to place the dynamics. This is the
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domain of interpretation. What we are seeking is the way to control dynamics and perform them spontaneously.