The frowning piccoloist

Dear Jen,
I've actually never seen anyone play with a smile embouchure before...very curious. It is something I'll watch out for in future students though. However, I was wondering what your take on playing with a pretty severe frown was. I saw a great piccoloist for a professional orchestra play like this and it must work for her, but I'm wondering how good of a thing it is to do in general? It seems like extra muscle work whenever piccolo can be taxing enough as it is. C.

Dear C.,
I don't know for sure how severe a frown must be for it to be "too much".
If a player has a protruding lower tooth, or a very individual jaw alignment, an unusually short distance between nose and upper lip, one lip thicker than the other, or a receding chin or buck teeth, virtually anything is possible.:>)

Perhaps the flutist with the severe frown is accidentally over-working their face muscles in an attempt to control the lip aperture; in which case the face and embouchure will tire more easily over several hours of playing; but on the other hand, maybe they MUST create this particular "face" in order to get their lips to form the best embouchure for tone.

Everyone is very different. There are so many variables among faces, lips and embouchures. Even the length of the teeth, cheeks and openness of the jaw hinge would create additional variables.

If a flutist had a very thick upper lip, frowning might help pull the embouchure into better balance, who knows? If you place your finger on the center of the upper lip, and then on the center of the lower lip, you fill find out for yourself how facial muscles affect the lip opening.

If you are teaching a flutist with too much facial tension, in the future, I would suggest working with the embouchure experiments of Roger Mather in volume two of "The Art of Playing the flute" which is entitled EMBOUCHURE.

You can also look at a variety of photos of flute embouchures online. Do you see any that are close to what you're describing with the "frowning piccoloist"?

You can also watch the "frown" muscles at work in this embouchure exercise advocated by James Galway:



An older flute teaching "how to manual" by Charles Delaney shows the muscle use of the face, and indicates that the muscles directly around the lips are the most useful, but this information may be out of date.

Delaney has a list of muscle-use conditions, but everyone has to figure out how to balance each muscle group. Here is what Delaney writes on the topic (click on jpeg to enlarge it).



Using an online face-and-emotion illustration (the movement demos don't work on my computer for some reason) you may be able to make your own understanding of the face muscles more clear:





Here is the frown muscle; it pulls the corners of the lips down but does little to help the lip aperture in the very center of the lips. However, maybe it helps stretch the upper lip downward in some players:




Here is the orbicularis obis muscle tissue that surrounds the lips. If you frown, and pull down the triangularis, you may affect these pursing and shaping muscles, but it is simpler and more direct to use the orbicularis obis muscles that are closest to the lips. The orbis alone can allow fine control of the lip aperture, especially in more advanced players:




And finally, although I'm no expert in these matters, here are the smile muscles, which as many of us have discovered, pull the lips away from the embouchure hole of the flute, which can be a very typical problem in student beginners who are told to smile to play the flute:




Hope this helps.

In general I don't know if we can simply look at a face and decide that the embouchure is too much, unless we are working one on one with a student, looking for tell-tale signs that they are overworking their muscles unecessarily.

After all, there are a zillion face types, muscle usages, dental formations and embouchure attempts, as well as the question of quality of tone.
If a player plays with good tone, in tune, and doesn't tire easily, then their embouchure is right for them, I guess.
Best,
Jen