I've done this a lot, and all I and my colleagues do is make a
hissing sound with our tongue or lips when blowing. It's true that
the instrument itself does not make much noise unless you do
something other than blow air. Robert's other points stand, but
nobody I know takes off or inverts the mouthpiece unless the
directions say to do that.
Christopher
On 12-Mar-10, at 12-Mar-10 3:41 PM, Robert Patterson wrote:
This is not that unusual an effect for brass players. What composers
(including Ligeti) seem not to realize is that brass instruments are
designed *not to make noise* when you blow air through them, which
tends to defeat the purpose.
The proper way to get the desired effect is to remove the mouthpiece,
invert it, and blow the air thru the inverted mouthpiece across the
opening of the mouthpipe. The only caveat is you have to give the
player time to take the mouthpiece out and invert it. Any dynamic from
pp to ff is possible, but playing ff requires lots of air, so there is
no way for a single player to sustain a note for very long.
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Aaron Rabushka
<arabus...@austin.rr.com> wrote:
IIRC Ligeti calls on his brass players in Atmosphères to blow air
through
the instruments without any definite pitch or characteristic brass
instrument sound. Does anyone here know of others who have done
this, and
what the limits are? (You'd think having been a brass player I'd
know this,
but nothing comes to mind at the moment.)
Aaron J. Rabushka
arabus...@austin.rr.com
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
