The Tongue

Next to problems with respiration, the most common problems with which students come to Jacobs are those concerning the tongue. The tongue is an unruly organ and has nothing to do with vibration, but can easily get into the air stream and negatively affect the tone’s production.

 

 

From Arnold Jacobs: Song and Wind*

Training the tongue by musculature is difficult if not impossible. Jacobs prefers solving problems of the tongue through speech, with consonant and vowel relationships. For example, the syllables “ooh-thu” and “kee-hoe” are used for the back and forth motion. “Hah” vs. “sssssss” move the tongue from the lower to upper portions of the mouth. To experience a constricted air flow, say “tee, yee, tee, yee.” To experience an open airway, say “ah, oh, ooh.”

Jacobs spoke about an oboe player who was having problems with her respiration. Her biggest problem was that she had an oversized tongue—”Her tongue in repose was taking up too much room in her oral cavity.”

His method of dealing with the problem was not to lecture her about her tongue—there was nothing that she could do about its size. Instead, he started by giving her speech exercises. “We had to do it by opening up the airway. You cannot communicate with a tongue. It will just stiffen up and be very uncooperative. But you can communicate beautifully with it through speech.” He started by making the speech out of vowels. He also started by showing her how to compensate for an airway blocked by the tongue. “Take a drowning person, what do you do? He is choking on his tongue—you pull his chin forward and pull out his tongue. Just moving your chin forward will tend to open the pharynx. So she could see right away that she could compensate for her tongue by opening her airway more.” He demonstrated how it is done reflexively in speech by the use of vowels. Then bit by bit he built on this insight so that she learned over many months to tie into a vowel concept in which her airway became subconsciously open.

Rather than concentrating on the position of the tongue, Jacobs relies on a proper signal being sent from the brain with the musculature of the tongue responding naturally.

The sensory nerves of the tongue provide very little information to the brain. “I would suggest that the student be more aware of what good articulation should sound like, rather than what it should feel like. With success, in good articulation, will come sensations with which the player can familiarize himself.”

*Arnold Jacobs: Song and Wind, Copyright 1996 Windsong Press, Ltd., All rights reserved.