Flute Teaching for the Non-Flutist

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Flute Teaching for the Non-Flutist

Posted by Thomas J. West on September 1, 2008 at 3:57 PM

Unless flute was your major instrument, it is likely that your ability to demonstrate proper flute embouchure to a student is limited. The best way to learn, of course, is to pick up a flute with your students and learn along with them. If you have a music education degree from a creditable institution, you most likely had the woodwind methods class that gave you a taste of playing the instrument yourself. You probably don't have enough clock time on the instrument to develop much tone or control of the flute, however.

Some teachers may be self-conscious about playing in front of their students on an instrument they are not strong on, especially if they teach secondary level students. Unless you have a student who lacks respect for you as a teacher and will use the opportunity to have a swelled sense of importance, most students are happy to see their teacher learning to play their instrument better.The one thing that you as a professional can do that they can't is apply your experience from another instrument to the mechanics of flute playing. You will very quickly be pointing out pitfalls and making some suggestions to the students as you detect those difficulties in your own execution.

Tone Production: The Most Important Reason to Play Yourself

Any teacher can learn the fingerings for the instrument and apply that in their teaching without ever picking up a flute. Unless you have direct experience with playing the flute yourself, you have to learn how to tell students to adjust their embouchure for proper tone production by doing a lot of observing and reading on your own. It is simply a physical skill that you must have some direct applied experience with in order to teach it effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of school band directors don't really "teach" embouchure and tone production, especially at the secondary level. Many secondary teachers just rely on their elementary feeder programs to teach the kids what they need to know before they get to high school.

In producing the correct embouchure, it is essential that a player be capable of producing a full-bodied flute tone by playing on the head joint alone, disconnected from the flute body. Many students develop bad habits with embouchure because of bad habits in hand position on the flute body that transfer to the head joint. The most common of these is having a tone hole that is either rolled in too far or rolled out too much. This changes intonation and makes playing in tune an near impossibility.

When playing on the head joint alone, the tone hole should be pointing directly at the ceiling, the lower lip should form around the lip plate in a totally relaxed manner, and the upper lip should form to create the proper opening. When blowing a note, the pitch produced should be a concert A4 (A 440) and should produce a loud, full, and resonant tone. Until a student, regardless of age or years of experience, can produce this tone effectively and automatically, their progress as a flutist will be minimal.

Stealing a Page Out Of The Brass Handbook

The other part of embouchure control that a flute player must have is the ability to change registers using the embouchure only. Just like a brass player, the flute player has direct control of which overtone, or partial, the instrument is producing. Brass players practice lip slurs to develop control, accuracy, and flexibility of changing pitches in this fashion. It is my belief that flute players should practice the same. I have students practice blowing the airstream onto their palm and make it "travel" up and down their palm by moving their jaw forward and back.

On the head joint alone, an average flute player should be able to at least produce A4 and A5 an octave higher. More experienced player will be able to produce more. With the full flute assembled, I have students practice lip slurs just like a brass player does, starting usually on long-body notes such as low D, E, or F. I have them keep the fingering constant and use their embouchure to slur up and produce the pitch an octave higher. The regular fingering for these upper octaves is usually not the same as the fingering in the lower octave, so the note will come out reluctantly, often with stifled tone or inaccurate intonation. Slurring in this manner, however, forces the embouchure to make it all happen.

The overtones starting from low D, for example, are the same as the brass partials. I have students play these slurred to the top note, then take a breath and slur descending as well:

Developing consistency in this regard is critical to flute player success.

Teaching Flute Vibrato

Another skill that just never gets covered in methods class is how to teach flute vibrato. Flutists use a diaphragm vibrato (unlike saxophone, which is done with the embouchure). I have students sustain a top-line F and pulse the air in the following pattern:

It is impossible to do this style of vibrato unless the airstream is completely relaxed and free of any muscular tension anywhere in the body, so you may need to return to breath support basics to get a student to make vibrato a part of their playing.

These are all teaching strategies I developed after experiencing flute first-hand as I played along with students. Clarinet is my primary instrument, so if you'd like to hear these concepts relayed to you from a flute specialist, watch the excellent short video at this website. I think you'll find my concepts and hers and nearly identical (I didn't watch the video before I wrote this article, honest!)

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