#Note durations manuals

Breathing is about inspiration and expiration. I feel that this perception is far too narrow. We don’t think about inflow as music, but as necessary gaps within which the player can recover their breath so that they can get back to work. We have been taught to think of woodwind playing strictly in terms of what we hear as musical notes, which represents the outflow of air. How have we come to this pass? The answer is simple. The result: their arc of expression will diminish as they struggle to fulfil these enormous durations, and the whole affair will feel exhausting if not demoralising.

Now the player has no time to recover their breath, and their natural breathing cycle has been stretched past the limit. Reading this, our hypothetical student orchestrator figures out what that means in terms of beats per minute, and scores exceedingly long phrases in their work, one immediately following another. Freed from the necessity to learn about the limitations and natural processes inherent in breathing from the actual player, students might use these charts to justify composing completely unplayable phrases.įor instance, let’s assume that our chart says that oboe players can hold a note for 45 seconds. But once those values were established, their existence would pose a threat to intelligent scoring. We’d need to set a different value for each instrument and auxiliary, and adjust that for the lung capacity of each player. Take, for instance, the outcome of answering this question.

#Note durations manuals

This question shows that the manuals haven’t adequately covered the subject of how wind players breathe, and how that breath is used musically and expressively. This gap undoubtedly contributes to that question often posed by the student composer: “Just how long can a wind player hold a note?” It’s puzzling why, therefore, some orchestration manuals pass so lightly over the subject. 1 from “100 Orchestration Tips,” Part I: The Wind Section)īreathing for wind instruments is cyclical, not inexhaustible.īreathing is the foundational mechanism for the operation of wind instruments.