When playing wind instruments, the musical term 'embouchure' refers to the positioning of what?

Embouchure or lipping is the use of the lips, facial muscles, tongue, and teeth in playing a wind instrument. This includes shaping the lips to the mouthpiece of a woodwind instrument or the mouthpiece of a brass instrument. The word is of French origin and is related to the root bouche, 'mouth'. Proper embouchure allows instrumentalists to play their instrument at its full range with a full, clear tone and without strain or damage to their muscles.

While performing on a brass instrument, the sound is produced by the player buzzing his or her lips into a mouthpiece. Pitches are changed in part through altering the amount of muscular contraction in the lip formation. The performer's use of the air, tightening of cheek and jaw muscles, as well as tongue manipulation can affect how the embouchure works.

More Info: en.wikipedia.org

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41 Comments

Larry Freeman

Donna Bayar Repsher, Oui, comme dans "fermez la bouche".

erik hughes

teresab, that means "shut your mouth", and has nothing to do with playing an instrument.

teresab

Relates to ferme la bouche,

Mary McAvinew Bowles

I play flute and french horn, it was a term one heard either in private lessons or in band.

dsneed

tesla alset, Great reply tesla. It's good to learn more about you. Keep up your sharing with us. We apprciate it.

valanion

The positioning of the Fingers is fixed on Wind instruments and the mouth is the only other thing that is used except maybe in the Bagpipes so I chose mouth which meant I had a good chance of it being right

Dave Walser

Merle is not smallest bird of prey little owl is

jack patti go

Got it! Only made sense!

james parrillo

I did not take French. I would not know how to pronounce la bouche correctly. Maybe, it would sound like a nonexistent English word boosh? My great grandparents were Slavish, from Slovakia. A word they taught my mother is bozk. That means kiss. I never saw the bozk before I researched it today. I had only heard them say it. It sounds, to me, more like the b, the u in push, than maybe a g(soft), and long e, in two syllables. The French word is probably one syllable. In my mind, it could have sounded like the Slavish word I heard pronounced, as listed above, b-u-g-ee. I would not have guessed a term applied to the placement of the lips. Thank you, Christine, James's wife

silrem

CATEGORY HISTORY??? NO NO! Should be Culture among the choices Quizz gives us. I hate obvious mischaracterizations.

Suzanne Beer

Makes sense ..

Lynne Zeman

I played the clarinet in high school and that instrument had minimum need for embouchure, but brass instruments, trumpet, sax, slide trombone certainly did.