Circular breathing—An introspective study across all types of wind-instrument generators

Abstract

Circular breathing is an extended technique for wind instruments to play a continuous sound. To do so, the performer pushes out air temporarily stored in the cheeks while inhaling. In the second part of the cycle, the player exhales, refilling the air in the cheeks while driving the wind instrument. The two main challenges of this technique are maintaining a constant embouchure and air supply. This talk spans from the author’s Hyperspecialization technique on the soprano saxophone that involves all major types of wind-instrument generators, including brass, flute, double-reed, single-reed, and free-reed generators. The history, difficulty, and outcome for each generator type will be discussed. The free-reed generator is the easiest to perform with circular breathing because the free-reed resonance frequency only depends on fingering and cannot be controlled by embouchure. The embouchure for the flute generator is very different from the other circular breathing techniques, and transferred knowledge and experience can hardly be applied. The type of wind-instrument generator itself is not always a good indicator of the easiness of performing circular breathing. For brass embouchures, for example, the didjeridu adapter was much easier to perform with circular breathing than the cornetto mouthpiece because of the latter’s tight embouchure requirements. For double reeds, the duduk reed was more challenging than the bassoon reed, because it requires much more air to excite the instrument.