A major part of flute playing is learning to manage
the flow of breath from your body into the body of the flute. Much of
the expressiveness of your music will come from the degree of control
and flexibility you have in your breathing.
In flute playing, breathing is done mainly from the
diaphragm, a muscle that extends horizontally across the bottom of the
chest and presses against the bottom of the lungs. To find your
diaphragm, push your stomach way out as you breathe in; then pull it
way in as you breathe out. (Make sure you're not getting the directions
backward!) The muscle that does that is the diaphragm, as it moves down
to allow the lungs to fill (stomach out), then up to squeeze air out of
them (stomach in).
Here is an exercise to give you the feel for proper
breathing: Stand erect, holding your elbows away from your body. Now
push your diaphragm straight down, and your chest muscles slightly
outward. The sensation should be that your entire upper body is a
bellows that's filling up, evenly and all at once. Your stomach should
not protrude very far forward, as it did in the initial exercise given
above. Instead, there should be a slight expansion in the stomach, and
a similar expansion in the small of the back, directly behind it. An
even smaller expansion should be felt around the chest, in the front
and back. There will be a very slight raising of the shoulders, but
this should come only as a result of the chest expansion, without any
movement of the shoulder muscles themselves.
Fill your lungs only as much as is comfortable,
then exhale by reversing the above instructions. When you have the feel
of the breathing, use it while blowing a note on your head joint.
Though this is actually a very natural way of
breathing, many people do not normally breathe fully, and they may have
trouble with it at first. You may have to build up the strength of your
diaphragm slowly over a period of time. The extra oxygen in your system
may cause dizziness and tingling feelings in your limbs, especially the
hands. This is called hyperventilation. Beginning players usually
aggravate the condition by using much more air than is necessary to
produce the sound. Hyperventilation will stop bothering you as you get
used to the extra air in your lungs and learn to blow more efficiently.