I don't know the answer to your question, but I've always called them long tones to differentiate them from short tones. In long tones, you vary your embouchure during a single note to try to get the sound you're looking for, whether it's pure or dirty. I was never taught to hold the long tone as long as possible, just as long as necessary. Short tones, OTOH, are brief puffs to try to get the attack, or initial sound of the tone, that you're looking for. So the embouchure is changed between notes, not during them.Katharine wrote:Out of curiosity-- what is the difference between "long tones" and what Jennifer Cluff calls "pure tones"? She seems to say that "long tones" are misnamed because the point of them is to develop tone and not breath capacity, so one shouldn't actually hold them as long as humanly possible, but other references seem to imply the opposite. Are they two separate things? I can see the value of both and am inclined to do both...
None of my teachers ever encouraged me to try to hold tones as long as humanly possible. In fact, Chris Norman said there's no such thing as breathing too often, just not often enough, and what some people interpret as breathing too often is just breathing improperly or at the wrong time (a non-musical breath). Another teacher put on a CD with Micho Russell playing a reel, and he breathed seven times in a single pass through the A part. I'd never noticed it before.