I bagan studying flute last year, but I had a bad illness which I'm now finishing therapies of.
The problem is doctors told me - as for playing flute - I could have problems sometimes with excessive saliva, sometimes with dry mouth.
I must find the courage to ask them if there's a therapy for such a problem.
In any case, have you ever had some excessive saliva or dry mouth? Are there meds?
Are there METHODS and STUDIES one can make to learn and practice and face these maddening problems?
Well, as far as I'm aware there are no meds to control saliva (you'd need to be having a pretty serious problem with it to consider that route, in any case), but I'm no doctor.
It's not unusual for saliva to accumulate while you play. Try to keep yourself well-hydrated, even when you're not playing. Not only will this prevent damage to your lips, but it can help control salivation. When you're actually in the middle of a practice session or performance, try storing the saliva under your tongue (or in some other out-of-the-way area of your mouth) until you get a chance to swallow it.
Storing it in the mouth tends to work for awhile, but is not always effective. For me, it perhaps works for maybe about a page, or even lesser. Any longer and the saliva will start to obstruct with flute playing. It's even trickier when i have a piece which has extremely short rests and no time to swallow.
chaos0008 wrote:Storing it in the mouth tends to work for awhile, but is not always effective. For me, it perhaps works for maybe about a page, or even lesser. Any longer and the saliva will start to obstruct with flute playing. It's even trickier when i have a piece which has extremely short rests and no time to swallow.
If you can get through a page without swallowing, you should be fine. If you're playing at 144, you really only need two or 3 beats of rest to swallow, take a breath, and be ready to keep going, and in most pieces, you get at least a small reprieve, even if the page is pretty black. At slower tempos you need even fewer rests to pull this off.
Actually there are meds that can dry out a mouth. I've got a really wet mouth (or so two different dentists have told me). The one I currently go to now just has that little vacuum thing going all the time with me. The other one gave me pills to take before I came in to dry me out. Don't remember what they were called.
Of course, you don't want to be taking pills every day to control this. However, perhaps your dentist could prescribe something that you could try a time or two and then keep handy for concert day (of course, you don't want to try something new on concert day -- what if it made you pass out or get hives or something awful).
As for me, I just count on being drooly and having spit drip out the end of my flute now and then. And, when I swab it, I keep the cloth out of the case to dry.
