One of my favorite diatribes as a teacher/coach is about the genesis of sound. The question is, where does it come from, and we follow that question from the back of the hall, through the air, into the instrument, the mouthpiece, the reed, the lungs… and before that? Somewhere in the brain, I guess. So let’s say we want to be “better musicians,” or “better at the trumpet,” or whatever; by the methodology above, we would need to first make sure we had some ideas about how we want to sound, and then to make sure that inner sound is prevailing as we work through phrases. And as we work through phrases in different ways (singing, playing, noodling), our inner voice is also refined and evolved. And as we move repeatedly through this process, we are aware that we are building an instinct. As a microcosm of this principle, I talk about metronome work. We practice with a metronome, so we learn our phrases with good time, good technical execution, and so we can create musical tension in some kind of controlled fashion. But we also have to be aware that eventually we must turn the metronome off, so we acknowledge that we are using an external stimulus to train our internal metronome, to build our instinct for keeping good time. And we repeat and repeat and repeat until that instinct is pretty good. The circle of life. All good, right?
Laying out only the above in a convincing way is enough to blow the minds of 98% of trumpeters out there, and consumes the vast time-bulk of the work I do with clients. But there is definitely something beyond that. I have read and researched so much to try and find the words and scholarship to give credence to this, but there’s not a lot out there. There is also a structure of beliefs and assumptions about music and our relationship to it that fundamentally shapes us. Here’s a very narrow example: take the opening of Schumann’s 2nd, the 2nd trumpet part. A violinist might be baffled to learn that this piece can knock all but a few out of any audition. Half notes with a smattering of other easy rhythmic tropes? But any trumpeter will tell you it is the stuff of many nightmares. But try this, trumpeters. Become a violinist for a moment. Say to yourself, it is just half notes. It is just a G. Sing it if you need to. I will treat you to a Diet Coke if it doesn’t work. And that’s my point. We have subconsciously set up a set of values about that particular piece. Low Gs are hard. Keeping slow quarters is damn near impossible. Sixteenths disrupt the flow.
So the 2% here, in my mind, picks up here: why do we feel stuck with those values, that clearly are not helping? Why is it such a difficult task to identify those assumptions and jettison them as necessary? There is so much to this. I haven’t even thought of the right words to describe this problem. Here’s another way to think about it. Why am I not playing with XYZ orchestra? I literally have every piece of skill and sound and knowledge I needed to win that audition (or any audition), and more. But I have established a series of assumptions and processes that reinforce those assumptions that have impeded my ability to deliver my best work, or even 80% of my best work. This is just an anecdote of course (although probably a true one), to help me describe the problem to you.
Obviously I am still working on that one. I’m not sure I even understand the issue. I do wonder though if we maybe become addicted to our problems. We fall in love with our limitations and protect our struggles. I love my failures and I want to just hug them forever. And maybe when we try to fix them in the ways of traditional practice, we are really just feeding them.
So here’s a little practice game I’ve been having fun with. There’s only one rule: “You can’t make something better by doing it again— only the same, or possibly worse.” Very challenging to practice like that. (It’s also not entirely true, of course). But the nice thing about this game is that it changes the nature of practice. Practicing becomes a much deeper, much more creative process for me. I can repeat a passage, but only after I have taken steps to change some assumption I have about it. It’s just a low G, why do I keep messing it up? Because some part of my loves messing it up, and going through the same process of fixing it, then messing it up again. So I let go of that process. How about I do something to challenge my assumption that this is even an excerpt I *need* to work on? I could play some low Gs and create a little displacement exercise to establish that I can reliably play a low G at literally any moment, in any context. Hopefully I have now challenged the assumption that that particular low G is somehow harder or different than any other. Ah, I see now. I am manipulating that note because I *believed* (incorrectly) it was different or harder, which was causing the problem.
If you have thought about this, maybe you have also thought about how insane this could be in other contexts. Like the assumptions we hold about ourselves more holistically. I assume I am not enough, or that I am too much. So then I manipulate who I am to try and fit the moment. But what if that assumption is false, or creating the problem? I can imagine that the solution is similar: create exercises that challenge that assumption. Imagine situations, or find small scale proof of concept real ones, where my unmanipulated most authentic self meets the moment perfectly.
More on this later perhaps. For now, I have to go play some low Gs.