Comments On Other Blogs

I've recently been doing more commenting on other blogs than posting here. Doing this post just to have a convenient bookmark for them all.

Talking about Taruskin at Elaine Fine's.

Talking about embouchure at Dave Wilkin's.

Talking about music as healing at Kyle Gann's and at New Music Box and at Pliable's.

Horn Diary

Back in August I got a new horn and it's been an amazing ride ever since. The move was from a Yamaha 567 to a 667, and it's still hard for me to believe how much easier it is to play. It's physically lighter, so playing off the leg as I do is less tiring, but the main thing is that the "slots" for each pitch are so much easier to hit. It's as if they are more uniform throughout the full range of the horn and that there's a much more either/or feel to getting the right pitch. 

It's also the case that I find it much easier to hit what note I want at the beginning of a piece, or after a long rest. That used to be a scary proposition for some pitches, but somehow those better defined slots make that easier as well.

With the new horn, my high G immediately went from sometimes there to just as good as the notes right below it, and the high Ab and A are starting to be possible. The written D a ninth above middle C has also become much easier to play. Previously it was always something like a register shift that I didn't always get, and now it's just another note.

Overall the instrument just feels more refined, especially the rotor levers. I now sometimes notice I'm playing with exactly the right amount of finger effort and that the valves changes are much more synchronous with embouchure changes as I move from note to note.

The overall tone is more refined as well, though I wonder if I'll ever be able to get that raw sense of anguish I got during the Fauré Requiem on the old horn. 

I didn't post on the new horn right away because I wondered if there'd be a honeymoon period right at first, and there was. After about 10 days or two weeks there was a week or two of getting that slight buzzing sound that almost sounds like something is loose, but that somewhere Farkas says is a bit of saliva right in the aperture of the embouchure. After a while I somehow adjusted and the horn plays as it did right at first.

Since my background is largely in stringed instruments - guitar, cello and banjo - I'd never really experienced how a better instrument is so much easier to play. With the strings the same technique will sound better on a better instrument, but there's nowhere near as much of a sense of the instrument being so much easier to play. 

On a different topic - I've finally begun to transpose horn music. The same local music man who organized the Fauré Requiem a couple of years ago is going to do the Brahms Requiem this spring and has asked me to play, so I downloaded the horn parts. I don't think I'll ever be able to transpose at sight, but working with this music over a couple of weeks I've been able to play it as written and not needing to put it in Finale and transposing it, as I always thought I would have to. Because I've played piano since childhood, both bass and treble clef read as second nature - and with all the arranging I've been doing, viola clef and tenor clef make sense to me. With that background, seeing music written in one key and playing it in another is really just sort of another clef substitution.

One last thing is a comment on the strength of muscle memory. The trigger on the new horn was set up as they all are, needing the trigger pulled to get the Bb horn. Back when I had my embouchure crisis and began working with Jeff Smiley's Balanced Embouchure method, I also restrung the trigger so that doing nothing gives me the Bb side and depressing the trigger gives me the F. My thought was that I was tensing up way too much in places I didn't need to when playing the Bb side, so that relaxing the thumb when going that direction helped me counter the over stressing. (I get a lot of strange looks from regular horn players). Anyway, the point is that until I restrung the new horn, I really couldn't play it as the trigger feeling backwards threw me for a loop. Intellectually I knew it really shouldn't make a difference, but it did. I went to a store to try out the new horn, but basically decided to get it on faith as I couldn't really play it as it was.

Flute Diary

This summer I spent a lot of time on the alto flute after something like seven years of hardly touching it and it was great to play it again. I recruited Hayley from the Orange community band to join me and Dr. Andy to work up music I'd arranged back in the 90's for flute, alto flute, and cello, along with some things I'd written for keyboard with those instruments.

Jumping around from instrument over the years has its drawbacks, but there are wonderful advantages as well. All the work with the horn and the regular flute meant I was able to get much better tone and volume on the alto flute than I did in the past. There's also sometimes a complete absence of the hissing, tire leaking air sound that used to be a regular feature.

I think the work with BE, Jeff Smiley's embouchure method for trumpet and horn, helped me better understand the way all the breathing and muscles work together to produce the embouchure, and that the better you "get" that, the easier it is to have a comfortably open throat and jaw, which in turn allows for creating centered, full tone. 

With both flute and horn my tendency was to obsess over what the lips were doing. I've never particularly liked buzz words, but that 60's hip term gestalt really fits the bill for explaining the true nature of embouchure. Embouchure is how everything else you're doing manifests in the lips. I realize this is one of those commonplaces of teaching wind instruments, but it's also one of those things where you have to experience what the words are talking about. Just because the words make sense to you doesn't mean you have a full understanding of their import. 

The other thing that has struck me (all over again) is what a perfect trio the flute, alto flute and cello make. There's the wonderful balance of treble, midrange and bass sounds, and the flutes have that difference tone ghost of an extra instrument from time to time, and all three are agile instruments.

Horn Diary

This summer has been the best I've ever had on the horn. During the hiatus of the community band I successfully got back the Farkas  Very Deep Cup mouthpiece I started with years ago, but moved away from when I had the embouchure crisis and the callus a while back, when I switched to a Medium Cup and then the Deep Cup for a while. I love the tone of the VDC mouthpiece and that its thin rim allows for so much embouchure movement inside the rim. While it might be marginally better for me to stick with a smaller mouthpiece for band music, and to match the first horn player's tone, I'm going with what I like more in the music I'm doing away from band.

One set of pieces I've been working on are the 12 Duos Mozart wrote for horn. I got the music years ago, but the gauntlet of preparing band music drew me away from it, and it's been wonderful music to come back to. Like some of the Handel pieces, they combine simplicity with musicality, with every note perfectly placed. One thing I've really enjoyed has been the detailed articulation, which seems to be the original intent of Mozart. They're making for great exercises as well as pleasing pieces for both me and the brass group. I'm putting them in keys that allow the trumpet and horn play 1st and 2nd voice up and then horn/trombone and Eb tuba down an octave.

Now that I seem to have some basic horn technique to work with I keep noticing an issue of brain rewiring. Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line. And I keep being caught off guard by how an interval, of say a fourth, feels different up and down the range of the horn, whereas on the piano it feels the same everywhere.

Something else I've had since I got the horn and got back to this summer are books of the hunting horn calls. I can finally play all the high F's and occasional G's called for. The blend of signaling and music is both fun and interesting. One thing I'm trying to arrange for the brass group is the old hunting song "Do you ken John Peel at the break of day" with some of the hunting calls between the verses.

As for community band, having a 1st horn player has made it a much more pleasant experience in that I'm not in the position of having to play music that's really too hard for me. Not playing the higher note in harmonies is a challenge after years of doing so, as is trying to be in tune with the 1st horn more than the band as a whole. But all of that seems to be coming along, and simply hearing how a good player plays band music is a continuing revelation. It's sort of like a dialect I've never gotten the hang of because I'd never heard it spoken.

Me and BE

 "BE" is the short hand label for Jeff Smiley's "The Balanced Embouchure" approach to helping people with trumpet and horn embouchure, of which I'm a big fan and have posted on a number of times over the past couple of years. 

James Boldin has just done a post on it and here is part of the comment I put down below it. It's the best brief summary of my response to BE I've come up with so far.

Appreciate the open minded approach to Jeff Smiley’s work. I’ve been watching the debate on this for years, ever since getting his book and using his approach to get through an embouchure crisis that had me thinking about giving up the horn.

My sense of it all is that it can be very helpful for people looking to take a new direction due to the standard approaches not helping whatever issues they might be wanting to work through and who are willing to rebuild from the ground up.

For those for whom the standard approaches are working, though, a major overhaul and starting all over is something of a threatening prospect.

What I most appreciate about Jeff’s approach is that it helped me get a much broader and deeper understanding and feeling for what the embouchure can do and needs to do, and that helped me figure out what I needed to do to get everything working. He gives you the tools, but the responsibility is yours, and that’s a nice fit for how I like to work with people.

The other thing about Jeff’s approach I really like is that it goes well with all the neuroscience coming out saying how making music uses so many different areas of the brain, not all of which are always under our conscious control. His exercises helped me get a better sense of that when it comes to playing the horn.

My guess is that a lot of music educators don’t “get” what he’s up to because it’s so very difficult to look at something differently after a lifetime of building up something has worked for them. Besides, most people in the field are probably “naturals” to one degree or another and can’t really conceive what it’s like for the rest of us who aren’t. I’ll never be a natural horn player, but Jeff’s book helped me understand what that must be like and what I have to do to approximate it.

James says he's going to get the book and try it out. I look forward to his response and maybe talking with him about it. I'm also reminded I printed out Dave Wilken's somewhat riled up take down, with the idea of comparing it to the book the next time I reread it. The thing is that I've been having such a great time on the horn, particularly since my flow experience with the Fauré Requiem, I haven't felt a need for a refresher.

Horn Diary

I've mostly settled into the Farkas Deep Cup mouthpiece. The diameter may be a bit too big for me, but since switching back at the beginning of the year there's been steady improvement in control and endurance from that moment of switching. The improvement has slowed, but I don't think the point of diminishing returns has been reached. I so much prefer the tone of the larger mouthpiece I really want to work as hard as I can to make it work. I'm also getting those unsolicited positive comments on my tone that I used to get when I used the Very Deep Cup mouthpiece those first years, but that dried up when I was on the Medium Cup. 

Being a total long term novice at the horn, I'm not sure how best to talk about the tone I'm going for and that various band directors and musical friends, whose advice I value, have complimented. The one thing that has given me more of what I want (outside of mouthpieces) has been playing off the leg. That lets the horn vibrate throughout and fully develop its timbre. 

In his book on the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, Christopher Hogwood makes the point that Handel was the first to bring the horn in from the out of doors to play with the instruments of the court. What I love about the horn is that it can have an amazing out of doors sound without having to be brassy. 

Two other things that happened back at the beginning of the year were my getting my first lesson ever and a fine player from the Charlottesville Municipal band joining us here in Orange so as to have the opportunity to play first horn.

The lesson went very well in that no horrible technique issues were discovered and that the embouchure I've worked out using BE looks good and sounds good to a regular teacher. Alternate fingerings were demonstrated and more of them made sense to me than when trying them previously over the years. Since I no longer am responsible for first horn parts, I get to spend a lot more time down on the F horn and get to mostly stay away from all the high stuff on the Bb horn.

Playing second horn is an absolute treat. When I was the only one playing off beats I'd always have to drop out a measure every so often to keep from sliding back on the beat. Just having to follow/be with someone else is astonishingly easier. After playing the first horn parts for so long, playing that secondary harmony under the first parts is a much different proposition, but as I get used to it is a lot of fun. Though it's all written out, it's not dissimilar to throwing on a vocal harmony line to someone else's vocal solo.

My biggest problem right now is getting used to the alternate fingerings. Playing the G above middle C on the F horn is much easier than on the Bb side, but it "tastes" very different. Sometimes it feels so different than what I'm used to I think I'm playing the wrong note. On the other hand, using the third finger instead of one and two for the A below middle C has been a revelation - it speaks more easily, and has better tone and intonation. Besides knowing more now than I used to, I think playing off the leg and having a mouthpiece that allows flexibility have really refreshed my playing. There are times it feels as though I have a new instrument.

Music Educators' Gated Community

Over the weekend I came across a post of Dave Wilken's from back last March which is a lacerating review of Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure. Before getting to the specifics of the disagreements, I want to do this post laying out what I think are the divergent world views which underlie them.

I think of music educators as a privileged elite living in a gated community. As children they were blessed by nature and/or nurture to have what it takes to pass the audition to get into their school's music program, which serves a minority of students and is often callous in its rejection of those viewed as unworthy. They benefited from a lot of money and attention spent on them the other students miss out on. 

As time went on, they excelled in the very Darwinian advancement process, which tends to favor technique (which is somewhat quantifiable) over musicality (which is much more subjective). By the time they reach the top of the heap, they've spent their entire career with folks just like themselves. They've never had to work with "regular" people. And sort of like the Harry Potter wizards, there's often an us versus them view of the "muggles."

For those admitted into the system it works very well, but I think it sets the members of that gated community up for not appreciating the issues associated with helping those outside it learn how to make music. Because they never think about those issues, my feeling is that certain biases creep into their framing of those issues.

I'm often reminded of the Victorians of the Industrial Revolution when reading music education materials. They're often based on Cartesian dualism, where the body is like a factory full of machines waiting for the brain to be the captain of industry laying out what has to be done. Apply industriousness and force of character to a correct understanding of the mechanisms involved and all can be achieved. 

The problem with that view is that it presumes the conscious mind is 100% in charge, but the new neuroscience suggests that's not the case at all, the work of Benjamin Libet being some of the earliest work on this subject.

As a side note I'd add that the "force of character" angle also helps those living outside the gated community understand the verbal abuse that educators veer into from time to time and that students (at least those not offended and quit) seem completely OK with. My guess is that students accept the verbal abuse as par for the course due to the combination of their agreeing with the notion that simply trying harder is often the answer to musical problems (they are an elite, after all), and the (perhaps unconscious) knowledge they can be expelled from the elite as easily as they were admitted.

As a therapist, the population I most want to serve are all those of us outside the gated community. As for Jeff Smiley, my sense is that years of mindfulness while teaching has led him to an approach very much at odds with that of most educators, and one that I find to be a great way to approach music making in general for "the rest of us". It really works for me, but I can see how someone who's spent a lifetime with another world view that has worked for them isn't going to appreciate how valuable it can be for someone with "beginners mind" when it comes to making music.

2/8/11 - When I put this post up I sent a note to Dave saying I'd be happy to put any response he had to it down at the bottom of it. Here's what he said down in the comment section (with slight editing):

Hi, Lyle. Interesting read and I look forward to reading more details. Thanks also for the link. I think Jonathan's summary of my opinions in his comment above is spot on.

The broad strokes you paint with in this post make it difficult for me to step back and objectively see how my teaching philosophy or review of BE mirror a "gated community." On the one hand, I do feel that the "ivory tower" culture of academia sometimes makes us miss where the metal meets the mouth. On the other, some people outside that culture could benefit from poking their head inside the tower and looking around once in a while. I think the idea of a lone genius with a personal lab of students revolutionizing brass pedagogy is largely a myth. Real progress is a collaborative effort, opposite a "gated community."

In the comment below Dave's I try to be more clear about what's meant by "gated community".

Dave has also done a second post on Jeff's work here. 

And as an example of what Jung would call synchronicity (and a skeptic mere coincidence), here is the latest post over on Scott (Mr. Dilbert) Adams' blog where he turns his "thinking out of the box" mind loose on education as we know it.

A few moments later - Here's a link that just popped up suggesting an effect of diet on education which I want to save for a future post on Dave's reservations about Jeff's talking about general health matters in his embouchure book.

2/9/11 - Here's another synchronous/coincidental link, this time from Pliable (another outside the box thinker). A snip from near the end of his post:

I looked in vain at last night's performance for any of the mainstream music journalists who repeatedly pronounce on the future of music education from nearby London.

Live Music for Parkinson's Patients

Here's a brief item about a regional orchestra looking to see if being in the presence of live music can benefit Parkinson's patients. They're taking a first step towards evaluating anecdotes such as this one:

"One of the Phil's chorus member's tremors stop when he goes to the concerts. They start at intermission and stop again in the second half,". . . 

This reminds me of both how singing can help some people overcome a stutter and how music can still get through to people with late stage Alzheimer's. 

It may also tie in to this quote from a post over on Horn Matters by a professional horn player talking about what he thinks was a bout of focal dystonia:

I realized that my attention, especially when warming up, had shrunk down to that tiny area of my face involved in making a buzz. I widened my focus, specifically to include my air column and posture and on maintaining what I call a “supported” setting AND a relaxed, non-stressed mental state.

The speaker is Mark Taylor, identified as a "jazz hornist". His phrase "widen my focus" is the most succinct statement I've seen of how involving more of the brain and body can help clear what seem to be localized problems. It's also a very good way of putting how I think Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure (BE) helped me with my embouchure. It's that change of focus I also like to bring to my therapist's approach to helping people make music.

Plus, I'm delighted to hear that there is such a thing as a "jazz hornist".

The other thing that struck me about the music organization playing to the Parkinson's patients was that there's a whole new way they could serve the community. 

Horn Diary

In this post Jonathan West talks about different kinds of horn tone. Back the weekend before Christmas I played horn in the community concert band's Christmas program on Saturday night and then in a cantata Sunday morning. It was a wonderful experience of the difference between the first tone Jonathan talks about (wind quintet and small ensembles), and the last (concert band).

In the community band I'm the only horn, with five trumpets, two trombones and three baritones. I generally play at least shade higher than the given dynamic when against the other brass, just to get some balance. Over the years I've discovered that a brassy tone can help being heard, and have been encouraged to play that way. The problem is I didn't take up horn to be able to make that sort of sound. I understand its place in the band arranger's palette, but feel trumpets can do brassy much better. 

The sound that appeals to me is more what Jonathan talks about first, that of the horn in a small ensemble. Since September I've been listening to a recording an ensemble Jonathan is in playing a wind quintet I wrote sometime back. Without consciously realizing it at first, hearing that tone of Jonathan's changed the sound I'm getting from the horn, and the cantata was a perfect piece of music to explore that tone.

Dave Wilken often says we make a mistake when we assign the reason for musical growth to a particular cause, because when we practice we're doing lots of things, not just the one thing we might be focused on at the time. I agree with that, but also feel that listening to my friend Susan's flute tone this summer and hearing Jonathan's horn tone on that recording both had a catalytic effect, as those aural experiences made me more aware of what I wanted on each of those instruments and, on a proprioceptive level, how to get there.

During this past semester I started playing "off the leg" and am enthused with the results.

When I started horn I used a Farkas very deep cup mouthpiece because I liked the tone. When I had my embouchure crisis and began working with Jeff Smiley's BE method I also switched to a Farkas medium cup mouthpiece. I didn't like the tone as well, but it was lots easier to play.

During the brief hiatus from band I've been switching to a Farkas medium deep cup. I instantly felt better able to lip pitches into tune, which I think is due to there being more lip inside the wider diameter, so there's more to work with. My hope is this mouthpiece will be something of a compromise between ease of playing and the tone I prefer.

I've been spending nearly all my playing time on the F horn, and have been enjoying not having to play 1st horn parts. In the past when band was in session, just trying to keep up with simply being able to play all the parts took most of my energy. These days my endurance and range are much better, and having become familiar with concert band writing, my hope is I can learn those parts much more quickly and then still have time and lip each day for chamber style music.

Jeff Smiley & Neuroscience

Here lately I've realized that the best way to explain my championing Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure is that his book and method take into account, more than any other I've encountered, what the neuroscience is telling us about music making. There are a lot of levels and systems in play, and learning how to make music means learning and getting a feel for a lot of different things and modes of behavior and getting it all to work together. 

Every time I've reread The Balanced Embouchure there have been head slapping epiphanies, and I think that's due to his covering so many bases, it's hard to hold it all in your head at the same time. Next time around I'm going to keep notes on the different aspects he covers. Then maybe I can figure out how to apply that to music making as a whole, not just embouchure formation.

A crucial part of getting all these systems working together is devising exercises that allow the brain to make it's own adjustments, as opposed to trying to tell each muscle what it should be doing. I was reminded of this by this post over on Hornmatters, where Professor Ericson puts up a letter written by one of the authors of methods he's been discussing, William C. Robinson. Here's a short quote that rang the bell for me:

. . . Think the pitch, quality and sound you want and the brain (which is the greatest computer ever invented) will tell the embouchure what to do to produce that tone. You don’t try to control the embouchure by trying to control the embouchure – instead, think the pitch, use the air and the brain will tell the embouchure what to do to produce that sound.

Horn Diary

The Mouthpiece Honeymoon Syndrome  

The last entry mentioned my wanting to go back to the Farkas deep cup (DC) mouthpiece after using the medium cup (MC) since the meltdown. I ended up back with the MC because I got fooled by the mouthpiece honeymoon syndrome one more time. In an exchange with Bruce Hembd a while back, he confirmed that this is a real issue experienced by other (real) horn players.

Basically what happens is you come across a mouthpiece different from the one you're currently using, the new one works fantastically well, you switch over, only to have the bottom fall out around 10 days to two weeks later. Back this spring I actually got into the third week before all the wonderful things turned to not so wonderful things.

What seems to be the case is that while your embouchure "set" for the initial mouthpiece can work even better on another mouthpiece, the foundation isn't there, so (for me) the part of the embouchure touching the mouthpiece gets out of whack with all the rest of your physical involvement with the instrument.

It's not as bad as a complete meltdown, but leaves the seemingly unanswerable question of whether you should go through the whole rearrangement in hopes of coming out ahead of where you are. I decided to go back to the MC, and bought a medium deep cup (MDC) to try out over time.

Reed Embouchure

We have a sax player in the Friday group, who has wonderful tone and intonation on the tenor sax. He also plays the alto sax in the Presbyterian Ensemble. It's the soprano sax, though, that he's really keen on, having only recently given it a lot of time. His sound reminds me strongly of my sound on the horn. The higher I go, the more tentative and unsure it gets, but with the soprano sax I think you have even less room for error with both tone and intonation. It may well be the least forgiving instrument in the band. To my ear, only the piccolo can come close in sounding as flat out wrong.

He's mentioned a couple of times how he realizes he needs to "loosen up" his embouchure as he goes higher. Makes me think of BE. Just wrote him this in an e-mail and hope to pursue it with him:

I've been using a book/method for horn called "The Balanced Embouchure", which was written by a trumpet player and there's a horn player who has adapted the exercises for horn. Turned me around.

Here's the basic idea as it affected my playing. We tend to think the embouchure is just the muscles right at where the mouth meets the instrument. I had ended up super stressing those muscles to the point of collapse one day in rehearsal (turns out this is not unknown among the horn players I'm in touch with via the net).

The method is for brass embouchure, but I'm thinking the deep principle might help other embouchures as well.

Here's the deal - whatever you can vary in your embouchure - do it in extremes. Get used to the feeling of doing it really wrong in one direction, and then go do it just as wrong in the other direction. Doing this shows you how much deeper into your musculature your embouchure goes. If you get all of it going just right somewhere between the two extremes, not just the bit closest to and touching the instrument, your control will be much firmer, and your ability to fine tune tone and intonation much enhanced.

There is, of course, way more to the Balanced Embouchure than this, but this idea of exploring extremes to better understand and feel the middle is one of the underlying notions of BE that I want to try using in realms of music making beyond trumpet and horn embouchure.

Horn Diary

In the past week four horns from the Charlottesville Municipal Band sat in with our community band for two rehearsals and two concerts. I continued to play 2nd horn and sat with 1 and 2 on my left and 3 and 4 on my right. It was even more fun than the last time this happened. 

For one thing, having an idea of what to expect left me in a better position for more critical listening. Before when this happened, experiencing for the first time what being in a horn section sounds like had such a powerful effect, details got lost. I also had more opportunities for conversation and all four of the players were gracious and very informative in their responses, and were very good about letting me look closely at their instruments and mouthpieces.

My main takeaway was just how good they are. I was extremely knowledgeable about the music, having struggled for two months trying to play my part close to adequately. On their first read through they didn't make any real errors, but some of the bits I'd had trouble with weren't as smooth as the rest. What amazed me was how quickly they improved. We went through the program four times, and every time their playing was significantly improved and more musical. For them, the technique is there, it's just a question of mentally inhabiting what the score and the conductor want. Made me realize just how rudimentary my technique is.

What I enjoyed most was hearing them interpret all the expression and articulation markings in the music. Having grown up playing piano I don't fully appreciate what those marks can mean, especially on the horn. I kept having the thought that they were sculpting shapes in the sound of the music. So much of music making is the mental space you have of what's possible, and anything you can do to increase that is beneficial. I may not be able to be as expressive as they are, but hearing what they did shows me the way.

Something else that I kept noticing was a quality to the tone that I'd missed previously. I could hear 1 and 2 a lot better, and 1 had a new instrument and that might be part of it. Words are going to fail me here, but what I heard from time to time was that point midway between brassy and mellow, an amazing urgency within glorious tone. I had an involuntary emotional response to the "call" of the horn. I can't ever remember having such a visceral response to a musical tone quality. 

They all had mouthpieces with nicely rounded rims - none approaching the thinness of the Farkas VDC. One player loaned me a Schilke 31, which is close to a 32, which I think I'm going to get one of. Big cup, large diameter opening, and comfortable rim. 

It still amazes me how unsettled the horn is as a physical instrument. They all had different wraps and ways of draining condensation.

I've seen occasional mentions of a sort of stereotype for horn players - very nice people with a bit of eccentricity thrown in. These four players certainly have the being nice people aspect down - they drove something like a total of 200 miles without remuneration to play with a group far less accomplished than their band. They could not have been more helpful to me with my questions. As to the eccentricity, if that is the case, for me that's not a bug but a feature, being a somewhat biased observer on that issue.

Horn Diary

The intonation issues I wrote about in the last entry had several causes.

One was the position of the right hand. I had decided it was too far out of the horn and ended up having it too far in. To my ear it seems that having the hand too far in affects intonation of the different valve positions differently.

That problem was exacerbated by not using my embouchure well for that final tweak on intonation. A year ago, when I began incorporating Balanced Embouchure principles in my horn practice, I also switched to a different mouthpiece with a thicker, more pillowy, rim. ( A Farkas/Holton MC instead of a VDC.) I was less happy with the tone, as it was brassier, but that's what the band directors seem to want, and it made playing easier.

What it also did was to increase the amount of lips being pressed against the mouthpiece and unable to have an effect on the intonation.

At the same time, I also pushed all the tuning slides all the way in, thinking to reset them over time, but didn't, because just pulling out the primary slides of each horn worked.

So now I'm back to the VDC mouthpiece, all tuning slides pulled out various lengths, and my right hand seems to be in closer to the right place.

For the first time, here in the past six months I can hit the high F with no problem. Before that I could occasionally, but never with both good tone and intonation. The F# and G above that are passable most of the time and the Ab and A are like the F used to be. 

I seem to be in the minority on preferring the less brassy tone of the VDC mouthpiece, but have decided to go with it most of the time as I so much prefer it.

Also have switched back to the normal sitting position for playing the horn. The other one was a bit easier on the back muscles and made it easier to play with the volume needed to make the one horn sound more like a section. Our new director is really working on the band playing with less volume overall, which I'm realizing is one way to improve the tone quality of the group.

Recently my cello and fret-less bass friend Andy was here for an afternoon of music and we recorded some things on the Sony. I was just as close to it as he was, but with the bell pointed away, and even though he was unamplified, the cello is louder in the mix that the horn. With the flute the balance was much better.

A Year of The Balanced Embouchure

It's been just over a year now that I got in touch with Jeff Smiley, the trumpet playing originator of The Balanced Embouchure, and he put me in touch with Valerie Wells, who handles the horn side of things. I bought the book and have blogged about it over time (with the tag BE). 

I continue to think Jeff's approach to helping people find their best embouchure is the best approach to music making I've ever come across. From time to time you'll see folks on the web talking about what they think it is, but you can tell they haven't read the book, so seize on a detail without appreciating the full range and scope of the method.

It's easy to understand why this is, because even though I've read the book from cover to cover twice now, whenever I flip through I'll come across a passage that I'd forgotten about or hadn't fully appreciated at the time of reading. Often this is because the passage is so common sensical I assume I already "know" it. Music making includes all kinds of large and small scale mental and physical activities, and knowing about them all isn't enough. You need to be aware of them in real time as you play as well, until they become second nature.

Jeff's book is a terrific aid for gaining those necessary awarenesses, but his method is to help you achieve them in the best way that works for you, not to instill "the right way". As a therapist, I see the way you walk the path towards greater abilities of making music to be more important than the abilities themselves. I think it's also the case that how you go about developing your music making abilities shapes those abilities for better or worse. 

Since I've been working with Jeff's method, my horn playing has been transformed in some deep sense. I've got better range and endurance, but the main thing is I now have a much better "feel" of what's going on with my embouchure. A big part of Balanced Embouchure is how the exercises give your musculature a chance to find its best way of working, a lot of which is happening below the conscious level, which is why it's hard to describe and is so often misunderstood.

For those of us who aren't natural players, Jeff's method helps us find our way towards how we would play if we were natural players. It's that approach of helping people find their own way towards natural music making I'd like to expand into more general aspects of making music.

Valerie Wells

Valerie Wells helps Jeff Smiley with the horn aspect of his Balanced Embouchure method. When I got in touch with him just a little less than a year ago, he gave me her contact info so I could buy his book from her and so that she would be there to answer questions about how BE works with the horn. 

Just like Jeff, she responds quickly to emails and is happy to answer questions. Periodically she has sent out group emails to the BE horn group with tips and updated exercises made appropriate for horn (Jeff plays trumpet).

Here in the past few weeks she's been getting a blog going as a way to stay in touch with BE horn players and to be a place where those interested in BE can get an idea of what it's about. She has a couple of good posts up now, one about her experience with BE and another about how it has helped others.

As I said in the post last week about Jeff's updated site, I find his approach to helping people learn music making to be very impressive. He understands we all come to music making with different bodies and minds, so there's information in the book covering a very wide range of issues. Very few folks are going to need every bit of the info, but whatever you do need for your particular situation is probably there.

A lot of music educators seem to operate on the principle that the student is an empty vessel needing only to be told the "correct" way of doing things. Jeff's approach begins with respect for the student as an individual, and an expectation that the student will be an active participant in figuring out what works best for him or her. 

Jeff Smiley

Jeff Smiley is the man who came up with the "Balanced Embouchure" approach I've mentioned various times in posts with the "BE" label. Basically I was ready to give up the horn about a year ago due to a recurrent lip callus. I came across his website, ordered the book, and with the info in that book, turned around my horn playing, got rid of the callus, have extended my range and endurance a bit, and feel much more confident about my playing.

I find his approach a wonderful model for presenting information on how to go about learning music and hope to emulate it as much as possible in my own materials. Learning music is a complicated endeavor calling for attention to a wide range of issues and Jeff does a great job of getting you to think them through and to figure out what works best for you as an individual.

He has revamped his web site, especially the section for horn players. Highly recommended.

Horn Endurance

Jonathan West has in this post nicely summed up, amplified and put into larger context the extremely helpful and on point advice on horn endurance he's been giving me in the comments here. He's obviously spent a lot of time thoughtfully considering a wide range of issues relating to music making, especially in ensembles large and small.

More importantly, he's able to write clearly and concisely. My situation is somewhat unusual, and like they say, your mileage may vary, but I find his writing on music making some of the best I've come across, and a model for what I hope to do in my materials.

When I started blogging a year ago this month, I never guessed one of the benefits would be to get such wonderful help on learning the horn. Thanks, Jonathan!

Horn Diary

From time to time I've read about a horn player having a "meltdown" and always thought it meant just getting a few more notes wrong than usual. Having had one last Sunday at band rehearsal, I now know what they were talking about and that it's a whole different thing than regular playing. One part of me was mortified at the errors being made, but the clinical part of me was fascinated by observing what was going on and trying to figure out what was happening.

It may well not be a physiologically correct way of putting it, but it felt as if the muscles right there where the lips meet the mouthpiece went into tiny tremors or spasms and that that disrupted the feedback loop between my brain and embouchure, so that I was either over or under correcting. 

The precipitating factor has been trying to play higher and faster than I'm currently able. Once we got to the easier stuff, everything got better. And even though I'm the only horn, with the OK of the current band director, I've switched to the 2nd horn parts and practice sessions this week have been a delight. I can play everything and still have lip left over at the end. Without all the effort going into simply trying to get the notes it's much easier, and much more fun, working to develop the musicality side of things.

The general lesson learned is that good technique is a whole body phenomenon, not just the part of you that comes in contact with the instrument. To crack a whip, it's the motion of the whole whip that matters, not just the bit at the end. Trying to play beyond my current ability led me to overwork the muscles right at the mouthpiece without the support of all the surrounding muscles in the embouchure - up to the nose, down to the chin and the cheeks and jaw. It's like trying to strum a guitar using just the wrist and not the rest of the arm up though the elbow and to the shoulder. If you don't use your body wisely, the part you're overusing is going to suffer fatigue early and often.

The other thing this brings up is that my materials may not be the answer, but our little community band trying to play arrangements without players for all the parts is what helped create the situation for my little debacle. Seems like there's a huge niche between having nothing and having arrangements calling for dozens of instruments and players who can play them. 

I'm convinced it's possible to come up with arrangements that are fun and allow for mixed levels of ability (and improvisation) that let folks who aren't driven by the competitive goal of the first chair to simply have a good time making music and advancing at whatever rate suits them. 

I had a recent exchange with Greg Sandow and told him what he was up to reminded me of that vogue phrase of a decade or so ago in the psych world - "client centered". He's looking at the issue of increasing audiences for classical music by thinking about what the audience wants, not want the arts organizations need. Bruce Hembd just posted on something that gets horn students excited but that the education establishment seems uninterested in. I think that over time most bureaucracies and organizations tend to become more concerned about their own needs than those of the clients they're meant to serve.

F Horn

The community band and the Presbyterian ensemble are both on hiatus, so for the past month I've been exploring the F horn using the Balanced Embouchure approach, sticking with written notes mostly from the Bb below middle C to the C an octave up when it comes to repertoire. The Kenwood Players will be performing in two country churches, one this Sunday and another the next, so I've been working on the alto lines of the old time hymns taken down several steps and put in flat keys. Also working up the alto lines in the small pieces from Handel's Water Music  and Music for the Royal Fireworks that have been a part of the learning materials since the beginning.

The F horn is so much more forgiving in its core range than the Bb, at least for me. Even though you can make most of the notes on either horn, they feel slightly different on the lips. The closest thing to it is how you can make the same note on the low E or the A string on a guitar using different frets. The vibrations are the same frequency, but on the E string and F horn they feel fatter, thicker, broader. 

Somehow that extra heft of the vibration makes the note easier to work with on the F horn. It's an exaggeration, but the F horn feels like comfortable tennis shoes and the Bb horn feels like ever so slightly tight dress shoes. Working on these alto lines on the F feels great because good intonation and tone come much more easily, and my endurance is much better. And when my lips do give out, it's a slow loss of control, whereas on high notes on the Bb horn the loss of control can be sudden.

One reason I'm posting on this is because it changed my mind on an issue brought about by the unsettledness of the horn world. There's no agreement among educators on how to start students on the horn. Some say on the F, some say on the Bb, some say on a double and some say on a 3/4 size double. 

Given that concert band music wants the horn high in it's register, I'd thought the Bb horn would be the way to go, but now I'm not so sure. The comfort of playing in mid range on the F horn is allowing me to feel and work with my embouchure in a way not possible on the Bb.

The problem might not be the horn, but the music.