KMEA Reflections

I spent two days at the Wichita Band booth at the Kansas Music Educators Association conference last week, as an exhibitor. It was a very interesting experience in terms of participating in the conference as an exhibitor rather than a regular attendee.

While living in Iowa I regularly attended the Iowa Music Educators Association conference in Ames in conjunction with the All-State program, and equally frequently attended the Iowa Bandmasters Association. I spent two years as state president of the CMENC (collegiate version of MEA) organization in Iowa, and was involved with planning the conference from that side.

Attending these workshops and conferences are great for professional development. They offer an opportunity to meet with colleagues, attend sessions and clinics with great teachers and excellent performing ensembles, and to shop around and see what resources are available for your use as a music teacher.

For our booth with Wichita Band at KMEA, we had a display consisting of our most popular instruments for students in the public schools. Additionally, myself and Kevin Stiles (who runs the blog Sousa Central) have spent a fair amount of time working for and with educators, and were running the booth with the intention of being prepared to field any questions teachers, students, or parents might have about the products and services we offer.

Overall, the conference was a lot of fun and hopefully also of some use to other interested parties. Next week Kevin and I will be road tripping to Cookeville, Tennessee for the Southeast Horn Workshop to be held on the campus of Tennessee Tech University. At the end of March we’ll be heading to Conways, Arkansas for the Mid-South Horn Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas. Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you!

The Mindfulness Component

I’ve been pretty neglectful of the whole “mindfulness” component of this website. I think it’s time to remedy that.

Let’s talk first about what mindfulness actually is, and then apply that to music. According to one of my favorite mindfulness resources, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, “Contemplative practices quiet the mind in order to cultivate a personal capacity for deep concentration and insight.” These practices include but are not limited to meditation, prayer, yoga, etc.

How do these practices relate to music? Well, it depends. As Vincent Chicowicz has said, “The battle is not with the instrument. The battle is with ourselves.” Additionally, deep and focused concentration is at the heart of truly effective practice, which in turn is at the heart of musical performance. Furthermore, attempting to affect an audience emotionally through our own outpouring of emotion relates to beliefs about the interconnectedness of beings. All of these diverse strands can come together through mindful musicianship, and a discussion of those interconnections is a favorite pastime of mine, as well as an idea behind this blog.

A lot of musicians, myself included, by nature have (and are forced to have) extremely active and analytic minds. Through contemplative or mindfulness practices (and I use those terms interchangeably here), we learn to still that active analysis and awaken something deeper, more primitive and primal, and more collected to our raw experiences. By allowing ourselves to do that, we awaken to a higher level of music making and of simply being, which is one of the things I think is at the core of the real experience of music. Music is about personal expression, realization, and, more deeply, the fundamental truths of our nature as people and our experiences as human beings on this earth. I think!

Mindfulness and contemplative practices are gaining footholds in the music world as late. New work in the fields of psychology, integral theory, and other areas have led to a greater understanding of how to improve what we do with and in our minds. Mindfulness and contemplative practice has inspired musicians for a long time, from the spirituality of John Coltrane to the idea of the concert as a spiritual experience advocated by the conductor Sergiu Celibidache.

In fact, the University of Michigan recently offered the first degree of its kind, the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Jazz and Contemplative Studies. Workshops like the Integral Trumpet Retreat draw/drew many participants interested in learning and applying new dimensions to their understanding of music. Articles about mindful practice in music abound.

Simply put, mindfulness is a life technique that can improve your music making. Paraphrasing a quote from a masterclass with the great Gene Pokorny, we must remember that “we are human beings who make our living playing music.” Human beings first. Being one of those is hard, and expressing whatever it is we have to express is even harder. Taking a moment to use mindfulness or contemplative practices to still our chatter and reconnect with the moment will make life and our music making more balanced, more fun, and more powerful. And that, my friends, might just be what it’s all about.

As always, please let me know what you think! There will be more to come on this topic.

Mouthpiece Matters No. 2: PHC 25 Cup, PHC S-18 Rim

I’ve recently had several clients contact me requesting larger rims. I’ve attempted to comply, and decided it was my turn to try out a large rim setup and see what that felt like.

To do so, I checked out a PHC 25 cup and a PHC S-18 rim from our shop, and went to town this afternoon. For technical specs on the PHC series of mouthpieces, check out this link.

I started my test by playing the first few pages of the Brass Gym, then moved on to a few Ward Fearn etudes (have I mentioned how much I love the Ward Fearn book? Yes, I have. And I will again!).

What I found was that the rim is too big for me. I have fairly big lips, but this rim feels monstrous to me. According to the PHC spec sheet, the S-18 rim has an internal diameter of 18.00mm. My normal mouthpiece has an Osmun London-wide rim, which measure at .675 inches; when converted to the metric system, it’s about 17.4mm. I didn’t expect .6 mm to provide such a huge feeling of difference, but it certainly did.

The large diameter of the rim caused me to immediately shift my embouchure placement, bringing a fair amount more upper lip into the mouthpiece. I got tired more quickly, and had a heck of a time with the high register. The width of the rim felt nice, but it’s just too big for me.

Long story short: if you have large lips or some other setup that requires a large rim, check out the PHC S-18 rim. If you play on something a little smaller, be aware that small differences in size can feel drastically different in muscles as sensitive as those in our embouchures. I will try the same cup with a smaller rim (perhaps the AN or AW) in the future, and let you know what I think.

This rim and cup combination would be good for someone with very full lips, in my opinion. Let me know what you think!

Mouthpiece Matters Number 1

Since I now work at a music store as a French horn specialist, it has become both important and necessary for me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of horn-related equipment, particularly mouthpieces.

When it comes to mouthpieces, I’m way less of a “gear geek” than I am for other things such as horns themselves and various method/etude books. For the vast majority of my career I’ve played on one mouthpiece that works and not worried about it overmuch. What I am finding now, however, is that many other players a) have rigid requirements for mouthpiece technical data but, conversely, b) like to experiment.

At the shop where I work, we sell the Paxman series of PHC mouthpieces, as well as Engelbert Schmid, Josef Klier, Bruno Tilz, all the Holton Farkas mouthpieces, Giardinelli, Stork, Schilke, and even a few other mouthpieces. Wow! What’s a guy who’s only ever played on an Osmun LW-16, a Giardinelli C4, and little else to do?

Practice. Practice, practice, practice. Fortunately, the place where I work wants me to have a personal, in-depth understanding of everything we sell, so we’ve worked out a system whereby I can check out a mouthpiece or two over the weekend and try them out.  Here’s the first in a series (hopefully!) of posts about the mouthpieces we sell at the Wichita Band Instrument Company.

First up is the Josef Klier W1EK. You can see their website for technical specifications, but what I found was a very comfortable mouthpiece that had very secure slurs, solid attacks, and was generally a positive playing experience.

The W1EK is a shallow cup, which is fairly different from what I play on most of the time. My experience was that this shallow cup made the high register feel a smidgen more secure, but really cleared up the tone. It gave things a bit of a sparkle that it’s hard to quantify, but I really enjoyed it. Really, really enjoyed it actually.

My testing process involved a week of miscellaneous playing. I made sure to spend some time up high, run a few Shostakovitch 5 tuttis,  and do a couple of Ward Fearn exercises (I love the Ward Fearn book, by the by, and might have a future post coming on it). In each of this situations the W1EK performed admirably.

This particular Klier is of one piece, in silver. I would highly recommend it for someone looking for a new mouthpiece. Definitely worth a trial, and might be worth a purchase, from me, after next payday!

Balanced Embouchure Experiments

Greetings, blog-land. For two years or so I have been running across different mentions of the Balanced Embouchure system. I’m always curious about learning new things, concepts, and approaches, so I started checking it out.

I found that the Balanced Embouchure System was created by trumpet player Jeff Smiley, who apparently woke up one day with the system in his mind. He maintains that traditional pedagogy, which would be equivalent in the horn world to the teachings of Farkas and others, tended to ignore “lip movement” in favor of concentrating on a flat chin, and thereby fail to reach a large number of students whose facial structure did not match that recommended by their teachers.

After Smiley began applying the principles of the Balanced Embouchure system in his lessons, he noticed a huge change come over his students, and that the method worked effectively in helping all of his students achieve results.

I first came to hear about the Balanced Embouchure system through the horn blogging world, and found a variety of article about the topic. What intrigued me (then as now), is that so many people were against the BE approach, and felt like any knowledge of the actual physical mechanics of what the embouchure was doing was dangerous.

This came to a head for me when I had a young, inquisitive middle school student last year ask me what his lips were doing when he played low and how that was different from what he did when he played high. I told him that we should concentrate on the music rather than the mechanics at the moment, and that worked, but it raised a question in my own mind about what, and how much, information to tell a curious 8th grader.

I asked a few teachers that I respected what they thought about my student and his question, and the dominant response was, “Don’t tell him much of anything. The more he thinks about it the more confused he will become, and it will cause more harm than good.”

Fair enough. I’ve heard of paralysis through analysis before, and seen some of the dangers of overthinking in my own life and playing. We kept concentrating on the music, and the kid continued to do relatively well.

But now I was curious. I found an article by David Wilken, whose opinions I respect, that seemed to disagree with a number of BEs philosophies. Additionally, a good friend of mine told me that BE was just derivative of Caruso, and that I should go straight to the source (which I did). I was interested in BE, but I dismissed it, and went about my life.

Now, a brief aside: I don’t have much of a high range, and it bugs me incessantly. Yeah, I can basically play the range of the instrument, but I am not secure above a high G. I’ve faked it and made it work for a long time, but playing up there terrifies me, and I can hit the important high C about… 45% of the time. If I am very, very focused and things are working well I can get up there and above, but I have to do a lot of what I call “creative nonsense” to make my mind and body work together. I’ve done lots of things: long tones, playing in the high register, pressure training… the whole gamut of stuff. Still: nothing.

In frustration, I sort of relegated it to being “hard” and left it at that. But now I’m at a time in my life when my professional playing obligations are minimal but my curiosity is high, and so:

Yesterday I wrote to Valerie Wells, who runs the Balanced Embouchure for Horn blog, and am in the process of ordering the book. I plan on working through it and will let you know what I find. I am excited to see if this approach can help me develop the areas I hope to develop!

 

Ion Balu Practice Mute Review

I mentioned earlier that I’d have more to say about my Ion Balu practice mute. Indeed I do! I actually made a YouTube video demonstrating the difference in sound that I experience with the mute. You can view that video:

As I mention, the clip’s not supposed to be a performance but rather a demonstration. That said, it is kind of sad that you can hear my laptop’s fan kick on towards the end, but c’est le vie. Let’s talk about the mute!

First of all, compared to open playing there’s more resistance. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about that: it’s science! As it is, it definitely has less resistance than other practice mutes that I’ve used before. I do not find that it affects my pitch center a ton when I come back to playing open, either, which is a plus.

Secondly, the thing is absolutely whisper quiet. Which I love; I could (probably) practice in the middle of the night and not annoy my upstairs neighbor too much. I definitely see how it could be used to “taste” a note on-stage before a particularly tricky note or solo if there was enough sound going on. This whisper quiet feature is what attracted me to the mute in the first place, and why I bought the thing.

Finally, all of my dealings with Ion have been very pleasant. He seems like a happy and nice person, and he is quick to answer questions or solve any problems that arise. I am a fan of his mutes, and own one of his straight mutes as well. I’m saving up to get one of his stopping mutes, as that was my introduction to his company.

(Brief anecdote: my good friend Nick Wills is a horn player in Iowa. He was the first person I’d ever met to have a Balu mute, and it was a stopping mute as I recall. I was intrigued and did the usual web research. I then began buying his products slowly, one-at-a-time, and hope to eventually have the full line! The stopping mute is next for me, and I remember vividly seeing Nick’s and thinking, “What is that thing? It looks crazy!”)

What I would take away from this review is the following. I think there will inevitably be an element of resistance that changes any time you use a practice mute. With that said it is my opinion that the Balu practice mute is the best that I have played, and would strongly recommend it to anyone in a situation where a practice mute would be beneficial.

Learn more about Ion Balu here, and purchase one of his mutes here.

Striking A Balance

I’ve been thinking a fair amount recently about how my playing will fit in to my new life as someone who doesn’t play for the majority of the day.

While I was in college, I would practice between two and six hours a day regularly, generally falling into the three-hour camp. I’d spend an hour in the morning doing a routine (both warm-up and technique), an hour later in the day doing etudes and other things that would be addressed in my weekly lesson, and an hour later in the evening working on excerpts, solos, and endurance things. Also typically in those days I would have between two and six hours of rehearsal (Wind Symphony followed immediately by Orchestra, and for three years those two followed immediately by marching band on Mondays and Wednesdays, intermixed with brass quintet, horn choir, and other ensemble work on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and weekends). This resulted in playing times averaging between three and nine hours a day depending on what I had going on.

Fast forward to my current situation: working generally away from the horn from 9am to 6pm. I do some playing during that time (I play test every horn that leaves our shop before sending it out), but that playing is typically a few scales and arpeggios, some slurring, and testing specific notes like high A and high B-flat. I would say I get maybe a half-hour of playing time during the day.

So what I’ve been concerned about, especially now that I want to get back into a regular playing routine, is how exactly to include the amount of playing that I want in a day that is otherwise very busy with non horn-related things.

The thing that I’ve found to be helpful is planning. First of all, I’m coming off essentially a three month break in serious playing. Secondly, I am faced with limited time. So what I have decided, then, is to a) plan, and b) make things as convenient as possible. Let’s break it down.

Planning
I have to think about what I will play ahead of time. I want to shoot for two hours a day of playing outside of work, and I want to hit several specific things:

• Warming Up
• Technique
• Lip Trills
• Range
• Solos

I don’t have a real ton of time to devote, so I choose literature to work on a few days in advance. I pick The Brass Gym for warm-up and technique purposes, and I also have John Erickson’s book of Ultimate Horn Technique.

Marian Hesse’s Daily Routine for Horn Players provides for more advanced work, including lip trills, flexibility, overtone series, and range building work; between those three books I have items 1-4 included. Then I just pick a solo, some good etudes, or something else to work on and have it all on my stand, ready to go. Which brings me to point two:

Convenience
Since I am by nature rather lazy, things needs to be right in front of me and ready to go when I have the slightest moment to take advantage of them. To that end, I keep my horn assembled and on a stand on my kitchen table, right next to my music stand. I keep my mouthpiece in my pocket all day for work, so when I get home it’s easiest to just head straight for the horn, pop in the mouthpiece, and get to playing whatever it is I want to play before sitting down in my comfortable recliner, since that usually spells the doom of anything productive I want to get done.

I also live in an apartment, with an upstairs neighbor. I want to be respectful of her desire to relax and have quiet sometimes too, so I use my Ion Balu practice mute (more on that in another post), which I also keep in my horn and ready to go most times.

The final step in making things convenient for myself is to keep all of the music I currently feel like playing in order and ready to go on the my stand. That way the horn, my equipment, and my music are all set up and ready, only needing me to just head to them first when I get home.

In conclusion, for now, it is possible to fit your practice schedule into whatever kind of time your life allows. It just requires some advanced planning and preparation as well as understanding of your own tendencies. It is doable, and I hope to report back on the success of these steps in the near future!