Playing Music: how to win your fears.

Try our Search Box:

The Mind is the Key

Brad Howland

Introduction
A Little Psychology
Goal Setting
Pay Attention!
Trial and Error
Ensemble Playing
Intonation

Introduction

As a former fellow student once said to me, "Your mental attitude is everything!" We were both doing post-graduate study at Northwestern University and he was discovering what most students learned when they went to study with the great brass players of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: that what you think determines what you play.

Arnold Jacobs, former Principal Tuba of the CSO, was the leading teacher of this approach. Before passing away recently he was considered possibly the greatest wind teacher of all time, and students of all levels–from novice to professional–came from all over the world to study with him. Many of his most prominent students published accolades about him in Arnold Jacobs: The Legacy of a Master, which is also a great source for his ideas.

Although I did have one unforgettable lesson with Mr. Jacobs, I mainly studied with him second-hand by attending his master classes at Northwestern University and three summers of study in the National Youth Orchestra of Canada with Richard Erb, Bass Trombonist of the Louisiana Philharmonic and former student of Jacobs.

Jacobs’ key concept is "Wind and Song." For my interpretation of wind, see the article Breathing 101. Here is what I think he meant by song:

A Little Psychology

The human nervous system consists of two parts. Motor nerves go from the brain to the muscles and tell them when to contract, and sensory nerves go from the muscles and tissue back to the brain carrying information about the outside world. We use the motor nerves to do things like walk, talk, and play trombone, and the sensory nerves to perceive the world through sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

The two systems, motor and sensory, are independent. If you pay too much attention to the senses, it is going to reduce the intensity of your motor nerve impulses. Normally when you conceive a goal in the brain, it should travel instantly to the muscle tissue, but if you fill up your brain with feelings, emotions, and distracting thoughts about the performance it garbles things up.

Of course you have to listen to your playing sometimes–perhaps ten percent of your practice time–but the rest of the time you should listen to the goal in your head. You are detached from the results of your actions. If you miss a note in performance you are so involved with the music that you might not even notice it.

The senses can't really be trusted to relay accurate information anyway. How do you know what you hear two feet behind the bell is anything like what the audience hears 50 feet away in the hall? This is why recording yourself is so important. The tape recorder is the most objective feedback you can have in a practice session.

There is the old example where I toss my keys to you across the studio. To make the catch, your body must perform many complex muscular tasks; if you tried to control them all by telling your body what to do, you would be paralysed. Instead, you see the keys and let the body do what it must to catch them.

This is a fairly brief discussion of the playing process from a mental perspective. For more information, read the fantastic article by David Leisner, Six Golden Rules For Conquering Performance Anxiety. Now let's look at some more specific ways to set goals.

Goal Setting

Setting musical goals for yourself is essential. Perhaps the most important technique is to fill the brain with sound. You might imagine that there are two trombones, one in your hands and the other in your head, and the one you want to play is in your head. The body does not respond well to language, so rather than issuing mental commands, turn your attention to the sound you want to produce-its tone quality, pitch, articulation, shape, dynamic, or color. You can "hear" the sound with your inner ear, or "see" the note being played with your powers of visualization.

Whatever you focus on, it should be the greatest, most beautiful sound imaginable. This is why it is so helpful to surround yourself with players who are better than you, go to hear live concerts by professional musicians, and listen to recordings of the great players. Listening to great sounds tends to get them into your head and pull you up.

Here is an experiment. Take up the instrument and play one easy long note, say middle F. As you play, ignore the actual sound you hear and create a sound in your head. If the actual sound seems much louder than the inner sound and drowns it out, crank up the volume in your head until your brain is full of sound. Now listen to the quality of the sound. How would you describe it? You want the most beautiful, dark, rich tone possible. Add some vibrato and see how that intensifies the energy of the sound. If your mind wanders off to make distracting comments about the proceedings, gently but firmly bring it back. Let go of extraneous thoughts; don't cling to them.

Some people use a more physical approach. Program yourself by mentally rehearsing away from the horn. Play a passage four or five times in your mind; if you make a mental mistake, go over it a few more times until it sounds just right. Imagine picking up the instrument. Feel the weight of it and sense the wind blowing through the horn as you play great notes. If you have an upcoming performance, make it even more realistic by picturing yourself in the hall, the sounds of the audience, and the feel of your concert clothes. Now try playing the piece on your instrument. How close is your performance to the imagined one? What parts need more mental rehearsal?

Another goal-setting technique is to focus on what you want to communicate to the audience. Music is communication, and requires a composer, an interpreter, and a listener. You are telling a story through your horn. You are the medium with which composers create their art, channelling their feelings and emotions through you to the audience. Therefore, you should get to know as much as possible about the life of the composer, historical background of the music, performance practice of the period, available recordings, and traditional interpretations; then you can make a tasteful rendition. Of course, don't be afraid to put your own stamp on it, because your individual statement is what makes it interesting.

Keeping a goal journal is a good way to motivate yourself to practice. I often have difficulty practicing for an upcoming symphony concert when continually rehearsing and performing various gigs. I never seem to want to practice on days when I have some ensemble to play in! When I keep a goal journal, I use my time better. When the concert finally rolls around, at least I feel confident that I prepared to the best of my ability, and I am less stressed.

To create a goal journal, write down all your personal, technical, and musical goals. Include upcoming solos, auditions, juries, or performances you want to prepare for. Make technical goals reasonable, gradually extending the limits of what you can do. Then assign priority numbers to each goal, taking into account how much time you have to prepare the material. You are now in a position to come up with a plan to accomplish your goals. Decide what you are going to practice, for how long in each session, and with what frequency (daily, three times per week, weekly). The final step is to take a calendar and plug everything in, scheduling practice time to avoid conflict with other obligations.

When planning practice time, try to be reasonable, 1½ to 2 hours per day is plenty, unless you are taking good long breaks, or are recording yourself and stop frequently to listen. Don't adhere to a dogmatic schedule, for the mark of a good plan is its flexibility. Allow yourself the opportunity to fail and try something else. You can revise your journal as you go along and should probably rethink your goals at least monthly. The important thing is to know where you are going, why you are going there, and how you are going to get there.

Pay Attention!

An important aspect of the mental approach to playing trombone is that you have to pay attention to the present moment. For example, suppose you are playing the chorale at the opening of the fourth movement of Schumann's Symphony #3, the infamous Rhenish. Most orchestral trombonists get pretty nervous for this excerpt, because you go up to high Eb in a long unbroken pianissimo chorale, after sitting through the first three movements of the symphony without playing a note.

The first note is middle Bb. While playing it, if you are worried about the coming Eb; or the fifth movement; or the fact that you couldn't play it yesterday; or wondering what the conductor, your colleagues, and your student in the audience will think of you if you blow it; or what you will make for dinner; or will the stock market crash–then you are going to get into trouble!

As you play that first note, you are better off completely immersed in the sound of it, aware only of what is happening that moment, in your head and hands. Then, you play the next note, and the next note, and after that...the next note, and so on. If a note sounds bad, you are aware of it; but without berating yourself you go on to the next note, letting go of the bad one as something in the past, therefore out of your control. There is nothing you can do about it now. Similarly, if a note sounded really good, you don't take time to congratulate yourself because you are playing the next note and applying all your powers of concentration to that moment. Congratulations, you are in the "here and now"!

Trial and Error

You might be wondering, "If I just forget about all my bad notes and go on, how will I get any better"? The answer is in your mental rehearsal of the music. If you repeatedly imagine the sound of great music, then try it on the trombone, eventually your body learns by trial and error what it has to do to reproduce that sound.

I've noticed that most of my students are afraid of sounding "bad." They suffer from the universal human fear of looking stupid. I try to convince them not to worry about it–just take a chance. Better to get it with a bad sound than miss because of the fear of sounding bad. A wrong note is better than no note at all. Let it sound bad; eventually it will sound very, very good. Furthermore, it has to sound bad at first, otherwise what would be the point? How could we get anywhere? If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth doing!

People tend to get stuck on plateaus. Unfortunately, we don't learn in nice, gentle, ascending curves; we learn in fits and starts, sometimes surging ahead, other times seeming to bang our heads against the wall without results. It is important to retain our faith in that wonderful learning machine, the human body. Inevitably, with calm, patient persistence it will get by that wall.

For example, I had a problem that bothered me for almost twenty years–the Valsalva Maneuver. Then, at age 37, I fixed it. Imagine the joy!

Ensemble Playing

Most of the time we play in ensembles. These are good opportunities to focus on the here and now. There are many visual and aural events that we can guide our awareness to. Compromise is always necessary, as with other musicians in a chamber group, or with the conductor in an orchestra or band.

The essence of playing in an ensemble is that the individual loses his/her ego in the group. You have to accept the interpretation of others–in a quintet 80 percent of the time, in orchestra a lot more. You harmonize with your fellow musicians by listening carefully to what the other parts are doing. When everybody is continually moving toward everybody else, then you have a unified ensemble.

Brass players: don't play too loud! A full, rich, unforced tone, if it is in tune, will be reinforced by the partials of the harmony and carry easily to the audience.

In the orchestra trombone section, the second has to play louder than the principal or bass. The principal player is usually up high and has no problem being heard; his job is to "float" on top of the other instruments. The bass trombonist is assisted by the tuba, the other bass instruments of the orchestra, and the fact that he/she plays a larger bore horn. The second player has a tendency to disappear, and consequently must play with a bigger sound to make the trombone section chords "ring."

Intonation

Playing in tune is always a challenge. You must know the difference between "harmonic" and "melodic" intonation. Most of the time we play in harmony with other instruments, and need to adjust the notes according to their function in a chord. For example, the third in a major triad is flattened, while in a minor triad it is raised. The fifth in a major triad is raised, while in a dominant seventh chord the seventh is lowered. These adjustments will reduce or eliminate the "beats" that occur in the sound of dissonant chords.

Scan the parts of any good orchestra trombone section and numerous up and down arrows will be found indicating the positions of key notes in the harmony. The best players leave little to chance.

There are intonation problems built into the trombone at the factory. Every instrument is a compromise, as fixing one area exaggerates the difficulties somewhere else. Instrument makers try to come up with what they feel is the best possible combination of good traits.

To play in tune you need to be aware of the present situation. Play the notes in the head and the slide will automatically go where it must to reproduce those sounds. Listen to the bass, and tune the notes in your head with the orchestra's foundation.

The tuning note given at the beginning of a performance has little value for intonation. How can playing one note help all the other notes be in tune, with their different harmonic and melodic contexts? What then, is the purpose of the tuning note?

Well, the opening A or Bb does have a crucial function. It provides the orchestra with an opportunity to establish what the musicians are going to do together-create sound. With the tuning note we slough off the attachments of our lives and begin to connect with each other. Use the tuning note to begin imagining sound with the other musicians.

For a great intonation training tool, try Stephen Colley's Tune Up, a CD-based intonation system. I've used it with excellent results. Sorry, at the moment I don't have any information on how you get get a copy of Tune Up.

Copyright © 1998-2003 by Music For Brass.com. All material on this website is the exclusive property of Music For Brass.com.