2. MIND GAMES, ATTITUDE, STRATEGIES
2.1 Practice: Addiction, Guilt and Self-Abuse
2.6 Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Practice: Addiction, Guilt & Self Abuse (“Mortification of the Flesh”)
“No pain, no gain” is an infamous mantra of countless sports coaches and trainers.
“If the medicine doesn’t taste bad it can’t be good for you” runs another traditional saying.
It is no great leap from these canons to:
“If I find it easy, I must be cheating. If it hurts, or requires great effort, then I am working properly, making the right effort.”
In this way we not only tolerate, we willingly engage in a form of self-abuse, a “mortification of the flesh” as a fair price for admission to the blessed state of technical accomplishment—because it seems incomprehensible and even illicit that horn playing might ever be relatively effortless.
No question: in order to increase our endurance we do indeed need to push our limits, not only the physical, but also the mental limits. After all, “to have endurance you must endure.”10
But never forget, that by the time we physically reach “the end of our rope”, when our lips are raw and bruised and our abdominal muscles have gone into spasm, when the mouthpiece seems to have cut its way right through our lips and is dislodging our teeth, when our left arm and fingers are so cramped we can barely hold the horn anymore, when we can hardly inhale anymore and the air we do have no longer seems to have any compression—by that time our ears have been virtually paralysed. The only things we can still “hear” are our own pain and exhaustion, while we continue to hope that the next note will speak and not “split”.
At this point we have stopped listening—and we ceased listening, in fact, a long time before. The goals of playing musically or of trying to learn something from our work will have receded to a very distant horizon. This is all the more tragic when we realize just how much extra strength, fluency and efficiency are released by musical playing itself.
We keep telling ourselves that this discomfort is somehow good for us; that it will toughen us up, make us great.
Distrusting the fact that playing musically is physically easier than merely playing technically well, adds insult to injury (often literally!)
Many of us even harbour secret thoughts that we have no right to play easily—it should hurt, there should be a struggle involved, we have to earn the privilege of playing easily—and that day will not come until we have suffered enough to demonstrate to our teachers and to our guilt-ridden inner selves sufficient discipline, devotion, dedication and commitment. And how we yearn for a pat on the back or a kind word from the Master!
PRACTICE. Everybody does it, more or less, and more or less well, and there is no alternative. We have to do the work if we want to improve and we have to do it to stay in shape.
The problem is that, compared with pianists and violinists, we hornists only possess enough physical strength to play for a relatively few hours per day. It is essential therefore that we work in the most efficient manner possible. Nevertheless horn students frequently waste their physical and mental capital on “mindless” and physically punishing practice that yields few results other than the conviction that the necessary discipline was perhaps proven. To whom then?
Too many of us are virtually addicted to grinding practice. As a result we assure ourselves only of ever-increasing tension, tired muscles and tired minds. This addiction is often called discipline, commitment or dedication, and the measure of accomplishment is often not what was actually learned during the practice session, but rather how many hours were put in, as some kind of concrete measurement of one’s commitment. 11
The well-intentioned and common suggestion that the student maintain a chart recording when, how long, and what he practises, carries a significant hidden danger: instead of studying while he practises, with awareness, the student is instead aware merely of what and how long he practises.
Too many of us practise in self-defence.
A famous saying among brass players goes: “After one day without practice I know it; after two days my colleagues know it; after three days everybody knows it.”
It is certainly true that regular playing does keep the embouchure strong, flexible and in shape. Missing a day or two does result in a certain stiffness and insensitivity, and missing many days also results in a weakening of the muscles. But underlying all of this is a common fear of many professionals:
“If I don’t practise every day I shall my lose self-confidence, I might lose my chops, or even forget how to play.”
And so a huge numbers of professional horn players practise every day, not because it is good for them, but simply because, just as when they were students, they have simply always done so; it’s supposed to be healthy, like brushing one’s teeth every morning and night.
No athlete suffers a heart attack the day after they stop training, no one gets a dental cavity the day after they lose their toothbrush, and no hornist has experienced technical collapse because they missed a single day’s practice.
Nevertheless there are countless players who remain fearful of that unknown, precisely because they have rarely missed a day’s practice. For such players practice is not so much a positive opportunity to explore and train, as it is a negatively charged defence strategy.
Not very good psychology when you think about it. Consider the following:
Practice makes perfect?
Practice makes permanent!
Practice makes perfect?
Only when you practise perfectly.
You won’t improve without practising but practising
won’t by its self make you improve.
Perhaps we should throw out the word and concept of “practice” and replace it with something else like: study, training, exercise, research, rehearsal, refinement, polishing, focussing.
I am only advocating a change of attitude; there is no need to re-invent the wheel. The wealth of excellent “study” materials and its authors is well known to all hornists. We just need to use these works in a truly constructive manner. (The etudes by the Czech Emmanuel Kaucky for example are in my opinion absolutely the best.)12
The Threat of Change
Why is progress so difficult? Although we dream of, and yearn for progress, much of the time we also actually resist changing. In a way, it is as if we want to achieve progress without having to change.
Perhaps we tend to resist change because we are actually more comfortable with known, familiar problems. Perhaps we even grow intimately attached to them. They have been part of our horn playing lives for such a long time that we might even have become dependent on them.
Can we become addicted to our problems, and if so, how does this come about? Surely we should be trying to solve or eliminate our problems, not “love” them!
Well, our resistance to change is simply because the known and familiar feels more comfortable—even if it is demonstrably wrong. Through hours of practice our minds, and consequently our bodies, may have learned an incorrect or flawed technique that nonetheless feels familiar and therefore can still feel “right”—whereas a new, corrected, but not yet learned technique will feel unfamiliar and therefore somehow “wrong”! 13
Furthermore, it can be breath taking, even a little frightening, to realise that the power to change a complete problem set is right in our hands (“at our fingertips”). If this were true, if we could effortlessly escape the clutches of hitherto intractable technical problems, then what meaning would our entire struggle and suffering up to then have had?
On the one hand, we yearn for quick fixes, for magic, instant solutions to problems vexing us. On the other, even as we leap gratefully at a suggested solution, we experience it as unfamiliar and find it difficult to trust it at first. Nor do we completely trust ourselves to put it into action.
Accepting an unfamiliar but successful new solution means being prepared to abandon the original familiar problem itself, thereby possibly devaluing it and all that had to do with it.
That is why it seems much easier if the necessary changes are prescribed or demanded of us by a teacher, and the more authoritative and credible he or she is the better. That way the student is protected both from confronting the uncomfortable issue of responsibility for making the changes alone, as well as the uncertainty about what direction to travel.
And what about our past successes, our previous solutions? We cling to these just as much as we cling to our problems. Jared Diamond writes,
The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity. 14
Improvement requires jettisoning successful past “relationships” and living a little dangerously.15
Warming Up—The Myth (Heresy—Forbidden Subject)
Everybody should warm up properly each day, right? This is a universal truth, isn’t it? I mean, without warming up, we shall be unable to play properly and might even injure ourselves. Doesn’t a thorough, comprehensive warm-up protect us from all kinds of evils and guarantee good results?
Actually it is a wide spread misconception that failure to properly warm up can lead to serious injury of lip muscles.
Overuse or misuse of large muscles can certainly lead to injury. Football players or runners, for example, can indeed push themselves to the point that a spasm of the thigh muscle occurs, or worse, to tearing of muscle fibre.
However the embouchure muscle group (orbiscularis oris) is responsible for only small and delicate movements of the lips. They are not large power muscles such as we have in our thighs, biceps, abdomens or our backs.
It is the extraordinary sensitivity of the oral region that leads us to the erroneous assumption that the lip muscles are highly vulnerable. It is not the lip muscles but rather the lip tissue, which is delicate and vulnerable. Too much mouthpiece pressure can of course bruise the lips, but failing to warm up will not actually damage the lip muscles.16 The nerves that control the lip muscle group enjoy a failsafe mechanism: they cease transmitting neural impulses to those muscles, virtually laming the embouchure, before we could ever damage them through overuse.17
Nevertheless, no matter how convincing any argument I, or any doctor, might make to convince us otherwise, hornists remain convinced of the necessity of warming up.
Let me be clear: I agree that warming up is advantageous, but I argue that it is not physiologically essential.
Early in my career, the battle with heavy morning rush hour traffic often caused me to arrive at gigs barely in time. Warm up? Where, when and how? It was all I could do to reach my chair, fumbling to get my horn out of the case in time for the downbeat! I share this experience with countless professional hornists.
I learned a trick: to the consternation of those in nearby cars, I would sing and or bellow loudly inside my own car. I discovered that in this way I could “open” up my lungs and get my blood flowing. It activated my chest and abdominal muscles, it seemed to clear the sinuses as well, and it certainly woke me up! I still had to favour the first notes once the show started, but within a very few minutes I was up to speed.
Like countless professional players, I had discovered that it was not actually essential to warm up comprehensively in order to play well, and I also soon realised that in order to survive the hours of playing required of me in the course of the day to come, I could not afford to waste any strength at all on unnecessary warming up. I had realised that warming up is more often a psychological than a physical necessity.
Admittedly, when we start to play the first notes of the day, we often discover that our embouchures feel anything but optimal. There can be many reasons for this, ranging from too much to too little playing the day before, water retention, chapped skin, illness, too little sleep, too much alcohol, and so on.
Our lips are sensitive and reflect our overall physical condition. So when they seem numb, thick, or strange, we can feel a powerful need to warm up. That’s entirely natural. But the idea is to recover our regular embouchure sensitivity and flexibility as soon as possible. And that does not have to take long at all.
Nevertheless, students in particular tend to spend inordinate amounts of time warming up. The most common and powerful motivation for these over-extended warm-ups is underlying insecurity and its most profound manifestation: inhibited, restricted breathing, both inhalation and blowing.
It is not in fact the lips that need to be warmed up so much, but rather it is much more the self-confidence that needs massaging. The issue that concerns me most is the confusion about three distinct tasks:
• quick and efficient warming-up
• daily training routine
• mental focus
I believe the warm-up can, and should be accomplished as quickly as possible, so that the hornist can then move on, as soon as possible, either to a constructive daily routine, or to the performance. Mental focus, the most vital thing of all, does not however even need the instrument!
In conclusion, warming up is so misunderstood and misused that I recommend abandoning both the term and the behaviour. Constructive, mindful, focussed work should be carried out instead.
It is a good idea not to even open the horn case until you are mentally and emotionally ready to make the very first sound you play a beautiful and convincing one. If you are not in that mental space before you begin, no amount of physical “warming up” is going to get you there.
Sunday golfers might permit themselves “Mulligans”. Hornists should not.
Horn-Deaf
In one episode of his BBC television series, The Human Body, Dr. Jonathan Millar presented a weirdly distorted life-sized mannequin, representing the human body, as we subjectively or kinaesthetically perceive ourselves. Various body parts seemed massively out of proportion, either ridiculously over-sized or under-sized.
The reason for this distortion was to demonstrate the effect on our body perception caused by the differing number of nerve endings located in various parts of our bodies. The most dramatically over-sized parts were the mouth, hands and feet, whereas the torso and legs were miniscule when compared to the actual proportions of a human body.
Even without the powerful image of the specially built mannequin, we can demonstrate this lesson to ourselves quite quickly and effectively.
Just imagine for a minute a visit to the dentist to have a cavity filled. Once the drilling was over, did you not find your tongue poking into and exploring the awful hole now to be found in your tooth? It was simply enormous wasn’t it? The hole (and the poor tooth) seemed to be far, far bigger than they actually are in reality.
This is because the mouth area has tens of thousands more nerve endings than any other area of the body and this is why our mouths seem, kinaesthetically speaking, not just extremely sensitive, but also inordinately large.
Glasgow Science Centre Fig. 1
Try this out: touch the middle of your upper lip with your fingertip. Notice how you can actually feel your fingerprint? Did you know that your upper lip is the only part of your body sensitive enough to feel that fingerprint?
Is it easier now to understand how quickly we can become overly fixated on our embouchure, with nearly all the rest of our body occupying some distant and—by comparison—less sensitive region of our body?
The sensations we experience in our mouth area are so powerful that they can overwhelm nearly all other kinaesthetic signals—all except those coming from our hands!
There are also a disproportionately high number of nerve endings in our hands (something which has allowed our species, and the other primates to develop extraordinary manual dexterity).
Ever watched a baby at work? Anything small enough to be picked up by those chubby little fingers is then placed in the mouth (and hopefully not swallowed). The child is exploring his environment using the two most powerful tactile instruments available to him, the hands and mouth.
So what has this to do with playing the horn?
Simply this: if the left hand is cramped up around the left side of the horn, fumbling with the valve keys, the right hand is visually lost somewhere inside the bell, both hands meanwhile responsible for the weight of the instrument, and the mouth is “punching” it out with the mouthpiece, then the poor brain is being overwhelmed with mouth/hand sensory input, so much so if fact, that it quickly becomes impossible to hear what is actually coming out of the horn.
Oh, the player may have a pretty good idea of what it feels like, but he won’t have the necessary leftover mental resources to be able to truly hear what is happening. He will have allowed himself to become, for purposes of learning to play the horn, very nearly deaf! It will no longer be he who is playing the horn; it will be the horn that is tormenting a suffering operator.
Perhaps the reader will have noticed that it is often easier to sing in tune than it is to play the horn in tune. Well it’s not necessarily just because the instrument itself is out of tune or just because you lack the necessary “horn technique”. It is because it truly IS difficult to hear yourself while you are playing. (I return to this subject in 5.4.b “The McWilliam Four-Step”.)
Just by having the instrument in your hands and on your mouth, and before you have blown a single note, the horn is already “too loud”! It can be “deafening”.
Eggs
(inspired by Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski)18
Does improved technique permit better music making or does improved music making actually encourage better technique? My first response is this:
All fish swim but not everything that swims is a fish.
It is virtually axiomatic that having good technique is no guarantee of being a good musician, whereas a good musician always seems to have good, or at least enough technique.
My second, and perhaps disconcerting, response is this:
When we make a consistent effort to play musically, technical improvements occur automatically, almost by themselves—as if the body knows instinctively what to do—even things we have never done before, never practised!
Simply claiming that technical improvements will occur almost by themselves will seem however too intangible, too much an act of faith for most hornists. Not only when we are young, but all throughout our lives, we never stop wanting to know how to do it. Sooner or later the mechanic in all of us demands a rational and concrete explanation of how to play the horn, a clear set of instructions.
Additionally, few teachers are content with warm, fuzzy therapies and esoteric philosophy—they also tend to seek manageable, consistent, reliable, objective and measurable explanations, tools and methods.
Consequently, everyone generally agrees on which are the most important components of horn technique, i.e. embouchure structure and mouthpiece position, optimal inhalation and supported exhalation, tonguing or articulation, instrument position and body posture, scales, arpeggios, slurs, lip trills, double-tonguing etc., and we develop elaborate ways of training and developing all of these individual fundamentals.
Over the last two hundred years numerous horn methods have been compiled that attempt to describe these basic mechanics or techniques. Their aim is to help in the ordered acquisition and improvement of techniques. Some are so-called “complete methods”; others are devoted to specific fundamentals.
For teachers and students alike, these methods are satisfying to work with, and by using such materials one can concentrate on individual fundamentals, as, and when it is most appropriate. The work at hand remains within manageable boundaries, the task is clearly defined, and it is widely believed that if the student succeeds in mastering each of the basics, he will then be able to enjoy the benefits of “good all-round technique”—sufficient virtuosity and strength to handle all repertoire with increased self-confidence.
Fine. Except that technical prowess is still no guarantee at all of being musical, or indeed even of being able to play in time and in tune. Technique doesn’t guarantee music, and hornists who are at best merely technically competent will never enjoy the true technical security that can only be achieved by musical hornists.
This is because it is musical playing which fosters, nourishes and ultimately builds good technique. Musical playing not only requires, but actually encourages and improves technique. It’s almost magic.
I now return to the title of this chapter, Eggs. There follows a parody on a typical Horn Method. Imagine breaking open a raw chicken’s egg in order to:
1. analyse its components and construction
2. demonstrate to students how to re-assemble it so that
3. they can learn to produce their own eggs.
Such instructions might go something like this:
Obtain a yellow, viscous, protein—and cholesterol-rich liquid and suspend it in spherical form within another transparent, viscous, protein-rich but cholesterol-free viscous liquid so that neither fluid mixes with the other.
Place these first in a delicately thin membrane, then within a sealed and seamless, oval shaped container of calcium construction. A small pocket of air should remain within the container at one end.
Be sure that all components are well constructed and that no impurities are present.
This task may prove difficult at first but with persistence and care, it will be possible to master the necessary skills in order to produce a hen’s egg.
How many times do we encounter the last sentence in the above parody in our horn methods? Such a statement virtually amounts to a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy. Statements such as these actually reveal that the author has no further idea how to help the student move forward. Reams of words and exercises have not ultimately helped the student to master the necessary techniques sufficiently. Why?
Just as no human being has ever succeeded in assembling a chicken’s egg, the essentials of horn technique are so inextricably bound up with one another, they are so holistically interconnected, that it is not only exceedingly difficult to deal with them separately, it is probably even counterproductive.
It is ultimately unavoidable that we understand horn teaching and playing in a holistic way, recognising and admitting the unity of musicality and technique.
Not Seeing The Forest For The Trees
Students and teachers alike are often confronted with the same significant obstacle to achieving improvement and success, namely “not being able to see the forest for the trees”.
In plain language this means being so pre-occupied with isolated details that one loses the overall perspective. Without maintaining an over-arching view, a task that should pre-occupy us only temporarily can assume too much relative importance.
When we start to work on some isolated and specific technique, without trying to understand what role it might play in the overall musical scheme of things, we run the risk of imbuing it with inappropriate importance. Before long we can become obsessed with mastering this particular technical requirement at the expense of the rest of the horn technique and above all, the music.
Here are two common examples:
The first and most frequent one is an over-emphasis on embouchure (see 5.1 Embouchure). Here, the teacher and/or student concentrates on constructing the optimal embouchure with such intensity and exclusivity that many other aspects of playing are ignored.
Starting with the admonition that the embouchure must first look good before one is permitted to blow through it, it can be just a short step from there to feeling that too much blowing will disturb the carefully constructed embouchure.
As a direct result, the player who concentrates nearly entirely on his embouchure inevitably restricts his airflow. The resulting tone will evidence this lack of sufficient air flow, sounding constricted, pinched, hard or cold, and in addition the lip muscles will certainly be over-worked. Nevertheless, the player can be convinced that all is still well because he can proudly show off a “correct” embouchure.
Well, he certainly cannot be listening to the quality of his sound because he confuses playing correctly with playing well.
Another example of a technical feature that can attract “too much attention” is the opposite of the above, namely breathing (see 5.2 Breathing).
In this case the student concentrates so much on an optimal breathing technique, that here too, “the tail starts to wag the dog”. The goal of making music, delivering naturally beautiful phrases with a gorgeous sound is ignored.
In many cases this well-intentioned, but lop-sided breathingcentred approach results in a nearly fetishist concentration on inhalation alone. In this one-sided distortion of the breathing process emphasising inhalation over exhalation, players typically attempt to suck in the greatest possible amount of air, irrespective of how much they are actually going to need for the phrase.
Players are frequently encouraged to open the mouth and throat widely to inhale, however upon exhalation, neither throat nor oral cavity return to a size appropriate for the desired sound.
As a result, the exhaled air stream actually loses necessary pressure and the sound lacks definition or focus. Not only can the player experience difficulty with intonation, attacks and dynamics, particularly pianissimo levels, but also suffer from reduced security in all ranges (see 5.2.a Ideologies).
Convinced however, that he is “breathing correctly”, the hornist can believe he is playing well, even though it may not in fact be so. He is certainly not listening to the quality of his sound! If he were, he might begin to pick up signs that something is still wrong, that whatever correctness he thinks is going into the horn, something quite undesirable is coming out.
Teachers always tend to emphasise selected aspects of horn technique at the expense of others. Students then try their best to fulfil what they believe are their teachers’ expectations. Thus both teachers and their students can fall into the trap of fostering and nurturing a technical asymmetry. This then damages the potential for a balanced technique, one that is always at the service of the music.
They may be looking, but “they can’t see the forest for the trees”!
10 John Barrows
11 Ristad, Eloise—A Soprano on her Head pp.38-39, p.53
12 E. Kaucky, Etudy pro Lesni Roh (2 Volumes)
13 Neither the body nor the mind likes new things very much. “Alexander Technique” is a widely practised body training method, which deals at length with this phenomenon.
14 Collapse, Jared Diamond p. 275
15 Soprano On Her Head, Ristad, pub, etc.
16 G. McBride M.D., Berlin
17 Dr. Prof. V. Strunz, Berlin
18 Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, The 5th Discipline