Now Leaving Rock Bottom

You are 25 (or 35) or 27 (or 33).  You dream of a career as an orchestral musician.  You have gone to all the right schools, studied with all the right people; they have told you how great you are, how much they believe in you.  You have gone to festivals and basked in the glow of making music your livelihood.  You are young, happy, and confident; you are budding success just waiting for the Spring.  Then, you go to an audition…  You attend an audition for second trumpet in the Southwestern New Mexico Symphony Orchestra of the Acoma Nation.  The position pays $6,000 per year, and, if you are lucky enough to win the job, you will settle down in a place 263 miles from the nearest Starbuck’s.  You show up at the audition with 5 trumpets, stand in a room with 62 other people with 5 trumpets, collect a number, play the exposition of the Haydn, then three excerpts (all of which sound strained and forced, nothing like you really sound), then you are “Thank You’d”, made to wait in a strangely small room with bad acoustic tile, sit for an hour facing the floor, then someone who doesn’t know how to pronounce Mozart comes and tells you that you have been cut.  Yes, this little plum of a job is just a bit out of reach for someone of your abilities.

Then, you redefine yourself…

You are 25 (or 35) or 27 (or 33).  You are out of work.  You have no employable skills.  You play the trumpet better than 15 out of 62 people who are willing to work for $6,000 per year.  Most of your friends are out of work or… they are wildly successful and texting you daily about how much money you can make when you actually are talented.  Then they complain that they have to go to rehearsal and that the conductor really sucks.  You are having a butter sandwich for dinner, again.  You contemplate mailing a butter sandwich to your successful friends.  You are faced with a wall of anxiety, a wall of fear.  You try practicing, but you can’t shake the way you sounded at the last audition, or you wonder why you are wasting your time practicing, wondering if it will ever pay off.  With nowhere else to turn, you go to the internet.  Somehow you find yourself perusing the writings of some strange trumpet player and teacher who apparently saw the Chicago Symphony once, or something.  Now you are reading this.  This could well be your lowest point.  Now Entering: Rock Bottom.  Population: 1.

Fortunately for you, this article isn’t over, so there is at least the possibility of things improving from here.  But what could I possibly write that could help you find your way out of this miserable corner you have painted yourself into?  Keep reading; you never know what lies around the next corner, or as one of my favorite writers puts it... [complete article]

 

Writing for the Holidays

I can’t believe it has been a month since I wrote here! It has been quite the month too. The recording of my first CD was an overwhelming, yet extremely rewarding, undertaking. I knew it would be a big project, but I didn’t know how much it would entail. I had been hoping to write on the blog about my daily activities as the recording unfolded, that idea proved, uh, impractical.

Now, however, the dust from that project has settled, and I will be writing on here with more regularity. I have just finished a new feature article about honing mental skills for the audition circuit, especially in regards to the struggle of landing your first orchestra gig. It should be up on the site by tomorrow morning, a kind of Christmas present for my readers. I hope you all enjoy it.

I wish you all a Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas. [view post]

 

Some Days

Sometimes there are days when, for one reason or another, I suddenly realize that I have absolutely no idea what the hell I am doing.

I hate those days!

 

Practicing for Tomorrow

Today was not a good day for playing the trumpet. Among other things, I barely had any time to play. By the time I was able to sit down and practice, it was 9:30pm and I felt like I was playing on borrowed lips. At this point, it was very tempting to just put the horn down, pour a glass of wine, sit down with a good book, and wait for a better day tomorrow. I decided against that though. Instead, I made myself play through some... [view post]

 

Going Home

The concept is simple enough.  A player you admire, someone doing what you aspire to, is playing a certain mouthpiece or a certain horn.  Maybe you see it in an advertisement, or maybe it is just talked about in the hallways outside practice rooms and on internet chat sites.  There was a thread on TrumpetHerald recently where the whole topic of discussion was what horn Chris Martin was using, the underlying motivation for such a thread remaining unspoken: if I could just get my hands on the exact equipment Chris Martin uses...  Or perhaps for you it isn't another player that makes you decide to try a new instrument.  Maybe it is the seduction of improving a skill that is difficult on your current trumpet, or maybe it is the constant lure of that magical sound that will finally lead you to the career of your dreams.  Whatever the motivation, a new instrument can woo us at our most defenseless times and lead us to decisions that, in retrospect, were not sound.  Sometimes, of course, a new instrument can be the godsend it seems to be, but it's by no means always the case.  Just as often, and perhaps more often, this decision works against us, and that is the reason it must be taken carefully.

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I had some work done on my old Bach C trumpet (239 with a 25A for the equipment zealots), but I don't believe I went into any detail about what was done.  The work entailed a few minor repairs plus a removal of the pitch finder mechanism that John Hagstrom had convinced me to put on after I won the 4th trumpet job in the CSO way back in 1998.  With the pitch finder gone, the horn was... [complete article]

 

Wanderings

Yesterday I dropped by the University of Miami Bookstore and picked up a new Moleskine. If you don’t know what a Moleskine is you can check them out at www.moleskine.com. These handy little notebooks are great for keeping a journal of your practice, a personal journal, or just a place to scratch the odd note every now and then when something strikes your fancy. When I picked mine up (storyboard notebook) it came with a small promotional for their new City Notebook. This ingenious little notebook includes: city maps, metro maps, translucent sheets for tracing itineraries, detachable sheets for quick messages, and personal blank pages amongst its many features. They have them available for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Prague, Rome, and Vienna. When I saw this, I had to resist the urge to run out and buy every one of the notebooks, book my trips to these incredible cities, and spend my time wandering their streets, photographing my shadow in narrow, winding streets.

One of the things I enjoyed most about being in a major symphony orchestra was getting to travel to many of the world’s greatest cities while on tour. I have been fortunate enough to visit all the above listed cities while on tour except for Lisbon, Milan, Prague, and Rome. I have enjoyed Belgian Beer in Brussels, sipped coffee on the Champs-Elysees, wandered through the streets of London until... [view post]

 

A Matter of Perspective

As I write this I am soaring (at 12,500 meters apparently) above scattered clouds and vacant stretches of blue, through an endless sky and over a ceaseless ground.  Impossibly inhabited little towns litter a landscape carved with lonely roads that meander senselessly but purposefully in every direction.  The men that imagined them and made them are invisible, but the product of their labor is laid out for all to see, like some kind of Earth-sized ghost town, with nothing but old signs and structures pointing to those who once roamed its streets. But forgive me; I wax poetic over the ordinary.  This is, after all, just a business trip.

Yes, it is just one more hastily packed and prepared jaunt around the world that people in our day and age have made so commonplace.  It is always the same people on these trips: The Noise Canceling Headphone Man, who has finally found the ultimate weapon for protection against...; The Talk to Anybody Conversationalist, who seems to always find a seat next to the most fascinating person they have ever encountered; The Bitter Old Man, shouting brusque instructions and complaints at his flustered, wobbling wife as they hurriedly slog through the busy terminal; The Sleeper, that irritating person who has the seemingly impossible (and much envied) ability to begin sleeping at the moment he drops into an airplane seat, only to awake refreshed and eager, like some modern sleeping beauty, when the airplane wheels kiss the runway on arrival.  This usual cast of characters, combined with the rigorous routine of security, the airplane boarding protocol, the squeezing down the aisle past the person who needs to unpack 17 things out of his carry-on in order to stave off relentless boredom for just a bit longer (yet another character that could be listed above) -- all of these things are the necessary evils and hurdles inherent in travel.  Both commonplace and irritating, they make our trip so inconvenient and difficult that we are left wondering why we should have to be burdened with such things in order to merely get from one point to another.

But that isn't really true is it?  It was not so long ago that a trip like the one I am on now -- from Miami, FL to Toronto, Canada -- would have taken days.  Not long before that, this trip would have taken weeks or months and would have involved preparations that would make even the most avid list-maker weep.  Now, though, we blast through the air near the speed of sound, whisked along on the wings of one of man's most remarkable achievements -- coffee and pastries in hand, iPod providing a soundtrack to our journey -- covering a distance in a few hours that once took man centuries.  And what do we do in sight of such luxury and wonder? [complete article]

 

My Battle with ARS (part II)

Today I had a relapse of ARS (Altered Reality Syndrome). This condition had been in remission for quite some time, but today I suffered a significant setback.

Upon arrival in Toronto — I am doing some master classes at the Glenn Gould School of Music — I hailed a cab and set off for my hotel. Once downtown, I caught glimpse of what turned out to be the Opera House.

“Is the symphony hall in this area?” I asked the cab driver.

“Excuse me?” replied the cabbie.

“The concert hall for the symphony, is it around here?” I replied, sure that I was just not speaking clearly enough. The cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror with a puzzled face.

“The concert hall for the Toronto Symphony, the orchestra hall, is it near here?” I asked again, hoping that the use of the word orchestra... [view post]

 

 

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