I am sitting here listening to the music of my friend, Michael Ward-Bergeman on his MySpace page. It is fantastic music, but cranking it on the living room speakers would have less than ideal consequences considering it is almost midnight as I write this (I have a whole house full of people that need to stay asleep while I indulge myself in the hyper-accordion). So what am I doing? I’m cranking the music on my headphones!

I love headphones. And by headphones I don’t mean the cheap little earbuds that come with your iPod (and no, not the old ones that came with your Walkman that have all the foam falling off the earpiece either. If you don’t know what a Walkman is, then don’t talk to me). I am talking about really good quality headphones; the kind that put you right into the middle of the music you are listening to, immersing you in the sound. My personal favorites are a pair of Sennheiser’s that I bought in London while on tour (Think airplane seat. Think demolished plug on old headphones). I paid a lot of money for them, but then again, I have had them for (gulp) 10 years. I think it has been worth it!

Anyway, the point is, there is really nothing like experiencing music played through a really good set of headphones. It is your own private concert in the best stereo you will ever hear. There is something about retreating to your own space and immersing yourself in the music you are hearing and that only you are hearing: your own audio world to observe and explore. Good music needs focus to be fully appreciated. It shouldn’t be relegated to some background soundtrack for dishes and laundry. Listening on headphones provides that. It provides you the opportunity to absorb music on a level it deserves. So grab your ‘phones, put on some fantastic music, close your eyes, and disappear for a while. You will be glad you did.

Plus, it doesn’t wake the baby. And at this particular point in my life, that is a pretty important thing.

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This morning I had coffee with Peter Maxwell Davies. Well, not the real Maxwell Davies, but with his music. Specifically, I had coffee with a brash 19 year old version of him who had the gall (thankfully) to write a compact hard driving Sonata that pushed the bounds of what is possible on the instrument, and has since become a staple of the solo trumpet repertoire.

Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to creating an effective recital program that will feature music from my yet to be released solo CD (exciting news on that coming very soon) while also including some of the high points of the trumpet repertoire. And whenever I think of programming pieces from the trumpet and piano rep, I quickly turn to that brash Sonata by the young Maxwell Davies, the piece he considers to be his opus 1. If you ask me, this piece makes a pretty impressive opus 1! Ironically, as much I have always liked this piece, I have never performed it. I guess there’s no time like the present…

My coffee time this morning was spent with the first movement, and in looking over the piano score I was struck by how unusual (yet critical) some of his choices are. For example, the piece has no time signature, but it is barred. Why? It would be no problem to notate time signatures throughout the piece. Perhaps this is my 21st century eyes looking at it, but why not notate the changing time signatures? The opening bars for instance would be: 4/4 (8/8), 2/4 (4/8), 9/16, 7/16, 2/8, 2/4 (4/8) etc. Perhaps when this was written it was not common practice to use time signatures like 7/16 and 9/16, or perhaps Maxwell Davies found a certain charm in the ambiguity created by omitting them. If the latter was the case, I’m not sure it worked, because I think the only way to actually count it is to break it down into some kind of meter, which means that the soloist then will have to simply supply the meters himself. Besides, it’s not like it can actually be ambiguous. After all, 9/16 is 9/16. It can only be what it is.

Another interesting aspect of the first movement is that he has chosen to have the 8th note get the beat, but he makes no notation to indicate that. He simply marks Allegro moderato at the top with no further indication. If you have never seen the score, it can be quite disarming at first sight. The page full of 16ths with no meter looks more like a black and white Jackson Pollock painting than you might like to admit — the complexity takes a while to process. If he had chosen, however, to have the quarter note to get the beat, then some of those above mentioned “meters” would not have seemed so daunting (if he was even concerned about that at all) and the piece would have had a distinctly friendlier appearance. The opening of the piece would then be rewritten to look like this: Bar 1 becomes two 4/4 bars of one whole note each, Bar 2 = 4/4 with a half note and half rest, bar 3 = 2/4, bar 4 = 9/8, bar 5 = 7/8 and so on… Now don’t get me wrong, I love the decision to give the 8th note the beat and have the 16th be the driving pulse for the piece; it just feels right. But I find this kind of decision making by composers — as they translate the music in their heads to the music on the page — a really fascinating process.

This piece would have a very different look and feel if notated differently. And I think the choice made by the composer to choose a specific notation has a noticeable impact on the way it sounds, even in cases like this where the actual content would be unaltered (all the notes and proportions would remain the same). Why, you may ask? The reason lies in the perception of the piece by the soloist. For instance, 16ths are faster than 8ths, more frantic, more motion and turbulence; 8ths are slower and less frantic, more stable. Of course, I have experienced many 8th note passages with a chip on their shoulder and a point to prove, bearing the turbulence of the world on their shoulders, but even in those cases, when the 16ths join in, that character gets heightened. If Maxwell Davies had chosen to notate the piece with the quarter getting the beat and the 8th notes providing the pulse, then this movement would have looked less frantic, less hair-raising, and it would have sounded that way in performance too. And if you know this movement, then you would understand that that would simply not do. Perhaps that is the rational for the missing meters as well. Maybe he wants to cause the soloist that feeling of disorientation leading to panic, an effort to bring out the frenzied, edgy nature of the movement, and indeed, the piece. Or alternatively, perhaps he wanted to create a sense of freedom on the part of the soloist, a feeling that we are no longer bound by earthly meters, but are free to roam the rhythmic heavens at a whim, in spite of the fact that we remain bound and tied to our rhythmic structure — like one of those hot air balloons at big tourist areas, ascending into the sky while remaining firmly fixed to the ground with a large offending rope or wire. It would be nice to ask him. Maybe a cup of coffee with the actual man, and not just his music, is in order.

But for now, while this exploration of musical notation and interpretation is a fascinating one, I’m afraid further discussion will have to wait. You see, my coffee is done, and I actually have to go and learn how to play this thing! For some reason, it is required that I know how to buzz my lips into a tiny metal cup in order to perform this piece. Go figure…

Given all this discussion, I think it is only appropriate that I include an audio example from the sonata. I have attached a clip of the opening of this movement performed by the inimitable Håkan Hardenberger with Roland Pontinen on piano. This recording is from his CD The Virtuoso Trumpet. If you don’t own this recording, check it out. It’s extraordinary. Perhaps now you will enjoy a morning coffee with Mr. Davies as well.

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I was doing some research on H.K. Gruber’s Aerial tonight. Specifically, I was looking into the cowhorn required in the piece — how one might acquire said cow horn and what might be involved in actually playing such a thing — when I came across this Wiki page. There isn’t much information here, but I did find one absolute nugget of a sentence. Just there, at the end of the Wiki article, the very last sentence sums up something I have been trying to tell people for 20 years.

The bigger the cowhorn is, the easier it is to play.

Throughout the evolution of brass instruments, some things have never changed.

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As you can see, I have just re-posted the article Dueling with Pinchas: Building Strength for the Brandenburg and Beyond. A few people have written me about this article, so here it is, back by popular demand. Let me know if there are any other articles any of you are looking for. Hopefully I will have time soon to go through all of them and make sure they are all transferred. Enjoy!

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My first year as Principal Trumpet in the Chicago Symphony had enough big repertoire in it to tantalize, terrorize, and titillate anyone with aspirations of sitting in that chair.  It just so happens that I was anyone.  It never really felt like sitting, however; more like roasting, but that is a story for another time… 

Amongst all the big concerts during that year there was one that stood out right from the time that I saw the press release for the new season: a concert featuring both Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale with Pinchas Zukerman as soloist and conductor.  This concert was to be done 5 times: Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday matinee, Saturday night, Sunday matinee.  Looking across the landscape of that season it seemed to me like the Himalaya Mountains: many high peaks, but only one Everest.  This concert was my Everest, my biggest chance to soar, my biggest chance to crash.  I did not want to crash, so I set up a strength building routine to make sure I was in the kind of shape I would need to be in to be able to play a concert that I wasn’t even sure was possible, to say nothing of well thought out.  Oh yeah, did I mention that I had never played either piece before?  Yes, my debut for both of these pieces was to be under the bright lights of Chicago Symphony Hall, playing with one of the world’s greatest violin virtuosos, while sitting in God’s very own chair.  Other than that, I was pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

The first step I take in working towards a goal such as this is to figure out what the biggest challenges will be.  For this concert there were big challenges, but they weren’t widely varied.  The biggest issue by far was to be able to get through the Brandenburg with enough gas in the tank to be able to have all the touch and finesse required of the Stravinsky, especially over a period of five consecutive days.  The other big issue was transitioning from piccolo on the Bach to C cornet on the Stravinsky and making the stylistic and technical shifts that went along with the change.  As far as the pieces themselves are concerned, once you are past the strength issue (assuming you have really good control over the lightness of sound required), the Bach is really quite simple.  The Stravinsky requires a lot more from the player in terms of wide ranging musicality and technique, but it is certainly manageable with good preparation; that is, of course, if the face hasn’t been shredded by that little ditty on the first half.   Thus, we come back to the lynch pin for this project: strength building.

The routine that I finally developed was based on an exercise that Bill Williams, currently the Acting Principal Trumpet in San Francisco, told me about.  It is a very simple scalar exercise where every step of the scale is a whole note.  Start out in the key of G major at a tempo of 70-80 bpm.  All notes in this exercise should be slurred, and each sustain should be held until you can no longer sustain the same sound and volume that you started with.  The exercise begins on a G in the staff and moves upward 5 notes (all in one breath) to D, which is sustained.  After a normal breath, you begin again on D and move upward 4 notes to G, which is also sustained.  Breathe, start again on G and proceed down 5 notes to C – sustain – breathe – C down 4 notes to G – sustain – breathe – G down 5 notes to C – sustain – breathe – C down 4 notes to low G – sustain – breathe – G up 5 notes to D – sustain – breathe – D up four notes to G – sustain.  Congratulations!  You have just completed one repetition of the exercise.  In order to build the kind of strength that is demanded of a professional trumpet player, though, you will need to be able to play through many reps of this exercise.  It is the strength gained through the repetitions that is the key to a truly strong foundation.

The first thing to determine is how many times (reps) you will play this exercise when starting out.  I started with three, but for most of my younger students I start with one.  It is important that you start with fewer reps than you can actually handle, building from a position of strength rather than weakness.  Regardless of where you start, you will be adding reps regularly, so having a high rep starting point is of negligible importance.  I added one rep per week, but you may find a slower pace to be more beneficial, especially with younger players.  Again, it is better to be conservative with the speed that you add repetitions.  Do, however, make sure to keep adding them on a regular basis; if you flounder around forever at 3 reps, you won’t get any stronger; you will have to push yourself in order to see improvement.  Each repetition should be followed by a short period of rest, somewhere between 45 seconds and 1 minute, and once all reps have been completed you should have a longer rest of 45 minutes or more before playing again.

When playing through this exercise, there are a few guidelines that will maximize its effectiveness.  First of all, pressure should be fairly light, but feel free to use some pressure while playing this exercise; it will be needed to stabilize the embouchure, especially at louder dynamics and in the upper register.  Secondly, the mouthpiece should remain on the lips at all times, although the embouchure does not need to remain active during the breath.  The breaths should be normal breaths, like those that you take with the mouthpiece still in contact with the lips, but with the corners opening to allow the air to come in.  Thirdly, this is a sound exercise.  You should always be attempting to make the most beautiful ringing sound you can.  Fourthly, experiment with changing the dynamics.  If I am doing three reps I may do one forte, one piano, and one mezzo forte.  This helps train the embouchure to deal with the changes in volume and still maintain maximum efficiency.

Once you are up to approximately six repetitions, you should start raising the key of the scale in half steps, but reduce the number of reps to three, then build them up again in the new key.  So a typical plan would be as follows: build up to 6 reps in G – raise the key to Ab and reduce to 3 reps – raise the reps according to your rate (mine was one per week) until you reach 6 reps in Ab – raise the key to A and repeat the same process.  Keep raising the key in this manner until you reach high C on C trumpet.  Six times through this exercise in C major will mean that you have a strength base to do just about anything you want, at least for playing trumpet in an orchestra.

“But you haven’t said anything about the piccolo trumpet!” you cry.  True enough.  That is because the true focus of this article is achieving the base strength that is needed to handle a concert that demands the highest level of physical capability, such as this one.  The achievement of that base should be your highest priority when training for such an event. However, in addition to the benefits that the strength base provides, you will need to ensure that the strength you are developing translates to the scenario in which you plan to use it.  For this reason I started doing the last repetition (or two sometimes) of this exercise on the piccolo trumpet.  Because of the immense demands of playing an exercise such as this into the upper register, I revised the exercise so that all notes are half notes with the “sustains” typically held only eight beats.  The starting note/key you pick should be one that is challenging to you, but that also allows you the ability to play through it successfully.  Before digging out your piccolo and playing through this exercise, though, I highly recommend that you develop a solid strength base.  I typically won’t involve piccolo at all in this exercise until I am able to do at least six reps in G major.

I firmly believe that strength building needs to be involved in every trumpet player’s routine, on some level and in some manner.  This exercise is another, among many, that is designed to take your long and disciplined work and turn it into the ability you seek.  Like those other exercises, however, it demands that you provide the work in order for it to show results.  The good news about investing time in this exercise is that its results have been proven under bright lights and extreme duress.  The results of my labor stood up to this difficult task, and the concerts came off very well.  By the end of the week, I felt that I could play anything, and I felt that I was getting stronger, not weaker.  It is only from riding on a well developed foundation of strength that such a feeling could be achieved — a foundation that has been achieved through daily work and discipline over long periods of time.  Having made this investment and having achieved the benefits of that labor, however, I can guarantee you one thing: it is worth every ounce of sweat invested.

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