Happy New Year everyone! The 2006 Christmas tour went incredibly well. We had SO much fun. We were lucky to have Jeroen Berwaerts from Hamburg, Germany, join our ranks on trumpet. He and Joe tore up the stage every night! Some of the tour highlights included performing with the NY Philharmonic Brass guys, concerts at Disney Hall, Princeton, and Berkeley, performances with the New Jersey Symphony and National Arts Centre Orchestra, and closing out the tour with a grand performance at Roy Thomson Hall with the Elmer Eisler Singers.
[Bernhard, Joe, Chuck, Jeroen, Gene]
The Path to Musical Excellence Step One — Forming your musical mind and developing musical concept
To open this year’s journal, I will describe what I believe to be the most important part of becoming a great musician, whatever instrument you play! The key is to FIRST master the basic musicianship skills. What are the basic musicianship skills? They are the following:
Sight Singing/Ear Training/Active Listening--learning to hear and internalize rhythm, intervals, harmony, musical styles, and the ability to sing music accurately on sight.
Music Theory--learning how to read, write, analyze, and generally interpret music.
Music History--learning the history of all music (including styles and performance practice) from ancient to modern times, and how it related to what was going on in the rest of the world.
Basic Keyboard Skills--I’m not talking about becoming Glenn Gould. You just have to develop a basic competence and familiarity with the piano. This skill goes hand-in-hand with learning and understanding music theory.
Why are these skills important and how are they relevant to performance? The reason these skills are so beneficial is simple. By mastering them, we will be able to learn music and form an interpretation of music BEFORE we ever pick up our instruments! It is the way we develop our MUSICAL CONCEPT. It’s where everything else we do in music comes from. Having a strong musical concept will save us countless hours of practicing time and also means we can always practice AWAY from our instrument (this especially goes out to all those players with repetitive stress injuries). It is the way to find our singing musical self.
Ear training is particularly important to musicians in this regard. To put it bluntly, I owe 50% of my success as a musician to my ear training and sight-singing skills. 45% goes to hard-work and 5% goes to talent! I could not be a professional horn player if I didn’t have a rock-solid internalization of music. Ear training is not just about learning exercises in a classroom. It is about training our ears every time we ACTIVELY listen to music. When we actively listen (as opposed to passively listening, i.e. music on television, radio on in the backround during dinner), our mind takes note of things in ways it didn’t before. The more you actively listen to music and train your ears, the more aware you will be when you play an instrument. The mind leads the body. LISTEN to as much music of all kinds as possible!! Just make listening a daily part of life.
Practically speaking, ear training will give you excellent relative pitch so you can always sight-read music well. Your accuracy will increase by leaps and bounds! You will be keenly aware of intonation and rhythm when playing by yourself and with others, allowing you to make quicker adjustments if necessary. You will have a much higher performing standard by which to judge your own progress during practice sessions, making you a better teacher of yourself. By mastering ear training and music theory, you will be able to hear a piece of music while you are silently looking at it! Music theory will come in especially handy with composing.
The study of music history will allow us to always know the correct style in which a piece is to be performed. This insight will help our music-making be that much more meaningful during a performance. It will help us understand the lives and times of all the famous composers we now perform and love. For example, understanding what it was like to compose and be an artist in Soviet Russia will give us much greater insight into the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, not to mention the folk music of Russia at that time.
Composing and Improvising are also very necessary components for becoming a well-rounded musician and are excellent for getting us in touch with our own unique expressive natures! Consider them the next step after the first four skills. We can and should compose and improvise without having mastered the first four skills, but it will be infinitely easier once those four skills are more developed, especially music theory and ear training. Don’t worry if you have never composed or improvised before… it’s really much more basic than it sounds. I’m not talking about being Beethoven or Charlie Parker… just getting a little involved in these things (doodling on your instrument, writing/improvising some simple songs will do, using a guitar or piano, or anything). Just get those creative juices flowing a bit. The important thing is to have fun. I personally like to sing and write simple silly songs and pieces for my friends and family. It sounds corny, but it’s actually a really fun way to get me in touch with my creative self.
So, as you can see, the basic musicianship skills are the foundation to a life of great music-making. These skills, along with composition and improvisation, should be looked at as the basis for creating who we are as musical beings! Whether we are a professional, amateur or student musician (it’s often quite a blurry line between the three, from my experience!), we should strive to develop our inner musical ideas first, alongside the development of our performing craft. The cool thing is that all these things can be done away from our respective instruments. We must sing our music, not just play it. Then we will be able to sing USING our instruments!! Getting better in these areas is the surest way to unlocking our inner musical self. It is the surest path in allowing us the ability to bring our creative ideas to the surface. It is at the core of forming our unique musical concepts. Without the proper tools, we cannot adequately express the deepest longings of our soul. This is the first step in our quest for true excellence in performance!
Thanks for stopping by, and please drop in again. My next journal will be on the importance of breathing in brass performance.
