Brass Players… Do this
As a Brass Player, who teaches multiple instruments, I find that we, as a subfamily, of musical instruments, have some amazing method books and some books that have stood the test of time. It is quite amazing to know that we have so many different “schools” of thought for how to best play your given instrument, below will be a very small list of the different technique schools out there.
The reason I bring them up is simply to explain that we have a lot of great ideas and beliefs on how to best play a brass instrument, and yet, we are either very unfamiliar with how all the different methods and how they work to make the best players or we are very adamant that the way we have learned is the only way to learn because it was the best (or only) way to get better.
My background in learning my given instrument, the french horn, has been less than ideal but does provide a great understanding of my desire for brass players in general. I wish my personal music instruction would’ve been more thorough in regards to being able to say that I had a consistent method of instruction at all. I am from Northwest Florida, where, unfortunately, private music instruction is not the norm and there is not a lot of access to music instructors at all, with even fewer ones who have studied under a particular style of teaching that would be able to carry a student through to a high ability level.
I firmly believe due to my environment and the situations around how I have been taught, I had to rely on other means of instruction, primarily through the internet, particularly YouTube. This led me to learn about many different schools of thought that I didn’t know existed. By the time I graduated college and started teaching, I made a goal that I would be a teacher that “desired to learn”. In so doing, I have taken online music lessons, purchased hundreds of different method books ( I literally have a whole portion of my wall filled with different bins of method books for every instrument type that I teach), and listened to dozens of podcasts/interviews with professional musicians and with influential brass teachers of our time.
One of my favorite quotations from a method book that I have thoroughly enjoyed going through is in the book, Twenty-Seven Groups of Exercises for Cornet and Trumpet by Earl D. Irons, where a portion of the book is discussing single and multiple tonguing exercises, “… where the last nine pages of this book were written and compiled with the sincere hope that the exercises will help eliminate some of the faulty triple and double tonguing that is so noticeable among most school age players.” This book was written back in 1938!!! To me that speaks volumes on how things have changed in less than a hundred years. I don’t know about most areas, but in Northwest Florida, most “school age players” can not double/triple tongue at all. It makes us feel like we have focused on some things that we believe is important but may hinder us later on down the road. We leave it up to our “future me” to figure it out.
So, as a teacher, I make it a focus for my students to incorporate double/triple tonguing into their practice times as soon as I feel as though they understand how to single tongue consistently ( which is around months 3-6. I also use a lot of flexibility and finger exercises, and a vast array of long tones and flow studies to produce the best sound possible. Which has led me to get into how different “schools of brass playing” differ and what are the pros and cons of each corresponding school and the results are fascinating. Logically, every school of brass playing has worked, since every school of brass playing has a proof of concept, the teacher/performer who studied under that particular school. The interesting part is how uniquely similar they all are. They each have some fundamentals that are all inherently the same ( which may need to be another blog post in itself) that have spread to each different school, the only differences are in how they approach those fundamentals and how important each fundamental is in the scope of instruction.
This whole blog post can be boiled down to this, invest in some further learning, purchase some new method books, listen to some great podcasts, and try a new approach. Do not be afraid of the “new” as there might just be something that can be beneficial in that exercise book. It will not only benefit us but also benefit our students in the long run, knowing as many ways to help them be successful.
This is not an exhaustive list, this is just a few of the many books that I have in my library of method books:
Brass Playing Methods
Bill Adams
Jean-Baptiste Arban
Saint-Jacome
Max Schlossberg
Herbert L. Clarke
Claude Gordon
James Stamp
Vincent Cichowics
Doc Reinhardt
Earl D. Irons
Philip Farkas
