wind and song

11-10-99

I'm sure you're all about tired of my gushing about the new job, so I'll cut it out for a day. Right after I tell you that I scooped the yard. I'll leave you to think about what that means.

After work I showered and went to teach my sole student. This kid is precious, in all ways. He reminds me a little of my first really good euphonium student, except this kid is so innocent-seeming. It was only our second lesson, so I don't know for sure how "innocent" he is, but he is musically pure. He's a private teacher's dream.

He has an incredible amount of raw talent. He's studied a little bit, so he has the basics down, and he's not terribly shy about playing in front of a teacher. He owns two of the most-used etude books for trombone, my two favorites, so I don't have to make him buy music. He has All-State ambitions and wants to play in college. He's a good academic student, intelligent enough to know when I'm joking, and he knows what I'm asking for when I say, "play it more...Italian."

But he's not yet spoiled. He practices what I tell him, not just the stuff he wants to practice. He wants me to drill him on scales. He's encouraging his high school trombone colleagues to take lessons. And—best of all—his band director is on my side. That was the worst thing about my situation in Lansing: the band director at the school where I taught had his own ideas about what the kids needed to learn, and his ideas were either old-school or fundamentally wrong.

It's not hard to imagine. The euphonium is a relatively young instrument. It evolved from the tuba about 150 years ago, and even the physical shape and proportions of the euph are still settling. There have been a few great teachers/players in the last 100 years, from the guys in Sousa's band to the present. Unfortunately, these teachers had widely varying schools of thought.

One of the "greatest" teachers of all was alive into the eighties. Many current band directors studied with or idolized Leonard Falcone; who taught at Michigan State. I don't dispute that the man was good. He was a great player and apparently a good teacher, judging by some of his students. But his methodology is outdated. He taught the basics of technique with a rote approach. His standard of sound was based on a skinny old horn that is now considered to be a student model. His musical style was exaggerated and soupy; imagine a sweaty, hairy, Italian tenor wailing and rolling his eyes, knotting a tear-soaked handkerchief, with a vibrato that shatters glass.

We don't do that anymore. Modern euphonium/tuba pedagogy is based on the teaching of Arnold Jacobs, whose passing I wrote about in one of my earliest entries. Jacobian pedagogy is based on the concept of wind and song: the air you breathe is used to make the sound, not the mouthpiece or the tension in your body. It's all very Zen.

I teach my students that breathing is the most important part of playing. You breathe in order to live; you breathe in order to play, and in some cases, you play in order to live. You live in order to play. Any way you look at it, it's all about breath. That's the wind part. The song part, well, that's more difficult.

So it makes me very angry when older teachers contradict me, telling my kids to tense their abdominal muscles and force out the sound. Tense? Force? "I studied with Falcone," he says. "Falcone's dead," is what John says. What do I say? Keep your hands off my students, unless you want to teach them yourself.