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Sprezzatura Time
It’s the end of the semester, and the usual flurry of recitals and juries has come and gone. Players emerge from practice rooms to the harsh glare of the footlights and are to some degree – lesser or...
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Taking Inventory
When you first start out on the horn, just about everything is a struggle. If you survive and continue a couple years, you acquire some skills and begin to find that there are some things that you can...
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Shortcut Culture
Higher! Faster! Louder! Sooner! Now! One of the selling points of music study is – or used to be – that it teaches disciplined hard work over a long period of time. But in this age of instant...
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Rhythm n Views from All Over
News, views, rhythm n blues gleaned from a quick blog tour… Pip Eastop (creative London superhornist) hates the harmonic minor scale. He finds it pointless and recommends that it be stricken from...
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Revolutionary News for Brass Players
I read a lot of journals, and not just horn journals. Sometimes you find really interesting stuff in, say Scientific American, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, Guitar Player, Popular...
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Of Dopamine, Anxiety, Tyranny, Yoda, Guitars, Arts Study, and Scary Music
Juilliard Time for some summer beachcombing through some interesting music-related links: Does music help you work better? Check out “The Power of Music, Tapped in a Cubicle“. “Melodious sounds help...
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Notes from the Past (on horn playing)
When I first started playing professionally in an orchestra many years ago, some interesting things happened. Life was a little different than I had imagined before that. Everyone’s experience is...
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Jeff Nelsen – TED talk on Fearless Performance (video)
TED talks are always good, and Jeff Nelsen has a terrific TED talk for horn players and for anyone who ever has to perform in any way at any time – which is all of us.
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Quick WarmUps Revisited
(Photo credit: Iguanasan) I tossed out a question last month (Dec. 11) and then never finished it. Let’s have another look. The original question was “What is the best thing to play in those situations...
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Good Beginnings
(Photo credit: thinkmedialabs) I don’t know about you, but the toughest part of performing for me is walking on stage and getting started. I usually get to feel at home on the stage after a little...
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