Women knock down brass barriers

When I was in junior high school—the time of the BeeGees, back-pocket hair brushes, and green M&M’s—only one girl played a brass instrument in our school band, and I am embarrassed to say that we boys often teased her. Her named was Wendy and she played the cornet. We didn’t tease her to her face because she was tough and probably would have punched us, but we did make comments about her when she was out of earshot, though she certainly must have known what we were saying. One time a fight broke out in the band room between her and a boy who played the trombone. Maybe she’d just had enough of putting up with our comments. Our sweater-clad band teacher, Mr. Pontrelli, didn’t seem to know how to stop it. He stayed in his chair and called out, “Hey, guys cut it out,” but they ignored him, and the wrestling went on for a long time before fizzling out on its own.

Like the fish in the joke who responds to the statement from another fish, “Water’s nice today, isn’t it?” with the question, “What’s water?” it never occurred to me to question why only boys played brass instruments in my school. Somehow, I believed without knowing why that brass was meant for boys and girls played the flute. How thoughtless we were!

For a bit of context, brass is a family of instruments that includes, in addition to the cornet, the trumpet, French horn, trombone, baritone, and tuba. It’s true that brass instruments are physically demanding—a lot of air has to jet through a tiny hole in the mouthpiece—which may explain why women were not encouraged to play them in the past. Brass was probably seen as too physically demanding and “masculine” for women.

This has changed since I was in school, and we are very fortunate. Today, some of the best brass players are women. From Norway, there’s Tine Ting Helseth, and from the UK, Alison Balsom, both international trumpet stars. Here in the US, we have Mary Elizabeth Bowden who is blazing a trail as an A-list trumpet soloist. On the trombone, we have Megumi Kanda, Shannon Barnett, and Amy Bowers. In jazz, there are many excellent women brass players, including Ingrid Jensen, Andrea Motis, Rita Payes, and Angeleisha Rodgers.

Even in major league symphony orchestras, where men still dominate brass sections, there are signs that women are breaking in to the club. Orchestral players such as Nicole Cash, Amanda Stewart, Rebecca Cherion, and Karen Bliznik are not just members of major orchestras, but also occupy some of the top seats in their sections.

Instrumental music still hasn’t come to a transformational juncture, as sports did in the US with the arrival of Title IX in the early 1970s, but there is hope that more women will excel at brass instrument playing and become mentors to girls and young women.

Regulating your emotions for better performance

Tennis great Billie Jean King is fond of saying that “pressure is a privilege.” The advice comes from a great athlete but applies equally to musicians. According to this wisdom, those who perform under pressure—whether athletes, musicians, or students taking an exam—are not burdened by an onerous task, but are in fact privileged to be in a situation where the pressure is on and the expectations are high. In other words, competition brings out the best in us, and those who compete are lucky to do so.

The psychology of athletes has been well studied, but that of musicians, less so. (That probably reflects that fact that sports is a gargantuan business compared to music.) Nonetheless, the findings of sports psychology can presumably be applied to music since both fields require performance under pressure.

Emotion regulators. In both fields, those who perform best have learned how to regulate their emotions. In a recent study of athletes, summarized by music psychologist Noa Kageyama in his blog at bulletproofmusician.com, four strategies for managing emotions emerged at the top. Athletes in the study went through a variety of different emotional states as they competed, but the best athletes—those with the best objective performance—used four specific ways to regulate their emotions: physical preparation, positive self-talk, planning, and impression management. Here is how they might apply to musicians:

1. Physical preparation. For musicians, getting ready to perform may include such things as playing scales, long-tones, and other types of warm-ups, such as stretching, breathing, and yoga.

2. Positive self-talk. With this emotion regulator, your inner dialogue is positive and supportive. Instead of saying, “How could I have played a wong note there?” you might say, “Thank goodness I finally made my first mistake.”

3. Planning. This regulator calls for visualizing a successful performance, imagining how each piece will start and what to do in case of a mistake or other problems. In this case, one “hears” and imagines the performance before actually getting on stage. Of course, “hearing” during the performance is also essential, as I’ve written in an earlier blog post.

4. Impression management. This regulator calls for trying to act more confident than you feel, controlling how you appear to others. Years ago I saw the trumpet player Rolf Smedvig in concert. He was known as a virtuoso, but on that evening he wasn’t performing his best. Nonetheless, he took a chest thrusting bow after each solo. I wonder whether he wasn’t doing some” impression management” on the audience.

We know the four emotion regulators the best athletes use. But what are the emotional tar pits, the places to avoid? The worst things you can focus on: catastrophizing, self-blame, rumination, and expressive suppression.

1. Catastrophizing. Here you worry about all the bad things that could occur and give too much weight to problems. A missed note becomes a judgment about your ability as a musician.

2. Self-blame. With this harmful emotion regulator, you remind yourself of all the things that you should have done after it is too late to do anything about it. “I should have practiced more. Why didn’t I practice more?”

3. Rumination: Here, you dwell on the bad parts of performing, such as sweaty hands, shakiness, and feelings of nervousness. The key word is “dwell.” Those side effects of performing may occur, but should not be focused on.

4. Expressive suppression. This often-tried but still unhelpful technique involves trying to convince yourself that you are not nervous. As I’ve said elsewhere, you cannot deceive yourself when performing. You may try to pretend you’re cool as a cucumber, but you know you’re doing something under pressure.

P.S. One reader of this blog requested that I present the information in an audio format, essentially a podcast. I cannot promise anything, but I am looking into this and will let you know whether this is possible for me.

Musicians have what employers want

If you put a list of the traits employers seek from their employees next to a list of the qualities that musicians develop as part of their training, you will see that the two lists match.

What do employers want? Team players, persistence, problem-solving, ability to take feedback, collaboration, emotional strength, and the ability to learn from mistakes.

University of North Carolina music professor Jennifer S. Walter recently summarized these traits in an article for the National Association for Music Education’s monthly magazine, Teaching Music.

1. Musicians learn to work in a structured environment that requires responsibility and dependability. If music classrooms are to achieve the objectives of a large group, they must be highly structured. Each student learns to function as a part of a larger whole. The teacher guides the students, acting as a quiet and responsive authority whose leadership comes from deep knowledge of the material under study.

2. Musicians learn how to persist in the face of setbacks. Musicians set the bar very high: public performance. Along the this rigorous way, there are many difficulties to overcome.

3. Musicians learn how to solve large problems by breaking them down into smaller pieces. Musicians decipher pages of printed symbols and turn them into art, a process that can only be done slowly and patiently.

4. Musicians learn how to take feedback, both positive and negative, without losing their poise. The term “diva” is a pejorative name for a self-important person who can’t take criticism. In reality, there are very few actual divas in instrumental music.

5. Musicians learn how to collaborate on a large scale. Many individual parts must come together to create the whole experience of a band or orchestra, and musicians must both develop as individuals and have a sense of how to achieve the goals of the group.

6. Musicians learn how to stay on an even keel. Music accompanies all the moods and phases of life, from high to low. Name a mood or feeling and you will find music that goes with it.

7. Musicians learn how to deal with failure. Handling failure is part of learning how to perform on a musical instrument. Every musician, including the virtuosos, has stories of embarrassing moments played out in public. And yet they bounce back for the next performance.

You are not good enough or old enough to quit

“Mom, I quit,” Condoleeza yelled.

“You are neither good enough nor old enough to quit,” retorted her mother.

Stanford University professor and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recounted this outburst as part of a speech she gave in 2017 about the power of music education.

Frustrated with the difficulty of learning to play the piano, Rice stood up from her bench one day when she was 10 years old, marched into the kitchen, and yelled at her mother that she’d had enough and was giving up. Her mother wisely held firm against her daughter, telling her to go back to her bench and continue practicing. Rice went back to the piano and continued playing. Later in her speech she remarked that she was “really glad my mother didn’t let me quit at 10.” Although the piano didn’t become her profession, Rice became a very accomplished musician (playing a solo recital for Queen Elizabeth) not to mention a very successful law professor and diplomat.

Let’s imagine for a minute, however, that her mother had given in to her 10-year old daughter and replied, “You’re right, honey, playing the piano is hard. I’ll leave the decision to quit up to you.” Rice may indeed have quit playing because a 10-year old does see into the future and understand the consequences of her actions. But where would she be today? Would she have become a professor at Stanford or the first female African-American Secretary of State? We can’t know for sure, of course, but in her talk Rice drew a direct line from the discipline she learned studying music to her success as a professor and diplomat.

Learning to play a musical instrument requires tremendous discipline, mental toughness, long-term thinking, and daily routine. According to Rice, these are the very qualities that brought her success in other areas of her life. Without the musical training, Rice believes that she may not have made it as far as she did in her academic and professional lives.

The litmus test. The truth is there is no faking it in music. Music performance is a kind of litmus test. Kids regularly get away with shoddy work in school (I’ve done some of that myself in my youth), but with music you cannot fake achievement. There is no last-minute cramming, no padding an essay with fancy words in the hope of sounding vaguely like an expert, no getting by on your smarts, no guessing the right answer. In music, you’ve simply got to do the long-term work, and that requires discipline.

How many people, looking back on their childhoods, are likely to say, “'I’m so glad my parents made me quit playing. I’ve really benefitted from not having a music education.” I daresay there are very few. You will, however, often hear the opposite: “I’m so glad that my parents would not let me quit. There were times when I wanted to quit, but they wouldn’t let me.” Or this sad comment, which I hear regularly from my adult students who are coming back to music. “I wish my parents hadn’t let me quit when I was younger. I’m not exactly sure why I quit. Maybe it was peer pressure or the feeling that someone else was better than me.” Bless those firm parents from years ago. Although their firmness certainly wasn’t appreciated at the time, it was the right thing to do.

Learning a musical instrument will teach you how to work. How to really work. Not how to fake it at the last minute, or sweet talk your way to a good grade, but how to take the countless small steps over a long time that are needed to get someplace that is worth going to.

Hear the music in your imagination!

Can you hear music in your imagination? Great musicians insist that it’s not only possible to “hear” music in your mind but that it’s actually essential to do so. A famous pianist once said that if you play before you hear, your performance will be built on accidents, so you must get the order right by hearing before playing. And a famous trumpeter known for flawless performances under high pressure remarked that he simply plays what he hears in his imagination. And of course Beethoven famously composed music after losing his hearing.

It seems that having a musical imagination is essential for musical performance, but do we have an innate ability to hear music in our minds? I haven’t conducted any research on the subject, but my years of experience working with young musicians has shown me that although beginners don’t usually have the ability to imagine music, they can develop it and the more they work at it, the more fully it develops.

What’s the best ways to develop your musical imagination, to increase your ability to “hear” music in your mind? To develop a sense of what we’d like to hear when performing, we have to have a reservoir of sounds in mind. Listening to great players and absorbing their sounds is the best way to do this. Luckily, we have a wealth of great musicians available to listen to online. (I maintain a list of great players on the “instruments” page of this website and encourage my students to use this resource.)

There’s a mistaken notion that we should try to develop our own sound as soon as possible. In fact, the best approach is to imitate the sounds of different players. No beginner can have a truly original sound. If we work hard and imitate many great players, we may over a long time of practice and dedication develop our own sound. Even Louis Armstrong didn’t sound like Louis Armstrong when he started playing.

My advice for music students in brief: listen, love, imitate, repeat.

Nervous about performing, part 2

Over the years of teaching band, I have played a role in the following unfortunate scenario many times. A week before a performance, the students play the concert program well in rehearsal, staying focused on their individual parts but also paying attention to each other and the conductor (me). They are relaxed because they are not playing for an audience. They look at me for their cues and if they play a wrong note or get lost, they quickly recover.

In concert, however, the performance doesn’t quite gel. A few students retreat into a private sphere of fear, not daring to look up from their music stand at me and each going at his or her own tempo, some rushing and others dragging the tempo. Some students get lost and others simply stop playing entirely, hoping perhaps that their absence won’t be noticed. Sadly, it takes only a few students overcome with fear to sap the whole band’s performance. Like a team sport, band suffers when the whole team is not at their best. If a few links weaken, the chain falls apart, and even Lebron James can’t make up the difference.

We make it through the concert, but we don’t give the audience the best performance that we can. What a pity, I think, that we couldn’t show what we are truly capable of.

I have also led concerts where the music was played even better than in the rehearsal. The rush of playing music for an audience turned what had been good music in rehearsal into an exciting and excellent performance. The students stay focused on their music and also follow my cues, and the performance surprises and delights me even as I am leading it.

I began to think about the gap between a poor performance and an excellent one and read many articles on the subject of performance psychology, both in sports and music.

I came across a blog by Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist and Julliard faculty member. He’s a funny and knowledgeable writer whose blog is worth your time even if you don’t play a musical instrument. Kageyama summarizes the strategies that can lead to better performance. He focuses on music, but the ideas could be employed in other areas where anxiety about making a mistake in front of an audience is present.

1. Practice effectively (know your music)

2. Manage nerves (the body’s response to adrenaline)

3. Build confidence (by performing often)

4. Become fearless (not playing tentatively or worrying about mistakes)

5. Control your attention (control the inner voice that criticizes your performance)

6. Be resilient (recover quickly from mistakes and setbacks)

No magic wand. Kageyama is careful to note that there is no way to get rid of performance anxiety completely. We are hard wired for it, and it’s a futile quest to pretend to be above and beyond nervousness. But there is help, most importantly, knowing your music.

Knowing your music is the most important of the strategies. That’s because there is no way around the fact that you must be an expert on your part. If you are playing second clarinet on “Jingle Bells,” then you must be an expert at your part, knowing each note, dynamic, and articulation. Where students sometimes fall down is that they don’t practice their parts sufficiently, hoping perhaps to hide in the section under the cover of another student who knows the music better.

In my program, insufficient practice ties into the parental support issue that I write about so often. Because our band classes meet only once a week, I count on the students to practice their music at home. But the truth is that some don’t do that, and their parents are not diligent about keeping their children to a practice routine at home. I don’t blame the parents because I know that their own lives are often hectic, but I do try to encourage them to help their children make time for practice at home. I once read a newspaper profile of the trumpet player Timothy Wilson. His mother was quoted in the article and her words sum up the idea very memorably. “If you live in my house,” his mother said, “you have to brush your teeth and practice your instrument.”

I will discuss the other strategies in future blog posts.

Nervous about performing?

In high school I had a friend named Mike Watts. It was a very lucky friendship for me because I was a band geek who loved playing and listening to music, and Mike’s father happened to be Ernie Watts. Ernie Watts is not a household name, but among jazz and popular musicians, he’s known worldwide as one of the A-list saxophone players. He’s played and recorded with everybody from Buddy Rich to the Rolling Stones. To use a sports analogy, for me it was like being a basketball fanatic and having Stephen Curry’s child as your friend.

Mike played the clarinet in the band and I played the trumpet. I could not get enough of music, signing up for every music class, workshop, scholarship, competition, honor band, or other playing opportunity I could find. I also loved listening to music and could spend hours daydreaming to a Rudolf Serkin LP I had just bought at Wherehouse Music in Van Nuys.

(One day, riding my bike home from the record store with a John Coltrane album in my right hand, I crashed into a parked car and flew over the hood, landing on someone’s front lawn. My record sailed across the grass to the front door of the house. A man came out of the house, picked up the record and asked me if I was okay. When I responded that I wasn’t badly hurt, he replied, “Well, at least you have good taste in music.”)

Love-hate relationship. Still, my relationship with music wasn’t all love. I loved playing and listening to music, but I often hated to perform because of overwhelming anxiety. I was afraid to make a mistake in front of an audience. In essence musical performance anxiety comes down to that: are you afraid to make a mistake in front of an audience?

It was very kind of Mike to invite me to come along to one of his father’s gigs. On that particular concert, Ernie was playing in a back-up orchestra at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angles (the former home of the LA Phil) for a popular flute player named Hubert Laws. This was in the days when musicians could afford to hire a small orchestra, including string and horn sections of woodwinds and brass to back them up at a live concert.

Hubert Laws is not a household name these days, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s he was a big name in jazz and instrumental pop. Popular enough that he could sell out a venue like the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion and hire an orchestra to back him up.

For me, being backstage at the Hubert Laws concert and meeting the musicians was a dream come true. I met Snooky Young, a trumpeter who had played in Count Basie’s big band as well as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show band with Doc Severinsen for many years. When he learned that I was a serious trumpet player, he gave me a few simple words of encouragement. “Keep on playing and you’ll get your chance.” When a player of that stature gives a young person a few words of encouragement, the effect lasts for years.

The musicians did a short rehearsal and sound check then broke for dinner before the performance that night. During the rehearsal, Ernie had to go to the front of the stage with Hubert Laws and perform a difficult passage of music on the flute, not his main instrument. The thought of doing that made me feel nervous even though I was safely watching from offstage with Mike.

At dinner, which we ate in a diner next to the concert hall, I asked Mr. Watts whether he ever felt nervous performing in front of so many people. His reply has stuck with me ever since. “I don’t feel nervous if I’m prepared and I know exactly what I’m doing. I only feel nervous if I’m not prepared.”

Want better grades? Learn a musical instrument!

The Harmony Project was started in 2001 by Margaret Martin to provide instrumental music education to elementary school students in Southern California who come from low-income households.

After a few years, Dr. Martin noticed that her students were doing much better academically than their peers who were not enrolled in the Harmony Project but didn’t know precisely why.

She began working with Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. Dr. Kraus studied the students in the Harmony Project, and her research showed that their auditory processing skills improved dramatically after only two years in the program.

Auditory processing skills—hearing, understanding, and remembering speech—are essential to academic success. The good news is that these skills are not fixed at birth but can be improved by learning to play a musical instrument.

The results of the studies done by Dr. Kraus were so impressive that Dr. Martin approached officials in the Long Beach School District. At her request, district officials there brought the Harmony Project to four elementary schools in Long Beach neighborhoods with high crime.

The students were tested after three years in the Harmony program, and the results were stunning.

Harmony students had a 61% increase in reading and a 54% increase in math proficiency compared with their peers who were not enrolled in the program. To put it bluntly, learning to play a musical instrument is very good for a child’s academic development.

Dr. Kraus also compared music training to Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps to see whether the effect was simply due to participation in an extracurricular activity. She found, however, that auditory processing skills were not improved by participating in JROTC. Only music training improved the participants’ auditory processing. JROTC is surely worthwhile, but it does not bring the same auditory processing and academic benefits that instrumental music does.

Why aren’t all schools rushing to implement this proven method of increasing academic success? The answer to that question, it turns out, is complicated and the subject of a future post. Stay tuned!

Yes, there is money at the end of the music rainbow

Imagine doing what you love and getting paid for it. Better yet, not just getting paid but actually making a good living at it. It may sound like a dream, but for many who work in the music industry, it’s more than a dream. It’s a reality.

It’s hard to displace the old belief that being a musician (or any type of artist) is a short road to poverty. So many movies depict artists as starving, tortured, and short-lived. It’s a romantic notion but a stereotype nonetheless. Perhaps it’s because filmmakers like to think of themselves as “starving artists” even when the reality is that they are pretty well fed. (One of the worst offenders in this category is the film “Amadeus,” which, in promoting this stereotype, creates a mistaken caricature of Mozart’s life.)

To test out this stereotype, imagine that your child says to you, “Mom, dad, I’m going to be a musician.” Did you smile with happiness? Or, more likely, did a wave of fear come over you? If it was a wave of fear, then filmmakers have done a good job of stereotyping.

The truth is actually quite different. Being a musician can be a fulfilling and financially rewarding career choice for those with the talent, persistence, and drive.

I grew up in Los Angeles, one of the meccas of the music industry, and several of my friends’ parents were professional musicians whose careers afforded them a very good lifestyle. There was Ernie Watts, a name you probably don’t know but who had (and continues to have) a highly successful career as a saxophone player. There was Terry Gibbs, one of the “swinginest” vibe players in jazz. I’ll never forget the day Mr. Gibbs dropped in to my junior high school band room and jammed with our band teacher, Mr. Pontrelli.

What music provides. As long as there is a demand for what music provides, there will be jobs in the industry. And what does music provide? The emotional lifeblood of movie, television, and video game soundtracks and jingles, countless live performances from tiny jazz clubs to dance clubs to symphony concerts to folk festivals to arena pop shows. Of course, music is often taken for granted, but that’s often the case with essential things in our lives.

Music goes with ceremonies and celebrations. Imagine a wedding or church service without music. Bleak images indeed! How about walking across the stage as a graduate to a soundtrack of silence? Or getting pumped up at the gym with silence booming out of your headphones. Music is everywhere and wherever there is music, there is also money being made from music. There is indeed music at the end of the rainbow of music.

If you are good enough at music to make it your profession, you will find many opportunities to earn money. It’s true that the days of a secure job by a single employer, such as playing in one of the television studio’s in-house orchestras are gone. To be fair, however, there is still much highly paid work for studio musicians in Los Angles, New York, Memphis, and other cities. There are surely not as many steady jobs in live music performance as there were when my parents were in their twenties, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t jobs.

For musicians willing to create their own opportunities, there is plenty of work to be found and niches to be filled. I personally know many people who make a good living as musicians and in related professions, including performers, producers, professors, teachers, arrangers, and composers (and merchandizers, of course).

The music business is large, healthy and diverse, and the stats back this up.

For example, the U.S. recorded music industry, which includes concerts and touring, was valued at $18.3 billion in 2017, up from $17.2 billion in 2016, according to selectusa.gov.

And in the U.K. the music industry contributed £4.5 billion ($5.8 billion) to the economy in 2017 according to the BBC.

Music may not have the gargantuan heft of the healthcare or real estate industries, but, leaving aside its inherent and incalculable artistic value, which you would be hard pressed to find in any other business, music is a solid industry with many exciting and rewarding career opportunities.

"He's humming again"

A card arrived in my school mailbox recently. As if sent from the pre-digital era, it was handwritten and tucked inside a matching cream-color envelope. It came from a parent whose children had been in the band years ago. This parent, a mom, had been very supportive and encouraging of the band when her kids were enrolled, but, as inevitably occurs, we lost touch after her children graduated.

Two of her children had been in the band, a girl and a boy, but the message in her card was about her son, who I will call Eric.

Eric had played the trumpet in the band, starting as a fourth grader and playing until he went to high school. He had done well in band, was quick to pick up new concepts and worked hard to master them. He also had a friendly and cheerful personality. He just seemed a happy kid.

After meeting him in the fourth grade, I also noticed that he was naturally musical, so I wrote his mother and told her that I had noticed his talent for music. She replied that she wasn’t surprised because, although he hadn’t played an instrument before joining the band, he was “always humming at home.”

Many concerts and parades later, when it came time for Eric to move on to high school, we shook hands, and I wished him luck and said that I hoped he would continue playing the trumpet.

I was saddened to learn that he had dropped music in high school, choosing instead to take up wrestling. For most kids, it’s either music or sports, and sports usually wins. This was a refrain I have heard often over the years. From another parent: “My son played music in Riordan High School’s excellent music program until football took over and he had no more time for music.”

In the card, Eric’s mom related that after three years of high school wrestling, he was forced to stop in his senior year due to an injury. Because he couldn’t wrestle any longer, she decided to see if she could rekindle his interest in music. She bought him a guitar and a few lessons as a Christmas present. His mom wasn’t sure how he was going to respond, but as he opened his present, he told her that he had always wanted to learn the guitar.

He continued to play after the initial lessons finished and then bought an electric guitar as well. After a pause of three and a half years, music had reentered his life and he was happy to be playing again. His mom was happy too, seeing something of her son’s cheery younger days return.

Eric’s mom concluded the card, writing, “[Eric] is musical and the best thing is that he started humming again. He always was a happy kid and hummed all the time. That stopped 9th, 10th, 11th and up to Christmas [of 12th grade]. School was so stressful. He didn’t have music in his life, but he does again. I share this with you because you planted the seed.”