Music school or school of hard knocks?

[AndrewMeronek]

. . . back in my day, when the earth's crust was still cooling.

Technically, the Earth's crust is still cooling, so there's that.

Also technically, there is nothing stopping you from going to music school today. All it takes is time and money. Well, so actually technically, time and money might stop you. But it is possible.

[OneTon]

Considering your CV, formal music education would have added nothing. it could have had a deleterious and detrimental effect, not the least of which might have been missed opportunities to benefit from fantastic playing experiences. No amount of education is guaranteed to make a person a seeker of truth. Duke Ellington, who dropped out of art school, is said to have peppered people with formal music education with theory questions. He most often used the answers to break the rules.

[ghmerrill]

Duke Ellington, who dropped out of art school, is said to have peppered people with formal music education with theory questions. He most often used the answers to break the rules.

But then first he learned the rules so that he could then break them -- presumably in some non-random fashion. So this is actually an argument FOR formal study of "the rules".

[OneTon]

Formal music education is appropriate for some and not for others. Each case is unique. The choice is up to the individual and their circumstance. When tbdana was first getting started, North Texas State was rare in offering extensive jazz study opportunities, and could have served only to slow her down. It is quite possible that the OP likes life in the fast lane.

[musicofnote]

content deleted by author

[OneTon]

But then first he learned the rules so that he could then break them -- presumably in some non-random fashion. So this is actually an argument FOR formal study of "the rules".

As I explained in my music education at the time, with the exception of music theory, we did not learn "rules based". We learned "my way or the highway" based.

So I ended up getting bitten by "learning the rules in order to break them", when those rules were ... changed.

My experiences in music school were by and large more positive. A few things got discarded but not many. My technology experiences were more like yours. Basic how to courses in CATIA were helpful. I was often being asked to things the on-site gurus did not know how to do. I was changing the laws to produce results. In a related computer application, the administrator didn’t know what they had, what was actually installed, or was perhaps lying. I had to find out what they had done by trial error. After that always demanded source data or coding.

Generalizations are dangerous and no answer is one size fits all individuals and schools. What the OP missed out on depends on the individual school and personal life experiences.

[ghmerrill]

As I explained in my music education at the time, with the exception of music theory, we did not learn "rules based". We learned "my way or the highway" based. Which is one reason why, after going to a couple Masterclasses towards the end of my educational career, I never went to another.

I'm sorry you had that experience, and I know how it felt. I had a similar experience in my very first class in graduate school that caused me to immediately change direction in terms of the faculty I was working with. It was at once something of a shocking and enlightening experience.

I don't think there are any fully accurate generalizations about "programmatic formal study" that don't rely on certain assumptions about who's dishing out that formal study and how they're doing it. Some of the best people in their fields are lousy teachers, and you can't learn from them (or at least YOU can't learn from them -- OTHER people may be able to). Some of the best teachers won't be able to take you beyond a certain level. And most students aren't very able to see that and make those distinctions.

That doesn't mean, in any particular case, that formal study (or more of it) wouldn't have "made you better" (in one way or another) or might have slowed you down or damaged your progress, or that it wouldn't have been beneficial to you to some degree or other. So when someone asks a question like "How would that have helped ME? Would it have made ME better in certain ways?", the answer is "That depends a lot on YOU -- and on what YOUR goals and capabilities were, and YOUR ability to respond and adapt to a program, or to find a program that fit YOUR goals and needs." And that often becomes more of an exercise in analysis of emotion, personality, goals, and circumstances than anything about what any kind of formal training program has to offer in general. Other people can't answer those questions for you. It's difficult enough to attempt to answer them yourself from a distance of half a century.

Other than that -- or perhaps with that context -- I can say this: I've been to master classes led by people like Pat Sheridan, Oystein Baadsvik, and James Galway. I'm pretty sure that I'd be very happy to have them as instructors, and that I'd benefit greatly from that. On the other hand, none of them are classic ("professorial"?, "career academic"?) music faculty members, although each teaches in (or has taught in, or runs) various formal training programs.

[tbdana]

In the beginning, I got out of the Army and moved home back to L.A. My plan was to go to Eastman and study with Emery Remington, only to discover that Remington had passed. Unsure of the path forward, I started looking around for other schools. In the meantime I started studying privately with Roy Main, who had a reputation for producing lots of successful professional players.

Roy asked me early on what my plans were, and when I told him of my school search and asked for his advice, his response was, "Go to music school if you want, but why? This is the best school in the world right here. You can study with me, and you've got the best musicians in the world that you can play with, learn from, and learn the business from, all while being in the business."

That made a lot of sense to me. There were great trombonists of all kinds here, from Ralph Sauer to Dick Nash to Frank Rosolino to Jimmy Pankow, and everything they knew, everything they could do, was right there for the taking. And the lure of actually working in the business while learning was quite compelling.

So I made the decision to stay and work.

I then met Dick Grove. Dick was a composer for whom I had done some TV thing I can't recall now, and I through him I met Lalo Schrifrin and lucked into subbing one day on a Dirty Harry picture Lalo wrote the score for. I became intrigued by film composing and signed up to go to Dick's music school to become a film writer. But after a couple semesters I got offered a gig in New Orleans playing with Al Hirt, and I quit school and moved to Louisiana. And that was the end of my formal music education. It turned out that at that age I was more enticed by the notion of performing nightly with a celebrity in a smoky jazz club in the French Quarter than by generating twelve-tone rows for writing atonal movie music that I might never get paid to write. So I made a choice and that was that.

I guess it does no good to second guess it at this point. But since I started playing again I've been examining my musical choices and playing the "what if" game. What if I had gone to Eastman after all? What if I had stayed in Dick Groves' composing school? What if I hadn't quit playing music for 30 years just when I was beginning to figure it out? I missed out on a lot of great possibilities, and seeing that my contemporaries of the time have gone on to be some of most successful trombonists in the world has made me question my judgment back then. (I'm low key proud and envious of those guys, by the way, though they will never know it nor would they care.)

I had to go on a very long journey to discover that, like the dumbass that I am, 30 years ago I quit on the very best thing I had, just when I was beginning to get the hang of it. What an idiot I was. I'm at an age now where people naturally look backward more than forward.

So I wonder.

All the wisdom in this thread has pretty much answered the question for me, and the answer is this: In the end, it doesn't matter. What's done is done, and the only thing that exists is now. And now I'm having the best time of my whole life playing again.

In a couple hours I get to leave my house and drive to a studio to record some tunes and take the measure of where I am after a year of returning to the infinite tube. None of the past matters. All that matters now is that in a few hours I will be doing the thing I love absolutely most in life. Maybe I had to make the choices I made in order to feel the gratitude and unburdened joy I feel playing today.

So, thanks for all your wisdom. Every word of it makes a difference.

[musicofnote]

content deleted by author

[harrisonreed]

"Go to music school if you want, but why? This is the best school in the world right here. You can study with me, and you've got the best musicians in the world that you can play with, learn from, and learn the business from, all while being in the business."

That made a lot of sense to me. There were great trombonists of all kinds here, from Ralph Sauer to Dick Nash to Frank Rosolino to Jimmy Pankow, and everything they knew, everything they could do, was right there for the taking. And the lure of actually working in the business while learning was quite compelling.

So I made the decision to stay and work.

Dana, you went to the correct music school, based on your stories. I might be ignorant, actually, I'm definitely ignorant, but I was under the impression that the vast majority of Remington's students went on to orchestra jobs. Yes, he also had some famous jazz students, but would Remington really have given you the schooling in jazz and studio music that you got "on the job"? Or was he an Autumn Leaves teachin' orchestra nerd? I honestly don't know, so someone please correct me if he was actually producing a ton of great jazzers.

Your decision to leave that work may be something that you might get more hung up on. But don't forget that time only goes forward. You might have been on every movie score if you had stayed in it, or you might have crashed on tour a year after you actually moved on to other work. It seems like you did purty good, to me.

[OneTon]

But after a couple semesters I got offered a gig in New Orleans playing with Al Hirt, and I quit school and moved to Louisiana. And that was the end of my formal music education.

Sometimes hindsight is 20-20 but not always. I met Al Hermann up at Telluride one year. He got his chops playing in NOLA with Carl Fontana. Al went on to teach physics with his PhD at Boulder, CO but continued to play trombone as well. Playing with AL Hirt, et al, are one in a lifetime opportunities. Carpe Deum is as much about capitalizing on opportunities as it is not wasting the day, or tilting at windmills. Missing out on some book learning pales compared to the life experiences you have had. Forget it.

[ithinknot]

Carpe Deum

I believe the major denominations discourage that

[Posaunus]

Carpe Deum

I believe the major denominations discourage that

Is this like CULTivation?

[harrisonreed]

Carpe Deum

I believe the major denominations discourage that

Good one.

[OneTon]

I believe the major denominations discourage that

Good one.

It is better to depend on a Higher Power than AI.

[Doug Elliott]

We all could have gone a different route.
I had a sort of similar start as Dana.
At various times I considered going back to school - Berklee, Eastman, North Texas. I also considered moving to New York, Las Vegas, LA, Nashville. Any of them could have been a good scene. But I had a pretty good thing going, freelancing in DC with fantastic players both classical and jazz, 10 years of serious study with Reinhardt (Philadelphia is an easy drive), some bus & truck touring shows, and then the Airmen of Note gig, and back to freelancing, running my own band, and now a lot of gigs as MD and arranger for a Sinatra singer. And making mouthpieces when I can.

[ghmerrill]

I believe the major denominations discourage that

Good one.

Interesting ...

Google Translate renders "Carpe Deum" as "Seize the day" while translating the individual word "Deum" as "God". Having in the past had some intimate knowledge of NLP translation software, I have trouble imagining how they do that. My only guess is that for some reason (????) they "auto-correct" "Deum" to "diem" (possibly based on phrase occurrence frequency in document corpora?) and provide the "corrected" (expected?) translation. But it's nutty.

According to Google Translate, both "Carpe deum" and "Carpe diem" mean "Seize the day." If you toss it "Carpe diem. Carpe deum." you get back "Seize the day. Seize the day." I regard it as a bug. I can't get it to do something similar in German (using several test cases). And it doesn't get other phrasal translations involving the two terms incorrect, as far as I can see. Very puzzling.

Now back to your originally scheduled programming.

[harrisonreed]

tumblr_9edac51c97b9de0e104610835b29d4a0_95e72933_540.gif

[CalgaryTbone]

So the premise of this thread is one or the other - music school or learning on the gig. I think that for most successful players, it's some combination of both. Even in music school, a lot of the learning is from the other players around you. Sometimes, what makes the advice of the teacher "click" with a student is that they hear examples of players that have mastered a skill sitting next to them. Sometimes, it's players on different instruments as well. This is why I've never been a fan of the advice to skip school and just study privately with a great teacher. Also, school can be a great networking opportunity, and the connections you make there can be helpful years later.

The other thing that school can give you is exposure to other genres, and chances to test out things like doubles (bass, alto, euphonium, tuba) without falling on your face on a paying gig and damaging your reputation. You can play those instruments with good players in small groups and start getting a feel for them. Likewise with genres, you can stretch out of your comfort zone, and have examples near you of other players who usually play in that style. A great way to become more comfortable in the style, and add to your employable skills. I have heard of/known players that entered school convinced that their path was jazz, and switched their emphasis to classical (or vice versa).

When I went to school, the emphasis was clearly mostly on orchestral playing. That worked out for me, and it aligned with what I wanted to do. Still, my time in jazz band, and in chamber music helped make me a better player, and opened up more opportunities to work outside the orchestra. Also, in an orchestra nowadays, you play pops concerts and chamber music regularly, so you use those other skills even in your "day job".

People can absolutely learn exclusively "on the job", but that's a lot tougher now in a tighter freelance market than what was happening when I was in NYC in the late 70's/early 80's. Also, that method strikes me as confining that player to a very limited choice of musical styles. That's great if you quickly become a top player in that style, but it might not pay the bills very well while you're getting there.

Jim Scott

[LeTromboniste]

So the premise of this thread is one or the other - music school or learning on the gig. I think that for most successful players, it's some combination of both. Even in music school, a lot of the learning is from the other players around you. Sometimes, what makes the advice of the teacher "click" with a student is that they hear examples of players that have mastered a skill sitting next to them. Sometimes, it's players on different instruments as well. This is why I've never been a fan of the advice to skip school and just study privately with a great teacher. Also, school can be a great networking opportunity, and the connections you make there can be helpful years later.

The other thing that school can give you is exposure to other genres, and chances to test out things like doubles (bass, alto, euphonium, tuba) without falling on your face on a paying gig and damaging your reputation. You can play those instruments with good players in small groups and start getting a feel for them. Likewise with genres, you can stretch out of your comfort zone, and have examples near you of other players who usually play in that style. A great way to become more comfortable in the style, and add to your employable skills. I have heard of/known players that entered school convinced that their path was jazz, and switched their emphasis to classical (or vice versa).

When I went to school, the emphasis was clearly mostly on orchestral playing. That worked out for me, and it aligned with what I wanted to do. Still, my time in jazz band, and in chamber music helped make me a better player, and opened up more opportunities to work outside the orchestra. Also, in an orchestra nowadays, you play pops concerts and chamber music regularly, so you use those other skills even in your "day job".

People can absolutely learn exclusively "on the job", but that's a lot tougher now in a tighter freelance market than what was happening when I was in NYC in the late 70's/early 80's. Also, that method strikes me as confining that player to a very limited choice of musical styles. That's great if you quickly become a top player in that style, but it might not pay the bills very well while you're getting there.

Jim Scott

All of this, exactly!

[baileyman]

“We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodely do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

In other words, our choices don't amount to much anyway. We will proceed down the paths of our lives the way we more or less have to until the path ends. Learn here or there. Learn this or that. You'll be fine, or at least you'll be what you were supposed to be in the first place.
The poem could be interpreted to say that it doesn't matter what anyone does. It all ends the same anyway.

Kurt practicing new triple tongue syllables.