New video – virtuosic baroque solo
Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:57 am
Please apologise if this seems like shameless self-promo. I guess it is, but it's also something I want to share for the lessons I learned from the process.
For the last two or three years, I've been challenging myself and exploring a repertoire that I had previously thought to be beyond my hopes of what I could achieve as a player, a repertoire which I associated in my mind with great musicians of other instruments who don't have to deal with a slide or move nearly as much air as we do, and can play so fluently that everything seems easy. It's not that the notes on the page were technically beyond my reach, but more that I felt that I could never do justice to the music between the notes the way some of my non-trombone colleagues could. The trombone can sound so clumsy compared to finger-holed instruments, and this music in particular is all about subtlety. But I decided to use this repertoire to explore ways of thinking about air and phrasing that were not intuitive to me as a trombone player, and to try to play in a way where one can't "hear the slide" (I don't mean glissandi, but just the quirks in the phrasing and articulation that come from dealing with the slide and can sometimes be a distraction from the music). At first it was just an exercise but in the process and during lessons I've had with non-trombonists on this material, I've had my mind blown on some aspects of my playing, in particular on how much intention and thought can go into every gesture and every note while still keeping a sense of the longer phrase or larger picture. I hadn't realised how superficial my musicality was. So it became more and more a project to improve my artistry in addition to my technique.
Eventually I committed to try to really bring this to a performable level and not just use it as an exercise. I'm definitely not all the way to where I want to be with this approach. Aside from occasional intonation quirks, there are also still moments here when I can "hear the slide", particularly with some of the dotted rhythms, and I think I could have even more extreme changes of dynamics and airflow between notes to control each gesture. But I'm pretty proud of where I'm at with this, and more importantly, of what I've learned for myself in the process. I want to emphasise the importance of challenging ourselves, whatever our level is, and not only try to improve technique but also confront our very musical ideas.
For the last two or three years, I've been challenging myself and exploring a repertoire that I had previously thought to be beyond my hopes of what I could achieve as a player, a repertoire which I associated in my mind with great musicians of other instruments who don't have to deal with a slide or move nearly as much air as we do, and can play so fluently that everything seems easy. It's not that the notes on the page were technically beyond my reach, but more that I felt that I could never do justice to the music between the notes the way some of my non-trombone colleagues could. The trombone can sound so clumsy compared to finger-holed instruments, and this music in particular is all about subtlety. But I decided to use this repertoire to explore ways of thinking about air and phrasing that were not intuitive to me as a trombone player, and to try to play in a way where one can't "hear the slide" (I don't mean glissandi, but just the quirks in the phrasing and articulation that come from dealing with the slide and can sometimes be a distraction from the music). At first it was just an exercise but in the process and during lessons I've had with non-trombonists on this material, I've had my mind blown on some aspects of my playing, in particular on how much intention and thought can go into every gesture and every note while still keeping a sense of the longer phrase or larger picture. I hadn't realised how superficial my musicality was. So it became more and more a project to improve my artistry in addition to my technique.
Eventually I committed to try to really bring this to a performable level and not just use it as an exercise. I'm definitely not all the way to where I want to be with this approach. Aside from occasional intonation quirks, there are also still moments here when I can "hear the slide", particularly with some of the dotted rhythms, and I think I could have even more extreme changes of dynamics and airflow between notes to control each gesture. But I'm pretty proud of where I'm at with this, and more importantly, of what I've learned for myself in the process. I want to emphasise the importance of challenging ourselves, whatever our level is, and not only try to improve technique but also confront our very musical ideas.
