All The Feels

[VJOFan]

I had a breakthrough in my running yesterday afternoon that reminded me of the central quest I had in playing from about 13 years old to about 22.

During a music camp, in a junior high school summer, I attended one of the weekly faculty recitals. As I sat there listening to the brass teachers, it became evident that they all had the ability to make their playing sound effortless and it was easy to see that they also were physically relaxed.

Somehow my 13 year old self recognized that as something important and I spent the next 10 or so years trying to get that sound when I played and also to get what I thought the corresponding feeling should be.

Eventually, somewhere between graduating university and a year or two into an orchestra gig it finally happened.

There are muscles active to keep me standing, to hold the horn and to control breathing, but the overall feeling is that the horn isn't really there a lot of the time, and my body is in a neutral state.

Does this describe how other's here experience playing? The mistake my 13 year old self made was not asking the teachers how they felt while playing. I went off on a quest based on an assumption. I could be the only one trying to feel like everything is relaxed and flowing and not actively pushing the sound out.

[Burgerbob]

My former teacher calls what you did "trombone empathy." It's a very important skill to have, I believe, where you can watch or even just listen to a player and understand some part of how they are playing. It is very impressive that you did it that young- I didn't have much of a sense of it until college at the least, I think.

That kind of bare minimum playing is my goal as well- something that is harder to understand is that when you see a great player using effort, it means they are applying ALL of that to the horn and it's going to be some extreme playing in some way. It's very easy for a younger person to interpret that as needing to use effort to play themselves, which is a trap I fell into for a long time.

[VJOFan]

That kind of bare minimum playing is my goal as well

It's got to be the key to most physical endeavours. Slow motion footage of Olympic 100 meter champions shows faces that often look half asleep. There is a vast amount of energy being released into the ground and rebounding back every step but it's done without undue tightness.

For brass playing this feeling might be the intersection of the various schools or methods: optimum production for minimum effort.