Tag: brass instruments
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Conversations With Young Brass Players
When I find myself engaged in conversations with younger performers, the conversations tends to lead into questions of “how and who”. “How do you practice that?” and “Who do you listen to?” These two PDF’s help me in my own evaluation of my practice habits and what I listen for as I continue to develop…
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More Album Covers
I didn’t feel the need to keep a day by day accounting of the album covers I chose like in the previous post, however, I think I will mention the combination of day 2 and day 3, and why they struck me as significant. Significant in part because they were both introductions to several aspects…
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Persistent Ear-Worm
Over the summer I find myself going between the dropping off my kid at summer camps, helping the family with home-related projects, working/ continuing to learn how to care for my house, writing/ arranging music and (of course) practicing my instrument. Summer is a convenient time to make significant progress on some of these things.…
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NBA Playoffs and Trumpet
Once again, I find myself multitasking during the NBA playoffs and somehow settle on a practice routine while watching games. This year it’s been four books, the Max Schlossberg Daily Drills and Clarke Technical Studies, Charles Colin Advanced Lip Flexibilities and finally any variation of flow studies. The first quarter involves mouthpiece buzzing of Schlossberg…
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Remembering a brass quintet recording – Drei Stücke
I was going through some files recently and came across an old program for a concert I played with a brass quintet. There were two big pieces on the program and both were pieces were obscure to me. The one I ended up looking for online was a piece by Stefan Hakenberg named Drei Stücke.…
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Trumpet and Basketball
Sometimes multitasking can go to far. For me lately, my practice habits have been lead by the NBA playoffs. I settle in to watch a game but feeling guilty about not practicing my trumpet. So I decided to create a practice routine around the game. I tend to think of this kind of practice as maintenance. More…
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The Westerlies Tiny Desk Concert
I love having time to just listen to something new to me. I also love checking out familiar groups with new projects. One of the groups I like to follow is The Westerlies. I came across their NPR Tiny Desk Concerts performance from 2016. And I loved it! It’s a refreshing and inventive program, with…
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The things students do
The past four weeks have been quite difficult for me. I had to take a significant amount of time away from my day job as a middle school music teacher to care for my father. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that as I continue to cope with losing him. However with all…
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Reminders Of Good Music
Sometimes I forget why I like certain composers and then I am reminded of how important some were to me as a young musician. I ran across this on NPR and once again I am reminded of why I love Aaron Copland’s music.
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Quick Warm Up
Having a quick warm-up at my disposal has been a very useful to me. Somedays I have 40 minutes to get my face ready for a day of playing. Unfortunately too often I get only 10-15 minutes to play in the morning. And that’s it! So when my private student informed me that they didn’t have…
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