Tuning Slide 4.3- What Music Does For Me

Life is a song. It has its own rhythm of harmony. It is a symphony of all things which exist in major and minor keys of Polarity. It blends the discords, by opposites, into harmony which unites the whole into a grand symphony of life. To learn through experience in this life, to appreciate the symphony and lessons of life and to blend with the whole, is the object of our being here.
- Dr. Randolph Stone

As I write this I am between musical experiences. A little over a week ago I participated in an amazing international event, the 3rd Moravian International Unity Brass Festival. I have never before had the opportunity to play in a large brass band of 167 musicians. I was one of the 1st trumpets and kept up with it (except at the end of the concert when the old embouchure said “No!”) There were 50+ trumpets and related, nearly 60 trombones and related, and nearly 60 horns, euphoniums and tubas. Stop and think of that sound. It is nothing short of mind-boggling. (Here is a link to a video of one of the hymns as we rehearsed it.)

When this gets posted on Monday morning, July 30, the annual Shell Lake (WI) Trumpet Workshop will be just getting under way. That, as any regulars here know, was the source of the great leap somewhere forward in my trumpet playing over the past three years. My whole understanding of music and being a musician changed in ways I would never have anticipated. It all started with a simple act of simply playing the lead pipe on my horn to learn how to “center” the sound of my playing. It’s all that simple, I was told. Just do that and you will play in ways you didn’t know you could.

These two specific experiences go far beyond the list of things I posted the past two weeks of why I play music. They go much more deeply into what playing music does to and for me. They get to the heart of the connection of life and music in me- in my soul, at the center of my being. I can list five specific things that being an active musician helps me with. In many ways this summarizes so much of what I have written over the past three years and the foundations of what I will continue to write. So here goes with:

What Playing Music Does for Me

1. Discipline
No one is a born musician. Some may have certain aptitudes, but very few (other than the prodigies) are truly able to be good at it without work, followed by more work, and then enhanced by more work. Knowing that Doc Severinsen “warms-up” for three hours in order to make sure he knows what he is doing and ready to do it when he gets on stage, humbles me. I think I am doing well when I take 30 minutes to do the daily routine before moving on to the pieces I have to know. Yet, I have developed a discipline- a training regimen for the trumpet- that I never thought I could do. While I don’t always carry that over to other areas of my life with the intention I give to the music, it has helped. I am more disciplined in exercise, writing, and even just taking the time to relax and read!

2. Focus
Part of discipline is learning how to be focused on what I am doing. I have seen it happen over and over- I take a mini-second to think of something else and I get lost. This happens even when doing something as rote as playing the C Major scale. My mind burps and I miss a note. I have had this problem for years when performing. It is easy to get distracted when I am by nature somewhat attention deficit disordered. Playing music has helped me learn to stay focused. This is a huge help in many other times and places as well. If I can do it when playing my trumpet, I can do it for other situations, too.

3. Listening
A musician has to be able to listen. If all I do when I play is listen to my own notes, I will never be able to be a good musician. I may end up being technically proficient at what I do, but, as they might say, “He doesn’t play well with others.” The skill of listening is one of those basic interpersonal skills that we all need to develop, no matter what our lives look like. Too often, it is said, we don’t listen to hear what the other person is saying, we listen to figure out what we are going to say next. Listening, by the way, is at the heart of what we do in a musical piece when we “play the rests.”

4. Blending
Another way of saying this is that we DO play well with others. When we have learned to focus and listen we will know how our part fits in with the others. It is easy to think that they should blend with me when the reality is we have to learn to blend with each other. The brass quintet I play with had a rehearsal on Saturday. At the end we all looked at each other and smiled. We were even excited by what we were sounding like. We all agreed, it was because we were paying attention through focus, listening, and blending. A musical group of any size is, by nature, a set of relationships. They are just like relationships we have with family, friends, co-workers, or even strangers we meet in our daily travels. Do I listen to them or do I ignore their needs or concerns? Do I seek ways to work with them (blend) to get a job done, to accomplish some activity, or just to let each other know they are important? I fear we are forgetting how to do that and instead yell at each other, throw memes around like firecrackers on the 4th of July. I learn- and am reminded to keep learning- when I play in a group, we need to work together. Always!

5. Mindfulness
For me, when I put all these together, I end up with being mindful. Mindfulness is to be that non-judgmental attitude that keeps me open to the present and what it happening. Mindfulness is one of the exciting therapeutic tools to come along in the past twenty years and has shown to have great impact on many kinds of situations. Being a mindful musician can help me move away from a narrow-focused view of what is happening and allows me to play more intentionally. It helps calm down my Self 1 that is forever over-analyzing and lets Self 2 show what it knows and what it can do. At times I know this sounds like a variation of the Music Man’s “think system.” But it is more than that. It helps bring these five things that I get from being a musician into fruition.

These five things will surely be showing up again and again in year four. I am constantly looking at ways of making them more effective and more natural. As I learn to do it in my musicianship, I am learning how to do it in all that I do.