Tuning Slide 4.44- How to Lose Your Direction

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Every leader will hit a series of plateaus in their lives. The key is not to stay there, because settling on a plateau can easily lead to an elongated season of comfort. Being comfortable is one of the leader's worst enemies.
― Gary Rohrmayer

Every year on Memorial Day I am taken back fifty plus years to a cool May morning along the Susquehanna River in north central Pennsylvania. I wrote about it the first year of the Tuning Slide and repeated it since. It was the year I hit a plateau that has taken YEARS to move away from. That moment colored everything that came after it- and became the distorting lens that changed how I saw what had been before it.

There was a time somewhere about half a century ago when I was your typical high school trumpet player. I no doubt believed I was invincible, the top of the band's musical food chain. My sight-reading ability was somewhat lacking, but one evening of working on it at home usually fixed that and I was able to exhibit the skill that my first chair position would expect.

I don't remember any hints of uncertainty or doubts about what I could do as a trumpet player. I was lead trumpet in our stage musical. I organized a small combo to play at our school talent show and even made an arrangement of the Beatles' Help! as our number. I was lead in a trumpet quartet that played at many local churches. I was also lead in a Tijuana Brass-style group that played at both the local pool and at our town's annual Fourth of July fest. I knew I would never be a professional musician- that wasn't in my plans. I did know that I loved being a trumpet player.

I had what I might later have called "mojo."

For fifty years, I have considered Memorial Day as the day I lost it. True or not, what we believe is often "truth" if not "fact." If we believe it, it is real.

It was a mostly clear, cool morning. I remember a misty fog along the river, not unusual on a spring morning like that. The sun was breaking through as I joined a group of veterans at the corner of Main and Allegheny Streets on the bank of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.

Memorial Day always began at the river. This was a time to remember the sailors who had died in service. Since we were only a couple decades past the end of World War II the memories were personal, real- not yet part of history. They were still at the edge of current events.

It was a simple ceremony. I don't know what was said. I remember what was done. A reading and a prayer, and then a wreath was tossed solemnly into the river. The honor guard rifles faced up-river and proceeded with the traditional salute. The volley comes from the battlefield tradition of three-volleys to indicate that the dead had been removed from the battlefield and properly cared for.

The sounds echoed from the mountains and it was my turn.

Taps.

My notes felt right. They flowed as I wanted them to. They moved up-river following the smoke from the volleys. It was an honor to be called to do this. My friend Steve, the second chair, was stationed a short distance away to play the echo. It was all moving and appropriate. It was finished.

Steve and I then joined the rest of our high school marching band for the parade. It would be our last official parade having just graduated. The parade moved up the main east-west street through town. We marched past what had been my Dad's pharmacy and then our house. We went by the junior high school where a Winged Victory statue remembered World War 1 sacrifices. Just past my grandfather's house a small curve in the street took us to the left-turn that led into the cemetery.

The band took its "parade rest"-style position for the ceremony.

My memory of that day is fixed with what happened next. The three-volley honor salute was repeated. It was not the first time I had been in this cemetery and heard that. My dad, a veteran of WW II, had died about 18 months earlier. That volley had echoed from the hilltop cemetery on that cold December day. Now I was standing but twenty yards or so from his and my mother's graves. I was focused and ready to go.

Taps is not difficult to play. It is ingrained in every trumpet player's mind. Its haunting sound is as familiar as our own names. Steve had gone to the hilltop behind us for his echo response to my call.

Perhaps I was nervous, or, at the other extreme, over-confident. I don't remember any performance anxiety at that time. This was not my first public solo performance. Most likely I was just careless.

Three notes in I choked. Everything I knew about performing disappeared. I had forgotten to let the water out of the horn. The sound started to gurgle, the notes lost their clear intensity. My mind went into auto-pilot, which 50 years ago did not include the simple act of letting the water out in one of the pauses at the end of a phrase.

I finished with the gurgles mocking me even more intensely when Steve's echo sounded so perfect to my ear. I was upset at myself. I had let the veterans down. I had let my father down.

I was ashamed.

I had one more opportunity. There was one more short parade that afternoon in nearby Salladasburg. There was one more cemetery with Taps.

That, too, became an embarrassment. I flubbed a note at the beginning and, yes, I again forgot to let the water out. That, I am sure, was more nerves and, even more likely, inexperience.

But it became my experience. It became, for me, a defining moment in my musical life. It made me, in my mind, a sloppy trumpet player.

One day in May 1966 set a standard of self-understanding that I have spent over half a century trying to change. I added my low sight-reading skills to it three months later when I did not get into the marching band at college. I never thought until recently that they simply didn't need another freshman trumpet player at that point and it had nothing to do with my ability. The Memorial Day experience was already coloring my personal lowering expectations and was undermining my self-understanding as a musician.

This story encompasses so much of what I have written about in these now four years of The Tuning Slide. Part of it has been to exorcise those ghosts and discover the musician I am. It has worked- and continues to work. I am playing today at a level I would never have thought possible. Musically, with the trumpet, I have found my voice. It is not impossible. You are never too old to take new directions and find the truth that will set you free to sing your song.

Next week we will look at how to move beyond these plateaus, real or imagined. Until then, let's go practice.