The Tuning Slide: 3-8- Lifelong Learning

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Every year two things happen with education and learning. Every summer about this time we hear that “School’s Back.” Every spring we hear that “School’s Out.” And every spring I react the same way:
I hope not. I hope NEVER!

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
-Daniel Boorstin

I had another good example of this recently. As many of you know, I have been playing trumpet for over 55 years. I have no memory of having learned how to play the trumpet. It happened in a different world to a person far different from the one writing this blog. In my mind I have always played trumpet even though I was in 8th grade when I started. Playing trumpet has been second nature. Or was until Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop in 2015 when in a few moments of instruction, Bob Baca, workshop director, taught me something I didn’t even know I needed to know. I started changing how I practiced and how I saw trumpet playing. An amazing transformation has been at work.

Fast forward two years to this year’s workshop. For a couple months I have been aware that perhaps my embouchure needed some fine-tuning. I seemed stuck on a couple things so maybe it was something about my embouchure. I had been working on that in my practicing. I need to point out that until then I didn’t know that it might be something I needed to do. I’ve “always” played like this. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I went to this year’s workshop with an openness to get some expert advice and instruction- to be “teachable” as I talked about last week. I signed up for a lesson with Bill Bergren whose opinions and approach to the trumpet have always impressed me as anyone who has read this blog before knows. So I went in for my lesson having previously told him what was going on.

We sat down and what did he do but start at the beginning. No, not the beginning of the lesson but the beginning of trumpet playing, just a few steps beyond “This is a trumpet.” I had watched Bill teaching a non-trumpet player how to play that morning. Here he was using THE SAME techniques on me, someone who has been playing for over 55 years. (Hear the arrogance? It was covering the lack of confidence I was feeling at that moment.)

At first I did everything but say “But, Bill, you don’t understand. My situation is different.” I started to get frustrated. “But Bill..”

“Just do it, Barry.”
“Breathe this way.”
“Blow like you’re cooling hot soup.”
“Sing it first.”

He wasn’t working directly on my embouchure, he was working on my breathing. He was working on how I put the trumpet to my lips. He was working on how I thought about playing this instrument that I thought I knew how to play. He was helping me set my embouchure.

Back to basics to learn what I didn’t know I didn’t know. It took a few minutes for me to relax and realize he was doing exactly what he knew I needed. I relaxed a little as I struggled with something I thought I knew how to do. I kept listening and attempting to do what he suggested. I worked on turning off Self One. That’s the part that wanted logical how-to instructions.

“But, Bill, how do I…?”

“Let Self Two just do it.”

We made a little progress, but time was up. I went back to the rehearsal room and tried some of Bill’s techniques. They sort of worked. I went back to my room and worked on it some more. The next morning as I started my daily routine I applied them some more. They began to happen- after some frustrated mumbling, of course.

They have a way to go yet, but now, a few weeks later, I am seeing the results.

Amazing.

We humans are not dogs! You can teach an old human new tricks. At one point I asked Bill, “How do you break a 55-year old habit?”

He quickly came back with the most common answer that has been around for the past 50 years. It comes from the book Psycho Cybernetics which says that it takes a minimum of 21 days! That’s how long the old mental images take to fade and to be replaced by something new. A lot of all this is changing how we see ourselves. If we believe we are too old to learn something new- we won’t learn anything new.

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t,
you are right.
-Henry Ford

More recent research emphasizes the “minimum” part of the 21-day rule. The more complex a habit, the longer it takes to replace it. It is meant to be more difficult to break a habit. It helps us run on autopilot when we need to. It is what Self Two runs on! In general, though, I know I have to be working on this for at least 21 days before it begins to become more habitual.

So far it’s been 14 days. And it is happening! Self Two is beginning to be in charge of how I set my lips to play- relaxed and ready to simply breathe out. I now believe I can do it differently. In fact I am at the point where I have to stop and think about how I used to do it. A sure sign that things are moving in a new direction.

It doesn’t matter what it is we are trying to do differently. Part of our success will be in our ability to visualize the new way. It may be getting the right note in our head before we play it; it might be in taking time to exercise or practice or eat healthier food. It isn’t willpower, it’s habit.

Learning is not a part-time experience nor is it simply what happens in schools. If that was the extent of learning, we would be a far poorer people and our individual lives would be quite dull. There are people who do stop trying to learn. They become satisfied with where they believe they are or that they have nothing new to learn. The past two years for me have shown that even in something as ingrained as my trumpet playing was, it can change and grow.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.
Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
-Henry Ford

School’s Out?
No way. I have too much to learn.

The Tuning Slide: 2.11- Staying Mental

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Aware that it may be nothing more than beating the same drum over and over, let’s take one more look at “deliberate practice.” Here again are the standards required of practice to be deliberate:

• Deliberate practice is focused. Students must give it their full attention.
• Deliberate practice involves feedback. Immediate, specific feedback on where students are falling short is vital.
• Deliberate practice requires a teacher
• Deliberate practice requires leaving one’s comfort zone. If students aren’t pushing themselves beyond what is comfortable and familiar, they will not advance.
• Deliberate practice requires specific goals aimed at target performances
• Deliberate practice builds on mental representations.

One of the most interesting to me is the last one:

• Mental representations.

I had never thought of that as part of what practice does. Now I realize that it is something that happens fairly unconsciously. We do build a mental picture of what we are doing. We do look for patterns in the music and, if we are more visually oriented may even construct some mental framework. I noticed myself doing that recently in working on one of our quintet pieces. At one spot in my part, there is a repeating 8th note “D” followed by 3 other 8th notes, then back up to the “D”. It repeats this pattern several times. I found myself circling the repeating “D” that gave the section a clear, almost physical structure. It also helped me see that whether notated or not, those “D”s work better with a slight accent so they stand out. After I did it I realized two things:

1. It was now easier to play in time and flow because
2. I now had a mental image in both sound and visual that described the section.

Unless you are already years into being an established and advanced trumpet player, chances are you wouldn’t notice that for a while, if ever. All you would have are the notes on the page. Think now of all those Arban or Clarke exercises that repeat the same pattern across a scale or across the whole set of 12 scales. They build a mental representation. They instill an aural pattern into our subconscious that eventually becomes a natural way of doing the scale. We can all probably play our basic concert Bb scale without even thinking. The fingers just move. But now try to play the concert B scale (our C#/Db). No way can I do that. That physical- and aural- representation isn’t there yet. But I keep working at it.

But I am not sure that the best way to keep working at it is by simply reading the notes off the page. This would have sounded like I was thinking crazy not that long ago. "I will never be able to remember those scales without having it in front of me." I felt it was absolutely necessary to learn them from the Arban series in exercise 46 on pp. 20-21. It repeats a pattern (visual on the page, aural from the horn) or mental representation, around the circle of 4ths. I got the basics and then closed the book and started working on it by “ear.” I still have some difficulty with Db and Gb but it went much faster when I internalized the pattern- a mental representation- and learned it that way. I discovered that also worked well with Clarke #2, the classic exercise that is one of those essentials of trumpet playing. So it does appear that when we work toward those mental representations and visualizations, things improve- and often more quickly and effectively than otherwise.

No matter how you do this, though, you are always working on those three “greats”:

• Great sound,
• Great rhythm,
• Great listening

Tempo keeps these 3 greats in order. When you get to a difficult place and miss the note, slow it down- it means the tempo was too fast. That also allows those mental representations to catch up to what you are playing. It takes a long time to play as fast as Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie- and do it well. Build the mental representations always, always paying attention to the three greats.
One more quick thought I heard: There is no better motivation for more practice than what happens when you practice more. You won’t ever say, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t practiced today.”

Staying motivated: See this link on the Learning Jazz Standards website for another way of describing all this.

I had said last week that I would talk some about “Grit”- the rest of the Peak and deliberate practice story. I think I will hold off on that until sometime in the new year. We’ve covered a lot of territory on deliberate practice in these three posts. It may be better to work on incorporating these into our own practice time. Grit will then become a refresher and expansion after we get a little more comfortable with being deliberate.