by Matthew Haislip
One habit I continuously catch myself in during practice is the tendency to keep the horn on my lips for minutes at a time. We all have our routines and exercises that help keep us in shape mentally, physically, and musically, but we often move from one exercise or etude to the next without much time for the lips and mind to recover, rest, and reset. In doing so, we are missing out on what could help us improve in all aspects of horn playing. To be sure, we all need some endurance-building time on the face each day to maintain a level of familiarity and stamina, but rest has its place, too.
In my warm-up, I tend to work on each set of exercises in each key I intend to play for the day and then rest after entire sets, but the horn barely leaves the face between iterations within a set, often leaving only just enough time to breathe. If I mix it up and take more time between each pattern, I find that the exercise becomes different: maybe easier, maybe more challenging, but a new experience instead of a thoughtless repetition. I must engage my attention more, even if only slightly. The short amount of time off the lips also helps with keeping me feeling fresh and not worn down.
Where I especially notice this is in the work I do playing overtone-series slurs followed by the same pattern articulated, often starting in the low register. If I take a quick breath and start the articulated set, I don’t even have to focus my attention to restart. It just flows easily from the tempo of the slurred pattern. But if I stop the musical time and take a few seconds to rest, I face the new challenge in starting the low note. It becomes a beneficial low-register entrance exercise, and I must engage more focus on the tempo, subdivision, pitch of the first note, and flow of coordinated horn playing to enter with beautiful articulation.
Another area where I notice this principle is in daily work on scalar exercises. If I go across the entire range of a three-octave scale all at once, I don’t need the same level of focus as if I rest at the top or bottom of the scale and re-enter from that note after a few measures of silence. By engaging the sense of focus, we add one more skill area to our practice.
Essentially, everything we play becomes a helpful opportunity to work on the coordination of hearing the notes before we play them and delivering each entrance with a beautiful start. One could call these accuracy exercises, but I think it’s more helpful to think of accuracy in terms of the coordination of ear, air, and time. By adding some rest to the equation, we engage our mind instead of just going through the motions. This is one more way that our practice time can become more effectively focused for our benefit.
Give yourself a break!
