Your well-being should be top priority

Looking for an additional goal for the new year? If so, consider your psychological well-being.

If you don’t already do so, begin to practice unconditional self- acceptance. Don’t look for those around you to define your self-worth based solely on your performance, accomplishments and achievements, as this can leave you open to chronic insecurity.

Don’t be afraid to take risks. Nothing ventured, nothing gained — especially when the risks are taken in a thoughtful manner. Learn to accept uncertainty as a fact in an ever-changing world. Don’t give up order and self-discipline, but don’t be bound by the need for control and predictability in everything you do.

Find something in life in which you can become fervently engaged. Doing so will help you avoid being bored, lonely and stagnant. For example, for people who are involved in a career, having a strong commitment to their work and embracing the challenges of the job provide a healthy framework for a large portion of their daily existence. This same joy of life hopefully carries over into hobbies, social interests and other activities.

Strive to avoid rigidity and inflexibility by embracing openness, diversity and change. Lifestyles that are governed by tight boundaries, stereotyped roles and too many rules create a brittle, static existence.

Resolve to quit living only in the past and/or predominantly for the future. Instead, try to increase your ability to learn from the past, be excited and look forward to the future, but enjoy every experience of the present.

Some people begin to enjoy life one day at a time only after a tragedy has almost taken their lives. Vow to start valuing the really important things in life now rather than later.

Make your mental health a high priority this year.

Hap LeCrone, a Cox News Service columnist, is a clinical psychologist. Write him at 4555 Lake Shore Dr., Waco, TX 76710; or send email.

hlecrone@aol.com

I have several personal projects (music- and non-music related) in the works, and so it’ll be nice to have some more time to myself in the upcoming year.  Honestly, with all I have planned I will not have much spare time to devote to this blog.  Perhaps this would be a good new year’s resolution- more time for me, less time for the less important things.  I still plan on keeping the site up and making the occasional update (especially monthly to the audition ad section).  I will also post on occasion, when and if the spirit moves me.  But for now, adios!

Well, it could be extremely boring if a musician made it so.  For a horn player, the notes are rather uncomplicated, so by performance #100 or so, you can literally play the 50 or so pages in the part with your eyes closed.  And from where I sit, I am unable to see the action onstage.  There is a small convex mirror (approximately 6” in diameter) that is taped to the audience side of the pit.  If you are a musician lucky enough to be sitting near the mirror, you can sometimes see the dancers onstage if you’re not busy.  This year, though, I’m unable to see the mirror, so I must amuse myself.

But I’m never bored- I have always played little mental games with myself during performances to make it more interesting.  My favorite is “target practice.”  The part is very taxing for the horn player, especially in a reduced instrumentation on a high part, and complete accuracy is almost impossible, especially when one’s chops are completely wasted.  So I add a point for every note I miss during the performance; the fewer points I get, the better I do!  To be honest, I think I’ve gotten a score of zero only once out of 200 tries!

I also like to pay attention to what’s going on in the audience.  It’s always interesting to hear what characters are out there, especially the kids.  Sometimes you hear kids who are having a great time, and have these really great, silly laughs.  Other times you hear screams of “I want to go home!”  And last night, some guy yelled out an unintelligible phrase that none of the musicians could understand.  It’s something different at practically every performance.

And, there’s always stuff falling into the pit.  An awful lot of fake snow has fallen into the pit this year; I’ve been making sure my coffee/beverage is either covered or under my chair, so it’s not dusted with snowflakes by the end of the performance.  Sometimes there are other random objects that fall, such as a small green object wrapped like a Christmas present a few days ago.  In past years dry ice vapor has fallen into the pit from onstage- very distracting, and cold and drafty besides.  The scariest object I’ve witnessed falling into the pit was a fake sword a few years ago.  Fortunately no musician was hurt when that happened.  There’s a protective screen covering the pit for Broadway shows to keep the musicians safe from fallen objects.  It does protect, but it also acts as a visual barrier between the audience and the music, and I’m personally glad that it’s not used for Nutcracker (but then again, I’m out of range of the falling objects, so I’m not too worried).

My favorite diversion during Nutcracker is simply to listen to Tchaikovsky’s wonderful music.  There was one year in Columbus when I didn’t play Nutcracker, and that year it was very difficult for me to get into the holiday spirit.  It never seems like I get in the mood for Christmas to happen until I start rehearsing/performing The Nutcracker.   It really is one of Tchaikovsky’s best works, and I do look forward to performing it every year.  It’s very difficult for me to listen to it when I hear it outside of the pit, like on the radio or at the shopping mall, for instance, but inside the pit, I do enjoy playing it.

This will be my last post before Christmas.  I will be taking a break of a few weeks from the blog to enjoy the holidays.   Merry Christmas and/or happy holidays to you!

This year I’m not playing too many Nutcrackers.  I’m just playing enough to help my colleagues out.  I have a bunch of practicing I want to be doing and if I do a lot of Nutcrackers, I have no chops left to do anything constructive at home.  It’s a very taxing work for horn, especially when you play multiple shows on a high part of a reduced arrangement.  So I’m taking it easy this year.

This year we’re doing a new arrangement of it by someone named Joseph Ceo.  I haven’t been able to find anything online about who Ceo is; when doing a Google search on him, I kept on getting hits for Chief Executive Officers who are on the boards of ballet companies.  But it is a pretty decent arrangement, definitely better than the Itkin arrangement we did last year.  It’s as if Mr./Ms. Ceo actually asked a horn player his opinion on what is possible on the instrument.  A few of the solos would have been more appropriately arranged for 2nd horn, and vice versa, so we ended up swapping some licks with the 2nd horn.  I still have to leave out a few notes here and there, or swap octaves with the 2nd horn to make it playable, just as with the other arrangement.  But other than that, the Ceo arrangement is very well done. 

Of course, I do miss the original Nutcracker.  Back when we used to do the original and unadulterated work, I never realized how spoiled I was to play an original 1st or 3rd horn part (those were also the days when we did multiple performances of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet- ah, nostalgia!).  The brass harmonies are so full in the complete orchestration, with 4 horns, a complete trombone section, and a tuba.  But I think those days have passed for my orchestra.  Nutcracker is really wonderful music and I hope to again play the original, as the composer intended, someday.  But original or not, to me it never seems like the holidays without Nutcracker.

As I mentioned here and here, I’ve been working on the book for a few months.  I originally was doing the exercises at the end of the day because I was worried the exercises would interfere negatively with my normal playing (they ARE intense).  That seemed to be going well, so during some of my off weeks I decided to try to put them at the beginning of the day to see what would happen.  It turned out that everything improved.

The RI/RO exercises make perfect range and attack studies, and the TOL (tongue on lips) exercises allow one to experiment with articulations and air speed, making for a complete maintenance routine.  When added to a brief warmup and a few scales, it’s a perfect 40 minute routine for me.  Ironically, the weirdness of the different embouchure sensations allows me to tune out how things feel and instead focus on what I want to sound like.  The vast differences between the RI and RO embouchures have fine tuned my regular embouchure, making it more streamlined, with no unnecessary movement.  The overall effect has been very freeing.  After playing through my new routine, I feel like I can play anything, anytime and anywhere.  I play my warmup, the BE exercises, and then forget about it all and just play music.

Being able to play in any range using either a rolled-in or a rolled-out embouchure has given me the flexibility and confidence to know I can play anything under any conditions, no matter how my chops feel.  The TOL exercises have been especially groundbreaking for me.  They have reminded me of the importance of tongue position in ease of range and tone color, along with articulation, and now I have another tool to work on those techniques.

When I’m having difficulty with an excerpt or passage, I find myself relating the passage to a specific BE exercise.  For example, I was having trouble with the mid-range intervallic leaps in the beginning of Bruckner’s 4th symphony.  But a mid-range interval of an octave or a tenth is by no means as large as a 3 octave leap in and out of the pedal register!  So, by reminding myself of what I have to do to play the interval leaps in RO #3 and RI #4, Bruckner 4 has become much easier.

I’ve decided that in my own development, the ALS (advanced lip slur) exercises weren’t really doing anything for me.  I found that I was able to play through all of them right away, so it wasn’t advantageous to keep playing them.  I find that I get plenty of advanced lip slur practice in my normal playing, so I’ve decided to just keep working on the other exercises.  I may decide to work on the ALS exercises later, but extending them into the trumpet ranges.

Overall, I’ve been thrilled at the results I’m getting from BE, which I was not expecting at all.  The exercises are fun, challenging, efficient and mercifully brief, allowing me more time to work on what I really care about in my practice sessions.  I look forward to even more improvements in the months/years to come.

*For a more detailed explanation of the Balanced Embouchure and RI/RO/TOL, see Valerie Wells’ website at http://www.beforhorn.blogspot.com/ .