“Improvement, not Perfection”
Another article from the original HTML Horn Notes Blog dated 2/7/05.
In my entry for 1/20/05 Three times or a thousand times? I address a presentation I recently heard that seriously pushed the concept of attempting to play things correctly 1000 times in a row. At the time I felt that this was, in short, very bad advice.
I have kept thinking since then about the topic of accuracy and perfection in my teaching and playing, and this weekend ran across some comments by Carmine Caruso in his classic Musical Calisthenics for Brass (Almo) on perfection. Playing things 1000 times gets at trying to achieve not only perfection but an extreme form of perfection. Caruso wrote in contrast that
Instead of thinking ‘perfection,’ encourage yourself to think in percentages, that is, ‘it’s a percentage better than it was.’ The words ‘perfection,’ ‘wrong,’ and ‘good’ should have gone out with the feudal lords: they have nothing to do with the art of teaching, and often their use can be a negative factor. If a teacher says something is wrong, the student has the right to ask, ‘What’s wrong about it?’ Then the teacher will explain, and the student asks, ‘Now, what do I do about it?’ It is easy to dispense with all those steps if the teacher merely tells the student what to do. It’s improvement, not perfection, that the student is trying to achieve.
Verbal negativity is not encouragement to the student. Teaching is giving with love, giving in a positive manner. This is such an important concept for teachers to remember. Unfortunately I have known many students who have lost interest in their musical careers because they didn’t have a teacher who could communicate to them a love for the instrument and the art form. They may have been technical wizards, but those teachers could not translate the proper inspiration, and because of this they lost their student’s interest.
This book, as stated above, is a classic that is well worth checking out by any serious brass student. You have to get the percentages up! I know that I in fact did not miss any notes in any round of the audition when I won the Third Horn job in Nashville. But as a student and as a professional alike you need to work to keep the percentages up, not to be perfect.
BONUS: I have for some years done a version of a Caruso routine, based on one that I learned from David Wakefield. As a bonus in this post, here is my version of a workable Caruso routine for horn. Find the book and read his text to get the full benefit of the routine below.
1. Exercise 6 but start on middle C and continue up a fifth.
2. Exercise 1. Start as printed then continue by dropping an octave at the final printed note, keeping the pattern going back up to G.
3. Exercise 2 but start on Middle C.
4. Pedal F#, at least three times held as long as possible, ppp.
5. Chromatic scale as in Exercise 25 but play from middle C to high C to Low C (go down three octaves).
6. Exercise 25 as printed, followed by the same chromatic scale as above
7. Exercise 4 but an octave lower than printed and hold the highest note possible.
8. Repeat numbers 4 and 5 as above.
Be a 
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