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With many years to reflect back on, there are certainly periods of time when important things happened. For me, one of those important periods was 40 summers ago. Aspen, 1982, and the year that followed.
Wait, you had playing problems?
Some players I am convinced try to project an image that they have never had any issues as a player. Even without projecting that image, some must look at someone like me and think I must have always been good and probably never had any problems. That is not at all the case.
I started college in the fall of 1980, a music business major (!) at Emporia State University. My horn teacher, Melbern Nixon, was a very nice man and helped me with many things, but was not actually a horn player, he was a trombonist and mainly a band director at that point.
I don’t know exactly how I decided to apply to attend the Aspen Music Festival. I did like Colorado, having taken many vacations there with my parents. Another influence might have been Mr. Nixon, he was close friends with the parents of David Wakefield, on the horn faculty at Aspen for many years. My parents drove me in and dropped me off there, the other two summers I attended I had a car.
The embouchure change
Soon after arrival, we had seating auditions and I was not placed in a group! What I was told was the horn faculty (Wakefield, Hatfield, and Cerminaro) agreed that I needed to change my embouchure and wanted me to work on that.
So that week I changed my embouchure. My setup then was that I played mostly lower lip and I had no low range. Wakefield did give me two lessons that first week to help me set up the new placement, and we worked out a plan. I had simple etudes, etudes in low transpositions, Mozart 1, etc. Shorter practice sessions, don’t push things too far too quickly. Don’t play more than I comfortably could play. Keeping my eyes on the end goal of developing a full range.
By the second week they started putting me in some conducting orchestras and such. I did the horn ensemble and by the end of the summer played a concert with an orchestra. Played in a quintet. Learned a great deal! Sprinkle in some great hiking and watching Cubs baseball on cable, that summer was a key one toward all that came later for me on the horn.
Name dropping from 1982
I could name drop a little too. That summer among the horn players there and close to my age were Ellen Dinwiddie, Richard Deane, and my roommate at the end of the summer was Paul Stevens. Paul is now horn professor at the University of Kansas, Ellen is in the Minnesota Orchestra, and Richard is in the New York Philharmonic. And I’m at Arizona State. I wonder who of those attending Aspen this summer will advance to the upper levels of the horn? And I believe I would not have been one that you would have guessed would advance, had you been there.
The injury
That fall I got pointed toward Nicholas Smith in Wichita for extra lessons, and I did that weekly for the next two years. During the school years I took two lessons a week, working on completely different materials with two different teachers. I made a ton of progress, but did have an “event” with my embouchure during the spring semester of 1983.
I still puzzle about it, but I must have developed a tear in my lower lip, there was a hot spot and it took ages to heal. Too much playing for sure, I was a very motivated student and playing 1st horn in everything at my school and in the faculty brass quintet (!), as the Master’s degree level Graduate Assistant left after only a couple days (small town Kansas was not for them).
There is a conventional wisdom that a muscle tear will take 3-6 weeks to heal. In my case, it dragged on for as I recall about 2 months.
Tactics to get through it
And I still had a junior recital to play! The tactic we adopted was I developed a recital program that only touched a G at the top of the staff a few times. It was not “low horn” but it was not too high!
I had a very stable warm-up routine, and there was also another tactic I learned that year. I basically looked at every day I only had so many notes I could play. Push too far and there would be consequences.
It did heal eventually, and I was off to Aspen again in 1983, playing a lot of interesting music on much better parts! (For more on that, see this interview with Bruce Richards, who was also a student in ’83). And I went again for a final summer there in 1985. Those summers I made a great deal of progress as a player and laid foundations for all that was to come. And, as I tell people often, you can make a semester of progress over the summer if you use the time well, with the structure of a summer festival being ideal.
Lessons that formed a career
In the big picture, I think making that huge embouchure change and having that injury has helped me as a teacher a great deal. I think embouchure problems can simply puzzle players who never had any embouchure problems. In my case, I got both categories of problems out of the way early (I actually changed my embouchure again as a Doctoral student!) and was able to achieve my goals beyond my dreams of the time as a player.
One type of problem I didn’t have
Talking to someone recently I was reminded that I was fortunate I did not have any teachers with odd ideas on breathing. Or, if they had them, I sounded good enough they did not bring up the topic. I feel fortunate too to teach now at a place where The Breathing Gym has been widely used, a deep and active type of breathing is needed on the horn.
Postscript: “The wobble”
I would mention one other playing issue that came up years later, a number of years into teaching at ASU. One fall semester I developed a significant wobble in my tone. While it passed as a vibrato of sorts, I privately worried if I was developing focal dystonia — although I could rule that out as it was more general to my playing than typically seen for FD. I found that practicing “Shawarma” from the Brass Gym helped, as did pitch bending and a slower warmup. But also, I know there was a mental component, as the wobble appeared noticeably at the beginning of the semester that I became Brass Area Coordinator. It comes back occasionally – almost always in the fall! — and I’m convinced it is part physical and part mental.
Conclusion: I’ve had my share of problems
Which is all to say, I’ve had some playing challenges over the years. It was not all easy and natural. If you are having some issues, don’t abandon hope, keep working, there are probably solutions to your issues.
I’ll add one final footnote. Going back to 40 summers ago, and this may sound a little shallow, but I get such a kick when I see David Wakefield “like” my Instagram posts. And I like to think he gets a kick out of liking the posts too, my teacher in a pivotal summer in Aspen some 40 years ago.
To hear more about the topics covered in this post, check out Episode 55 of the Horn Note Podcast (direct link here, or wherever you access podcasts).
**The photo featured in this article was AI generated in a website (Dall-E mini) that as I write this has been trending on Twitter. The specific prompt that generated the photo was “French horn at the Maroon Bells,” a famous hiking destination near Aspen.
