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About this time of year I always find some students are getting rather stiff in the chops, which leads to a discussion of how to avoid and manage this stiffness. But sometimes you have to play on with stiff chops and it may be easy to hear in the audience that you are stiff. What does the audience think?
I was recently at a performance that did not go as well as it should have that involved a brass soloist which will serve as a good example. What it was exactly I am not going to say, it is not relevant to the point of this post, but rest assured it was a very fine brass player and they were having fairly serious response issues. I totally could feel it listening, their chops were just stiff. As brass players we all know that feeling. But non-brass players don’t. One of the other audience members commented to me that the player sounded really nervous.
I don’t think the performer was nervous at all other than maybe the sort of deep dread of knowing that your chops feel terrible. Again, we know this already as we know how the chops feel and sound when stiff but this audience member, who has a background in music but not brass instruments, needed a bit of gentle education on the topic. Not that we want to just put a bunch of excuses out there, but it is important for people in music in general to know that nerves are not the only reason why brass players miss notes.
As to how to manage, it is a combination of what your playing days look like and how you warm-up and warm-down. As to the playing days, pace yourself! Try not to play too far into the stiff zone. You are safest thinking of having three main playing sessions, with the heaviest practice being on the days when your other playing commitments are the lightest. I do suggest warming down and also inserting things that resemble warm-down exercises in your warm-up if you feel stiff.
And consider taking a day off sometime. This is a topic that I had a post about in my original HTML blog that has not come forward to Horn Matters yet. In a post titled “Is it OK to take a day off?” dated 7/27/06 I wrote,
This is a question that seems to come up quite a bit. Over the years I have had a number of conversations with students on this topic and over the summer it came up yet again more than once.
Normally my standard answer is no, you want to play at least a little every day, your chops will be better off with a light day than with a day of no playing. When I don’t play at all, especially several days off, there is a good chance that I will fight stiffness as I get fully back in shape. At least I must buzz a little.
But actually, I just took two days totally off with only light playing yesterday and today. The days off were a “reward” for [recent] hard playing ….
The way the topic often comes up though is there are teachers that specifically tell students to take a day off. In pondering this recently I realized at least part of why this is–some horn students (and professionals) really need to take a day off as they can get just a bit too intense about horn playing (and everything else).
There are a lot of angles to all of this but the big picture is you do want to avoid if possible getting too stiff. Again, audiences will tend to not think it is your chops being stiff, they will think it to be more about you being nervous.
Stiffness normally will pass but if you ignore your chops and overplay for too long you can run yourself into chop problems. For a few more thoughts on this topic see this article.
