It's Not All Physical

 

Warning:
Practicing only physical exercises and no musical content, for too long of a time, can cause some serious problems in your playing. 

I've thought about eighty different ways to begin this essay and this warning was the only way which made sense. It IS a warning and a very serious one.

Over and over again I've seen players who have had physical problems on the trumpet who thought that the answer was to divorce themselves from musical work until they get their physical problems straightened out. They focus only on rudiments such as lip slurs, long tones and pedal tones in an effort to fix the problem. 

It's okay to do this for one practice session. It's okay to do this for one day. It might even be okay to do it for two or three days - but to me, that's really pushing it. But I've known of people who only practiced physical stuff for months or even years. 

Not a Prerequisite

You see, physical work is NOT a prerequisite to musical work. If anything, it's the other way around since any physical work you do SHOULD be for a musical purpose. We don't learn long tones for the sake of doing long tones. We don't do lip slurs for the sake of doing lip slurs. The object of doing physical rudiments should be to create positive results in our musicality. 

I will agree that physical rudiments are important and that we all need to do them. They isolate trouble spots in our playing by reducing the numbers of tasks to be done at once. Take long tones for example. Long tones require only one task and that is to play a single note. There's no need to spend mental energies on articulation, flexibility or anything else besides tone production. This is great when it's used as a rudiment. It helps us see things in our playing which we cannot see in a more active context.

But the fact is, real music is not isolated to one physical aspect. Music requires a complex combination of all the physical elements.  And while isolating individual aspects helps us to analyze specific problems in our physical playing, it is not enough, on it's own, to help us learn how to balance ALL of the physical aspects in order to create real music. 

Learn Balance Through Music

Of course, the best way to learn how to balance all of those physical aspects is to practice music, real music, not just exercises. That's precisely why I end each of my physical practice sessions (I call it my "routine") with a lyrical study. Playing real musical phrases and melodies brings all of the physical attributes of our playing into one place and gives it a purpose. By practicing a Concone (or something similar) at the end of a physical practice session, it's like saying, 

"Okay, I've done this by itself and that by itself. I've done all of these things individually. Now let's see what happens when I put it all together."

By if you go weeks or months without trying to "bring it all together", you can quickly become rusty at it. Part of the reason for this is that most of what we do when we play musically is subconscious. There are so many physical things going on when we play real music that we couldn't possibly think of all of them, consciously, at the same time. So we learn to pass those tasks over to the subconscious side of our brains. People who only practice rudiments and never music find this difficult to do. They want to control everything and it simply isn't possible. Our conscious minds cannot think of more than one thing at a time. 

Stay On Course

Another problem with not practicing music is that it's so easy to loose track of what physical work really needs to be done. As I said, rudiments should be used in response to musical problems. How can you know what your musical problems are if you never play anything musical? If you choose your rudiments only according to your playing on other rudiments, you could be heading in a very strange direction in your playing. 

And I've seen this happen. I once met someone who played some amazing things in the way of physical rudiments. It was simply amazing. And yet, since this guy had divorced himself from all forms of musical playing, he couldn't play a melody to save his life. He started off by focusing only on the physical rudiments because he was doing so poorly in that area. His plan was, when the rudiments sounded better, he would begin practicing music once again. 

But in his eyes, the rudiments never got better, not better enough that he thought he was ready to begin practicing music again. Whenever he made progress in his rudiments, his standards would go up and he'd see other things he wanted to improve in his rudiments. That's human nature. We're all like that. And for that very reason, he would have NEVER been ready to practice musical stuff because his standards kept increasing with the rudiments. 

That's why I limit my physical work to no more than half of my total practice day. Recently, my physical work has been far less than half. I do my routine once a day and then I practice several hours worth of music.

If you're one of those players who only practices physical stuff and would like to practice other, more musical stuff, but don't know what to practice, then check out my "Check List of Things to Practice".