Transcript Summary
Lecture is literature and within that there's a whole gamut of ideas that we
can talk about. Okay? Microphone. What I'll be talking about today is literature on your
instruments and how to approach it. Trumpet players, I just gave you five
different levels of literature and I don't pretend to have that be a complete
everything in the world on trumpet playing. French horn trombones and tubas,
I'm gonna try to get you a list later on this week, but go ahead and hang on to
that also. Okay? You can help some trumpet players out. Somebody says, gee, I wish I knew some
tunes that would work for this kid. Okay? I'll explain to you how those levels break up as
we go on. Second thing I want to talk about this afternoon is recitals. It's
something that if you're gonna go to college, you're gonna have to face sooner
or later, whether it's called the junior recital or a senior recital or a graduate
recital. Okay? Let me talk about how to put one of those together. Let me talk
about how and why we use different pitch instruments on various literatures. And
we're gonna be talking about music, which is why I hope we all do this thing in the
first place. Okay? There's lots of reasons we pick the instrument we play. As I told
my group this morning, I picked mine because my dad thought a clarinet was a
clarinet. He came up with a coronet. Okay? And so that's how I picked my instrument.
So it's the whole idea is we're here to communicate. We're here to say something.
Something that there's no other way for us to do it. We've picked a medium as an
art and we want to give the world something as part of us, which is what's
neat about being an artist. That's what this whole thing is about, is to communicate
emotion through sound. Or if you're in the art world, through sight, or the dance
world, through emotion. That's what we're about, communication. And why you're here
is to get so good at your instrument that it gets out of your way. That's what
we're doing this week. We're getting rid of all these physical problems so this
beautiful communication can happen. Okay? That's what this lecture is going to be
about today. All right? So, over here I've listed four ideas. Arbenz, Concone,
Bordone, Solos. Okay? If you have an Arbenz book with you, I'd like to have you open it
up to page 191. Okay? If you don't have an Arbenz book, jot that down in your
notes. Page 191. There is a series of absolutely wonderful pieces of great
vocal music. There's one part of the book I always tell my students I wish they had
never translated. They left it in French, or Italian, or German, or something. Because
we look at the titles and we don't want to play them. I mean, that's what it is.
My pretty Jane. I don't want to be caught playing that in the practice room at
Cal State, you know? Why do I weep for thee? Oh boy, the guys are, you know, are
not gonna think I'm hip. Okay? But these are so beautiful. All right? So let me
just give you some examples. Page 191. Number three. You look at this and you
pick up your trumpet, your French horn, your trombone, your tuba, whatever, and you
begin to approach this and you go. I played everything that's on that, every
note, the dynamic, every articulation, and didn't play one drop of music, did I? Okay.
This type of an exercise is for here, not for here. So one of the things you should
do when you play these beautiful songs is lock your metronome up someplace very
far away from your case. Do your own dynamics and tape yourself. Make sure you
wrote that down. Tape yourself. Ever go to a dance studio? Ever go to a comedy
store? What do they have in there? Mirrors. That's how they see themselves. They're
dancing, they're looking what's going on. What happens so much the time we're so
emotionally involved with this beast that we turn off our ears. So a tape
machine is your best friend. Buy a cheap one so when you throw it, it's
replaceable. So that's important. So now let's go back and look at this again.
Takes on a whole different flavor. And you can go back and play that two or three
more times and interpret it entirely differently. You can work on your vibrato,
you can work on arced phrases, you can work on what I call pressure points,
where a phrase goes to and then moves away from. For example,
I already landed on that E-flat. That was my point of pressure, my point of
tension. And then you can release that pressure. Release. And that's an awful
lot of what music's about. Causing tension and then letting go of it. Causing
tension. Making it more and then letting go of it. Or not letting go of it. Okay? So these are
beautiful, beautiful things to work on. And everybody should try to play at least a
page a day. One of the things I do at the universities is I make my top advanced
students play these songs. How many of you in the last year have played any of
those songs off of Arvindson? Yeah, look. Okay, yeah. Do it today before you put the horn away.
You'll love it. Okay? So there's a perfect source for music phrasing. Another book,
Konkoni, was a vocal teacher. Okay? And the vocal books, if you want to actually buy the
vocal books and get them with the, get them with the piano, if you want to get them with the piano
parts. The Konkoni books were published by Schirmer and now I believe by Bellwin. And you order them
for medium or middle voice. And there's three volumes. 15, 25, 40. And order them for medium
or middle voice. I use them a lot in church. They want to have an offertory. I'll play a couple
Konkoni's with the organ or the piano. They're beautiful. Okay? The Bordonee book, for years,
for trumpet players and horn players, the frustration was Rochou had them published with
Carl Fischer but they were in bass clef. And trumpet players don't want to play that, you know,
it's in bass clef. So that's finally come out. There's a lot of clams though. But let me give
you the publisher. Remember that? The Bordonee Vocalises. Bordonee. B-O-R-D-O-G-I-N-I. Looks like
Bordonee. Bordonee. And it's called Complete Book of Vocalises for trumpet and piano. Tezek. T-E-Z-A-K.
Publications. Edited by Benny Slukin. S-L-U-C-H-I-N. There's lots of mistakes in the book. There's one
page where you forgot to transpose. You go crashing into it. You go, whoa, what happened? But they're
marvelous. They're beautiful. So all you trumpet players have been struggling with the trombone
books. It's finally, somebody's come out and published them. The Bordonee. Yeah, because of the
piano parts too. What was the name of the Conconee? It's called Conconee Vocalises. And that's one with
the complete piano. There's also Sawyer. It has them out just for trumpet. Well, I like them with the
piano parts. You can get them for the same price. Shermer and or Bellin Mills. And it's not a trumpet
book. It's the vocal book for medium or middle voice. Okay. Yes. What's the name of the Bordonee book?
The Complete Book of Vocalises. I don't think so. Sure. T-E-Z-A-K. All right. Okay. So these
three items, Conconee, Bordonee, and pages 191 on back for a while in the Arbus book, are the first
places you should be reaching to play music. And one of the reasons it is, is all of these are within
your physical realm of playing. That's important. How do most brass players work on music? It's not
incredibly fast and incredibly high. They don't want to play it. And that's not music. Okay. Music
is communication. So now the next stage is solos. So why don't you take those graded solo lists I
gave you. And what I've done is I've just gone through a rather large number of solos and just
grouped them into levels. No problem. Go ahead. So take out level one. Bruce, do you have that star
series back there? Can you bring me up a couple of those? The thing about level one, if you want to
make some notes next to this, that would be just great. Level one, the way I separated level one
was limited range. Most of these do not go above G, above the staff. Simple key signatures. Two
sharps, two flats, max. And basic technique, not really wide leaps. It's a very marvelous series by
Vanderkoek, Rubank. It's called Star Series. You can buy them separately and you can buy them in
book form now. Published by Rubank. And they're wonderful. Yes. Okay. And let me just, the most famous one of
the series, because it's in the back, the good old Rubank Advanced Volume One is Centaurus. How many of you
played good old Centaurus? No. How'd you get through life? We'll give you an idea. What's great about these is it starts
off with a slow section.
Nice little melody. The kid can eat that up with a fork. Then he has this nice little section of 16th notes.
And that's the highest note in the piece. And it's neat. And a nice little contrasting tree on that little cadenza.
The cadenza's like. And it's great. If you're a young player or you have young kids, this whole series is neat. If
you're going through an embouchure change and you want to play some fun music, this whole series is just terrific.
Do you want to have your? There's one on there named Arcturus. Yes, Arcturus, Adorus, Rigel, all those. Yeah, it's great.
They're fun. Yes. These are a set of solos called the Star Series, Trumpet Stars. Published by Rubank. And it goes
from extremely basic. This is number seven. And it goes to number 12. And they're terrific. Lots of fun. If you have lots of
young students that you want to have them go to contests or play auditions for different things, these are wonderful. You can teach
them lots of music. And it's all within their realm of doing things. The Star Series. Then, basically, that's the list of solos
you're looking at there. All of these are in that realm. Okay? All right. Level two. What separates level one from level two is
more extended range. These solos will go up to high A, occasionally a high B. Requires more flexibility. In other words, you're going to have to jump
around a bit on these. And requires more endurance. Okay? Let me show you an example of that.
There's one there called Legend by Baklankov. All right? And it goes something like this.
That's a little bit above good old Centaurs. But still, in that range of things. Or you have, for example, Petite Concertante that would have maybe a technical
part that went like this. See, all of a sudden the melody jumps around. You really have to have more flexibility, more control, and more endurance.
That's what separates level two from level one. All right? Look at level three. Now, level three, this is where you're starting to get up and do some of the real meat and potatoes of the trumpet literature.
You look through that, and you suddenly start seeing a lot of pieces that you're probably pretty familiar with. The one I did for an encore last night is number four on the top of page two.
Sonata by Hubeau. Now, a lot of people were asking about that. That was the first movement from that sonata. It was called Cerebon. That one last night, it went...
That piece there. Okay, that was the Hubeau sonata. Really neat piece. You have Goldman Scherzo. You have Bad Nase, which is a piece I played last night. So you see, once you get to level three, you have some pretty meaty tunes to work on.
Basically, ranges up to about a high C, requires a much higher working knowledge of music, requires a very thorough technique, and pretty much the endurance problems are behind you at that point. These are major pieces.
Level four. Notice how long the list is. You can do your doctoral recitals from level four.
You'll find the Haydn, the Hummel, the Neruda, the Nesca legend, the Trotta. Basically, this would be something, this list here would be a list of very fine players, senior year in college, graduate school.
This is the standard literature. What you could do is order about five or six of these at random and just go at it. One of the biggest problems, especially here in Los Angeles, is we don't have any music stores. There's no place to go.
Here we are in LA, supposedly the capital of the world, right? And there's no music stores. There's no place to go and peruse solos. So you go to Bob King and you go, I'll order that one. And it's like you have no way to know what's going on.
So I promise you, with this list right here, if you just simply started with Nellie Bell's Golden Concerto and wrote to Robert King and ordered six of these, or just randomly started checking them off, you'd have a great old time.
Okay, you could build a really fine library with that. The range on this is from pedal tones all the way to E above high C.
And you better be well into the program of Clark and Arbins and St. Jacob's, Schlossberg, et al. This requires a very high level of playing, if you really want to play it basically and make it happen.
All right, level five. The list is short. A real good place to hear these are Tom Stevens recordings. These are the most challenging pieces in the literature.
The Tomasi, the Solberger, Hamilton, Bowling, Tutsuit, the Husa Concerto, Fischer-Tall, Lovelock, Times by Campo. These are absolutely incredibly difficult pieces.
And a number of them are atonal, which is kind of fun. And the piccolo works are very challenging. And I made a note if they were for piccolo or for other instrumentation.
Bless you. All right, so with that list in hand, you can start all the way from junior high school and work your way through the LA Philharmonic, literature-wise, for solos and etudes.
All right. Okay, etude books. I didn't include that on the list, but ready? A very good etude book series. Sir?
Oh, please. All the cornet solos. Any of the cornet solos are great. I think I practiced an oversight on my behalf. But there should be some cornet solos on there, honestly. I hope. Yeah, the cornet solos are wonderful.
Yeah. Yeah, so any cornet solos. Just an oversight on my behalf. Yeah, it's okay. Start with Clark Cataristic Studies in the back. All the way from May the Miss Polka to Showers of Gold. Great stuff. Yes?
There's different arrangements of it. There's one that's fairly low and there's one that's more up where the piccolo literature would be. Yeah. Yeah, this is not meant to be the exhaustive list of solos. You probably have a few favorites, too. This is kind of a starting place.
And I will definitely add the cornet solos. Okay?
What if you put them level four, level three and four?
Well, the cornet solos go for level one all the way through. I'm a good old May the Miss Polka by Herbert L. Clark. Remember playing that in seventh grade? You know, level two, level three, that type of thing. Yeah. Okay?
Atude books. My favorite series is Sigmund Herring. And start with forty atudes. And these are marvelous. They can go right along with the Arbenz Songs in the back. And forty atudes. And the smaller the number, the more difficult to book. So you go forty, thirty-two, twenty-eight, and fifteen.
In that order. And these are marvelous. And the forty atudes a very young player can play and really enjoy. Those are very good atude books.
From there you can go to Goldman Practical Studies. Great book on articulations. Just a great book on articulations.
Then the Bront orchestral atudes. And that's either published by MCA or International. There's different versions. Bront, B-R-A-N-D-T. Good old Bassley Bront. And those are marvelous.
Goldman Practical Studies. Yeah. Bront orchestral atudes or just atudes. There's a couple of different versions. Bob Nagel put one out and William Vacchiano put one out. Personally I like the MCA version because it's not all messed up articulations. It's a little more pure.
Yeah. We have them over there. Okay. All right. And then from there you can go to Charlier. Thirty-six atudes. Charlier. C-H-A-R-L-I-E-R. Theo Charlier. Published by Leduc.
Charlier. Theo. T-A-G-O. Thirty-six atudes. Published by Leduc. And that is a marvelous book. An interesting part is Charlier meant that to be kind of an elementary book.
The first time I had all the French translated it was a real shock to me. How many have seen or played out of the Charlier book? How many of you know the translation to the book?
Okay. You look at all that French and you're thinking this must be some pretty heavy duty stuff. He's talking about how to empty the water key correctly, how to sit nicely in an orchestra, how to, you know, the length of the tubes on your instrument.
It's all incredibly elementary things. Things that you should know in the business. It's very much right down the middle. There's no cosmic dust there. This is amazing. I was so disappointed. I was expecting some mind boggling things.
Where'd you get your translation from?
The International Tropical Guild came out with a complete translation of it. It was in an ITG journal. Just put together by page and I was going, oh good. Oh no. It was a real shock. Okay.
So Charlier. And that, from that point, wherever you want to go from there is on your own. But the Charlier book, when you can play number two and number 13 musically with great ease, you're in there. Those two etudes are marvelous.
Okay. Any questions so far about those? Mr. Catarabic, do you have any A2 books that you like to use beyond those?
I have drawers of A2. Oh yeah. Me too. But it always comes back to Charlier, the Waltersmith, Top Tones, which is a very, very advanced book.
Right. Top Tones, yeah.
It's a challenge for anybody. But I still like to look at the characteristic studies. I'm talking about in teaching and for students. I like to look at the characteristic etudes of Robert Clark and the characteristic etudes in the art of book.
Right. Very advanced also. By the way, for those who have not met, this is Mr. Frank Catarabic, our soloist tomorrow night for the Philadelphia Orchestra, if you have not met him yet.
Okay. Now, let's go on to building recitals, okay, so stage two.
Recitals are made up, I think, of three parts when I'm putting together a recital. Okay. And I don't know if this chord is going to make it.
The first problem is literature. Now that, at first you say, yeah, no kidding, you've got to play something. All right. But the problem is literature. What are you going to play? What is it you're going to play?
And the circle right here is kind of the key to this thing. All right. We all have good days and bad days. We all have days where you can take all of this literature, put it on your music stand and play it top to bottom and think that's, I finally made it.
And you have other days where level one would be too hard. Right. So here's the problem. You've got this ball of ability here. All right. And here's your really good day and here's your really bad day.
Now, what happens if you pick literature that's right here? How are you going to feel walking on stage that night? Yeah. Are you going to be thinking about all these beautiful communications that you've learned over here?
Or are you going to be worried about whether you're still going to have friends when you're done? Or are you going to a recital or a public hanging? All right. Okay. So that's one problem.
But here's the worst problem. What happens if right here is your average day? That's the day right there on that outside skin. That's where you can play. And right here, somewhere between here is kind of where it all averages out.
What happens if you pick a whole program that's right here? Are you going to sleep nights? No. I'll be honest with you, that's even worse than this situation. At least in this situation, you know you're not going to make it.
There's no problem. Okay. But right here, you're going to go nuts. You're going to go crazy. Because there's going to be one day you can play that recital and the next day you can't. And then two or three days in a row you can play it and then two or three days in a row you can't play it.
And all of a sudden, you have less hair than I do. Okay. This right here is really dangerous. So when you pick a recital, what you want to do is be a star right in the middle here. You pick literature that's going to be in your realm of possibility.
So that you're freed up. I was watching a marvelous show on PBS the other day with Jerry Schwartz and they were doing the Mozart Orchestra from New York and they had James Galway on. And they were playing all Mozart.
And they went backstage with Hugh Downs, who should never interview anybody. But they were sitting there and here sits Jerry Schwartz, you know, really fine conductor, great trumpet player, and here's James Galway.
And what's the first words out of Hugh Downs' mouth? Don't you get nervous out there? To James Galway. And it's funny because Galway's a pretty funny guy. Anyway, the guy looks up and goes, no, I'm just here to communicate.
And Jerry Schwartz comes in and he goes, well, you know, he says, it's so nice that we've done this. I've performed this with him before and it's so nice now to finally have some new accents, some new slurs.
We had fun with just two measures in rehearsal. It was fun, you know. And I'm sitting there getting closer to the TV, you know. And then the next words out of Hugh Downs is, so why did you guys wear that suit? That's interesting.
I'm like, oh no. Is Terminator on or something, you know. But it was just a horrible interview. But it was so neat to see these two gentlemen not talking about nerds, but talking about two measures of an accent or a slur.
It was neat. It was exciting. That's what it's about, to get this neat involvement.
So you're up here and you're picking this recital. And you don't want the recital from hell. You want the recital that you're going to feel good with.
So it's within your physical capabilities. If the highest note you can hit on the best day of your life is a high E, you probably shouldn't program a telemon. You can share it.
OK? So things like that. Now, the order of literature and how you go about doing that. OK, what I did last night was I said to myself, what do I want to play? I started making these decisions back in March and April.
And I said, OK, I really want to play the R2. I really love that piece and I want to play that piece. OK, and I'm going to play that on a B flat trumpet.
All right. I really want to play Legend. I really want that. And by the way, Mr. Inesco's birthdate was not... well, the birthdate's right. That was the dates of PDQ Bach, right? Peter Shickley, 1881 to 1780.
1955 should have been the second date, by the way. Whoa! All right. So I said to myself, I want to play Legend. And I said to myself, where do I want to play that? Do I want to play that for the Arturian or do I want to do it after the Arturian?
Do I want to play it on B flat or do I want to play it on C? I said, I want to play that on a C, which is right before. And also, I'm going to put it kind of up here somewhere.
OK, so those are the two pieces back in March and April. I've really decided that's what I want to do. When you put together a recital, pick out one or two pieces that you really want to do, that you feel really strong about. I want to do this.
Sit down with your teacher, if you're in college, and say, I really want to do the Arturian. And agree that you can play it. And OK, so you program that. And you have these two things now in my recital.
Then I said to myself, well, I don't want to go straight from Legend to Arturian. That's a little bit heavy. I want to put something in between. So I thought another C trumpet piece would be kind of neat. So I thought, OK, let's do that boatswim.
That's nice and light. And that was my rest piece. It takes no chops to do that. You just have to play it. So that was my rest piece. And you can program pieces like that into a recital, where you can rest while you play, physically and mentally.
OK, so that was kind of my little out piece. And there's lots of pieces like that you can do. You can do something like Animal Ditties, Tony Plo. That's kind of a fun piece. It kind of breaks up the thing, that type of thing. Something light and airy.
Or you can do something where you're not the featured person. For example, one of my students at Cal State Fullerton did Prayer of St. Gregory. Beautiful piece. We've got a string orchestra. We played it. It was a great piece.
So for the trumpet, it's challenging musically, but physically it's not very challenging. So it's nice to have one of these. So then I said, OK, I want to do something on my E flat trumpet.
I've got Haydn, Hummel, Neruda. A couple years ago I did a boat to a saxophone piece, put it on my E flat. So I thought, OK, I'll do Neruda.
That's a good hunk of a show right there. But I want to do something on piccolo. Now here's where not shooting off your foot in front of a lot of people comes in. I want to do something on pick. Well, I've already pretty well decided this. I didn't want to do Telemann.
I didn't want to do something that was just going to absolutely, kind of if you will, munch up my chops up here. So I picked a Torelli piece. OK? Two Rs for one Neruda. Torelli.
And the nice thing about most of the Torelli concertos is they're fairly limited range. You're not going to have to go up to those high E's. All right? And I played that on the pick.
Then I wanted to end this time with kind of a fun piece. And I knew I'd probably be a little bit tired by the end of this. OK? So, and I always loved the Grand Russian, so I did the lead.
And that's how I thought this through to put that recital together. I started with this, and I started with this. And I went from there and put together the recital.
That's how I decided the literature, and that's how I decided the order. And you can do that. I don't care if you're putting together a recital at junior high, high school, college, your community church, whatever.
And all of you should do this. OK? I still think the most pressure I ever felt performing was my dad would come up after dinner, sit down on my bed with a cup of coffee and go, play. You know?
And he was a great supporter. If I played half as good as he always said I did, you know, it'd be incredible. My dad was a great supporter. Bought me all kinds of solos. All the Harry James solos. Everything.
It was great. All the Clark solos. It was fun. Just had a ball with those things. So that was always kind of fun. But play at your church. And if you're scared, right, scared about playing, church or community clubs are marvelous places to play.
They're just happy to have you there. Check the piano first. Half step down, OK? But just playing at church for free. I always had to deal with my church when I was a kid. I'll play for free. Easter and Christmas I'd like a little bit of money.
But I used to love doing that. And they love it. And what a safe place to play. They're going to love you no matter what you do.
There's a marvelous story in How I Became a Coronetist by Herbert L. Clark about him playing in front of the church, playing through the church chorale four times and how he felt the fourth time through. It's a great story.
And playing for community clubs. Play for the Elks Club. Play for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Play for these people. Get used to standing in front of the people. And what will happen is the knees will stop shaking after a few times and you'll start feeling good about what you're doing.
And all of a sudden a neat thing will start happening. You'll be involved in your music. OK? You'll be involved in your music. So do that. Perform every chance you get.
One of my students at Cal State this year. Marvellous young lady. She came to school. Pretty average trumpet player. She had never played with piano in her entire school life. Ever. Never played in junior high with piano. Never played in high school with piano.
Spring semester came. She had to play one of our afternoon recitals with piano. I went to her rehearsals with her. Got her through them. Explained to her that piano players are there to follow you. And whatever temple they go, it's OK. You come to the temple. You want to go.
It's better to be apart. She finally got the hang of that. We got to the afternoon recital. She was outside just like this. We went in. It was just the trumpet players. All of her friends sitting there. And she played. It was wonderful.
And she came out and she went, oh my god. And I said, now, what was the lesson you learned? She says, when I'm a teacher, my band's going to play recitals. We're going to do a spring chamber music concert. I will never let a kid graduate from my high school band that doesn't play a solo piano at least once.
She said, great. It was a great year. See you next semester. But there was a chance for her to play in a pretty safe spot. She was not being graded. She was playing in front of all her buddies. They had to get up next and play anyway.
So that type of thing. Get out and perform solos. How to practice for these things. A lot of times what happens is you get ready to do your recital and that's all you practice. All of a sudden, everything else stops and you play through the hiding 10 times a day. All of a sudden, you play this song 10 times a day.
So how do you go about practicing for a recital? You make it part of your daily routine. I'm going to give you an idea of what I do and you can experiment with this and make it apply to you.
My trumpet is on my chops every day before 7.30. Period. And my morning routine is my Claude Gordon routine. I do my Clark. I do my St. Jacob's. I do my irons. I do my daily routines. I do my systematic approach. All of that type of material I do in the morning.
That's my physical time of the day. I wake up, it's a neighborhood. They put up with me. So that's when I do that. Then what I do in the afternoon, I block off about an hour and a half of time at school and that's my time to be in my office undisturbed and I practice my literature.
And one thing I've discovered is after you've done a lot of literature, you really need to do a lot of flexibility. So one of the things that I personally do after I've worked on that recital is I'll play irons or Smith or Charles Cullen.
Because what happens in recital chops, you kind of get limited here. All of a sudden you start feeling stiff. If you've ever worked hard on literature, you know what I'm saying? All of a sudden you feel like you're getting just kind of muscle bound. You break up the flexibility at the end of all of that.
As soon as you're done working on that recital stuff, pour the coals to flexibility. You'll feel a lot better.
One thing I don't believe in, and maybe you've been told this, if you have to play your recital once, play it twice a day.
Now you stop and think about that for a second. That sounds real logical, doesn't it? Boy, if I know I can play this twice, playing it tonight once is going to be a piece of cake. Don't do that. Here's why.
And I used to do this and finally I stopped doing it. The first time through the recital, what are you thinking about? Save it so when you play it the second time that day, you'll feel better.
And then what happens the second time through, you're tired, right? So now you feel terrible. You get all these negative thoughts about the recital.
Here's what I did every day. After that 7.30 warm up, going through all that routine, I'd go and teach my classes, teach my students.
Then I'd come back and I'd warm up again a little bit, play a cork first study, that type of thing, play some pedals.
Then I would play through the concert, working on specific problems, working on the endurance of playing the show.
Then at the end of that, I would get out Sigmund Herring, 40 etudes. And I would go as far as I could.
I got to the point where I'd get almost out to number 20 and 21 in the Herring. Just play through the first one, turn it, play, play, turn, play, play. Just keep going.
And all of a sudden, you go, and here's the psychology of it, you go, I can write a whole recital in half that book.
All right. Okay? But you see you don't care how you feel in that Herring book. It's kind of an attitude.
And you're building up these chops because it's all middle range. You get these big long muscles happening.
When I finally start to feel really tired, I'd do this. Or if I was getting bored of it, I'd get my Charlier book out or something like that.
Okay? That's how I went about building up mental and physical endurance to play that concert.
Okay? Any questions? Comments?
All right. How to practice? We just covered part A, pitched instruments.
Okay? One of the things I do at this camp each year is I try to play all the different pitched instruments, the piccolo, the E flat and all that.
So how do you get a handle on this thing? Okay? Clark Technical Studies. The first four studies are wonderful.
And what you do is just mix and match. Pick up your B flat trumpet one day, play through the first study of Clark on your B flat.
Then just almost randomly reach over and pick up another pitched instrument and play the second study.
And then pick up another pitched instrument and play the third study. Pick up another pitched instrument and play the fourth study.
And each day just do that. So every time you play the first study, play the second study.
Pick up another pitched instrument and play the fourth study. And each day just do that.
So every day you're playing something technical on the instrument. And don't do the same one every day.
Mix them up. Mix the horns up. You can really get familiar with everything.
That's a little simple little trick that I use. It seems to keep them all in order.
So as you're getting closer to recital, you're really hitting all those horns every day. All right?
Somebody asked me, I think it was today, why do you have all those horns?
And I said, well, you know, it's because you're getting closer to recital.
Somebody asked me, I think it was today, why do you have all those horns?
My wife asked me that same question regularly. Why?
Let's look at this recital again.
The real reason, myself, that I like to use different pitched horns is to get different sounds.
Simple as that. It doesn't make life any easier. If you can't play it on your B-flat physically, you're not going to play it on the piccolo.
I had a bandit call me up one time, Dave, what kind of a piccolo should I get for my trumpet players?
I go, why? He says, well, so we can play an octave higher.
Uh-oh. So it's like, it doesn't help you play an octave higher.
So like Mr. Torelli.
Doesn't quite sound the same on a B-flat horn.
So you use the pick to get that nice little light sound.
It gives you that nice little light quality that you want to have.
Gives you a little more pop, a little more sense to play lyrically up there.
Let's go right down the horn.
It gives you a chance to play that nice little light quality.
Same on the E-flat. You're halfway home to a piccolo.
So the reason you do pitched horns is to simply give you a different sound.
And that's how we put this together and cover the literature.
And that's how we play it.
And that's how we put this together and cover the literature and that type of thing.
Any questions?
Comments?
Okay. Yo.
I use the same mouthpiece.
And you can go into that and it's like, there's all kinds of different theories on it.
Last time I used the same mouthpiece all the way through the show.
Just kept switching them.
We can go into dangerous ground, but it's like, we can go into dangerous ground.
We can go into dangerous ground, but it's like, we can go into dangerous ground.
We can go into dangerous ground, but it's like, you know, it's like,
there are times when I go on piccolo, if I'm playing something very high,
if I'm doing like a Brandenburg or a Telemont or something like that,
it gets up into that tessitura, B minor mass, where I want to lighten it up even more.
So I will go a little bit different.
But it seems like on piccolo, everybody has their own solution.
One of my students who's just an incredible piccolo trumpet player,
she just tosses her one and a half C in there and she just keeps on playing.
I mean, she just sounds, I mean, unbelievably wonderful.
Just incredible.
I know guys who go down to the seven Es, all kinds of combinations,
but for myself, the way I play, I basically, I kind of like the mouthpiece I'm using.
I just kind of leave it in there.
Okay?
Bruce.
What about brass quintets?
Did you comment just in general on how to approach it, music, records, techniques, whatever?
Well, brass quintets are a ball, for one thing.
I mean, you know, chamber music, the smaller the group, the more fun.
You know, last night was not a solo recital, that was a duet recital.
Okay?
Patty and I spent a lot of time putting that together
and a lot of discussions about how to do things.
We spent a lot of time talking about how to phrase things and what we're going to do.
And rehearsals are more fun than recitals.
Man, I'll tell you, I'm glad you brought that up.
If all you're living for is that show, you're going to hate the show.
If you look at a performance as a culmination of something, it's wrong.
It's like this, a little wave and you keep on going.
Patty and I had some rehearsals that were just marvelous.
We got done and went, yeah!
It was just she and I there in the church playing.
We went, oh, that was neat.
I went, yeah, thanks, that was great.
And I felt good about it.
Nobody else heard it, just she and I.
The smaller the group, I think the better the music.
And trumpet quintets or quartets or brass quintets, quartets or duets are neat.
Yeah, they're fantastic.
Everybody should try to get a brass quintet going at your school.
Everybody, they're fun.
Robert King has a catalog here of the roof for quintet music.
It's incredible.
So yeah, get that going.
Yeah, I think some of the best times of my life, I used to do a San Diego brass quintet.
We used to do young audience concerts, like four concerts a week for young audiences.
It was just great.
We had a huge library.
We just switched concert order all the time.
It was a ball.
So quintets are fun.
Duets, everybody should play duets with friends.
Any other questions or comments?
Yes?
Oh, no, you can go.
You can go every which way but loose.
I mean, Canadian brass quintet, the whole gamut.
There's all kinds of new things.
From Little Brown Jug to Gabrieli.
You can do anything you want.
Oh yeah, it's fun.
Get the Robert King catalog.
It's neat.
And for you guys on the West Coast, by the way, who are tired of mailing your money back there
and having them come back and say you owe three cents,
there's a marvelous place in Oregon called Portland Music
that basically, sorry Bruce,
that basically has the entire Robert King and LaDuke catalog in stock.
The phone number is 800, it's a free call,
452-1133.
And a trumpet player owns it.
And for you band directors and orchestra directors and choral people,
they carry everything.
What's the name?
Portland Music.
And I've gotten things out of them I thought you could never find.
Two years ago I did Animal Ditties Part Two.
Nobody had that.
I even called Tony Ploga.
Tony, you got it?
No, even I can't find it.
He says, I got the manuscripts, I can't send them.
I said, I called Portland Music and this nice little old man gets on the phone.
Hi, this is Dave Evans from L.A.
Oh, hi Dave.
I said, I'm trying to find Animal Ditties Part Two.
And he goes, back in a minute.
I have three sets.
I said, good, send me all of them.
So it's just like they've got an incredible library up there.
Just neat.
So that's a real good source of music.
And what's neat is they'll send you the bill with the music.
You haven't got to send them the money first.
Very trusting people.
Trust me, send them the check and don't make it bounce or you're in trouble.
But they're really good.
They have everything in stock.
It's an incredible place.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Same type of thing.
But I think their library is even bigger than Byron Hoyt's.
I mean, it's amazing.
Yeah.
It's a huge warehouse.
Yes?
Portland.
As in Portland, Oregon.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay, sure.
800-452-1133.
If you were trying to set up for the rest of your set, what solo level players would you need to have to be able to start and have fun?
Guys that...
Guys that play like you.
There's nothing more frustrating than to have a real big gamut drive the group.
Any level.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you've got to be able to play a little bit, but there's real easy stuff out there.
There's things you can double instruments.
We have trombone, French horn, double.
If you have a prominent French horn, a prominent trombone.
Where the second trumpet part can be played.
And it's all kinds of combinations.
Okay?
So yeah, the quintet literature is just huge.
Okay?
Big mosquito.
Yeah, big mosquito.
All right, any other questions?
All right, thank you very much.
We have a recital.