So in case any of you on this blog are thus far unaware, I am a trumpet player. I started in 3rd grade, I remember the first beginner Walmart trumpet my parents got me, and taking lessons, and being a very poor player for a very long time. I think it is only through the instance of my parents that I stuck with it through elementary, middle school, and high school, and now I play for the marching band and Jazz ensemble at my college. I was recently having a conversation with my marching band director who is a very dear friend of mine, and he was berating the jazz band trumpet section for not performing musically. At first I was mystified as to the meaning of this criticism. Not that I’m not adept at handling criticism. Anyone who has ever learned music from a teacher knows that criticism is at least 90% of every rehearsal, and that’s how people get better- correcting and improving. But he went on to say that the music isn’t notes and rhythms. This statement is a little counterintuitive. If you pick up a sheet of music, what it contains is primarily notes and rhythms. When you’re learning music, what you sit down and focus on is learning the notes and rhythms. At least I do anyway. Instead, what he said that what makes music musical is details. I’m familiar with his teaching style, and I knew that by the term “details” he refers to thing such as the emphasis of certain notes and the deemphasis of others, the clean releases, the uniform attacks, and the nuances of balance and voicing. It seems to me that surely this is an instance of missing the forest for the trees. It’s all well and good if these are the things that experienced individuals and ensembles focus on because there is a tacit expectation that notes and rhythms are already prepared and mastered, but as we conversed, it became evident to me that to him, these things are of utmost importance. If you don’t play half the notes, so long as the notes that you play have the correct weight and emphasis in the lyricism of the material, then that is far better than playing every single note and rhythm correctly but flubbing the details. In fact, in our marching band, he encourages less experienced or competent players to do exactly that. Sousa’s marches are reduced to a series of downbeats. Slurs are supplemented for half the section because their legato tongue is too percussive. This is always something that I struggled to agree with, in my 3 years of playing with the ensemble. As a relatively experienced player, It seemed to me that what one ought to learn first would be notes and rhythms, and all that detail stuff is the makeup on the cake, the superstructure that elevates a solid performance to another level. To him, this is false. It is not only false, it is borderline blasphemy.
Whether or not this is true is not the subject of discussion here. I think that this too is a subject of contention and controversy and represents a bridge I’ll burn when I get to it. What really had me thinking is far more concrete than abstract, and far more selfish than grandiose. Because when I show up to rehearsal, I know that what I focus on is still very much notes and rhythms. When I take a rep, my first priority is “don’t flake up” (without the word “flake”). And it seems that on some level, my director is saying that that’s wrong. Obviously it’s important not to make mistakes, but it is not as important as making music musical. And what makes music musical is the minutia, the smallest sips of breath, the contrast between loud and not so loud, the fractions of seconds that space notes. So how are these two things balanced? Human capacity is boundless and incredible in many ways, but I feel like in a rehearsal situation, the number of things that I can focus on a reasonable juggle to effective execution is finite. Additionally, I don’t believe that what he’s suggesting is that one ought to under every circumstance attain mastery of material such that making rhythmic/pitch errors are unthinkable, and one only needs to focus on details, because he explicitly states that given a choice between complete rhythmic/pitch accuracy and appropriately executed detailistic choices, details are more important.
What I’m left to ponder is where is that threshold? What is the appropriate balance between attention to what is on the page and the details of the music? At what point does one decide to pivot from focusing on one to focusing on the other? Frankly, I don’t have an answer to this, but I think that it’s a massively important thing to understand. A similar approach to this concept would be to explore the question of which ensemble would you rather listen to? One that tends towards less precision is stylistic detail or one that tends towards more innaccurate pitches and rhythms? I think for me, the answer would have to be the latter. How I would listen to a band that makes some errors in pitches and rhythms is that these are distractions. They are inclusions or artifacts in a material of fine quality. However, how I would listen to an ensemble that has complete accuracy but no musicality in their details is that the fundamental substance of their performance is not so great as the other ensemble. I suppose that this perception isn’t too far off. How many beginner bands are there where they have complete accuracy in pitch and rhythm? . . . Okay probably not that many, but if they did, would that make them as good as the Chicago Symphony? My point is that what makes a beginner band a beginner band isn’t their accuracy to what is written, it is their understanding and execution of certain musical concepts. I think that what my director aims to teach is that these concepts are expressed through the details. I suppose similarly, what makes a player like Bud Herseth an extraordinary professional isn’t the fact that he allegedly never missed or even chipped a single note, but rather with the level of musicality to which he played.
I don’t know if this will or should in any way translate to my approach to music, because previous to this conversation, I already held both priorities in high regard, and I don’t think that this idea truly disparages the importance of either of them, but merely questions the ultimate importance of any of them.
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