Absence makes the mouthpiece grow fonder

Not awesome in one's throat.

I am nearing the end, I hope, of an unwanted extended vacation from my horn.  The day before Thanksgiving my tonsils decided to balloon to the size of very small balloons, and thus there was... silence.

No horn playing, no speaking even, unless you count self-pitying whimpers.  (Which I do.  Come on, I'm a single girl in NYC and my mom's 2000 miles away.  Someone's gotta feel sorry for me!)  I haven't touched my horn in TWELVE DAYS!!!  Which is the longest amount of time I've taken off since summer vacation in 8th grade when my horn was locked in the roof rack on a family road trip and beer exploded all over it.  Good times.
This time off has been an unfortunate necessity.  It's not even an issue of playing being painful or difficult, I simply cannot make sound on the horn.  The air leaks out my nose and unless I hire a designated nose-plugger for every time I play (that's a prime gig, right there) literally no sound happens.

So what have I been doing with my time on the injured reserves?  To be honest, trying to find people to cover all my gigs for me.  Being a sick freelancer sucks, especially when you're a perfectionist masochist like me and really really believe you can make it to that rehearsal even though you're pronouncing the word "sports" like "ssscchmorrps."  I've also been watching Planet Earth, cuz duh.  And traipsing to all the different ENTs in the city in search of better, stronger, faster antibiotics.  But really, what have I been doing?  Missing my horn.

Missing it in a way that feels very elementary school.  I just wanna take out my mouthpiece and play a few Lion King songs.  (Though that's pretty much all the time, let's be real.)  I open the case just to look at it.  Put it together, feel the weight balanced in my arms.  And yes, I plug my nose and try to play a few very mournful, elephantine notes just so my mouth remembers exactly where the mouthpiece belongs.

What better way to start a slow movement to a Mozart concerto?

I haven't felt this way about my horn in a long time.  It often feels like a burden in its dirty baby-coffin case, bumping into people on the subways.  It often feels like a chore to press metal into my mouth for hours every day when I just did it hours the day before.  And sometimes my lips feel like disembodied fleshy money-making machines which I wish made just a little more money.
But right at this moment, as I'm staring at the lonely case tucked away in the corner of my room, the horn just feels like an old friend that I've known since I was 8 years old.  And I miss that old friend quite poignantly, and am very much looking forward to our joyous reunion....tomorrow? Lips crossed!

Fall Makeover

If heaven exists, it will smell like freshly sharpened pencils.

As the summer draws to a close and I start back at my job tomorrow, I've been feeling that wonderfully invigorating autumnal reflection time coming in.  The Jews have it right, this really should be when the New Year begins.  Everything feels in balance at this time of year, climatically speaking, and it's all I can do to resist getting a dog to accompany my evening walks.
Since I no longer get to experience the singular joy and renewal that is school supply shopping, I have to get my kicks some other way these days.  And so I've decided I'm sorely in need of a practice makeover.

My practice has gotten saggy and tragically un-hip.  My weak areas have gotten weaker, my strong areas are kind of the same, and my recently purchased iPhone (hellloo 2006) has been making far too many cameos in my practice sessions.  Basically, I've been coasting for a while now on doing the exact same thing, not really investigating the outcomes.  So...(sing it Diana) I'm coming out, I'm coming, I'm coming out....

 ...with a new warm up.

I've been doing virtually the same warm up for about 5 years now.  Errry day, my little squiggly arpeggios that were called the "Laura mating call" back in college.  Errry day, my same scale patterns, trill exercises, as fast as possible single tonguing things.  Shockingly, this became OMG mindless like 3 years ago, but more importantly, I've created this psychological need to have the 25 minute warm up time or else I'M SCREWED.  Not actually, of course, but in my mind, I have to warm up before everything I do.
But let's be real.  I ain't got that much time nowadays.  And I don't have the same kind of chops I did when I was in undergrad.  Overall, my chops are better, more efficient, but I also can't afford to be nearly as inconsistent as I was in school.
In school, you're allowed to absolutely destroy your face in brass quintet, horn choir, lessons, and marathon practice sessions....then take the next 2 days off to eat nothing but popsicles.  But when you're freelancing, you have to sound fresh, sound like yourself, day in and day out.
So I'm taking a gamble that by constantly switching up my warm up I will actually gain more consistency in my overall playing.  (OK, that's not really a gamble, pretty much every one of my teachers has recommended this.  But sometimes following instructions is annoyingly slippery to actually do.)

(Not actually Mozart's journal)

I've also started keeping a practice journal.  No, seriously.  And it is helpful in keeping my head on straight.  Not to mention it's a goldmine if and when I ever have a studio full of little horn minions' minds to meld.  Mwahaha.

Mostly it feels good to just make a change, and feel the wonder that is sucking at something new.
So happy end of summer! May everyone find new things to suck at.

Guru on the Mountainside

This week I had the much-needed chance to pick the brain of a horn player with whom I used to study.  I actually only took like three lessons with this guy, but his playing was enchantingly beautiful and he helped me stop totally sucking at "Till Eulenspiegel" so I'll call him a former teacher.  This is actually the first chance that I've gotten to interact with a former teacher since crossing the threshold of "professional", and it's interesting how things change now that I'm not in school anymore.  First of all, I get to drink beers with teachers now.  Bonus.  And talk about the future of the classical music world with some semblance of first-hand knowledge, instead of wild surmising about what one's future career path holds.  (Not that the wild surmising isn't still happening.  I just have other topics to pull out of my back pocket in the meantime).
Most importantly, even in just the 12 months that I've been gigging and doing my thang in the city, my perspective on horn-playing has changed.  Not in a technical sense, just in how I view the role of the horn in my life nowadays.  And in fact in a technical sense, I discovered that I've wandered a bit astray since leaving the friendly confines of school.
The horn is a difficult, completely unintuitive instrument.  There aren't many intuitive instruments out there (God bless the ukulele!), but brass instruments can be especially tricky because diagnosing problems involves X-ray vision and not a little psychotherapy. 

And French horn embouchures!

I haven't been experiencing big problems in my playing lately, but I also haven't had too many Eureka moments in the last year.  Thus, seeing this awesome horn teacher has made me nostalgic for the earnestly curious and optimistic horn player I was in my undergrad.
Wonderful playing on any brass instrument involves pretty much just three things: a solidly functioning embouchure, an efficient way to get air into your instrument, and a whole bag of mental tricks to keep yourself calm.  That is the path to the mountaintop.  Or rather, that is the mountaintop and the path is whatever the hell it takes to do those three things day in, day out.  I had this modeled for me every single day of my college life with my amazing teacher and nearly-as-amazing studiomates.  But back then, the motivation for good horn playing was to beat out my friends in seating auditions.  (Which I rarely did, for the record). Nowadays, though, horn playing is a means to communicate profound emotions to people who may not be accustomed to appreciating them, to share all of the experiences for which I'm grateful.

Perhaps it's this way.

So now it's even more important that I practice with the true intention of becoming a great brass player.  Not a passably-professional player in New York, but an artist of the French horn.  I've definitely made headway up the mountain in my young life, but I've also spent some time lately doing cartwheels off the side of the path. Cartwheels are fun and impressive in their own way, but I need to keep treading that often unexciting path to mastery.  Planting my flag atop French Horn Mountain is not the world's noblest summit, but it's the mountain I have chosen to climb.  And I'm really glad I had this past week to re-connect with someone far more musically advanced than I who was willing to climb down a few thousand feet... to remind me which direction is up.

Artist Dates

I read once in a moderately famous-for-musicians book that it's really important for anyone embarking on a freelance career (which I guess is me, though "stumble" rather than "embark" is more apt) should make artist dates for themselves.  An artist date is an hour or two once a month
where you meet up with someone who inspires you, who gets you feeling jazzed about various projects, or who doesn't care about your projects at all and just wants to listen to Schubert.  And it's important to actually schedule these rather than just expecting or hoping that they'll happen because sometimes the inspiring people are also the busy people.

Dream bus! Note the flames. And the lizard.

Well, I had a lovely artist date tonight with an old friend with whom I used to team up and fight crime.  It was great not only to catch up about what's been new and exciting but to actually have a sounding board for future plans and dreams.  In business talk, by which I mean an article that was photocopied for me once, organizations discuss getting "the right people on the bus".  This friend is most certainly the right people (hell she's usually driving the bus) but she also understands the kind of buses I like to build.  Or order?  Or ride?  I'm losing this metaphor a bit.  Whatever, she just gets what I'm trying to do in the world.

In my job and in my head, I often feel a dichotomy between the Big Plans I make for my future career and my artistic mission and the Really Little progress that gets done when I'm slogging through the daily stuff.  Whether that be practicing my horn just for the sake of practicing (hello audition-less horizon...) or composing a thoughtful email when all I want to do is watch Netflix, it's just hard to fit it all together.  I think musicians are lucky to have a daily job that culminates so beautifully in a meaningful product (e.g. a concert), but there are parts of my life that never seem to culminate.  And maybe they never will culminate. 

But somehow just having to articulate those artistically unfulfilled areas to a friend feels like a small accomplishment, a la "The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one."  And having thought-provoking questions thrown back at you is another small accomplishment, which in fact cancels out the earlier accomplishment.  I guess what I'm saying is, on the slippery sand dune that is PROGRESS (however one defines it), it's reassuring to discover someone else's shoes are filled with sand.  And maybe you're even climbing the same dune?  And you can roll down it together some day, which believe it or not actually makes the sand dune start to hum.  True story.

Been there, sort-of hiked that.

Mozart to the rescue

A few days back my psyche decided I'd had just too many chipper days in a row.  I'm currently living and working on a beautifully remote island surrounded by baby fawns, fragrant forests, and world-class string quartets, and it'd just been too long since I'd whined about how difficult my life is. 

I get to see this most every evening.  Right???

So, of course, while pretending to connect to the outside world via Facebook I decided to get depressed and jealous of two acquaintances of mine who just won major orchestral jobs.  Full disclosure: These were French horn playing acquaintances.  Fuller disclosure: These were jobs that I had unsuccessfully auditioned for.  So the resentment wrapped in utter admiration wasn't totally out of line.  But in any case, I spent the entire afternoon moping about how I'm never going to be permanently employed as a horn player, the classical music world is so tough and competitive, orchestras are such bullies for brutally cutting people during auditions, why oh why did I never pursue that second degree in math, etc.  I also felt, despite the fact that 97% of my friends are classical musicians, that no one would understand my petty malaise on this certain afternoon. (I am in fact incredibly happy for these friends of mine, by the way; they both work super hard and are ridiculously talented and deserving of their success.  Just for the cyber-karma points...)

That evening I had to/got to attend a string quartet concert at a very small church.  This group is quite famous and quite awesome, on top of being just nice, friendly people.  They had this great program of Mozart, Dvorak, and Britten but to be honest, I really wasn't looking forward to going.  I just wanted a break from 24/7 music that goes along with the "working at a music camp" job description. 

However, from the beginning of the concert, I was instantly cheered up.  And by instantly, I do mean from the very first notes of the first piece.  After all, how can you really feel overlooked and jealous when late Mozart is being played for you 10 feet away with energy, conviction, and spot-on intonation?  And how can you really feel like no one understands you when you hear 250 years of music history spanning countries, styles, and personal circumstances, all of which is moving and profound and just so fun?

I have been told after concerts I've performed in that it was "the highlight of so-and-so's" day.  I usually thank the person politely as that sounds like a reception room platitude, but just a few days back, I experienced that kind of highlighting in a way I hadn't before.  I'm almost never "not in the mood" to hear a live performance.  It's part of my job, it's part of my life, and it generally takes almost no provocation for me to be an enthusiastic audience member.  So when I felt that reluctance or hesitation, maybe I was feeling what a lot of non-musicians feel when going to a live classical music performance- worry that they're not going to be "into it", that they're going to have to fake appreciation, that the music won't mean anything to them and they'll feel empty and uneducated.

But I simply couldn't help but be swept up.  And I can say with assuredness that almost everyone in that tiny little church felt the same overwhelming energy.  It was just a fantastic concert, and we all felt grateful to have been there on that cold rainy evening.  (I felt extra grateful cuz I didn't even have to shell out $15.)


So there you go.  Why get depressed about the music "scene" when what I have the privilege to do is so universal and so transcendent?  And by transcendent, I guess I mean distracting.  Live performance distracts us from the annoying pettiness that envelops our daily lives and, in the case of Britten, gives us little bonus tinglies when we listen.  Also, I saw a baby fox on the way home.  So we'll call it even, Friday.

"Yes! And..."

In my current pretty-awesome job, I not only throw down chamber-style with some really nice friends, but I work in a New York City public school classroom on a weekly basis. Now this is gonna sound like some Pollyana-BS, but working with students at my high school has been a joyful privilege and life-affirming gift. (No, seriously). Of course there are ups and downs in any school setting, but the students at my school are so full of personality, energy, and earnestness that I end each teaching day with face muscles sore from smiling. This can sometimes cause problems given I use those same muscles to play my horn, but it seems it just can't be helped.

Anyway, I'd like to share a particularly fun activity from a few weeks ago that reminded me of the power of collective energy. This semester, I've been focusing on improvisation in most of my lessons. Because many of my ninth-grade students are beginners on their instruments, I often use improv games or exercises that use just the voice or body percussion. On this day, I asked the students to think about how they can create a musical pattern using only the sound of their name. I started off by saying my name (“Ms. Weiner!”) in as many different ways as I could think of: quick and whispered, loud and yodel-like, very percussive, really slow, etc. Then each student had to share his or her musical name with the class. As in any class of diverse personalities, some students stood up and belted out their name, others looked at the floor and said it as quietly as they could, and some were in between. I then put the students into groups of 4-5 to create a musical composition using the names of everyone in their group. The only restriction was they could use no other words but their names, but anything else was fair game. 

After about five minutes of chaotic brainstorming and quite a lot of giggling, I asked each group to share their piece with the class. I was crossing my fingers, as I'm learning teachers often do, that the students would create something complex enough to spark a discussion about music composition, like how different tempos and pitches can be layered. However, I was blown away by the improvised creativity of these name compositions. One group started out by passing a single name around the group until it reached its loudest volume- then they started saying it backwards. Another group created an ostinato (vocabulary word!) using just a pair of names as a foundation with the other three “soloing” on top of that. And finally, one group actually created a narrative, with the inflection of each person's name depicting a different emotion and interacting with each other just as they would as people. Even the more introverted students were able to contribute to the final product since background voices are just as vital as soloists in music. And the extroverted, shout-to-the-rooftop students, of which there were quite a number in this class, had a field day with this.

"Oh, I'm sorry Ms. Weiner, were you standing at the front of the classroom cuz you wanted to say something?"

 It got me thinking about an improvisation workshop that I did in December with SNL's Rachel Dratch. She emphasized through a whole series of silly, hilarious games that the fundamental rule of improv is to say, “Yes! And...” This means you always accept your teammate's idea and build upon it to create a scene, and is surprisingly difficult when you're actually performing in front of people. Of course the students in my class were saying “Yes! And...” to each other within their groups while they were coming up with their name compositions. But they were also saying “Yes! And...” to me as a teacher. I was just hoping they wouldn't be too embarrassed to say their name in a funny way in front of their peers, but they accepted my premise and ran with it in an inspiring, dare I say moving, way. And that made me feel pretty gosh-darn special and creative too!

Now if I could only get the trombone players to stop throwing their mouthpieces.

Since then, I've used the sounds of their names to teach syncopated rhythms, to introduce the idea of counterpoint, and even to help the clarinet players articulate better. Not only does this make them feel like they are the stars of the lesson, but it reminds me how astoundingly creative they are as individuals and as a class.  Gold star for me and for them!

Poetry Reading

This month I've been trying to get back in touch with my creative side, with, shall we say, mixed results.  I've been writing some poetry, and this one was inspired by the Brahms G Major string quintet, one of his last compositions and one of the most uplifting chamber works in the repertoire.  Give it a listen if you're unfamiliar.  And try not to judge too harshly, blowing air through a metal tube is my main gig...

After all, for Brahms it was enough.

G Major was the lifespan, the cell, the nebula

Of love and warmth and dignity

And it was enough.

All the dissolved self, the needless chatter, the daily life that requires

Swallowing the chalky bland wafer of fear

And speaking the words eroding your throat 

as you suck on the marbles of another human’s irises, 

as you straighten that extra bend in the river of your spine,

as you gather your internal organs to that underground spring of

no longer caring.

-All that is refreshed by G Major.

Refreshed by the very idea of Johannes Brahms

so depressed he can’t get out of bed, but so in love

with the blades of grass

that he dips his pen one more time into the well of G Major,

and sighs deeply.

Not refreshed like your internet browser, the same pixels

Loaded again and again into a cyber-cannon of loneliness.

(I don’t know hell, but I know Facebook on a Friday night.)

Refreshed like racing your dog across a field that still smells like rain,

Head down, feet disappearing as soon as they appear.

Losing the race, to be sure, but also losing

the unwaxed dental floss that constrains our limbs

And keeps our tongues from flapping in the wind.

Refreshed like loss.

Like losing that thing, that everything, that precious thing,

That thing that symbolized your human thing among all other human things.

But then you forget that thing.

Your mind pinches its pie crust of memory over that thing.

And when you hear G Major, you hear that thing

But you also hear the lightness and simplicity

of non-thing, of nothing.

G Major refreshes

Overthrows

Like a coup d’etat in the kingdom of your skull

Where the tyrannical consciousness-

who in all fairness pulled herself up by her cerebral bootstraps from the humblest roots,

the very stem of the brain

-reigns no longer.

G Major kicks over her throne, knocks over the palace walls of understanding

For just one moment.

Or three.

Or forty-seven continuous moments of realization

That the geographic center of the kingdom isn’t your gilded palace

But a split tree trunk on the horizon.

No, past the elegant horizon

to the jagged, unfinished horizon.

That’s where G Major lives.

And if you’re refreshed enough to bushwhack into that terrain,

leave the self behind it’s too heavy to carry all that way,

You will find the infinite pool of G Major.

And Tolstoy

And Einstein’s notebooks

And true listening.

And if you can pay the exorbitant price of your attention,

you will find the source of imagination,

cold and clear.

Don’t try to pilfer it, slinking back to your frontal lobe fortress.

It will slide through your fingers and harden like wet cornstarch.

But you may return to this pool, to this refreshment, if you wish.

Hell, take surly taciturn Brahms as your guide.

Return.

Breathe deeply.

And pay up.

The Power of the Ahhhhhtz

"All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction."
 That's a good line, Jeremy Denk.  Wish I had written it.

Today I don't feel much like blogging about horn-related topics, mostly because I'm frustrated, near-disgusted, with the limitations of my instrument.  I've spent a leisurely Sunday morning listening to the Goldberg Variations, and without fail, that piece always sends me into a French horn funk.  How can I possibly confront the limitations of time, nature, and God with a one-toot-at-a-time metal tube pressed into my face?  But that's a topic for another day...

So today I want to discuss the warmer, fuzzier topic of falling in love.   More specifically, (stealing from Oprah here) my Aha! Moment with the arts, when I had a realization of what the arts can do for humanity and for me as a person.  While I'm absolutely sure I had a give-my-heart-to-music experience, or else why am I doing what I do, I can't actually conjure up that memory.  Nor for visual arts, dance, and theater, though I'm also sure I fell in love with those artistic disciplines when I was a kid.  But I can recall the exact moment I understood what good writing can do.  And it was in 6th grade silent reading class when I stumbled upon this poem by Langston Hughes, entitled "A Christian Country":

God slumbers in a back alley
With a gin bottle in His hand.
Come on, God, get up and fight
Like a man. 

Now, as has been mentioned in previous posts, I was a precocious kid and though I had no taste, loved anything serious and intellectual and "above my reading level."  But this poem just knocked my teeth out.  Given my socio-economic status and hometown, I'm absolutely sure I would not have actually known what gin was nor when and where Langston Hughes lived, nor would I have probably ever seen a back alley, let alone been in one.  But these four lines made me feel sad, scared, and confused all at the same time and called into question my weekly Sunday school relationship with God.  I couldn't stop re-reading them, I couldn't get them out of my head.  And now, so many years later, I still can't get them out of my head.

Up until that point, I had thought of literature as entertainment, a chance to try on someone else's life for a change.  But reading that poem, I began to think about the notion of a writer- some guy who sat down at a desk, looked out a window at an urban landscape, and chose those specific words to elicit that mixed-up, angsty emotion inside my upper-middle class elementary school classroom.  Wow.  It just changed everything for me.  I understood the immense power of the art of creative writing.  Sock you in the gut, Cassius Clay power, not to be taken lightly.  And not to be tortured in my English classes at school.  As a result of that moment (and the fact that my mom is a lit-hoarder and I grew up in libraries and book stores), I am a lifelong lover of words, poetry, literature, and books.

Ummmmmm dream home.

So now the question is, what particular set of circumstances allowed me to fall in love in that moment?  And more importantly for my work with under-privileged high school students, can I create similar conditions so they too can have an artistic Eureka experience?  Was it just sheer coincidence that my scrolling eyes chose that poem at that moment in my intellectual and emotional development to lead me into a literary life?  My gut tells me yes, it was just a random happy-accident, but the statistical demographic breakdown of artistic audiences tells me...no.  It is just a fact that children born to higher-income parents are more likely to enjoy classical music, art museums, ballet shows, poetry readings, etc.  I am grateful for that step up in life, but goddammit, I want every single one of my students to experience what I experienced in that Langston Hughes poem.  (And geez, the Harlem Renaissance might as well have been on Mars for me, so maybe it'd be even more potent for a 16-year-old kid in Harlem...)  And I want them to experience it in classical music even more.  But that memory of mine is so personal, so individual, I wonder how I'd even incorporate that into a classroom.  In fact, that's what makes that moment memorable, the fact that this poem was revealed to me alone, not to my classmates or my sisters or even my teacher.
But I do think there is a way to communicate love, to communicate the esoteric purity of a work of art using the tools of teaching. In the open-ness of my unadulterated nerding-out, maybe some kids will find a path into the complex labyrinth of the arts.  Or just ceaselessly mock me.

P.S. If you don't know, the title of this post comes from this Youtube gem.  Also the reason I want to yell "Guten taaaaaaag!" every time I step off a plane in Germany.

The Wheel of Chance

Dis my jam.

Book club time! Recently I read a book called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  Mostly, it was about the history of probability theory and how people really don't understand the concept of randomness.  So, mostly it was a nerdy math book for nerdy math dweebs like myself who think Pascal is the bee's knees. 
But the final chapter of the book ventured into unexpected territory about how society judges success based on performance.  The author discussed hedge fund managers, baseball players, and major CEOs who have either been lauded or damned for their "streakiness".  It turns out, though highly counter-intuitive, that generally people perform about the same year in, year our.  Statistical anomalies, such as a hot streak or a bunch of tanked failures, are rare but not that unlikely given everyone's average performance in a given field.

Of course, in my day job, there is no better probability calculation than professional auditions.  With the field narrowed down from 100 to 8 to 3 to 1 (or none, in most auditions these days....), you have some serious roulette wheel action happening.  And once you take more than about, say, three auditions you start to realize how fantastically idealistic the audition process is.  There is a huge component of randomness not only in how particular musicians perform but in how the committee listens and reacts to certain players.  That's not to say that you aren't in control of your own performance; there are a gajillion practice strategies, mental training activities, and weird food and drug recommendations that enable you to combat the grueling firing squad of an orchestral audition committee.  But I don't believe that as an auditioner you are in control of your own destiny; not even a little bit.
There are certain individuals, and I'm friends with a couple of them, who are amazingly consistent auditioners.  But even consistent auditioners lose about 90% of the auditions they take.  It's depressing from a statistical point of view, but the optimistic other side of the coin is losing an audition puts you in pretty good company.  And at this point, my field is starting to evolve to appreciate the fact that auditions are not the only indicator of artistic success.

Sometimes internet memes speak the truth.

So really, we're all in this cesspool of random dice tosses together.  And you just can never predict which statistical anomaly will be your statistical anomaly!  That may just lead to something awesome like, ya know, stable health insurance.

Feel the (moderate) burn!

While visiting a good friend of mine and fellow horn player last week, I was whining/fretting about the fact that, though nothing catastrophic has happened yet, I feel like my endurance is less than stellar lately.  For me to get through a demanding chamber music program, like I had to recently and have to again in the very near future, I have to be totally fresh, have barely played that day or even the day before ideally, and feel really warmed-up.  But in the big professional world of NYC, that's not an option with dress rehearsals and sound checks and gigs the morning of.  Girl's gotsta pay the bills. 
So my wise and cheerful friend who has extremely demanding chamber programs of his own, gave me his secret to endurance success: practice a lot.  Like, really a lot.  (For brass players).  Like 5 hours a day for the week or two leading up to the performance.  This really hit home for me.  I mean, I practice very consistently and a decent amount for someone who's no longer in school: usually 2-3 hours.  But 5?  That's a whole 'nother ball game.  A ball game of serious muscle. 
(Speaking of muscle, my friend even does straight-up face pilates, basically stretching and stasis exercises for the embouchure muscles.)

Though I missed the boat on the whole two weeks before the big show intensity cuz I was too busy eating ice cream for breakfast and having beer for lunch with afore-mentioned friend,

"Practicing's just a crutch for the talentless, right?"

I have been trying to pump it up this last week and a half.  And I gotta say, though it sucks cuz it hurts and cuz I sound OMG bad by hour three, it also feels good.
So much of my relationship with music has become intellectual in the last few years- mental practice, detailed analysis, trying to verbally explain something to a student.  It feels good to just think about MUSCLES.  I'm like an athlete in training!...for something extremely nerdy that very few people will watch. 

Though I have mixed feelings about the raw-egg smoothie before concerts.

The only downside is, for brass players in general and yours truly in particular, there is quite a small distance between feeling strong and powerful and ready to take on any long tone you throw at me, and feeling exhausted and weak and like I just want to soak my lips in a bathtub of hot chocolate.  But I'm headed for 30 hours of rehearsal of a not-easy piece in the next five days, so at this point, it's just a matter of trusting my muscles (and rocking out to "Eye of the Tiger" at every rehearsal break). 

Live, Breathe, and Die

February is my month o' rehearsals.  I think I only have four days this month without some kind of chamber or orchestral rehearsal.  Which is awesome because it means I'm working and seeing people and blowing air through my (freshly cleaned!) horn, but it can also mean Rehearsal Rut: feeling like you can't see the forest (the performance) for the trees (really detail-oriented rehearsals).  A couple days ago in a chamber rehearsal, one of my colleagues introduced us to this rehearsal technique called "Live, Breathe, and Die."  It's pretty simple; you play through a section of music with one person as the leader.  The other members have to live, breathe, and die for everything that person does, plays, even thinks.  Then you play through it again with someone else leading and see how things compare.  There's no discussion, no arguing, and everyone gets a turn to determine how the music goes.

And this, my friends, is one of the most profound musical ideas I have yet experienced.  It's so simple on paper, but actually giving all of your energy and artistry to another musician opens up a world of musical generosity.  Not to mention insight; how many things can we learn if we just stopped asking questions and instead listened for the answers?

Come on, who wouldn't want to emote for this face?

In orchestral settings with a really great conductor, this living, breathing, and dying can often happen for the maestro.  Having him or her shoot you a look or give you an encouraging gesture makes you want to play for them, and that's why orchestras don't always sound the same all the time, even the best ones.
But in chamber music, it can be more difficult to separate your performance from your self.  There are only a few of you onstage, you're wearing something other than all black (thank the Lord), and you've prepared the whole work using only your experience and perceptions.  I always find it difficult to really live in the moment in chamber music because the stakes are simply higher for my role.  Yet that's totally counter-intuitive.  Chamber music is the most loving kind of music-making there is, in a way.  You're up there with friends, making eye contact, giving your best performance so your friends can give theirs.  And living, breathing, and dying for another human being is kind of what it's all about right?

This drawing has always disturbed me.  Look at the veins!

I'm thinking about all of the possible implications for this philosophy.  Can you imagine working in a group where people took turns living, breathing, and dying for another's idea?  Can you imagine a teacher living, breathing, and dying for their students' opinions?  It's so beautiful, and it works!  It makes you hear differently and perceive time differently, and most importantly, it lets you forget about yourself for whole measures at a time!

Instead of the Transparent Eyeball, it allows you to become the Transparent Ear.  Which is actually a really gross image.  And only a moderately good name for a band.