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.