Description: Occasional thoughts about music, brass playing, the Bible, and theology.
A high school band director in my state reached out to me recently and asked if I would contribute to a project compiling advice from university faculty members on what prospective music majors on their instruments should know and be able to do before beginning their degree programs. I think he mainly wanted lists of skills and competencies that such students should have, and I have included those as an appendix to this article, but even more important than these lists are broader ways of thinking about mus
1. Your instrument is a musical instrument . Perhaps this is less of a problem for players of more traditionally melodic instruments, but I sometimes find that young low brass players do not think very musically at all about their playing. Such students approach playing from an entirely mechanical perspective, as if their instruments are simply noisemaking devices requiring neither artistry nor expression. Some students—amazingly, even some who are entirely capable of singing their parts (see below)—play wi
2. If you can sing it, you can play it. Playing a brass instrument is much more similar to singing than is playing any other family of instruments. Just like singers, brass players vibrate a part of the body in order to make music, and the pitch at which that vibration occurs is determined by the signal sent from the ear/brain to the embouchure. The vibration simply occurs in the lips instead of the vocal folds, and then is amplified and colored by the instrument. Because brass instruments can produce multi