Well, when she told me that she was contemplating graduating a year ahead of schedule except that she really wants to have a Senior year as a musician (band, contests, district and state bands), I knew I didn't need to worry, but also told her that as big as she is in the small pond, she doesn't need to hobble herself with a one-year disadvantage when she hits the ocean. She agrees.
She's working with them to see what minimal classload she can take her senior year to be considered a fulltime student so she can still get her honors (if they're still hers by then -- she's facing the same challenge at the same time as me in high school: excruciating boredom, but so far is dealing with it better than I did) but hopefully be able to increase her load of trumpet students (currently 4) so it can be a part-time job to include on her resume.
And after she gets past the contests this year, I'm going to be a bit more forceful about getting her to spend some time on piano. As with the trumpet, I'm good enough to be her teacher on piano for a few years. And enough to bring her up to the level required of all music majors.
For a brief time, she was considering not doing her solo this year, actually. She gets worked up and over-practices stuff. The psychology of musical excellence is rather tricky, and I, her trumpet teacher, and her band teacher have all been telling her that she needs to get herself a lot less personally involved in the technical aspects of her playing and think more of the musical aspects. Especially since there's little room for improvement on the technical aspects and 1% improvement now is orders of magnitude tougher to gain than it was 2 years ago. One of the things I've harped on is that I don't hear her playing anything but her solo or other technically-challenging material, and she needs to give herself a healthy dose of playing solely for the joy of playing. Playing because she wants to hear the music she's producing. To that end, we've started ordering the "Music minus one" type CD's with the Canadian Brass (the first trumpet is absent from the CD and you play that part yourself with the included sheet music).
None of us old people could convince her. Even though she readily cites me as her greatest musical influence, even ahead of professionals she admires (with the possible exception of Victor Wooten, who she practically worships along with Geddy Lee -- bass is her second instrument).
What it took was Ben (the aforementioned visiting college student) telling her "Those people who say they're practicing 6 hours per day are full of it." (note: the people who say this are usually in a lower chair in district bands while she's the perennial 1st chair and is moving up the ranks in State) He said that he practices maybe 90 minutes per day, in 30-minute sessions, and some days he doesn't feel like playing so will just do 10 minutes of long tones and put the horn in the case and out of his thoughts. I'd long been trying, to no avail, to tell her that if she doesn't *want* to play at any given time, playing is the worst thing she can do to herself as a musician.
He told her that the amount of time spent practicing is far less meaningful than the quality of the time spent practicing. I think the phrase he used was "practicing effectively". Not repeatedly going through the same material she can do flawlessly every time. Finding something new to work on in every session. Or polishing a few measures of her solo rather than running through the whole piece. And he also told her, like I've preached so frequently, that if you can't ever play just for the joy of playing and hearing the music you're playing, you're on the wrong career path.
He definitely got through to her. Some nights I'll barely hear her playing through her Yamaha silent-practice system (an amazing setup whereby she's barely audible to the outside world, but through her headphones, it's like she's using no mute at all) and many's the time I'll grab a bass with my silent practice system and we'll sit in her room until midnight or later (even on school nights) and just play for hours, each of us plugged in to each other's personal headphone amp.
So she's psyched again about her solo and doesn't even care (so she says) if she gets a 1 rating or not (though it's pretty well assured so long as she doesn't really butcher it since she'll get so many points for the piece's aggressiveness).
It's really fun the way we are about music at our house. I remember when we got the drum set, Mrs. Bob pretty quickly said "Ain't no way that thing's staying in the living room." but told me about a month ago that she's actually quite pleased that our living room contains not only a drum set, but about 20 other instruments spread around it (including the Yamaha electric piano I bought 2 weeks ago at her last trumpet lesson because I was so pleased with its quality). That the room is unapologetically a self-indulgent music room in addition to being where we watch TV.
And without fail, if I plug a guitar into an amp and start playing Beatles songs, or I sit down and just put down a beat at the drum set (we both became surprisingly adept at it pretty quickly), she'll hear me and show up and grab an instrument. The other night, for example, about an hour of her just improvising using blues scales and the few modal structures she's just starting to get comfy with, while I kept time for her on the drums.
We don't do as much of that right now as we usually do because the emphasis (for both of us -- the piano part is very difficult) is her solo. But after that's behind us, we'll go back to the usual of just jamming on whatever instruments we want for the joy of making music together.
When she graduates high school and goes off to college, I think I'll miss my jamming partner more than I'll miss my daughter and best friend.
I've got a great picture on my desk that my son took of us that though it was "posed", was a last-second pose we both just settled into that really conveys our relationship. The mutual adoration and respect that's so rare between parent and teenage child. I'll PM it to you sometime.
Oh, and I think I've mentioned before how entertaining our neighbors think we are. We often play outside together, usually both on trumpets and my nearest neighbor (1/4 mile away) told me that when he hears us warming up, he and his wife will usually sit in lawn chairs and just listen to us. And "the show" is usually over when we do the National Anthem, with her playing the lead, and me playing a variation of the tuba line.
Anyway, back to the piano. She mentioned to me that only 8% of people who audition for Julliard get accepted and I told her (while she was seriously considering not doing her solo this year) that if she does her solo and keeps doing more aggressive pieces throughout high school, she has just as slim a chance of acceptance as anyone else, because as rare as her "freak of nature" type is in the sticks, there are a LOT of them when you take the whole country and world into account, so she only has an 8% chance if she stays the course (she'll audition, though she has no plans of attending Julliard even if accepted -- a little too serious/stoic for her musically speaking), but that if she skips any year of soloing, her chances come down to less than 1%, and if she doesn't include a piano piece on her audition tape, it's unlikely any serious music school will accept her. Doesn't have to be great at it. Just needs to demonstrate that she's at least comfortable with the instrument upon which all western music is based.
And though she'd been basically kicking and screaming about taking up piano (though readily took up other brasses and sits in as the tuba player for the junior high band), she's finally starting to come around.
And not because I keep telling her that if you want an instrument you can play for the sheer joy of hearing yourself, piano can't be topped. No, that wasn't good enough. It was Ben's surprise at the fact that she can't play piano aside from a few currently popular songs she learned by ear.
And now that she's playing around with different modes, me showing her how much more sense they make when you look at them on a piano keyboard has helped.
What holds her back is that she's so accustomed to excelling at the instruments she does play (trumpet, bass, and tuba) that she has trouble with the humility of playing an instrument she's not currently good at. But she'll sit and listen to me play for hours because she really loves the sound of piano, especially since I'm playing every night now that we have an instrument with decent action and sound rather than the Samick acoustic piano I'd been using (or, more accurately, largely refusing to play because of its quality).
But anytime I play, she has to hear Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) and all 3 movements of it. She loves how lyrical/beautiful the first movement is, and is floored by what her old man's capable of making his fingers do in the 3rd movement. <g> Actually, the 3rd movement, like her trumpet solo, is something that's so technically challenging that once you know it, the worst thing you can do is THINK about what you're doing, because thought gets in the way.
She's promised me that once she's past the State competition on her solo, she'll start dedicating at least half an hour per day to the piano. Major sigh of relief on that one. I think it helps that she never hears me practicing scales or anything. I just *play*. And whatever I feel like hearing at the time. And since she's got more musical talent in her pinkie than I have in my whole body (and I'm not too shabby when it comes to music), I honestly think it'll be a matter of just a month before she has a small reportoire of songs she'll be able to play for the sheer joy of hearing them and knowing she's the one playing them. And she's certainly got the fingers for it. It took me years to strech my hands to be able to reach a 10th (which I can only do with my left hand), but she was able to hit it the first time she tried.
I just hope it doesn't replace her love of the trumpet because, speaking as an experienced musician (including professionally in my past), and not as a proud daddy, she's more amazing on trumpet than she realizes. The small-pond syndrome. She's so much better than her 2nd-chair trumpet player and anyone else in her section that even she knows there really isn't a comparison, and can't use them as an accurate measure of how good she is and gets few opportunities (district, conference, and state bands) to really find out how big an apple she is among other apples.
Helped immensely that she spent a week in band with a college trumpet major who she not only could relate to but who was a peer, albeit a bit better than her. But not so much better than her that she sees college trumpet-playing as anything even remotely daunting.
She's a really stubborn kid, though. She got it into her head that she should be able to do *everything* with one trumpet and one mouthpiece. She owns exactly 4 of them. 3 variations of the Bach 3C (one normal, one acrylic for cold weather outdoors (marching band), and one gold-plated because it looks so great on her silver horn for solos) and a Schilke 14A4A which she begrudgingly uses for jazz and pep bands only because her parts are so high, she doesn't wear out (get "shot" in the parlance) as quickly on the Schilke as the Bachs.
She's going to let me get her a 3C Bach Megatone though, after the solo's behind her and at least try it as her only mouthpiece for a week and see what she thinks. I've got about a dozen mouthpieces and my favorite one these days is a 1C Megatone. Huge rim (which darkens the tone as does her 3C -- main reason she uses it because her big-bore Stradivarius horn is a bit "bright", to be kind, "shrill", to be honest, but darkens nicely with a big mouthpiece) and a shallow cup which takes away darkness of tone but facilitates high playing, and a lot of extra mass to it to add some of the darkness the shallow cup takes away.
A Bach 1C is the biggest mouthpiece Bach makes, yet I've got fairly dark tone and most of my upper register on it. I can take that one pretty reliably up to the F (an octave above the top line staff F) and she tops out at the D on her 3C. I've also got a Bach 11EW (the "pea-shooter") that I can take up to an A and am very close to reaching the trumpet Holy Grail; the C an octave above the one 2 ledger lines above the staff, with it.
And it doesn't help that her band teacher is a tuba player, so doesn't fully appreciate what a difference a mouthpiece makes, and her trumpet teacher only uses a 3C, but his professional playing doesn't call for any upper-register work. It helped that Ben uses a 3C for most work, but uses a small Schilke for jazz, so now she's more open to trying other mouthpieces and we're even planning a motorcycle trip to a huge music store in Oregon this summer so she can try out different horns and buy one specifically for Jazz use.
She's been frustrated that her upper register isn't getting any higher very quickly, and though I show her that my upper limit is about the same on her horn with her mouthpiece, but a good 5th higher on my horn with a different mouthpiece, she's stubbornly insisted that anything she should be able to do trumpet-wise, she should be able to do on big equipment. Despite my telling her that just because I *can* type with one hand, there's no benefit to forcing myself to do so when I can double my speed by using both hands.
Wouldn't listen to 2 years of me trying to talk her into trying different equipment for different styles, but Ben shows up using a mouthpiece specifically designed for playing high, and now she's all interested in trying different equipment. <g>
So I'm hoping she'll fall in love with the Megatone (doesn't "slot" as well as her mouthpiece because of the shallow cup, but she's got great control, so should be an issue) and finally quit being frustrated that she can't play as high as she wants to because she insists on using the wrong mouthpiece for playing that high. Though she's quick to point out that there are professionals who play as high as I do using her mouthpiece, but isn't so sure they're not using horns better suited to the upper register.
I'm sure it also helps that I had her try my Megatone in her horn recently and she found her upper-end was the same despite it being a trombone mouthpiece compared to hers, so she (correctly) suspects that just popping a 3C Megatone into the horn will add at least a 3rd to her upper register while sacrificing very little in the low end.
So, get through this year's solo, the trio Ben, her, and I may end up playing at the Spring concert, and we'll get the 3C Megatone and get her seriously started on piano, and I think she'll be a more consistently happy musician.
She actually started playing trumpet in 6th grade but quickly dropped out of band because she was getting ridiculed by the upper chairs and especially since she was using my horn, which is a Yamaha professional model, and professional horns don't just sound better than student horns in the right hands, they're far more difficult for a beginning student to play. She expressed interest again the summer before 8th grade and we got her a Bundy (owned by Back and strictly student horns) and the standard fare of beginners, the 7C mouthpiece, and a few months into her 8th-grade year, she was 1st chair in high school band, and a few months after that had gotten good enough to be able to play a professional horn. Which is when we bought the Strad. Which, btw, is now 3 years old and the sweetest-playing horn I've ever laid hands on. It's very nicely broken in and because she's borderline OCD regarding its protection and upkeep, it's basically a brand new horn that's had a great break-in. I've played a lot of horns and though its bore being larger than my Yamaha's disagrees with me somewhat, it's got the smoothest, quickest, quietest valves I've ever played.
I get the feeling she won't do like I did. Backing off once I got good enough to be personally pleased with my musicianship and not particularly caring to play professionally anymore or put much effort into getting better. I've told her that while she's in high school, she has a kind of "duty" to see just how far the envelope stretches for her musically, but that it wouldn't bother me in the least if she completely abandons music upon graduation and just emulates her old man by specializing in something else while having "accomplished musician" in her back pocket and playing only when she wants to for the joy of it.
Because without joy, it's not music and quickly becomes a tedious responsibility.
Oh, and she recently told me what the average salary is for musicians in the New York Philharmonic. I think it was $80k. She asked if she could live comfortably on that and I told her it'd get her by in NYC, but would be a very good living if she could make that with the KC Philharmonic.
So hopefully about 4-6 years from now rather than bragging about my budding musician, I'll be recommending CD's to buy because she's a studio performer on them (she REALLY likes that idea -- doesn't want to be in a nightclub band, but really gets a kick out of being a studio musician backing other bands) or they're of an orchestra she's part of.
I often recommend the military as a possible approach for her as a musician because I was a musician in the Army band and bandsmen are much more musician than soldier, but she has absolutely zero interest in that.
And see what you did? As long-winded as I can get when talking about cars, motorcycles, tractors, online communities, and programming, all of them together pale in comparison when I get onto my favorite subject: My daughter and her music.
Time for me to quit bragging about my daughter and do some of the kind of work that keeps the lights on. <g> |
