The Trumpet and Me

For me, it started while I was busy in university taking a non-music degree. I had always played piano and trumpet all through school growing up. In fact, I do not remember a time when I didn’t play. I had even considered going to music school after high school, but life had other things in mind for me. In fact, I didn’t even audition for music school. Familial pressures, societal expectations, a host of reasons led to a different route for me - I ended up studying engineering instead.

By the time I had transferred to the University of New Brunswick from the University of Prince Edward Island to finish my bachelor’s degree, I was desperate to start playing trumpet again. It had been five years and I felt that there was this big gaping hole and I was desperate to play again. I lucked out when I saw a poster advertising the UNB Concert Band. I was never so happy or so excited. And yet, I was nervous.

I had never felt that I was that remarkable a player and I would have considered my skills as a player to be mediocre at best. After that much time away, I felt like I was learning to play all over again, and it was an effort to get back into it. Despite all this, I somehow started to make an impression on conductors, players, audience members, etc.. It turns out that I had “The Tone”, “The Sound”, whatever it is that you want to call it that all brass players strive to have. And I had it naturally. One would not really think that this a problem, but when my playing technical skills were mediocre and non-existent at best, it became a problem.

Everyone who heard me play, assumed my skills were far greater and far more refined than they actually were. This meant that I started to get calls and requests to play for other events and venues. The first time I sat in an orchestra, I was handed a part that I did not have the range for. Talk about sweating buckets! I was working really hard to meet the expectations, but I was stuck. And that was only the first of my playing problems!

After graduating with my masters degree, I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee where I played with the Knoxville Concert Band. At the time that I was a member of that band, the trumpet section was full of trumpet faculty from the University of Tennessee (UT) and Maryville College. The music they played was far more difficult than I had been used to playing, in addition to playing marches at 144 bpm instead of the British/Canadian practice of playing them at 120 bpm. One of my fellow trumpet players was a professor emeritus with the music faculty at UT and he kept asking me why I wasn’t one of their students. But no pressure, right?

A few years later, I did get to go to music school. I auditioned with the piano at York University and was accepted. I signed up for the concert band in the first semester and really only made it to one or two rehearsals, but in those rehearsals, they assigned me a lot of the first trumpet parts. Comments were made that I was a natural trumpet player. I was honestly terrified. The music was far more difficult than what I was able to play. I stuck with my piano courses and just ran from the horn.

Finally, I made a critical decision. I needed help with the horn and putting it off wasn’t going to make the issue go away. At the end of that school year, I approached one of the instructors for the first year Musicianship course and confessed that I was stuck as a trumpet player and did she know anyone that I could study with to help me become unstuck. She gave me the name and contact information for a fellow in Toronto. And that is when I had my first breakthrough. He got me unstuck and with some effort, I was able to start to make more progress in years. And that is when I realised that targeted lessons had value in getting past playing problems.

Less than three months after my initial lesson with the teacher in Toronto, I ended up as principal trumpet in the next orchestra that I would play with for the next five years. I still ran into technical issues, but instead of letting them fester, I would make the effort to find a teacher to help me through. I ended up as principal trumpet for another orchestra, started receiving even more calls for musicals, and other ensemble work. It opened up a whole new world for me.

I get it. As an amateur player who has been playing for years, you want to up your game. You wish you had the skills and the tools to improve your performance and feel more relaxed at the next community concert band rehearsal and shine for the next concert band performance, and just maybe the local theatre group has asked if you could help out with one of their productions. I would love to have a chance to connect with you and discuss your journey. Where are you in your trumpet journey and what support do you need?