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Title: An Open Letter to a Beginning Trumpet Player
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Blog Entry: You will find that you must approach the trumpet as we are told we must approach like, getting from it only what you put into it - Not less, but certainly not more. The proposition is simple, quite fair, quite with out mercy. One masters the clarinet or the violin. One does not master the trumpet. When the trumpet player talks of mastering their instrument he means only one thing - that they will master themselves.For you will discover that the trumpet is little more then a kind of Amplifier. It can Project sound, but having no reeds or strings it cannot create sound. It has no built-in mechanisms for this purpose. It is just a tube of metal whose length can be altered by opening and closing three valves.Simple as it is in design and function, the trumpet makes severe demands on the player, who in a sense becomes the "instrument" and supplies the "working parts". The player first hears the sound they want to produce and then makes certain muscular formations to accomplish the feat. You will find that the muscles used in trumpet playing are those you have used before - In fact, those you use every day without giving them much thought. So you must start to think about them and learn to control them by an effort of the will. And you must do this so many time, so many thousands of times, that their movements become almost instinctive.You will be consumed, I warn you now, by the idea of playing the trumpet. At all hours of the day you will be at work on those muscles wholly acting in union or in sequence, create sound. And you will hone and refine other sets of physical skills. You will get more then you bargained for, including moments of despair when love turns to hate. In deciding to play the trumpet you have chosen to do battle with yourself, the most intimate enemy of all. "If one decides to play an instrument with all seriousness," Pablo Casals wrote, "One becomes a slave for life." I believe you must make each day a willing renewal of this slavery in order to achieve your goal.And what is the goal? As you slowly, even painfully, master the skills of trumpet playing you will begin to see that the challenge is the goal. The discipline is the goal. The Pursuit is the goal.Spring, 1977Cline, H.S.U"An Open Letter to the Beginning Trumpet Student"  By E.R.G. Shelswell-White (from "instrumentalist" May 1977 p.34)Rewritten By Kevin M. Beardsley, for sexually politically correctness