Tuning Slide 3.42: Listening for Your Sound

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them.
― Michael Bassey Johnson

Professor Harold Hill was supposedly a con man. For those who may never have seen the musical The Music Man, Hill would come into town, get people to buy musical instruments and then skip town leaving the wannabe students without a director and their parents without the money. He pushed what he calls the Think System. Just think about what you want to play. Keep thinking and it will get better. Finally, after thinking long and hard enough you will be able to play. And Hill would have skipped town.

In River City Hill met his love, Marian the Librarian and is forced to face the townspeople. In the end the kids DID learn to play and they go marching through the streets of town playing a rousing "76 Trombones". The think system worked- and no one was as surprised as Harold Hill- although he never admitted that.

Many of us know already that the Think System does work, although we do need instructors to lead us in the right direction. One of the most important pieces of it is learning how to listen. Listening to music in general, to other musicians, and then our instrument and to our own sound. These then lead us to listen to the song that is already singing within us.

Some of us start by knowing there is this song in there. Others discover the existence of the song after years of work and practice. All of us who care to be musicians will eventually hear our song- a style, a genre, a sound that fits us. Do you remember the early days of hearing other musicians who played the same instrument? Take a moment and remember that moment when you said, “I want to do that, too!” The world was new and exciting- even infinite. You could have turned to three or four other people standing with you and said, “Can you hear that? Isn’t it incredible?” and they would have looked at you sideways and nodded politely. But you heard it. It was someone else’s music and song, but it touched you and brought your song into consciousness.

It's that first and early listening that gets us to where we are today at whatever level we are currently playing. Setting aside the instruction for the moment, that sound never left you. Fifty-some years later I get the same feeling as when I first heard the opening notes of Al Hirt’s "Java" or Herb Alpert’s "The Lonely Bull". It was and is the sound of the trumpet. It was and is my sound. It has never left me. If I had stopped my playing those songs would today be just nice nostalgia. Instead as I have continued to play and change, they are still living sounds. In me. Through my horn.

I have listened to all kinds of music over the years, all of which shaped and informed my sound. I could never get the guitar to do the same, although I have loved trying- the songs of guitar- bluegrass, folk, rock- have impacted my trumpet sound. But over the years two things happened with my trumpet. As I listened to other trumpet players, Doc and Maynard, Clifford and Lee, Chet and Miles, I discovered that there are many different sounds to the trumpet. Bud Herseth and the Chicago Symphony Brass section and the Canadian Brass opened whole other sounds and styles. The rich and wondrous range to trumpet music was nothing short of a gift from God.

I learned how to make different sounds on the trumpet. I began to realize that I have to pay attention to those sounds- their similarities and differences. Listen and imitate. Experiment. Not just with the specific notes, but with the sound and rhythm, the tonguing and fingering, the phrasing. These soon became intuitive to some extent. Not that I was practicing enough for many years to improve as much as I would have like to, but it was building. I was learning the languages of the trumpet. Even just thinking of the sound as coming from a different style or source would change the music I was making.

That was the part of listening to the horn. My particular horn, an almost 50 year old Bach Strad, that I have been playing now for almost 35 years, is one I know. In the past three years of intense practice and learning I have found that I have barely scratched the surface of what we can do together. A couple years ago when I first found a new mouthpiece and compared it to the one I had been playing I discovered that the new one caught my sound in new ways. It was more me, more alive in the ways I felt the music. That was me, working with my own horn, and bringing them together in my sound.

If you have listened long enough and developed enough awareness of your song, your sound, and the potential the music universe of your instrument becomes endless. In the book Making Music for the Joy of It, the author, Stephanie Judy, spends some time talking about listening and sums it all up this way:

Listen without judgement, not what is wrong but what is…. Every note of every instrument is available in a fantastic range of volumes, attacks, duration, and tone qualities. It is both frustrating and liberating. (P. 116)

In essence what you are doing she says is finding more ways to play it, not taking control. If you are judging your playing (Self One at work) you easily end up with feeling that is was “no good.” All that does is shut the door. The path toward your sound, and the path your sound can take, is closed.

There is a sound inside each of us that we want to make. It may not yet be a song, but it has everything you need to make it your song. It may not be a particular song that is already written, although those can lead us. It will most likely be a sound and style that moves you. As it does so, it will also move your playing into new areas. Just do it. Just play it. Listen.

Then listen some more.