On Nov 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
message: 9
date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:58:08 -0800
from: Scott Hartman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
subject: [Hornlist] A favor to ask you all
Hi everybody,
I have a former student who is attending a well known music school.
She is going through an embouchure change and her life is no fun
right now. She is depressed and I have cheered her up all I can.
What I would like, if you would indulge me, is to collect as many
stories as I can from people who have had to face tough situations
and have come out well and happy. Horn related stories are best, but
I'll take everything.
Thank you in advance. Please send the stories directly to me at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
scottito
Hey Scott,
I know i will be seeing you tonight in the pit, but I thought this
would be a good chance to relate the end of a small story I started a
few weeks back. I think others can get some encouragement from this
as well as your former student.
About a year and a half ago I took on the task of fixing the
embouchure of a young man, only a freshman in high school at the
time. One of my former students brought him to me when she heard (and
saw) him playing at a coaching session for chamber music. His
musicianship and desire were evident to everyone, but she felt his
embouchure was holding him back.
Well, when I saw him I knew that she had done the right thing. He was
so far pushed up and into his upper lip that it hurt him to play up
high. I mean it really it hurt. Also his tone was airy and he
couldn't move around well on the horn at all because the upper lip
was pinned. Amazingly enough, though, his lower lip was set up
correctly. Still, it was the worst embouchure I had seen in some time.
To give a little more background, you should all realize that this
young man comes from a family of farm workers- a broken home- where
his normal life would have included living in a small house with 2
other families. He has no money and is constantly approached by gang
members. There's more but the important thing is that he has been
taken under the wing of a teacher of his who has become his virtual
mother. She and her husband also saw Lolo's potential and decided to
do something about it. He is a great kid- smart, polite and extremely
gifted as a musician. We can all be happy that here is one who was
saved from a potentially terrible fate.
So we worked for about a year on the problem. It might have been a
shorter process, but his former teacher wanted him not to change. We
basically had to start from scratch and Lolo had a lot of bad habits
associated with his pressure oriented playing techniques. This was a
hard decision for Lolo, but he finally chose to put all his efforts
into the change. (This is a hard decision for many students who have
achieved a certain level of success at a young age. It is hard for
them to understand what they could really do if they honed their
technique to its highest level, and all the old wives' tales about
embouchure changes not being possible don't help, either.)
Last spring he made a CD for use with potential scholarships and
auditions. It was simple enough, just the first 2 parts of the Saint-
Saens Concertpiece and the Mozart 1. This was to accommodate his
range, which was, at that time, just up to Fs and Gs. My belief is
that you should always pick pieces that show you off well and that
the audience will like, regardless of your level of playing (but that
is another subject). I was encouraged that the man who did the
engineering for the CD, came up to me at a concert that evening and
said, That kid Lolo can sure play. I mean he doesn't just play
notes, he plays phrases and has beautiful releases- everything. I
told him the story.
So recently, after having started this story in a post about me
perhaps being too dogmatic about pedagogy, which I won't repeat now,
I got word of one of the results of the CD. (I think in that thread I
mentioned that Lolo had learned how to lip trill in one week and how
well he gets around on the horn now.) Lolo has won a scholarship from
the NPR show From the Top. He will be playing on the show sometime
in 2007 and will receive a $10,000 award for lessons and a new horn.
Awesome! So sometimes there are happy endings, or beginnings. For
Lolo this is just the beginning, but now at least he does have a
beginning. He has the stuff to be a great player, and that is what he
wants to do- his way out of his circumstances- but he also has the
stuff to succeed in anything he might want to do. This wasn't easy
for him- or me for that matter, but it is paying off, big time. Look
for Lolo Vallecillo on NPR.
So Scott, tell your former student that part of life is change and
that change is not easy sometimes. Life isn't easy sometimes but hard
work will be rewarded. The good news is that there is more out there
with the right tools to make it
