“Let’s go to the seaside!” What a nice uncomplicated request from the children. And another, “It’s your birthday on Saturday; we’ll have a party for a few of your friends”. Great fun.
For the children, the first suggestion instantly conjures up a picture of sea, sunshine and sandcastles. The second event might suggest balloons, cake, presents, hunt the thimble and sandwich spread for them. Or it used to be thimbles and sandwich spread in my day. Do they still exist?
These are the pictures immediately presented in the minds of the children. They are clear and uncomplicated and are certainly simpler visions than those in the minds of the parents. For them, of course, their memory will fleetingly go back to the same pictures that they had in their own youth, and of course they will enjoy both events vicariously, through their children’s eyes. But their other considerations will take a different form from their children’s. These thoughts will include a list of things like driving carefully, getting to the beach, remembering to pack food, drink, and sun-cream, as well as the spades and the flip-flops. As for the birthday scenario, they will consider their mental to-do list; sending the invitations, making the cake and finding the candles, making the sandwiches, and buying and blowing up of the balloons, especially the one over the front door.
The goals are the same, but the considerations are not. In our youth we live a less intricate life. In later years the memories remain, but the complexities of our existence catch up with us.
We might define simple concepts like these as uncomplicated, plain and simple. We describe complex thought as containing a group of components, which may indeed be quite simple constituents. A university campus is a complex of constituent buildings. The different circumstances in which the words simple and complex are used should make it easy to use them and their synonyms properly.
We must not confuse complex with complicated. All of us can acknowledge that rocket science is a highly complex subject. The complexities are well known and understood by the experts. But the word ‘complicated’ actually has a rather different meaning. Complicated describes something that is often difficult to understand and may well contain a high degree of difficulty. As a result, it possibly even involves danger. Advanced – probably ‘wild’ – white-water rafting might come to mind as a sport that could, if the circumstances are not felt to be under control, contain elements of exceptional and unforeseen risk.
So, with words, the better we understand their context, the better we can apply them to real situations. Understanding the word ‘easy’ versus the word ‘simple’ and the word ‘complicated’ versus ‘complex’ might be a good start. A scale of C major only becomes easy when one has fully understood the simple aspect of the rules by which we need to abide.
For well-trained musicians, the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride through a concert is invigorating. For them, unforeseeable circumstances are unlikely to occur. In my career, I have only once seen a poor horn player faint while playing a Strauss concerto. In the Opera House, at the end of Götterdämmerung, the lights were indeed intended to go out. However on one occasion they were extinguished in the middle of Pelléas et Mélisande, with Pierre Boulez conducting. In a concert of quite contemporary music in London a row of, I think, about seven tam-tams, each one of slightly different size, fell into each other and went over like dominoes. And when I was at college I watched in awe as the dinner-jacket trousers (presumably borrowed) of a ‘cellist fell down round his ankles as he stood to receive deserved applause at the end of his performance. But for me, this is the sum total of this type of mishap over fifty years. They all had relatively simple causes. The horn player was excessively anxious, and had probably made the mistake of drinking a strong cup of coffee just before the performance. I did the same thing just before my very first concerto with the Hallé, to my everlasting shame. The lights in the Opera House were faulty, the tam-tams were too close together, and when being poured into the trousers, the player had clearly forgotten to say, ‘when’.
There are many pairs of words that are similar yet quite different in meaning. One could cite ’hearing’ and ‘listening’, as well as ‘seeing’ and ‘observing’. They need to be thought about.
Apart from these, I feel I would like to discuss the words ‘Instinct’ and ‘Intuition’. I have touched on them in a general way before. After further ponderings and looking back over my, in very many ways unexceptional, career, I have come to the conclusion that if a) I had practised harder and b) I had been clearer in my head about the decisions I had to make at various stages over the years, I would c) have practised harder and made many more wise decisions.
As far as Instinct is concerned, I think it is fair to say that some of us tend to make some dubious decisions when we are young; decisions based on responses triggered in us at the time. These instincts can stem from aspects of our inherited DNA, and the values and character traits of our parents and elders, and the environment in which we grew up. We are hard-wired to react in a way that we cannot resist; neither would we want to.
Feelings that tended to inform so many of my actions when I was young were based on instinct that is, instinct as a gut reaction. I began to be aware that my gut reactions to musical situations occasionally and gradually began to contain a few potentially Intuitive hunches which could be called gut feelings within a situation. And the best gut-feelings are the ones you just know are ‘right’ at that moment. For me, this gradual development, as I look back on it, seems to have been brought about by my lucky predisposition to be able to learn experientially. In this way I reassuringly gained a small level of autonomy. And these two words, Instinct and Intuition, have a direct correlation – albeit sometimes a little blurred – with Easy and Simple and Complex and Complicated.
In D.H. Lawrence’s short story, The Rocking-Horse Winner, the young boy knows he is lucky and rides his rocking-horse until he simply and intuitively ‘knows’ the winner of a particular race. He took this to such extremes that his feelings took over his life completely. We cannot live on intuition alone; rationality must be the dominating factor of our existence. His very youth prevented that.
But thinking of an instance of an instinctive, as opposed to a rational reaction to a situation, a more unusual event comes to mind. The scene was a performance of a Stravinsky triple bill containing Scenes de Ballet, Firebird, and The Rite of Spring. During a busy passage in the Firebird the third horn stood up and walked out of the pit. Thinking he had been taken ill, the section were surprised, in the second interval, to find him, changed out of his dinner jacket, in the Kemble’s Head pub, downing a pint. He was asked what had happened, and he replied, “Oh, I’ve resigned!” The rest of the section said to him, “But why didn’t you say something?” “I couldn’t” came the reply – “You were playing at the time!” Was that instinct? Or a sudden intuition concerning his future career? To many it must have seemed an irrational decision in the face of any other consideration. But who are we to blame him? Wherever it stemmed from, it was after all his decision.
But back to my point. In normal circumstances, playing a musical instrument competently involves performing a rational sequence of often quite complex procedures – individual skills that need to be placed at the front of one’s mind. After being mindfully analysed and mastered, they must be separated, assembled, and then put together in the right order. Eventually, of course, this will happen subconsciously, without any extra conscious work from us.
All this poses the questions:
- What are the steps to be mastered?
- How do we recognise the issues within them?
- How are they mastered?
Put another way, one could make a list five important considerations;
- the who
- the why
- the what
- the how and
- the when
Who? It is only we the player that is responsible for our own actions. No one can do them for us.
Why? Because we love playing and want to get and give pleasure in our music-making.
What? We need to think hard what we need to do, and ask teachers for the answers. And listen to other respected horn players when we are deciding what we need to work on. Then follow their advice.
How? We must experiment. We must use common sense and be prepared to practise routines in a repetitive way always listening hard to what is coming out of the bell. We ought not to judge others in a pejorative way, but we can and must judge our own progress and monitor our results. Above all, we must use imagination.
When? Because we want to ‘get there’, we will want to play as often as is necessary. But, of course, always leaving time for our equally important hobbies and the nurturing of relationships is equally important, for us to be as well-rounded an individual as we can.
Having looked at the list, there is no doubt that the above questions need to be asked and answered, but if we think that all we need is to master the instrument in the most appropriate way, we are greatly mistaken. For, if we are to discover our particular potential as an individual, it will be in discovering our own character, which is different from everyone else’s. While finding our own character we are of course allowed – and need – to have our heroes, and copy from them. The musicians I bow down to are not necessarily horn players, although Dennis Brain rises higher than most. I count the vibraphone player Lionel Hampton, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, the singer/actress/director Barbra Streisand, the violist Patrick Ireland, the clarinetist Jack Brymer, and the pianists Philip Fowke and Art Tatum. among my heroes.
All these true masters of their craft that I most admire would probably have had the humility to deny that they were completely flawless in the mastery of their instruments, any more that we are ever going to be. Einstein, as a violinist, could not count his bars, it is said. I would also include my father in my list of heroes, for his last verses of hymns and his powers of extemporisation. But for me, what defines their genius is the humanity that shines through all their work. Apart from brilliance, both idiosyncrasy (character) and an attractive whiff of intuitive eccentricity is crucial to their appeal for me.
Fine players identify and hone the skills they need. The secret to mastering them is lies most importantly, in identifying the simple ingredients that make them ultimately attainable. We have one priority. Underneath that is a list of important individual considerations to think about and practice, separately, one from the other.
For example, brass players want to hold a long straight note for a period of say ten or fifteen seconds in the low, middle or high registers. They need to have worked out, by trial and error in as sensible way as possible, how to make use of optimum embouchure pressure, for the note to remain stable. This involves organising the muscles in and around the embouchure so that they neither become over-tensed nor remain too relaxed, for they will probably find that both conditions will make the note shake. If they are thoughtful and focused, they soon discover all this when they are quite new to playing a brass instrument. Everyone does.
We learn early that trying to remedy a shaky note can lead to an instinctive series of movements. One of these is trying to firm the embouchure further. That seems on the face of it – literally – to make considerable sense. Another might be to press the mouthpiece harder onto the lip. That would also be both an obvious and instinctive action. As I say, it stands to reason that both solutions are suspect and need to be remedied. This takes a little thought and more time. But the rewards, in the form of that free trip to Italy on a Youth Summer Course or beginning to be asked to play in concerts, are enormously rewarding.
So it stands to reason that the simple answer to a shaky long note is not the easy route to follow. Simply because the remedy first requires a lot of time; time spent first working out which muscles in the face need to develop, and then practising patiently to nurture them until they become stronger. When I was about twenty and relatively fit my cousin, a farmer, both shorter and younger than I, asked me, outside the cowshed, to lift a half-hundredweight sack of animal feed for him. I could not do it. He had become stronger than I simply by learning how to use his body correctly and then doing so every day for about four years.
As I say, the answers are often simple once we understand them, but they are not always easy to put into action because they involve a gut feeling that we need to work on them. Intuition involves feeling. As for holding a note straight, one simple, and, again, not always an easy thing to do is first to take a good breath and, after a few seconds do something a little counter-intuitive. Take an imperceptible amount of pressure off the lip and continue to hold the note as steady as you can. This immediately tells you which facial muscles to concentrate on for the note to remain straight – if a little fuzzy, depending on how much you have reduced the mouthpiece pressure.
If one takes a good, correct, and relaxed breath, then holds a note for a few seconds (say 5), and then slightly reduce the mouthpiece pressure for another 5, thinking about the optimum balance in the facial muscles, and then replace the pressure, the last note of the three will usually be infinitely better sounding than the first. Over time our tone improves. The one priority was our unwaveringly beautiful tone. The four considerations were the breath, the balance in the facial muscles, the amount of pressure we used, and how we used our ear to monitor the result. Playing a note beautifully straight is just one aspect of brass playing. But the principles ar the same, whatever one is trying to achieve on the instrument.
It cannot be denied that there are many who do not see that having a list of considerations is crucial to their particular success. In our thoughts, we are, after all, quite different from each other, and I would not dream of criticizing their way of thinking. We all have our own ways of thinking about work and success. Some may, to an extent, merely decide that because they greatly love music and get joy out of playing – and have, of course practised too – they can just perform, trusting their instincts and intuition the whole time to get the results through experience. These players may become very successful.
Yet sooner or later, they, like we, know that the ideal of Perfection is unattainable. True knowledge is the knowledge that we will always make mistakes. I sometimes wonder who the idiot was that first pronounced that we are only as good as our last mistake. The best knowledge of all that we can have is that we are always infinitely better than the worst mistake we have ever made. Through practice, these types of mistakes are the ones we try to prevent. Not making them is a good reason to be satisfied; making them is just cause for a rueful smile and a few long notes the next day.
Intuition, on the other hand, has been said to be the subconscious processing of information that is too complex for rational thought. This is not to say that these thoughts come to us through a form of magic; they are still learned, but without our realising at the time that we are learning them. Intuition is often called a hunch and is a cognitive process, while instinct is a behavioural process. ‘Gut’ is an apt description. We have all had ‘butterflies in the stomach‘ in advance of a situation that we feel is going to happen without warning, any second.
We have all heard someone asking a woman, who has expressed an opinion, in a stupidly sardonic way “What’s that? Women’s intuition?” as if such a thing is a myth. The fact remains, and is well attested to, that women and especially those who are mothers, do indeed possess levels of intuition that men do not have. They know instinctively, without being told in advance, when a member of the family is ill, or in need of something. And what is more, while having about twenty percent less lung capacity than males, they can hold a note for just as long a period of time as men.
Recently, a wise person that I know suggested that if out of the corner of one’s eye one caught, for a split second, a glimpse of part of a strange ear sticking out from round the corner of a building, something ‘in our gut’ might very well immediately tell us to run and climb the nearest tree. If the ‘ear’ then became part of a man-eating tiger, our reaction would have been proved to have been a wise one. Was It Instinct in our stomach or a hunch in a small part of our mind that caused us to react in this way? It may well be confusing if what we thought at the time had been a gut reaction then appears on reflection later to have been triggered by an intuitive gut feeling. An instinctive rational decision? or just a feeling? Both are linked to feeling and emotion.
If it is true that our ability to develop intuitive feelings starts to develop out of our experience of the world, it is not true to say that young people cannot be intuitive. I have taught many young horn players who just seem to ‘know’ what to do in different situations, and not merely horn playing situations either. It may indeed have been a case of their having intuitive skills at a young age.
It is curious that one person’s intuitive phrasing – say, of a melody in a way they had not previously decided on – is so often accepted by the listener as simply ‘right.’ Whereas the more obviously poorly judged phrasing of a tune is always immediately thought of as ‘wrong.’ This confirms to us that the intuitive ‘right’ phrasing might well be natural to that player or possibly have been a learned thing. If it sounded poor it was probably a misjudged and instinctive reaction to the music. Maybe good judgement is a result of their early maturity and already-formed wisdom. Or maybe merely indeed a highly developed instinct to make the right musical decision. It is not easy to divine the source. And who wants to, anyway?
Many people are able to recognise the difference between information in the form of advice they receive from their teacher, and eventual knowledge that it was correct advice when they had proven it. Information in itself is not the same as knowledge. The process is helped by trying hard to see the value of another person’s point of view.
When engaged in conversation, intuitive people demonstrate their skill when they gently find out about the ‘other person’ without appearing overly inquisitive. Friendships are made this way. At the risk of appearing to have been a little obsessed with the man I knew for twenty years, I might mention a friend’s habit of carefully inviting pairs of people to dinner who, in character, were invariably completely opposite to each other. Because in this atmosphere, each pair intuitively realised they needed to tread carefully, they always succeeded in getting on famously with their neighbour.
This intuition must be applied to our music-making. One can hear the wonderful recordings of the Philharmonia Orchestra under an elderly Otto Klemperer. Here was someone whose wayward parabola described by his stick had to be somewhat, shall we say, ‘Interpreted’? by each of the 80 or more individual members of the orchestra. I witnessed the phenomenon of the waywardness of his beat myself, during his recording of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in the Kingsway Hall. The result is a miracle of ensemble, each person simply yet intuitively ‘knowing’ when to play. That is intuition gained both from experience but also from the knowledge that it can be attained.
Instinctive early learned responses are based on self-preservation. There are plenty of examples of this, but a couple of simple ones might be pulling our hand away when it touches something hot or spitting strange food out of our mouth. The most obvious instinct in self-preservation is the act of breathing. In horn playing, one’s instinctive reaction to a difficult solo might be to play it very quietly. In other words, if we do not take a good breath, the audience will not notice our quiet mistake. Whereas in reality, often, the very opposite might be more effective. I remember my friend Nick Hill’s ‘If in doubt, sock it out’ during a recording session. It was the best advice since the very act of taking a full breath will often trigger our natural subconscious – and learned – skills that are appropriate to the situation. In other words, being brave enough to make the decision to ‘fight’ is more positive and effective than the decision to ‘flee’.
Nevertheless, instinct ought not to be confused with habit. We tend to hear someone playing beautifully and say to ourselves that they now do it ‘instinctively’. This is not necessarily true; they have practised so hard that their skill has become habitual, just as we tend instinctively to walk in step with someone in the street.
If on occasion, a player does something a little different with a phrase, one can safely assume this to be the result of an instant and quick intuitive decision in their conscious mind at that particular moment – call it a ‘gut-feeling‘ – but not of an instinct to play differently. On the other hand, I have heard players who never vary, even slightly, their interpretation of a piece of music, say the solo from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.
The important thing to remember is that a player, through habitually playing beautifully every time he or she picks up the instrument, has created – but is not perhaps making the most of – the chance for an intuitive action to be realised. For intuitive players, it is a particularly unique atmosphere during a performance, which triggers an intuitive response at that moment.
But as we become older and learn more about life outside our home environment, we slowly gain the ability to see a third alternative to Fight or Flight. When necessary, there will still be – throughout our life – the need for the elements of fleeing or fighting that we first learned when we were young. Nonetheless, we might also discover the possibility of a further constituent that can incorporate these two instincts into our everyday mind. That great Horn player, teacher, and composer Gunther Schuller announced in 1953 what might be considered his equivalent of this – something he called the Third Stream – which was a fusion of Classical (his background), the Jazz influences of his later youth and the art of improvising within the two genres. This liaison he found intuitively, based on the already large experience in all fields of music-making. He had been a choirboy in St Thomas’ Church in Manhattan and then, after playing the horn in good professional orchestras when very young, was soon playing jazz under Miles Davis (whose embouchure, incidentally, he later helped repair) at the start of his legendary career. Schuller’s highly-tuned intuitive powers were honed, as ours can be, by applying a high degree of rationality to his work.
Instinct in the sense of the well-worn expression ‘Flight or Fight’ is not abandoned when we act intuitively. If we had poorly formed instincts, our intuitive powers themselves would be very much poorer. There is little point in our having an intuition (an instant judgment) on first sight of the girl on the other side of the road that she is our lifelong soul-mate, and then, just as we excitedly cross it in order to propose, being run over by a lorry.
The Holy Trinity of Instinct, Intuition and Rational Thinking, and the discovery of their true meaning and usefulness, must be our aim.
