Andrew McCandless, Trumpet

Alcatraz Prison

How many of you have ever been to Alcatraz? When I lived in San Francisco I went there a lot. It seemed like I had a lot of visitors when I lived out there and one of the big things to do was go to Alcatraz and take the tour. It’s a really great tour! It’s the kind of tour that is guided by a recording and everyone uses headphones to follow along. You can start and stop the recording at anytime so that everyone can go at their own speed. (For those people who may not know what Alcatraz is, it is a famous prison located in the San Francisco Bay that was home to some of the most dangerous criminals in the mid 1900’s. Al Capone was one of the inmates incarcerated there.)

Anyway, my favourite part of the tour is the dining hall. There is a quote that I really love when you get to that section of the prison. There were a lot of rules at Alcatraz. In the dining hall there was only one rule. You could take as much food as you wanted, but you had to eat everything that you took. This finally brings me to my topic for the blog this week. Breathing!

One of the biggest problems that we as trumpet players face is over breathing. How many times have we come to the end of a solo, or a study, and find ourselves out of breath and panting? Well I have. The reason for this is over breathing.

In my opinion the main reason we over breathe is because of tension. When there is too much tension in the body the air has trouble getting out of the lungs. When that happens we feel like we need another breath. In reality we have a lot of air left, but our body has already used the oxygen that was in it and now it needs fresh new air to feed the body again.

Now when we have taken another breath, what happens to the air that is still left in the lungs? Nothing good, that’s for sure. Barbara Butler used to call this stacking the air. We are putting good air on top of bad air, and the more we do that, the harder it is to get the bad air out. Think of it as a very slow process of strangulation. I know it sounds dramatic, and it is, but in a way that’s what’s happening. You are starving yourself of good oxygen and the body is in desperate need of it. If you do that long enough you won’t have to worry about the Ballerinas Dance from Petroushka ever again!

So what do we do? My suggestion is to follow the Alcatraz rule. Take as much as you want, but use all that you take. Be careful that you aren’t always taking huge breaths. Take breaths that make sense to the phrase you are about to play. I also don’t mean for you to play until you are squeezing out that last drop of air. We want to use our air, but we want to be sensible about it.

Here is an experiment I used to do at Eastman. Take the Clarke Technical Studies book and go to any of the exercises. Start on one that’s in the middle register. Take a nice, regular sized breath and start to play. Play until you really feel you are out of air. When you feel that, stop and exhale. Often I find that I’m not really using the air that I have taken in. By practicing this way I’m able to train myself to use the air that I have taken in more efficiently. Remember this is just an exercise and you don’t need to play to the very end of your breath all the time.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Best,
Andrew

Ps. Air is still one of the greatest bargains in life. It’s free, use it!