Andrew McCandless, Trumpet

Ever feel like you are doing a juggling act with all of the music you have to learn? Whether you are learning music for a lesson, or a performance it’s a terrible feeling to have. I know because I’m in the midst of having that feeling right now. We are in the middle of our New Creations festival at the TSO and that means new music and lots of it. This year isn’t too bad for me because I only have three new pieces to learn. A lot of my colleagues, in fact most of them have it a lot worse than I do. Still, it’s hard to fit it all in. Learning new parts is not something I do very often. Usually we are performing music that I have played quite often. It always takes me a little while to get myself in the right frame of mind to start learning from scratch. I have the same issue when performing new solo repertoire. Also the fact that it is new music often means it’s written for someone in-human, maybe a cross between Bud Herseth, Maynard Ferguson, and Allison Balsam. It’s also frustrating to learn this music because no matter how hard I try, I often don’t like it.

Anyway I know that we’ve all been there, so what’s the best way to deal with it? Here are a few tips that I try to keep in mind when I start to feel like I’m juggling too many pieces and not actually learning any of them.

Priorities*
I always try to plan out my time leading up to a performance of a new piece. I want to make sure that I’ve really learned it without over-practicing. When you know that you have these challenging parts coming up figure out how much time you will need to learn them. It’s always better for me to start early. Once it’s too late there is nothing I can do to recover.

Head Time X Face Time = Go Time!*
Make sure that you aren’t learning the music only with your chops and your fingers. I find it very helpful to spend working on the piece mentally also. Make sure that you are learning the rhythms correctly by spending a lot of time with the metronome, but without the trumpet. Find time to sit at a piano and sing the part. This can help your ears and also help you to come up with musical ideas.

Divide and Conquer*
Split the music up into manageable sections. Sometimes this means splitting one piece up into several different parts. Nothing is more depressing than looking at a stack of new music and feeling like you’ll never learn it all. I try not to keep my music on the same stand. It’s just too overwhelming sometimes.
So those are a few of my ideas for new music. We have one more week of the festival and I think I am over the hump now. By the way this year’s festival focussed on Osvaldo Golijov. If any of you are unfamiliar with his work I highly suggest you check out his music.

I hope this is helpful.

Best,
Andrew