BY TRACY FRIEDLANDER
Tracy Friedlander is the founder of Crushing Classical. We’d like to welcome her to CutCommon as she shares her industry advice column with us!
In grade 8, as a young budding talent on the horn, I got braces.
Braces on your teeth when you play horn is bad news.
It hurts to sandwich your lips between the hard metal mouthpiece and your jaggedy braces. (And you can’t play horn unless you press the mouthpiece against your lips…!)
After getting braces, there was so much frustration when practising. What used to be easy was now hard. I even kicked a hole in the wall out of frustration. I don’t think my parents will ever let me live that one down!
The psychological impact of braces was much tougher than those two years of physical discomfort. As I grew older, I became insecure about my high range on the instrument for a variety of reasons – a lot stemming from those years with braces when I doubted my own potential to reproduce the ideal sound I was hearing in my mind.
Fast-forward through years of lessons — and even some embouchure tweaks —after the braces were off. I could play high, but I knew it wasn’t ‘there’ yet.
I wanted mastery.
Eventually, figured it out. You know what the secret was? I realised I was the one who knew how to fix the problem all along. And out of that self-confidence came the mastery.
It happened when I was done studying with teachers. I took all the advice, all the great tips, and all the info from lessons. I used most of it, and threw some out. Then I went inward, and figured out how this was going to work for me.
Once I did that, within a short amount of time (relative to how long I obsessed and worried about my performance), I had mastered the high range with ease.
Reflecting on this, I realise: any time I felt real mastery and confidence in any endeavour, it was because I was doing it on my own. I was doing it from my point of view, relying on what I feel, think and know to be true – with zero outside influence, or depending on how somebody else says it should work for me.
It’s obvious that education from outside yourself is necessary. But, in training to be a musician, a very common and substantial mistake is the pressure and ‘Forever Quest’ to get answers outside yourself – to have someone else know for you how it’s going to get done.
So take the leap. Trust yourself and what you have learnt, and go within. You’ll find a knowing there.
And the biggest secret of all? You had it all along.
Find out more about Tracy’s work on her Crushing Classical Facebook page, Instagram @crushingclassical, and on Medium. You can also sign up to her mailing list here.
Featured image by Azamat Zhanisov on Unsplash. Image of Tracy supplied.
