The Chicago School Is a Myth (Mostly)

The label half the brass world uses and none of it can quite define. This episode asks what the Chicago School actually is, and what it never was.

• The word school implies a building, a faculty, a curriculum, a degree. None of those things exist, and the two men who give the label its name never wrote a method together and never agreed on a sequence of steps.
• Jacobs and Herseth did not even deliver in the same language. Jacobs was a talking teacher who sang through exercises, had students walk and stand on one foot, and kept a medical archive that ended up at DePaul. Herseth spoke in short, oracular fragments and spent most of his time demonstrating, letting the sound make the argument.
• Song and wind comes from a 1996 book by Brian Frederiksen, Jacobs assistant, and it is a student's book, written after the fact, not a syllabus Jacobs handed out. In the room where he said it, it was a corrective aimed at a specific over-analyzing student, not a universal law.
• Big sound is a description, not a prescription, and the moment you turn it into a prescription you skip the entire middle. The air is the engine, not the hammer, and the size was a by-product of the ease, not the goal. The player who hears big sound and thinks push more air has missed the whole point.
• The load-bearing aphorism is the least quoted one: think about what it sounds like, not what it feels like. The mechanics are in service of the sound, and if you put the sound in your head first, the mechanics tend to sort themselves out. That is a defensible claim, and it is the one that actually works in the practice room.
• What actually transmitted was a sound, heard repeatedly in a city where you could not avoid hearing it. The standard got into players' ears and started doing work that no syllabus could do. The small set of phrases that described the sound survived because they are short, memorable, and hard to argue with, and they traveled until the context dropped out and the sentences became slogans.
• The word school is a later invention, a name that players outside the city put on a sound they had heard on a recording. The lineage is real in the sense that a player at DePaul heard the CSO, went home, practiced, and taught a student who then heard the CSO. The school is not.
• Resources Mentioned in the podcast:
  • The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet
  • The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

  Available at: https://TrumpetStudio.com

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