Song and Wind Has Become a Fig Leaf for Lazy Practice

Two words half the brass world uses as a sentence and the other half uses as an excuse. This episode asks what song and wind actually was in the room where Jacobs said it.

• The phrase is true, and it was true in the room where Jacobs actually said it. Song carried most of the intellectual weight of playing and wind carried the rest. What the sentence stopped being is a description of the work. It is now an ending for a conversation that should have just started.
• The bench in Jacobs' studio was full of things that have nothing to do with music: a Voldyne reading vital capacity to about five liters, an Inspiron flipped for the exhale, a Breath Builder taking roughly fourteen ounces, air bags, a peak flow meter, and a compound gauge he bolted to a drilled pipe.
• Around 1960 Jacobs and a few Chicago Symphony colleagues sat through real pulmonary function testing at a University of Chicago hospital, and he wrote a long joint piece on respiration with Dr. David Cugell at Northwestern. In 1982 he put inexpensive versions into the world so a student could own it.
• He kept himself on the same scale he held everyone else to. His vital capacity ran close to five liters early in his career, dropped to about two point seven five liters after cancer surgery, and he worked it back to somewhere between three point eight and four point four.
• The load-bearing part the slogan dropped: Jacobs quarantined the mechanical work on purpose. The gauges came out away from the instrument. The split describes what should be in your head in the moment of performance, not how you spend the practice week.
• Strip the second half out and the phrase collapses into think musically and blow, which is not a philosophy, it is a permission slip. There is no baseline, no device, no number, and so there is no evidence that anything has improved.
• The Harold Hill / The Music Man caricature was named most clearly in a 2015 piece by Frank Byrne and Michael Grose, both Jacobs admirers, and they were writing the accusation back at its skeptics, not at Jacobs. His original critics accused him of having no mechanics. His followers now quote him as proof that mechanics do not matter.

• 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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  Get it on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trumpet-studio-practice-hub/id318232014