Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
MUSE 375
Palmer/ Spieker
March 7, 2017
Lesson Review
Over spring break I had the privilege to work with one of my former students from
home. Erin Brown is now a senior trombone player who is very talented for her age. Our lesson
was about 30 minutes long and I used various techniques to bring out the best sound for her.
This review will discuss what I feel went well in the lesson as well as what did not.
The lesson began with Remington scales. The main purpose for these long tone scales
was to establish the center of the pitch and to have the best rounded tone and volume. When
the she began to play there were not a lot of issues with her tone quality, the main issue that I
saw in her long tones was the speed of her slide and then how her notes tapered off at the end
rather than being supported all the way through. In order to fix the slide movement speed, I had
her play a quarter note on beat one and rest for the other three beats, then in the last
subdivision of beat four I had her move the slide. We did this a few times before applying the
technique to the normal Remington long tones. This exercise fixed the slow slide movement
almost completely. When working on the tapered notes I used an analogy of playing solid bricks
of air through the horn rather than a cone. This imagery was somewhat helpful, but in order to
compensate for the tapered notes at first I had Erin surge her air the last two counts. Then after
doing this a few times taking away the over training helped to keep each note very solid. Some
things that I had wished that I had done better was to be more concise with my descriptions
and to be faster to find issues. It took me a few minutes to find a way to really fix the details
After the warm up we moved to working on the solo that she would be performing for a
few last minute auditions. The piece that she was playing was Ferdinand Davids Concertino.
This trombone concerto is one of the best known concertos in all of trombone repertoire. That
being said I have spent a lot of time on this piece. The biggest issues that I saw in this were
some rhythmic discrepancies. Dotted eighth sixteenth notes were being played like eighth notes
a lot and there were also some rhythms that were rushed (quarter notes that were being played
like eighth notes and long notes being held too long). After addressing this the piece ran very
smoothly.
The final portion of the lesson consisted of a mock audition. I had her introduce herself
and then asked her to play a few scales. After this I had her perform part of her piece. Following
this I gave her some feed back on how the audition went. Her scales were very good. There
were no pitch issues whatsoever and the tempo was at a very solid pace. The performance of
the piece was also done very well. There was a lot of musicality in her playing and the sections
Over all I felt that this was a very fun lesson to teach. There were several different
portions of the lesson that I have never been able to do before. I value the experience greatly