FBSMC 12, Music and the Natural Worlds, Beyond Brass Playing

When spending time building a relationship with the natural worlds, it is important to ‘tune’ ourselves to the environment that we are going to be in and fine tune when we are actually in it.

One way to prepare and ‘tune’ is to start to leave behind some of our thoughts from wherever we are coming from. This is not to be forced, but can come from a simple call over to oneself like, “I am now going to settle mind, emotions and body and enter a different environment.” Then one can do some of the vowel meditations or other soothing breathing exercises to unify mind, body and emotions. If our mind feels extremely scattered, find a tempo to attach yourself to and couple it with the breathing exercises. Perhaps you have song or simple melody or tone sequence that calms and settles. If super- hyped up and stressed, it can be useful to do some quicker, hyper breathing for a short period of time and consciously say to your self out loud, “I release this stress from my mind, from my emotions and from my body.” Then gradually get into slower and calmer deep breathing.

This is a simple outline of things to try and much more detail and specifics could be filled in. For example, when doing the vowel meditation, each one of the vowels resonates within a certain space in our body. From those spaces, one can add the phrase, “dissolve you stress from this space” and feel it dissolve You can also put other words that connect with you more than dissolve like, ‘melt away’ anxiety, peace please come.” The encouragement here is to find the ways and means that work for you and these are some examples.

Vowels are common to think about in brass playing but we can extend this use in so many ways and then bring that enhanced experience to our playing with fuller meaning.