About this exposition
Winning an orchestral job is a very common goal or even a “dream” for many of (bass) trombone players. In order to get there however, we must experience the challenge of an audition. Playing in an audition is always difficult and finding effective ways to prepare for it are crucial, if we are to be successful. This is one of the reasons why I have decided to focus my research on finding effective practicing strategies for two orchestral excerpts: Richard Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” and Robert Schumann’s symphony no.3 “Rhenish”. These two pieces have many different characteristics, such as historical context, musical style, the use of the instrument. Through this research I aimed to get closer to finding how can we get to know the orchestral excerpts well and perform them as proficiently as possible in the moment of audition.
The main topic of my research is how to prepare orchestral excerpts for bass trombone and more specifically, how to find approaches and practicing strategies. In order to do this, I formulated my main research question, which is: how can we identify the main difficulties and devise effective practicing strategies for preparing orchestral excerpts? For this purpose, I chose the two above-mentioned case studies on which we will focus below. In order to further focus my research, I identified a number of sub-questions that guided my process: What points should we be aware when preparing for bass trombone orchestral excerpts? How to set up practice strategies and deal with technical challenges in the excerpts, such as, register jump, sound consistency and air coherence in different dynamics, clear articulation and sound idea? How can we formulate exercises that aim to prepare specific bass trombone orchestral excerpts, instead of simply practicing the most common exercises from etude books? How can we create an even and full sound in parts with loud dynamics? What is the guidance for interpreting the tranquil or expressive parts? Most of these sub-questions came up while I was preparing and practicing the orchestral excerpts, and I think these questions include some of the main challenges one will encounter when practicing orchestral excerpts. In the following text I will discuss the two bass trombone orchestral excerpts, I will analyze their difficulties and propose different ideas for practicing and interpretation.
Perhaps the main reason that motivated me to focus on the topic of how to prepare excerpts is that as far as I know there are almost no bass trombone etude books whose aims are particular to practice orchestral excerpts. For a long time in the past, when I practiced orchestral excerpts, I just played each of them, perhaps simply started from the slow tempo or gentle dynamic, and simply repeated it, and played the whole thing in the way of what the excerpts were supposed to be finally. I love playing orchestral pieces, but to be honest, I was not really aware of different ways in which I could practice them. The turning point, when I got clearly different ideas about playing orchestral excerpts, happened when I started working with my former teacher, Brandt Attema, who was my first bass trombone teacher when I began my studies in the Netherlands in September 2018. He really emphasized that when we practice to play music, we should give the music the certain corresponding imagination in the way of playing, rather than only playing notes numbly and straightforwardly. And as long as you have your own interpretation, it does not matter if people’s individual ideas are the same or not because everyone is unique and independent. So, the point is that you must have something in mind. Moreover, he also gave me many ideas how to investigate and compose exercises from pieces I am playing, not only in case of the solo repertoire, but also orchestral excerpts. From then on, I felt like finding a new world and really got a magical inspiration. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to practically look into and sort out the approaches of how to build up the foundation of playing orchestral excerpts and practicing the excerpts from exactly the orchestral excerpts which we are struggling with at the moment.
In the past, I had practiced many different exercises from many individual technical and etude books, but I would say that all of them aim to practice general abilities or technical skills. However, practicing etudes in order to improve one’s skills takes a lot of time. Then why don’t I try to find the way to practice something particular from the piece what I practice? Everyone could actually be their own inspiration and inventor of exercises and approaches in the pieces that they are playing. Overall, this is an approach that I tried to develop during this research.
In this way, I think it would be absolutely more interesting and motivating during practicing. If I briefly illustrate this approach with a few examples, which will be discussed in more detail below, this would mean that, when I come up against something challenging in the piece, I start thinking how could I try to vary it to practice in different ways, such as register, interval, with and without tongue, slow and soft, with mouthpiece only, with slide movement and air flow only and so on. Rather than simply playing the same thing which wrote on the score. Based on this idea and motivation generally, I was wondering if I could integrate these ideas and try to sort out some practical approaches and give some motivation for the bass trombone players as an external inspiration to prepare the orchestral excerpts. During the research process, I also benefited from organizing, developing and adjusting my practice ideas.
In general, the main research idea is inspired by ideas of my former bass trombone teacher, Brandt Attema. He let me realize that not only we have to use time in more efficient way, but also, that we can always extract something from the piece, which we are struggling with or focusing on at the moment, and then invent the specific exercises that directly helps us to get used to the patterns in pieces.
To sum up the above, they are my original ideas to do this research: find out how to effectively prepare and practice the individual orchestral excerpts, and then sort out the inspiration into practical approaches. What’s more, if people who receive my idea from my research in the future, I hope this would be a good materials and inspiration for them not only simply a method to practice, but also manage, or even master bass trombone orchestral excerpts with specific practice and strategies. Eventually, I wish each of us could reach some positive achievements by obtaining the inspiration that I am going to illustrate.
In the following chapters, we will look into more details about how I try to deal with the orchestral excerpts with the ideas and approaches that I mixed from my teachers’ points and my study experience. I hope through this research, my ideas could also inspire you in certain way that improves your practice in a different way which you don’t really experience before. Furthermore, in later chapters, I will also demonstrate the results of the questionnaires that I inquired from several bass trombone players including students, teachers and orchestra musicians with their opinions. It is quite interesting to figure out what people’s approaches and ideas are.
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