Warren,
The videos from the Yamaha Day of Trumpets clinic are certainly a key to the ideas that I am presenting in this post. I remember our conversations from the TPIN list and see that you’re brand new to Trumpet Master, so you probably missed my early comments on this topic.
I wrote the attached overview the first time I went to the Yamaha web site last year. It seems appropriate to include it here as well, since you asked. This was a definite highlight for me last year (after getting only brief notes from players that attended the class) when the rep at Yamaha contacted me and said that all of the classes had been taped and would be included on the web site.
Please follow the link to the David Krauss clinic as well (if you haven’t already read it).
Quote:
You can pick up dozens, maybe even hundreds of albums with these players, and experience their interpretations of most of the standard literature in the repertoire. These classes at the Yamaha Day of Trumpets give us all that special insight into how they are able to produce the sound that carries easily over the orchestra. The examples that they relate to the audience before they play, are exactly what I was expecting to see in these video clips. I couldn’t have been happier!
I heard David Krauss give a similar presentation at the ITG Conference in Denver. I have never heard a James Thompson master class (although I did hear him do Pines with the ASO many years ago). I’ve never heard Robert Sullivan speak either, and this is a very rare opportunity for me to glimpse his ideas about playing the trumpet.
I like to read, and every chance I get to ask questions of people who have worked with James Thompson, I get very detailed oriented. I can literally see the words that he uses on the page when discussing these topics, because of the many people that I have had conversations with via email (and I like to quote him a lot in the posts that I make here). To see him “live” (probably as close as I’ll ever get to it via these clips) was a real treat for me. I was so pleased to see how his ideas dovetail into those of David Krauss.
He began his class by saying, “What makes a great tone?” Someone in the audience calls out Resonance. Then he says, “where is the right spot for the note” and gives a brief demonstration moving above and below the resonant center of the pitch (you can’t describe this in words as simply as he does in the video clip). He finally arrives at a note that rings and says, “that’s the one I hear in the room. Let’s call that the center”.
I love metaphors, and he pulls out a great one at this point in the talk. He says, “I like Rob MacGregor’s idea. Consider a bobsled in the Olympics. The sled is going right down the shute, not hitting the sides, not scraping up the sled, right down the tube. That’s the sweet spot, we call that the center”.
The center is equivalent to resonance, which equates to maximum overtones.
He then plays an excerpt from Shostakovich Symphony Number 7 that literally made my speakers sizzle with his resonant approach, but when he played the same example from a stance of volume, there was not that same “buzz” in my speakers. He then talked about the quality and resonance of the tone and related this back to an opera singer, cutting through the context of a Wagnerian opera (same metaphor as David Krauss). This is possible through “purity and resonance of tone”.
“Get the resonance and don’t push the volume. The louder you play it just doesn’t work.”
These words tie directly to what David Krauss says in his presentation and are also the words that Marcel Tabuteau uses to describe projection.
These are ideas that we need to achieve the sounds that these players are making everyday in their world class ensembles. To get the first 32 bars of the Honegger Intrada from Krauss as an example of this concept is absolutely fantastic. To hear James Thompson change the color of his C trumpet from something your would hear on a D trumpet (or piccolo) followed immediately by an example of the color of the cornet on the same horn simply by modifying his sound concept, is incredible!
I, for one, couldn’t be more pleased at the playing that is presented on these video clips in combination with some of the best examples to illuminate these all important sound production concepts.
Bravo to Yamaha for sponsoring this Day of Trumpets and then for bringing a small snapshot to all of us who couldn’t attend via these brief video clips. I’m thrilled!
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