I recently had the opportunity to give a solo recital at the International Women’s Brass Conference in Denton, Texas, and the recital went pretty well. This may not seem like a momentous announcement, but I have realized that, for me, it is. I have spent some time reflecting on how far I’ve come, particularly in my ability to put mindfulness principles in action during high-pressure live performances.
My performance anxiety began when my physical playing difficulties began to manifest. Sure, I got nervous when performing in college, but never to the point that it crippled me. I mostly thought of it as a type of fuel for my performance. My teachers always focused on developing my musicianship, which grew into a strength for me. But tuba teachers are sometimes hesitant to assess a player’s embouchure and ask them to change it. Partly this is because it’s hard to see what’s going on, but in my case I think it was because my embouchure worked … until it didn’t.
I always played with a kind of “upstream” setup, which is what happened naturally when I first approached the instrument (I started in 7th grade). I had a kind of underbite when playing, pointing the air upward in the mouthpiece. As I began to play F tuba and encountered solo music that demanded higher and higher notes, I developed a habit of moving my face upward in the mouthpiece and applying pressure. For a long time, it worked, but it was unreliable. Toby Hanks, who I studied with for my Master’s degree, was the first teacher to tell me that something about my embouchure looked wrong. Again, he didn’t tell me exactly what to do or not to do, but he did tell me that for higher range notes I should have more of my facial muscles in the mouthpiece so that they wouldn’t have to work as hard. He suggested a more “downstream” shape to the embouchure—blowing downward in the mouthpiece. This is something that is suggested by many method books, but for some reason it hadn’t come up in my tuba study before then.
At this point I decided to try to change the way I was playing high range notes, both because of Toby’s suggestion and because I had seemingly reached the edge of my capabilities doing it my original way. What followed were several frustrating years of adjustments. Just at the moment when I should have been most confident in my abilities as a musician—doing Master’s and Artist Diploma recitals at Yale—I suddenly took ten steps backward physically. I was second-guessing and overthinking everything. I had to plan for new endurance limits and embouchure shift points. I couldn’t rely on myself to do perform the way I had in the past. After a while of committing to this change I couldn’t even comfortably go back to my old way of doing things because I was no longer accustomed to playing with a high degree of pressure.
I continued to try to adjust to this new technique after leaving Yale but I didn’t really have anyone to guide me. I began teaching college students shortly after completing my Artist Diploma, which probably increased my focus on technique. I could get by doing what I needed to do (freelancing, the occasional faculty recital), but I was never comfortable. The fear of walking on stage and having the instrument completely refuse to cooperate with me was very real. I lost a ton of my confidence as a player, and I was mentally at my worst during recital situations.
After years of this struggle I reached a breaking point. My approach to building endurance and technique had always been to practice as many hours as humanly possible, but all that practice didn’t seem to be helping. If anything, it was demoralizing that I still had the same inconsistencies after so much work. I was still really struggling with the “old way/new way” concept, and trying to make my technique as consistent as possible. I finally reached out for help to my undergraduate teacher, Dr. Ross Walter.
He listened patiently on the phone to my very detailed description of how I was struggling with my embouchure—how certain notes seemed to work both ways, but I couldn’t figure out how to approach notes that were in my “discomfort zone,” which was right on the edge of where I shifted my embouchure. And then he asked me a question that should have been obvious, but completely surprised me. He said “Well, which way sounds better?”
I suddenly realized that in all of my focus on technique, and on exactly what I put into the instrument and how, I had managed to completely ignore the most important part of the equation: the sound that comes out of my bell. I had been thinking in binaries like “old way/new way” and “right way/wrong way” instead of looking at my technique as an ever-evolving work in progress. When Ross finally asked me that pivotal question it broke me out of the tunnel vision I had developed, and I was able to find the solution almost immediately.
Part of my issue was that once Toby suggested to me that I might need to adjust my embouchure, I became stuck with the mindset that something was wrong with me. I was forever trying to fix myself, yet not always considering the full picture in the scope of my entire playing career. I did what felt best when I first started playing tuba, and changed when I needed to change. The solutions I found after grad school may not have even worked for me at age 18. Since that conversation with Ross I have tried to let my technique adjust to create the sound I want. The sound itself is my primary objective. I try to live by the words of another teacher of mine, Andrew Hitz: “Play along with the sound of the tuba in your head.”
This (finally) brings us back to the mindfulness in performance aspect that has changed for me in recent years. The old fears about not being able to play on stage when it counts will take a long time to completely die, if they ever do. My method of staying mindful in performance is to focus on that internal tuba sound and to do my best to play along with it. I’ve always had the hearing skills to do this, but I have had to work hard to train myself to focus on that instead of on technique. I try to remind myself before a performance to focus on output, not input, and I often fail at that. But luckily the practice of mindfulness is still just that: a practice. So instead of beating myself up about losing focus, I try to congratulate myself for noticing it and then guide my thoughts back to the tuba in my head.
My thoughts during my recent recital ranged from “OMG that’s Don Little in the back row!” to “I really should have put my hair up because it’s in my face” to “Should I have asked for a different lights setting for this room?” to “I wonder how my recorded track sounds out front…” But for today I’m congratulating myself because I noticed each of these moments and consciously steered my attention back to the tuba in my head. Each of these instances was a helpful reminder of what all musical performances should really be about: the music.