Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Europe


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Posted by Jay Bertolet on June 18, 2000 at 06:36:26:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Europe posted by tommo on June 18, 2000 at 05:05:59:

Dead on the mark, Tommo! It is funny you should mention Heiko in this context. Let me relate a little anecdote in this regard:

In my junior year of college, I attended the Interlochen Summer Camp in the now defunct "University Division". It was a real bad choice because one of the band directors at the University of Michigan had been hired to run that division and he had recruited a bunch of his students to go to Interlochen for the summer and "play lots of great literature". Well, it turns out that he couldn't recruit any string players so the orchestra wasn't capable of doing much more than Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. As a result, the brass players sat on their hands most of the summer. It would have been a total loss for me except that this was the first year that Heiko attended the summer camp in the high school division. That summer, there were two really good players. Heiko was one and there was another player from Israel named Ariel Sasson. Anyway, it was the quintessential battle between the two of them for the top chair. Heiko was the great solo player and played everything on an F tuba. Ariel was the great orchestral player and played everything on a Kaiser Miraphone 190 CC. And of course, the first week of challenges was on Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie. For the whole 8 weeks, Heiko never took first chair from Ariel. What a valuable lesson to learn! Orchestral excerpt have their own difficulties and require lots of attention to master. The fact that Heiko could play rings around Ariel technically didn't matter one bit. Both were good players and turned into accomplished professionals but Ariel had spent his time learning orchestral rep instead of solos. He had also spent a considerable amount of time on his low range, what is affectionately known as "the money range".

I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to be really good at something, you need to focus on that thing in your practice. Practicing solos may make you a more musical player but it won't help you to play excerpts if you haven't worked hard on them.

My opinion for what its worth...


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