I’ve attended many clinics and listened to a lot of professional trumpet players. “Practice long tones and lip slurs” is common advice. If you’re not a brass player, you may not know that the term, “long tones,” refers to holding a note for several counts. When I was in ninth grade, my teacher assigned 12-count long tones (think, one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two…) from low C, to high C. 25 notes in all. Strenuous. Like holding a weight motionless out in front of you, but with your lips. I took some comfort that her teacher also had her practice this way as a young player. She also assigned “lip slurs.” On a brass instrument, each fingering (or slide position) can produce a series of notes, seven series in all. Smoothly making the transition from one note to the next in the series, without changing the fingering, demands a high degree of small muscle flexibility. You could think of these two exercises like planking and cross training for the face.
Playing a brass instrument requires both endurance and finesse, which means players must build muscles, like weight lifters, and be able to use them with fine control, like surgeons, to navigate steps and leaps, high and low, loud and soft, fast and slow. So, you must practice long tones and lip slurs. And you can’t just practice one without the other.
In life there are many pairs of opposites. Order and freedom. Reason and passion. Justice and mercy. Equality and individuality. Tradition and innovation. Like long tones and lip slurs, these represent divergent goals. They’re of no use in an either-or dichotomy. Paradoxically, we must strive for both, at the same time, or neither can happen. To have freedom, there must be order, certain limits to that freedom. Liberty is not license, as Locke wrote. So, freedom means accepting responsibility and maintaining discipline. What good is freedom without self-restraint? What good is having rights without responsibilities? Unlimited freedom would result in chaos – disorder. While we would all be free to do whatever we wanted, our personal freedoms would be at war with each other, colliding like shrapnel in an explosion. Without responsibility, the rights of one would conflict with the rights of another, until no one had any rights at all.
Divergent goals are like binary stars, locked in a stable orbit around each other, yet free to move through space and time for billions of years without colliding. Reason, like gravity, holds things together. Passion, like orbital motion, might throw things apart if unchecked by reason. It’s been said we need to decide using reason and act with passion. If we decide using passion, it may take all the reason we can muster to correct our mistakes and change course.
There can’t be justice without mercy, and vice-versa. Justice must consider motives and circumstances, which is to say, the human condition. The nature of justice – fairness – is bound to the ideal of treating others as we would want to be treated. The concept of people getting what they deserve comes to mind. So, we have rules about evidence and testimony, and strive to “make the punishment fit the crime.” Who deserves cruelty, other than possibly the cruel? Even then, a lack of mercy would be unjust. And it’s certainly unjust to administer justice unequally, being lenient with those who have connections or means, and strict with those who do not. Unequal justice is not justice, but a cudgel for one man or group of men to control others.
And we can’t really have equality without considering how to make it possible for people to express their individuality. If we’re not equally free to be who we are, what does equality mean? Without acceptance of and respect for differences, there can be no equality, only enforced conformity.
We’ve learned these lessons through tradition. Yet, tradition must be open to innovation, the drive to improve, to fix what’s broken, to find a better way of living. To hold on to tradition, one must be willing to innovate.
So, we need “long tones and lip slurs,” life’s divergent goals. These may be difficult to achieve or even pursue, but without them, we can’t be complete players, or human beings.
MurrayWorks 