Daily Dues

According to legend, Dale Clevenger was once asked by how he approached warming up. In his oft-impersonated Tennessee drawl he replied "why, I never warm down!"  Another anecdote about warming up involves a horn student at the Marlboro Music festival who observed that John Barrows would arrive ten minutes before rehearsal, "belch out a middle C" , leave stage to drink coffee and chat with colleagues, then return to stage at the tuning note and proceed to play brilliantly. When the student asked Barrows if he warmed up at home, Barrows replied "I used to warm up. I warmed up every day for years and years. One day I was warmed up!"

Most of us mere mortals require some type of daily warm up, for both physical and psychological reasons. When I was first getting serious about playing the horn, I found a copy of The Art of French Horn Playing by Philip Farkas in the band hall library of my high school and used it as my horn bible. I was especially drawn to Farkas's daily warm up, which he professed to practice in full every morning. Over the next several years, I tried to make the Farkas Warm Up the foundation of my practice routine. Some days I would slog through it and come out ok; other days I found it to be exhausting. I was definitely way past "warmed up" by the end! While I have since become a more efficient player, going through the full routine still makes me feel like I need a nice, long break before I continue practicing.

While the Farkas Warm Up was not for me, I was attracted to the idea of a systematic routine that could improve my skills and consistency without tiring me out. I tried lots of prescribed warm up routines endorsed by famous teachers (Standley, Singer, Caruso, Brophy, etc.) but eventually burned out on all of them.  Over time I realized that the appeal of a prescribed warm up is not really about the exercises themselves but rather the belief that the daily ritual of warming up will set the conditions for positive results on a daily basis. I would posit that there's a benign placebo effect in the daily warm up. Any ritual that offers stability in the occasionally chaotic, frustrating endeavor of playing the horn is not something to be dismissed. But the best warm up routine is useless unless one can find the time and energy to actually do it on a daily basis. An hour long intensive daily warm up is not  something I have the endurance or discipline for; especially if I have lots of music I need to prepare. I want my routine to be concise, purposeful and interesting enough to keep me engaged. Most importantly, I want to feel fresh and flexible by the end of it so I can work on actual music.

My teacher taught me to think of the daily warm up as the "nuts and bolts" that hold your playing together. Charles Kavalovski (another famously diligent warmer upper) called his warm up the  "Daily Dues." In this sense, the warm up is designed to maintain and improve technical skills with the added bonus of waking your air and lips up for the playing you need to do that day. In reality, most professional players (especially if they've arrived at the concert hall uncomfortably close to the start of rehearsal time) are ready to play after a few minutes of noodling (provided Bruckner 4, Ravel Pavane, Till Eulenspiegel or another touchy solo is not first up on the rehearsal.) For an advances player, the "warm up" portion of the routine is really the first five to ten minutes (for me, that's breathing, buzzing, flow studies and flexibility exercises on open harmonics). Whatever you have time to do after that falls under the category of daily maintenance. This block of practice usually immediately follows the warm up but it could occur later in the day as a prelude to a practice session or an evening concert. These exercises can be practiced in sequence although sometimes I feel more engaged with technical practice when it's mixed in with other practice material such as excerpts, etudes and solos.

After years of experimenting, here are some conclusions about what works best for me:

- A warm up routine should be no longer than 30 minutes. Quality practice time for a busy professional or student is often a luxury and I'd prefer to spend it working on actual music rather than technical exercises. If there's a specific problem I want to work on, I'll find an etude or orchestral excerpt to address the issue whenever possible.

- A routine should make my chops feel better, not worse. Long exhausting "warm ups" defeat the purpose of getting you ready for the day and often engrain bad habits. Try to use exercises that emphasize efficiency rather than strength. If you want to work on stamina and efficiency, it's a lot more fun to play through a Mahler symphony or a Strauss concerto.

 - The exercises that make up a routine should address fundamental concepts necessary to play well. In my experience, good technique can be boiled down to relaxed breathing, easy sound production, flexibility, mastery of scales and arpeggios, and efficiency. If the exercises you are working on don't address these concepts or are needlessly repetitive, you might ask how they are serving you.

- The routine should be consistent but have an element of novelty. The basic framework can be the same from day to day but, for the purposes of avoiding boredom or burnout, it's nice to mix things up slightly. For example, the scale patterns might change with the days of the week (Sundays are major scales, Mondays are natural minor, etc.) On odd days, start scale and lip slur sequences tongued; on even days, start slurred. Use a flashcard app to add an element of chance to what you're doing that day.


- Start each day with a "beginner's mind." I like to think of my first sounds of the day as rediscovering how to play the horn. I like to start with buzzing in part because, as a beginner band student, I wasn't allowed to touch the horn until I could play tunes on the mouthpiece. Before I ever opened a horn case I understood that the sound of the horn is merely an amplification of the buzz! Eventually I progressed to easy mid-register notes and took easy, relaxed breaths to create the most pure sound possible. Then I graduated to  lower and upper register notes. I  try to start each day by recreating the feeling of "beginner's mind". My chief criticism of the Farkas routine (and other well known warm ups) is that, within the first few minutes, you're playing at the upper and lower limits of the horn. I believe it's much better to start slowly and focusing on taking full, relaxed breaths and making beautiful sounds... just like a beginner!

- When the routine feels stale, make a change. This point is maybe the most important one. For most players, doing the same routine every day for years on end is a recipe for diminishing returns, or worse, the development of bad playing habits. While some parts of my routine have remained consistent over many years, every few months I feel the need to make a change. Sometimes that means simply changing the order of a sequence. Sometimes it means adding, eliminating or substituting an exercise. I'm always on the lookout for new exercises. If I find one that's novel, interesting, uncomplicated and will help me improve my playing, I'll add to my rotation.

Technique is a means to an end. That end is to be musically compelling and connect with whoever is listening to you. With this in mind, the goal of a daily routine should be to maintain and refine technique so that we are able to express our musical thoughts freely and become better musical storytellers.