Why is band looked at as nerdy by most high school or college students? Why do people mock or make fun of someone who is in band just for the sole fact of playing the trumpet or clarinet? Do these people not understand the work, hard work at that, that it takes to become proficient at an instrument? Being a performer takes a lot of time and some people don’t understand what it is like to prepare for a concert, prepare for a show or play, or even just to prepare to play a simple tune like “Ode to Joy” when you first start out. To become a performer takes skill and dedication that most people don’t realize until they are told about it, but even then, being told about it and actually being a part of it our two completely different things.

First a performer starts out, well, not as one. Focus on band for this example. The aspiring performer has to pick out his/her instrument. This is what the picture of the mouthpieces is about. How do they choose between a wide range of instruments? There’s something called an embouchure. What an embouchure is, simply put, is the shape that a person’s lips need to be to be able to “buzz” on a mouthpiece. The tighter the buzz and the faster the air, the higher the note will be when it is played on a horn. Some people can only buzz on certain size mouthpieces. So they just have to find the one that best suits them. 

So now the prospective performer has picked out his instrument based of the buzzing test. Now comes the fun part, the first time playing the instrument. For this example, the performer will be playing the trombone. So he has this expensive yet simple piece of metal in his hand, and he absolutely no clue what to do with it. So he just put’s the mouthpiece in what looks like the proper hole, but no sound comes out of the instrument. He had put the mouthpiece in the wrong part of the instrument. Now most people probably think that is an exaggeration, but they couldn’t be more wrong. When starting out, simple things like setting up the instrument, to even the proper way to hold it, are foreign to most people.

Jump forward a couple of weeks now and the new player has been working hard. He has been playing the trombone for a little while now and thinks he is getting the hang of it. That is until his instructor puts a piece of paper in front of him will little black dots in a staff and tells him to be prepared to play that next class. This is the next hurdle for a performer; learning how to read music. It is like learning another language. A lot of people will disagree with that though, arguing that it can’t be that hard because it is only seven notes. While that is true, that there are only seven notes (letters A-G), there are different ways to augment those notes. For instance, there’s the note A, but take that up a half step and now there’s the note A-sharp. This might not seem like a big difference, but if ever heard played together these notes will make a person’s head hurt. This language of reading music is a very difficult hurdle for the performer, and can make a simple tune such as “Ode to Joy”, which only has six different notes, a rather daunting task for someone when they are starting out.

Next comes the final step towards being a performer, preparing for a concert. Jump forward a good amount of time so our performer has a decent grasp on how to play his instrument. Now he must learn to play in an ensemble. Now most people would think that playing in an ensemble couldn’t be any different from playing by yourself, but there are a lot of different factors that a musician has to think about when doing so. For instance, he must be in tune with everyone else around him in the ensemble. Otherwise an out of tune horn will clash with the sound of the in-tune horn and make a very unpleasant sound. He must also blend in with the sound of the group. If he plays too loud he sticks out from the other members of the group. But those are just formalities for playing in an ensemble. The hard work is preparing the music. People go to concerts and see a group perform, but do they realize how much work goes into the thirty-minute concert? A performer will play the same piece’s day after day at rehearsals, probably put in about 50 to 100 hours of work into a concert, and then preform it for at max an hour. Think about that for a second a performer puts in that much time to prepare for the concert, and then it’s over in the span of an hour. The dedication of a performer is phenomenal, and something that aspiring musicians will learn about.

The last step in being a performer is to experiment in other types of ways to perform. Band, for instance, has marching band. This is one of the hardest transition for a performer. This is because of the difficulty of learning how to play an instrument while also moving in sets with a group of hundreds of other people. This is a very difficult concept to learn and it takes a while for a performer to hone these skills. Now how hard can marching band possibly be? It’s a lot harder than most people think. As a member of a marching band they have to be able to play your instrument, obviously. But while doing that they also have to be able to march in tempo, be in step, which means everyone is stepping with their left and right foot in unison, and taking the exact size steps to an exact spot on the field in a certain amount of time. For a performer, this is a lot to think about, but it is just another way for them to be able to evolve as a performer.

In closing, I want to finish with this. Being a musician is more than just playing an instrument, especially at a higher level. When someone says, “I am a musician”, they aren’t just saying they can play an instrument. They are also saying that they have learned the second language of reading music and they have been through the struggles of learning how to play for the first time. They are saying that they know what it’s like to but in massive amounts of work for only a short amount of results. But most of all, they are saying they have found a way to express themselves in a way that is so much more powerful than words. As a former high-school band director once said to his students, “Music is universal. It doesn’t discriminate. Music doesn’t judge you based on where you came from or where you are now. But most of all, music lets you connect to people you never thought you would, only because you share the same passion of creating music.”
