The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 095 Eli Epstein: Music Making from the Inside Out

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast, episode number 95. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice and building a purposeful career. And now your host, violinist, teacher and high performance coach, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone. I hope this episode finds you feeling happy. I know that the world continues to offer challenging stories every day, but I hope there are also many blessings in your life right now. Before I introduce today's episode, I want to take a minute to thank GLBMstar17 who wrote this review of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:57 As a student and a musician, this is my favorite podcast. I learned so much about practicing, honing my craft, the professional world of the arts, and I come away inspired with each episode. I keep thinking, what else is there to say about practicing? Surely we must have covered it all already. But I still am finding new practical tips and tricks to add to my arsenal. Dr. Gauthier has curated such an astonishing variety of hosts and does a great job asking

Starting point is 00:01:28 interesting questions. Thank you so much, GLBM Star 17. It means a lot to me to read that the content of the podcast is bringing you so much value. And now for today's episode, I'm really excited to bring you an extremely knowledgeable, thoughtful, and inspiring musician, Eli Epstein. Acclaimed for his glowing sound and his lyrical freedom, Eli is a sought-after horn player, educator, and conductor. He was second horn of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1987 until 2005

Starting point is 00:02:05 and horn professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music during most of those years. Eli has appeared several times as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra, and he's performed recitals and chamber music concerts throughout the world. He left the Cleveland Orchestra in 2005 and moved to Boston to devote more time and energy toward educational and creative endeavors. He serves on the faculties of the New England Conservatory and Boston Conservatory at Berkeley. Eli has presented workshops, masterclasses, and recitals at conferences, conservatories, and universities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His students hold positions as chamber musicians and music teachers and have won posts in more than 25 major orchestras in North America.

Starting point is 00:02:57 Eli's book, Horn Playing from the Inside Out, A Method for All Brass Musicians, was celebrated as an overwhelmingly stimulating and productive treatise. Its positive influence on the profession will be immediate and lasting. I'm particularly excited about this episode because Eli's philosophy and approach to practicing and music making embody so much of what Mind Over Finger is about. He talks to us about the importance of listening to music in order to ignite our interest, refine our ears, and improve our playing, the process of myelination and how it affects our work, ways to deal with our negative inner voice, ways to express authentic emotions through sounds. He tells us about the magic if, and he shares so much more wisdom. I think you're

Starting point is 00:03:49 going to love this conversation. Let's get to the show. Eli Epstein, I'm so happy to have a chance to chat with you today. thanks it's great to be here renee eli first of all i want to thank my amazing producer bella kelly for introducing me to your work way back and i'm so glad that she did because well apart from being an incredible musician your approach to music making resonates with me profoundly i love your teaching philosophy, which is about focusing on the whole person and developing excellent technique in order to free students to express their feelings and their stories and selves with their audience. And I also want to share this quote from Yeats that you have on your

Starting point is 00:04:49 website, which encompasses so much of what I strongly believe in is education is not the filling of a pill, but the lighting of a fire. I love this so much. And I can't wait to dive into mindful practicing and music making with you. But before, please tell us about you and your musical journey and how your artistic path has unfolded. Sure. So I started playing the French horn when I was seven years old, which is very small for the French horn. I don't advise it for anybody but uh my dad was an amateur violinist and he felt like it was really important for all of the children i was the youngest of four children still am um for all of us to play an instrument and so i watched my older siblings choose the flute and the trumpet and the piano

Starting point is 00:05:43 And I used to sit on my father's lap when I was a little kid, and we would listen to all the romantic violin concertos, Brahms and Bruch and Mendelssohn violin concertos, and he would point out, you know, this is the clarinet, this is the bassoon, this is the horn. And when he got to the horn, I was just like, it was sort of like love at first hear, you know, I just loved the sound of the horn. I can't, you know, really explain it. But, you know, even, you know, as part of an accompanying orchestral part, it just really stood out to me. And I said, that's what I want to do when I grow up. and so he found a teacher for me and I started taking lessons and you know I really I loved practicing and you know I listened to my dad practicing violin just sort of sitting on his bed in his bedroom and listening to him practice and I I kind of got a pretty good idea of how to practice except for you know don't be negative with yourself because he used to he used to like call his fingers klutzes and you know sort of talk to his fingers and I I remember thinking very consciously to myself later on you know I never

Starting point is 00:07:12 want to practice like that in this sort of negative way but I did sort of pick up this whole idea of deconstructing things and taking things apart and doing them slowly and putting them back together and then playing through a whole passage so I really credit my dad as you know he was kind of teaching me without knowing it how to practice well except for the negativity part which we can get to later but I was taking lessons I practiced I listened to a lot of records of uh you know my dad would got me the dennis brain mozart horn concertos which is still my favorite recording of the mozart horn concertos was recorded in the 1950s and um and i would just sit next to the one speaker that dates me a little bit and and just with my ear next to the speaker

Starting point is 00:08:16 and trying to figure out you know how does he do that how you know it just sounded so effortless so easeful and it still does and I still sort of wonder how did he do that but now I know a little bit more about how he might have done that and I got really good on horn and by 10 years old I was put in this woodwind quintet program at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. I grew up in Philadelphia and Settlement was a fantastic place to go and there was this teacher there Shirley Curtis, who was a bassoon player, and she had this incredible program. And it seemed like, you know, there was like the 10-year-old woodwind quintet, the 11-year-old, the 12-year-old, all the way through high school. And it was like an incredible igniter for me. It was like the

Starting point is 00:09:13 classic sort of talent hotbed situation where, you know, here I was at 10 years old, this really little kid with a big French horn. And I could see these older kids who were better at their instruments and better at playing chamber music than I was. And, you know, once in a while, if a horn player in an older group would be absent, Shirley would say, Eli, can you fill in in the two o'clock group? And I would, and then I'd get to play with the really big kids in ninth grade, you know. And it was a way to kind of just keep on igniting me to do better and better and better and practice more and more and more. And some of these kids in the senior quintets would actually win competitions to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra on educational concerts.

Starting point is 00:10:09 and it was like oh well that's possible to do like if I'm in this program and I ended up winning competitions to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 11 and 12 and 16 and and my group that I was my woodwind group won a competition to play Mozart Symphony a concert on a movement from that with the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 16 so then we became sort of the big kids and all the 10 year old kids could look up to us so it was this real self-perpetuating system that Shirley had put together she was a real rigorous teacher she had been to Curtis and Marlboro her husband was in the Philadelphia Orchestra Sid and you know he would coach us once in a while and he was super rigorous and we would tape ourselves and listen

Starting point is 00:11:09 back you know back when it was much harder to tape yourself right yes and um so that we could really hear what other people were hearing and uh there was just a whole lot of rigor and a lot of fun socially. It was really fun to be in this Woodwind program. And, you know, later Shirley had me conduct the Woodwind group when she wasn't able to conduct it. And as like a freshman in college, I went to the University of Pennsylvania for a year. So I stayed in Philadelphia. And then I went to Eastman because I really decided, yeah, my passion really lies with classical music. And my high school teacher said, go to Eastman, study with Vern Reynolds. So I did. And I started playing in the Rochester Philharmonic as a substitute. And that's where

Starting point is 00:12:12 I learned the most, I think, in school was actually the professional experience of David Zinman was the music director at the time, the young David Zinman, who became, you know, music director of Tonehalla Orchestra in Zurich, and, you know, conducted all the great orchestras in the world after that. But as a student, it was a great experience to have this professional situation where, you know, it's like four rehearsals, and then you play the concert, than you play the Bruckner Symphony. And I was in the enviable position of like the two first horn players not getting along with each other, and they wouldn't assist each other.

Starting point is 00:12:58 And so they'd say, Eli, will you assist so-and-so? Will you assist this other person? And I'd be like, yeah. And so that was very exciting to be put in a professional situation. I was like 18 years old and did that. And then after I graduated, there was a second horn opening in the Rochester Philharmonic, and I won the job. And I played there for seven years and played in a woodwind quintet, you know, no change there. And really loved doing young audience programs, and I was artist-in-residence in the Rochester City School District.

Starting point is 00:13:41 and my favorite audience is third graders because they're the most uninhibited people and I would play more orchestral excerpts in front of of them and I really wanted to play in a major orchestra in the Cleveland Orchestra which was the orchestra I was actually listening to when I was listening to Dennis Brain as a you know young child and also as a teenager I would come home and listen to George Zell and the Cleveland Orchestra play all the Brahms symphonies and I would listen to it over and over and over again and I just loved the sound and you know I guess I found out later the interpretation was sort of like the greatest and I thought I want to play second horn in the Cleveland Orchestra and lo and behold an opening came up for second horn

Starting point is 00:14:36 and I auditioned and Christoph von Docknani was the music director then and he chose me to play second horn and I was there for 18 years and it was like jumping on a locomotive and going in 100 miles an hour for 18 years and we recorded the whole orchestral canon all the Beethoven symphonies and Brahms symphonies and Bruckner and Mahler and three of the Ring operas, which was a real highlight with Mr. Dock Nani. And then I started getting into some other stuff, some creative stuff with inside-out concerts

Starting point is 00:15:23 and helping audiences find personal relevance in classical music as it's being performed. And I thought to myself, well, I've played in orchestras for 25 years now. I've played the entire repertoire many, many times over. And, you know, I think I always had the idea that I would leave. I would leave the orchestral career to be an educator, because I think I'm an educator at heart and um i sort of had this idea as like a 20 year old it's like i'll get as much experience as i can and then i'll go and i'll teach it you know then have that regenerative aspect of um sort of teaching what i learned playing in the cleveland orchestra with all that rigor um with that really

Starting point is 00:16:21 high level. I remember Lynn Harrell coming, who's a famous cello soloist, who I think died recently. And he had played in the Cleveland Orchestra as principal cello with Zell, with George Zell. And when he came, one of the times he came to play a concerto with Cleveland, he turned around and, you know, it's very warm. And he said, I feel like I went to the Cleveland orchestra school of music and and I was like that's it that's what this is it's like every single day there's this tremendous rigor and you know you're sort of being even in the rehearsals held to this real high performing standard and um you know being I mean Mr. Dagnani he was incredible musician with incredible ears and would always be correcting intonation and

Starting point is 00:17:20 really was quite demanding in a lot of ways every single day and I was like in on in one way it was difficult and but in another way it was it was like being in a great music school for 18 years and then i took a leave of absence i i moved to boston because my family lived here and my parents were still alive and um i thought well boston has a lot of music schools and uh it's hard to say how scary to leave a tenured position in a major orchestra but um i just i i knew some people. I knew the personnel manager of the Boston Symphony. And he was great. I mean, he said, Eli, you know that musicians can't choose where they live. And I laughed. But, you know, he gave through a lot of work my way because there were several horn openings, it turned out,

Starting point is 00:18:30 when I moved to Boston. So I sort of made this transition into the city and got to know a lot of the musicians in the BSO by going on tour with them and playing a lot with them. And then I was taken on by Boston Conservatory and New England Conservatory and became the brass chair of NEC Prep. And so it's sort of a full circle kind of thing because I had such a great experience at the Centermint Music School in Philadelphia. As a kid, I just thought, I want to give the same kind of rigor and fun and, you know, a really high level of teaching

Starting point is 00:19:19 that I got when I was a kid. You know, I studied with this guy in the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 13 through 16. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. And I thought, you know, brass players, if they're given really great teaching at a young age that's like the best thing because then they develop this great muscle memory and these great habits and sort of sustainable habits so um so i really enjoy that aspect of my career but i also enjoy teaching college students and i teach

Starting point is 00:19:54 Several courses, which creative musician, entrepreneurial musicianship, brass pedagogy, the art of practice and performance in the prep for the high school kids. And so I'm very busy. Thank you so much for sharing this. It's such an incredible story. And I really hear when I hear you talk about the importance of what you are bathed in as a kid when you're talking about watching your father and you're talking first about how you loved practicing and then watching him. And it's like learning by osmosis, absolutely. And then how this background forged your path to not only your performance career, but to the pedagogical activities that you have now and this mindful approach that you have. And you were talking about rigor and fun from being exposed to Shirley Curtis at Settlement. This is so important for us to hear how all of these elements come together in the making of a musician.

Starting point is 00:21:07 And you also talk about listening to music so much. And this is so important for all the young musicians out there to know that through listening, they can learn so much. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, now that we're in this pandemic for a year now, I think one of the biggest pitfalls for music students is feeling isolated and, you know, feeling like, you know, the really fun part is playing with other people, you know, and that the, you know, the totality of it is much greater than the sum of the parts, you know. Yes. And they really miss that kind of fun. And, you know, the whole idea of igniting, it's like we have to keep on igniting. And even though we're in pandemic mode, it's like what I suggest to my students is to listen. Like when I was a kid, there was no YouTube.

Starting point is 00:22:15 There was no Internet, believe it or not. uh and and now there's like an incredible library at like of of sound library of incredible live performances on youtube i mean you could never in a whole lifetime you couldn't go through all of them and it's like wow you could listen to the legendary um you know all the all the great you know, Jascha Heifetz, Yitzhak Perlman, Huberman. You could listen to, you know, incredible horn CDs that, for me, you know, have to be in some specialty record shop to find if you were lucky. And now you can just hear all this stuff at your fingertips. So what I suggest is, you know, listen to these great groups. Listen to great string quartet playing. Listen

Starting point is 00:23:14 to Kiri Tekanoa sing Mozart when you're studying Mozart horn concertos, because Mozart was writing in the same style for horn as he was for voice. And so those are the kinds of things I think we have to do on a regular basis to stay ignited, to stay interested, to keep learning. That's such great advice. Eli, on your website, which is full of great resources, by the way, And I encourage the listeners to check it out. And I'll put a link in the show notes, of course. You talk about radical practicing and how to increase our practice efficiency with creativity. And that's a big topic in my teaching and coaching work and something we discuss at length in the Music Master Experience, which is my online group coaching program.

Starting point is 00:24:07 Can you unpack this for us, please? What is radical practicing? What is that to you? yeah it's an interesting title um well like i said i i teach a course on brass pedagogy and and the in the first class my first question is tell me about the worst teachers you ever had and the best teachers you ever had and um it's a great topic with students because i loved especially talking about the worst teachers they ever had and you know it's a little bit horrendous to hear about teachers who were you know got angry got violent even um were bored with

Starting point is 00:24:53 uh teaching uh didn't have any enthusiasm about it we're just kind of checking in with their time card uh and then the the really great teachers always had sort of they were rigorous but fair and they were fun and they were incredibly enthusiastic about the subject and um they held students to a high standard but they were really you know sort of understanding and could explain things in very clear and brief ways and and then i i asked my students well which teacher do you want to be to yourself? Because when we practice, it's like there are two people in the room. And sometimes I do this exercise with students where I say, set up two chairs in the room. And one is your chair, the student's chair, and one is like the wise professor's chair.

Starting point is 00:25:59 It's like a gestalt thing that Joe Bergstahler told me about. And I think it's very effective And it's like, so the student plays something, and then I say, well, get up and sit in the wise professor's chair and tell your student, you know, in the briefest way and in the clearest way, what you think they need to work on and how they need to work on it. And sort of go back and forth that way. I think most students don't think of practicing that way, that they're actually the teacher and the student at the same time. Such a great point. Yeah. So when you know that, you start, I think, practicing really mindfully because you have to listen like a really astute teacher is going to listen to you. And, and so, you know, being patient, being astute, being very perceptive about things, recording yourself, playing with a metronome, being honest about did I stay with the metronome, you know, how is my sound?

Starting point is 00:27:12 how are other people going to hear my sound, what does my teacher tell me about what I need to do to make a more focused, more penetrating kind of sound. All those things need to kind of be thought about and kind of discussed, if you will, with yourself. And I think when we think of it that way, then we get really serious about the practicing thing. I think of practicing as, it's a little bit too simplistic to say, programming a computer. But are you familiar with the book, The Talent Code? Yes, I think I have it right here. Very good.

Starting point is 00:28:04 Listeners can't see it, but it's right behind me on the show. it's right there. I can vouch for that. And so that's one of my favorite books. I think you asked that question. And I have, it's a required book for my pedagogy class. And the reason is that Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code talks about this idea of myelin in the brain. And this is getting a lot of play right now. It's not just in The Talent Code. I think Don Green has been talking about it in his videos. And I'm like, yes, Don Green, good. You know, talk about myelin. So what myelin is, it's a fatty substance in the brain that wraps around neurons that are fired more frequently. And it basically acts as insulation to an electrical

Starting point is 00:28:59 wire. And the more insulation you put on those neurons, the faster those neurons fire and the more automatically those neurons fire. So it really helps to have just that basic information that when we're playing our instrument, no matter what it is, we're really telling our brains and, you know, sort of the motor neurons in our brains. This is what I want to do every single time, you know. So when I play my long tones every day, which I do, I make sure I breathe diaphragmatically. There's myelin wrapping around diaphragmatic deep breathing. I support, I set my embouchure, I sing every single note that I'm playing. So there's all this myelin wrapping around all this healthy stuff. And I repeat things enough so that we get even more myelin wrapping around those

Starting point is 00:30:07 things so that those neurons fire more and more automatically. So basically every day when I'm warming up, it's sort of like I'm reminding my body how to play the horn. And you can apply this to any instrument warming up on any instrument um so it's when you know that information it's like so important what you're wrapping myelin around because myelin is completely dispassionate it doesn't care what you're wrapping it around uh if you're wrapping it around uh missing the same note in Till Eulenspiegel excerpt every time it'll be like oh Eli wants that and you know kind of wrapping around that so have you ever noticed that when you make a mistake a few times in a row that you're bound to make it again and again and again it's because of this myelin issue so

Starting point is 00:31:05 we want the myelin to be wrapping around the good stuff the healthy stuff what you want it to automatize. Yeah, this is great. It helps you. It tries to help you do what it thinks you want, correct? This is really great. And, you know, I love what you said about this example of having the wise teacher and, you know, the bad teacher chairs. This is, self-compassion is at the core of everything that I teach with the deep practice model. And it's so true. I sometimes have students give a name to the negative voice so they can give it an identity and then gives it give it an activity so okay you can go sit in the corner here i know you're trying to be helpful but i'm trying to work over here no that's great because it's like acknowledging that we all have that

Starting point is 00:32:00 negative voice inside of us we all have sort of a critical thing going on but we don't have to sort of amplify that voice. We can acknowledge it and just say, okay, go sit over there while we do some work. You can have a rest period. Eli, you've written an incredible book for brass players titled Horn Playing from the Inside Out. And now I'm going to read the description I saw on your website where you deconstruct brass playing and present specific methods to improve technique musicianship practicing audition taking managing performance anxiety and expressing authentic emotion through sound that sounds like a book i need to read except i don't play horn but i could still learn a lot um and i would love for us to talk about that

Starting point is 00:32:57 last one expressing authentic emotion through sound if that's okay with you i know you include elements of the Stanislavski method in your teaching. Can you please tell us more about that, this approach of expressing authentic emotion through sound? Yeah, and I do think that there are parts of the book that a lot of musicians could get stuff out of, like this part. So when I went to Eastman, there were a lot of teachers who would say, you know, just sing it, Or, you know, this needs to be more espressivo. And I remember thinking, what do you mean? You know, like expressing what?

Starting point is 00:33:43 And nobody ever really got beyond espressivo, espressivo. And, you know, so I am the kind of person that I'm like trying to figure things out all the time. And I thought, so expressing what? But so you take, I don't know, an orchestral excerpt like Tchaikovsky's fifth, second movement horn solo, you know, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. And so my teachers would say, espracivo. Okay. Thank you. but uh so i i wanted to figure out a way to not only for me but to help my students be able to

Starting point is 00:34:38 get beyond that and be able to really get into the weeds of what is expressive about this what What is Tchaikovsky trying to express here? So before I get into Stanislavski, I want to tell you about the Music for People organization, which is a very cool group of people. It was started by a guy named David Darling, who just passed away, unfortunately, maybe a month ago, but he was a cello player with the Paul Winter Consort, and he and Bonnie Insull started these improvisation workshops to help. It was almost like healing people from bad experiences that they had in music when they were younger. So, for example, there might

Starting point is 00:35:40 be people who come to these workshops whose third grade teacher told them that they were tone deaf and couldn't sing on key. And David's point of view was nobody's tone deaf, you know, just lacking in experience. And so after I left the Cleveland Orchestra, one of my first things to do was to go to one of these workshops because I wanted to get off the page and uh and I didn't know what to expect but uh my son had been teaching in this camp and he heard from one of the other music teachers in this camp that this was a good good group of people music for people and so I went and they had this really interesting concept of uh that they're they're two different kinds of energy in music fire energy and water energy and within fire energy there's two energies yay

Starting point is 00:36:40 and hey and so yay is like handles hallelujah chorus from the messiah you know like hallelujah Ah, you know, this incredible, you know, jubilant feeling. And the, hey, feeling is more like host Mars from the planets. You know, like. Great example. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. You know, really ominous, really threatening, really aggressive and um and then there was ooh energy or water energy and and those were the

Starting point is 00:37:31 the gentler feelings um quietly joyful like silent night say or summertime from Gershwin's Porgy and Beth. And so like melancholy, sad, quietly joyful, tender, gentle, all these sort of softer feelings. And so what I did in my book was I made lists of adjectives for yay energy and hey energy and ooh energy and um and I was sort of playing off there was this fantastic viola teacher from a generation or two ago named Karen Tuttle who um you know was very famous in the viola world and she had lists of adjectives and I was like uh I had a friend who studied with Karen Tuttle and I said can I look at her list you know and it was along the same lines and I was like encouraged by that so I took her list and I added to her list and um so if you look at my

Starting point is 00:38:44 list that's in my book under ooh energy you can take the Tchaikovsky fifth solo and say okay what are some good ooh energy words for that well loving tender gentle yearning um wistful all of these things because it's romantic music it's like the complicated human condition that's never just happy or sad and you know it's like happy but tinge of sadness you know or sad but a little bit of happiness in it. And so, and then the question Stanislavski might ask is, well, when have you felt that way? When have you felt loving and tender and yearning yet wistful? And, you know, so we delve into our emotional memory. And, you know, that's one of the main methods that Stanislavski used with actors. He was this guy who knew Tchaikovsky, actually, went to dinner with

Starting point is 00:39:53 Tchaikovsky in Russia. And his whole thing was like deconstructing how acting works, because he wanted to be a great actor. And he knew that there were just natural actors out there who could do it, who could convince you that they were this other character, who could make you cry with their performances, but they didn't know how they did it, really. So he was kind of deconstructing the whole acting thing and wrote these three books. And that would be another book that I would recommend, Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, which is sort of all the basic stuff. So using emotional memory, we can go into our own stories. When have I felt that way who do I miss you know like my grandmother Frida comes to mind and you know so when I'm

Starting point is 00:40:50 playing this Tchaikovsky fifth solo I can think of my grandmother and you know the really close times that we had together and that I loved her very much and that I miss her very much now And what happens when we do that is all this, it's what Stanislavski calls activating the subconscious, consciously activating the subconscious. And so all these subconscious things start happening. And rather than having the teacher say, well, it'll sound more beautiful if you make this note longer or if you just delay this diminuendo or whatever, it's more like all these spontaneous things happen with our playing. that you know in the performance we we just don't know why we're doing it but you know people will come up to you afterwards and say i got chills when i heard you play that solo um i don't know how you did that and and i might say well i don't know how i did that either because um i was using

Starting point is 00:42:06 this story in my mind just like an actor would use their own experience so that's basically how emotional memory works and you know there's other methods like the magic if and if you want i can talk about the magic if yes let's hear about that ah the magic if just i f you heard it right So the magic if happens when you don't actually have an experience like I was just describing, and yet you have to be really authentic in your expression. So I was conducting a sectional at NEC on Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, and this was a piece that Shostakovich wrote when he was very scared of Stalin and the old story of having his suitcases packed by the front door just in case the KGB was knocking on the door. And, I mean, like, he was deathly afraid, like, most of the time. And yet the government was sort of, you know, he was unpopular because he had just written the Fourth Symphony,

Starting point is 00:43:28 which was, you know, really people would look at it and think it was kind of negative and depressing. And so he was supposed to write a piece that was more nationalistic and more joyful. Well, he sort of was able to write something that on the surface sounded sort of nationalistic and joyful, but under the surface was really quite critical of the government. And so there's, you know, in the first movement, there's this theme. theme. It's like, and, you know, in the brass, it comes back, and it's just absolutely brutal and relentless. And so I said to the group, I mean, they were very proficient, and it was in

Starting point is 00:44:22 tune and together and everything like that. But I said, you know, it's missing something. you guys have to sound way more brutal and for that we're going to use the magic if and so you have to imagine being the most ruthless person in the world who just has just doesn't care about anyone but himself and you have to imagine you know how would this person open the door how would this person walk into the room how would this person talk to you and um and so let's pretend you know i know most of you are not ruthless like that so let's just pretend we are and you know then when we did that passage again it was like it made the the hair on the back of my neck just stand up on end and you know it was just so powerful and that's it's it's

Starting point is 00:45:21 It's so much fun to conduct because you can do stuff like that and see, you know, the effect of, you know, the magic if times like 35 people. And so it's like two different methods that work very well with classical musicians. I think we do those quite readily. I love this so much. And I think that many of my listeners would find it so useful to have this process in mind when they try to approach musicality next time. And also, I think they should probably get your book. Eli, before I let you go, how about a round of rapid fire questions? Oh, yes, the lightning round. I like to joke that it's never that quick, though. what is a habit that you have that you think contributed to your success um so i'm very disciplined and you know i do my long tones every day and i'm like the kind of person who likes to be in the weeds it reminds me of something that i heard that gail williams said

Starting point is 00:46:29 gail gail played associate principal horn in the chicago symphony for a long time a fantastic musician and something I heard that she said was you have to fall in love with practicing you have to fall in love with practicing and I really like being in the weeds and figuring things out and you know just adjusting things little bit by little bit and then wrapping myelin around them when I figured it out and you know the whole process of practicing um is something that there's something about my personality that um I actually do enjoy and um you know I I love digging once the technical stuff has sort of worked out I love digging into the feelings of things and really looking beyond the notes to you know what was

Starting point is 00:47:25 the purpose of the composer what was he or she trying to say here and um you know and then look into their past into their biographies what was going on in the composer's life when he or she wrote this uh this piece and um how can i use that when i'm thinking about the emotional memory how can I think of a place in my life that's similar to what was going on in the composer's life because I really think there's like this triangle going on between the composer and the performer and the audience and it's like if you think of something like Beethoven Moonlight Sonata piano sonata you know it's this this really lonely really dejected like we're at three o'clock in the morning you know and nobody else is awake and there's the candle on the piano and uh here's

Starting point is 00:48:39 Beethoven just like crying his eyes out and you know you get to a great pianist and they know that they have to think of their own experience of feeling, you know, that lonely, that dejected, that, you know, grieving of something. And, you know, when the performer is really tapping into what the composer was going through when he or she wrote the music originally, then the audience picks up on that

Starting point is 00:49:16 and and the audience feels understood it's like oh I have felt that way too at three o'clock in the morning you know this is part of the human experience and that's why people like Beethoven have lasted so long that's why people can still relate to his music even though it was like 200 years ago, or over 200 years ago. He's the same human being that we are now. Eli, I'm not going to help the process being fast, because I want to bring up something that I'm noticing that I think is important, is you brought up the word rigor many times. But I feel like sometimes people associate the word rigor with rigidity, and they're not the same. And when i hear you talk about rigor i see it in all of the most beautiful ways and i think that you

Starting point is 00:50:13 illustrate that so well by talking about you know discipline it's rigor is more like a purpose and and um you know a disciplined purpose if i can say and you talk about loving practicing dedication listening to music you know and i just love to hear you say this because i want people to understand that one can be rigorous in such a loving and supple and self-compassionate and loving way thank you so much for um illustrating that so beautifully for us yeah it's like it's like the hard work comes from caring from from really wanting to do a beautiful job you know not for fame and fortune or anything like that but just because wow you know Schubert wrote this piece and I want to play it as best as I possibly can so that means that I have to really you know

Starting point is 00:51:15 practice it in a way that's going to allow me to play it the way I see fit and you know and be able to do that consistently not just once in a while but you know you play in the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston Symphony it's like okay four performances of the Schubert Unfinished Symphony how do you have that much control well you have to you know just keep really working at it but in this it is kind of a loving caring kind of way that you want to do really well because it's the right thing to do. I love this. What skills do you think, and you've offered many so far, but what skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to play their instrument? Yeah, that's a great question. I think a couple of things. I

Starting point is 00:52:20 I mean, I teach this course on optimal performance at NEC Prep, and I teach it because when I was, you know, I told you I won those competitions to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I remember feeling, you know, nervous about playing in front of this very, you know, famous orchestra and feeling like, well, there's no one I can really talk to about this. and you know I think I did well in those performances but you know there were points when I felt uncomfortable and anxious and and and I thought you know we really need to talk

Starting point is 00:53:02 about this this is such a taboo subject and so right now um there the NEC prep is having me do a workshop for the kids in the youth philharmonic orchestra which is there's like highest level orchestra. It's like an elective that they can take. So I have about 30 students in this. And I think the skills that Don Green espouses in his book, Performance Success, are really important to practice. And he will tell you that in his book, you know, this idea of what do we do with the adrenaline response um what are the best ways of dealing with this i mean like the the best attitude would be that it's normal to have an adrenaline response and you know so my heart is beating faster how do i slow that down well with deep diaphragmatic breathing what do i do with my

Starting point is 00:54:02 muscle tension in um the i mean basically don is saying you know most of the mistakes that we make as musicians we make because of tension muscle tension and i think that's true certainly true in my case and it's like if we practice this muscular tension reduction technique like i did a youtube video called relaxation before performance where i have you know the one that i do every day and i have done every day for like 30 years um it's like if you practice those things then you wrap myelin around the relaxation response so when you're sitting on the stage of symphony hall and you have a solo coming up you can sit and horn players can do this because we have lots of rests and go through that whole routine because when you're practiced at it you can actually do it

Starting point is 00:54:57 quite quickly and then you know kind of be at your best be at your most you know least amount of muscle tension so that you can perform the way you want to perform. So I would say that those skills are really important for, you know, high school and college students to learn and to feel like they're just as important as playing my scales. That if I spend 10 minutes on this every day, it's a really worthwhile 10 minutes. I would also say improvisation is a really good skill to you know just get familiar with not not really jazz improvisation because there are just as many rules and scales or more more modes and scales and jazz improvisation than in classical but that really helped me understand music in a whole different way and really look at you know here's

Starting point is 00:55:58 this horn solo in a Dvorak symphony guess what Dvorak was improvising on the piano when he wrote that you know so you sort of wonder you know why did he write it that way and it's like because it came to him as an improvisation just like you know Bach and Mozart and Bruckner you know were all incredible improvisers. I think classically trained young musicians sort of don't hear about that. And that, I think, kind of frees us up to think of, okay, well, these are the notes on the page, but they were all improvised at one point before they were written down. Right. Oh, thanks for this. How about a quick actionable tip that listeners could implement today in their musical lives?

Starting point is 00:56:52 Oh, I thought about the actionable tip, and I wrote it down, so I better look at it. Right. Okay. I challenge everyone to write a mission statement. So I teach this course at NEC called The Entrepreneurial Musician, and that's one of the first assignments in the course. to really write a mission statement and answer questions like, what are the talents and skills I've been given?

Starting point is 00:57:28 What am I wired to do? What on earth am I here for? How can I make the world a better place? And many other questions like that. And when we go into sort of the deep purpose into why we're doing what we're doing, what motivates us the most, what really turns us on the most about music and what we're doing, then, you know, it can be like this really flexible document for the rest of our lives that we can look at, you know, like every New Year's Eve or something like that, and just see

Starting point is 00:58:17 how am I doing with my mission statement? Like every corporation, every organization, every music school has a mission statement. And, you know, if you go online, you can just type in music school mission statement and find the mission statement. And it helps organizations make decisions about you know what's their next move it helps them know if they're keeping on track they look at their mission statements and they see you know is this part of my mission statement still relevant or have I changed and so I think I've used this in my career um I mean I I've always loved performing and expressing emotion through music and so playing in the Cleveland Orchestra was a big part of that playing a lot of chamber music

Starting point is 00:59:19 in my career has been a big part of that but it's it's like at at one point in my career like 15 years ago I decided you know I think I can do this in a different way than playing in an orchestra because in an orchestra all you have is your horn sound if you're a horn player and you know that is a big part of the sound of the orchestra but I thought well you know I have a lot that I want to talk about I have a lot that I want to share you know a lot of my inner world a lot of my inner life, inner musical life and spiritual life that I want to share with people, that I want to share with students, that I want to share with audiences when I do these inside out concerts. And I don't have enough time or bandwidth to do that while I'm still in this

Starting point is 01:00:17 major orchestra job, which is, you know, sort of all consuming. And so that's why I left. I wanted to have more time for my creative work and have more time to get into this regenerative aspect of my career. And that's when I had time to complete my book and get into all this other stuff with the MRI horn study, which is a whole other story, but which has profoundly changed how I've taught brass and really helped me write the book that I wanted to write starting a long, long time ago. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about this book? Because it really sounds to me like what I read about it, that this is going to be a canon for all brass players. That would be nice.

Starting point is 01:01:14 Um, yeah, I mean, I, there, there are lots of good horn books out there and, and, and good brass books out there. And, you know, when, when I was first in the Cleveland Orchestra, you know, I had, I said, you know, we were recording the whole classical symphonic canon and, and we'd have to repeat things over and over and over again, because that's what you do. when you record anything. And, you know, sort of, I had to figure out, you know, how do you play the trio from Mozart Symphony No. 40, 20 times in a row, and do it really as well as I could each time. And I had to sort of figure out a lot of stuff about my own horn playing. And so I did. I sort of did all this stuff, all this work and stuff about

Starting point is 01:02:17 vowels and where my tongue released from on the teeth or above the teeth and, you know, how I supported and just all this technical stuff. And, you know, then I started teaching at summer festivals, Aspen and Music Academy of the West, and I sort of whipped the stuff on my students. And, you know, at CIM also, I taught at Cleveland Institute, and I was like, does this not just work for me? Does it work for other people too? And I found, yes, it works for other people. And I wasn't reading a lot of this stuff in these other books, some of it, but not in such detail. And I wanted to put it down on paper, and then after I moved to Boston, I got involved in this sort of scientific study that I could never have even imagined. uh i i did an inside out concert in boston and this guy came up to me afterwards and

Starting point is 01:03:28 he introduced himself peter iltis and he he was a horn professor and still is at gordon college which is a small college north of boston and he wasn't just a horn professor but he was a professor of kinesiology, which is the study of movement. And Peter took a sabbatical and he said, can you teach my students? And I said, sure. So we kind of got acquainted that way. And one day he called me up. He said, you know, can we have coffee? Because I have a really interesting thing to talk to you about. And so he was involved in this study. This is kind of a long story, but I'll try to make it more concise. He was involved in the study about embouchure dystonia, which he actually had, which is a task-specific neurological disorder that makes the muscles of the face sort of seize

Starting point is 01:04:35 up when you start trying to play the horn or even put a mouthpiece close to your lips. And so he had done some work on this, and he was at a medical conference, and these two German scientists came up to him and said, you know, we have this interesting technology, and we wanted to involve you uh and the technology was called this flash mri technology which is basically f mri only it's done in very rapid succession so they have the capability of taking 100 mri pictures per second so in effect we had movies of what's going on like inside the mouth or in the throat or in the lungs, we could actually see movements

Starting point is 01:05:33 that had never been seen before. And so here we are having coffee, and Peter said, can you help me design this experiment? And we've got the whole horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic who is on board, and they're willing to volunteer because Göttingen was like a two-hour train ride

Starting point is 01:05:55 from Berlin. And so we created this whole protocol, and then they started doing this fMRI, making these MRI movies of all of these very high-level horn players. um berlin philharmonic canadian brass marie louise neunecker's really famous german uh horn soloist uh frank lloyd um lots of people like we had 12 people in this very high level and i was in that group as well and uh and i thought to myself well you know i came up with all this technique and i don't know if it's just me if it's just sort of idiosyncratically me and everybody the first horn player in the berlin phil does it his way and sarah willis does it her way and we're all doing different things inside our mouths and

Starting point is 01:06:59 and what what we found was that actually of all those 12 people everyone was doing the same movement patterns with their tongues. As they went up the harmonic series, they were in effect making the oral cavitation smaller and smaller and smaller as they went up higher on the harmonic series into the high register. And they were also moving their jaws in this very predictable way as they went into the low register to create a larger oral cavitation and and I was like oh my gosh I mean I had no idea and this points to pedagogy that you know if these people in the average age of all those people was like 50 years old at the time so they had already been playing professionally for like 30 years and so it's like there's the sustainable part you know they've been healthy

Starting point is 01:08:03 horn players playing at the highest level not just technically great but beautiful musicians you know artistically fantastic and um and so what's really cool about the the e-book version So in the third edition of this book, just print book, I put in a lot of these images, these still images, but the e-book version, which just came out like three weeks ago on Apple Books, has these MRI films embedded, and they're like illuminating the text. I'm like describing stuff and then I'm like watch this video watch this person who's very high level moving their tongue higher and higher and higher in this mouth in their mouth you know watch as this person moves their jaw lower and lower as they go to the pedal notes of the horn and it points to all this body mapping that um is is is amazingly consistent among those 12 people so um i'm very excited to present this because it it not only describes it in words and still

Starting point is 01:09:31 images but we have these movie movies of things that people had not seen before like six years ago. And since I teach a brass pedagogy class, and I know that there, you know, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, there's like, I'm trying to cover a lot of those learning modalities. So it's not just words that you read, but it's images, and it's movies that you watch, and you hear the sound as you watch those movies. And there are some recordings that I did that, like on orchestral excerpts, and I sort of explain how to practice

Starting point is 01:10:19 these orchestral excerpts. So for the auditory people, there's something. For the visual people, there's something. For the kinesthetic people, there's other things like finger breathing and lifting chairs to feel what it feels like to have really healthy breath support. This sounds like such an invaluable resource for everyone because like you said body mapping can be so powerful. Well it's so important and when we know exactly what's got to move and how it's got to move then it we tend to be less tense physically because like if we

Starting point is 01:11:01 for example if we're struggling with you know how do you play softer and we think you play softer by squeezing your lips together and creating tension here well the tension gets into the sound But if you see the MRI film that's showing this elite horn player making a diminuendo and his tongue is rising on the diminuendo and sort of acting as a baffle for the airstream that's coming up from the lungs, it's like, wait a minute, I don't have to be tense in the middle of my lips anymore. I can just leave them free to vibrate. And that's how you get a beautiful pianissimo sound that's really singing and really clear and focused. So when are we getting started on the violin version of this? Well, that's not my field. Eli Epstein, thank you so much for spending this time with me today and sharing this incredible wisdom,

Starting point is 01:12:05 these powerful and important concepts with my listeners. Oh, it's my great pleasure. It's really fun to talk about this stuff. And thanks so much for having me. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Eli Epstein. I would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were.

Starting point is 01:12:35 So get in touch with me. I'm mindoverfinger on both Instagram and Facebook and share your thoughts on those topics. As always, I'll have all the information related to this episode in the show notes. You can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com where you can find also more information about mindful and efficient practice, performance preparation and how to work with me. Speaking of which, the doors are open to enroll for the Music Mastery Experience, my life-changing, highly personalized group coaching program. Over the course of three months, I take you through a massive transformation in your music making. We cover tangible and very effective practicing and performance preparation techniques, mindsets that will optimize your playing, and I give you a real process to reach peak performance for those auditions and those concerts that are coming back, and to truly enjoy the entire experience of making music. Here's what Jamie had to say about the Music Mastery experience. Thank you so much for offering the MME course.

Starting point is 01:13:45 It truly was life-changing. It was a challenge many days to face old mindsets and open doors that had been locked and hidden inside of me. But this was just what I needed to do to be able to use the tools and mindsets that you presented in the course. Thank you for guiding me to be a better person and musician. Thank you, Jamie. In the Music Mastery Experience, you can get exactly what you need to create your ideal musical experience whether it's winning an audition performing optimally time after time leveling up your career or exploring new areas of your playing and you're going to do all of this while finding meaning and enjoyment in the whole process so if you have big dreams big plans and you're ready for more in your musical life book a call today

Starting point is 01:14:40 at mindoverfinger.com and let's make it happen. So that's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 095 Eli Epstein: Music Making from the Inside Out

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