Ian Bousfield: Unlocking the Trombone Code Ian Bousfield | Page 11

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Chapter one:
Listening

There are many different ways in which people listen to music. We listen to the notes, and
as trombonists, we listen out for the techniques involved, which is a little boring, really. If we
want to grow as musicians, we must learn to listen with our hearts. That means identifying the
emotion which hearing music creates within us. From this, we can learn. So, rather than listening
to a piece of music technically, listen to it emotionally. What emotions does the music summon
up within you? It might seem strange at first, but after you’ve been doing it for a while, it will
become a fluent language for you. Once you get access to your emotions in this way, you can
have an emotional data bank, which you can use in your own performance.
Our imagination is an incredibly powerful tool, and our trombone playing can be a
representation of this imagination. Of course, we can train our imagination by listening. But when
we’re practising, we should concentrate on what we want to hear, not on what we are hearing.
Certainly, we should listen to what we are doing, but if we listen to what has already happened,
the feedback is getting to us too late. We should instead be concentrating on what we want to
hear: sending messages from our brain — and heart — to our body, telling it what we want to
happen. In this way, I believe, we can improve what we do on a permanent basis. It is almost,
then, as if our imagination can form the template for what we want to happen, as a musician.

What is Music?
Emotion

Music is a communication art form. What draws almost everybody I know to music is, in my
opinion, the recognition of music’s ability to communicate, without words, heartfelt and deep
emotion to the listener and perhaps even to articulate notions of other experiences, other soundworlds. As a trombonist, indeed as any kind of musician, we cannot express an emotion in
music if we do not feel it ourselves whilst performing. And we certainly cannot if we haven’t
experienced these emotions ourselves. Some students talk to me very honestly about this. They
say that they have very great difficulty being expressive. In such cases, the problem almost always
relates to the student not actually feeling the emotion as they play. Although, emotion is not
something that we can just expect to happen in performance, I would argue. We have to practise
it.
If we were studying acting, we would not simply practise our lines coldly, day after day. We
would, rather, be practising how to deliver our lines: to articulate the meaning held within the
language on the page. It is exactly the same in music. Every time we play, the question is “how
do I express the emotion in this music?” Firstly, we have to feel this, even when we’re practising.
The second thing is, never ever to practise. I am not the first person to say this, but I never
practise. I only perform. Whether it is to nobody, or ten thousand people, everything that I do on
the trombone is a performance, displaying some kind of emotion.
After years of recalling and using emotions whilst we play, we develop a kind of emotion archive,
which we can dip into, at will, almost as a golfer would choose a club for a certain situation.
Basically, somewhere within those lines and dots on the page, and all of the mathematics that
Unlocking the Trombone Code