The Stepping Stone Approach

By Jeffrey Agrell

Imagine that the door to your house was suddenly six feet off the ground. You have to get in, there is no way around it. You’re in a hurry, so you run at the door full tilt and take a flying leap, trying to make it through in a single bound. Chances are good that result would be a juicy splat against the side of the house and the fracturing of something important. But you are determined. You are not one to give up easily. You think, I can do this. I will keep jumping at the door until I make it through.

As they say about winning an argument with an umpire, there are two chances that you would succeed in finally leaping through the door: slim and none. Ouch, you say, picking yourself up after the fifteenth try and noting that your leaps are now worse than when you began. There must be a better way.

There is: how much easier would it be to vault through the opening if you put down a concrete block first so that you don’t have so far to leap? Or two? Or six? Or twenty-seven? No-brainer answer: it would be a lot easier. If you took the time to lay down enough of these ‘stepping stones’, you could literally walk effortlessly through the door at last.

How often do we look at a new solo, etude, or excerpt and fling ourselves at it, expecting, or at least hoping to clear the difficulties in a single bound? We see the goal dangling tantalizingly before us: there they are, all the right notes, printed right there. The ideal tempo marking. The dynamics. The articulations and expressive markings. How easy it is to write a leap up to high C!

We need some musical stepping stones to help us attain our goals as effortlessly as concrete blocks would help us reach an elevated door. Here is the stepping stone theory in a nutshell: Whatever the difficulty of the piece, begin from a place that is easy and comfortable. Advance toward the goal in small, easily accomplished steps. This recalls Barry Tuckwell’s dictum: “Horn playing is easy. If it is not easy for you, you’re doing something wrong.”

Some ‘concrete’ suggestions for stepping stones:

1. In your first acquaintance with the piece, play through it and isolate the problem areas. These small chunks can be considered a series of microetudes, so to speak. They may be as brief measure or less, even two notes. Master them one at a time. Don’t play the whole piece until the microetudes are all perfected.

2. The first problem to solve is always rhythm. Work out and become completely familiar with the rhythms of each chunk (without the horn at first). Tip for help with really difficult rhythms, such as are found in contemporary music: enter the notes into a computer MIDI sequencer or notation program and have the program play them back. The great NY Philharmonic trombonist Joe Alessi said that this was how he learned an extremely difficult modern concerto.

3. To help almost every parameter, call on the Tempo Police: use a metronome to enforce slow tempos, starting slow enough that you can tap or play the rhythms and/or notes without hesitation. Amass great quantities of perfect repetitions. Then move the tempo up one notch and repeat. Gradually and effortlessly you will advance the metronome toward the final tempo goal. Intersperse mental practice (finger along as you think through it) with instrument practice. Speed will occur naturally and easily as the continued perfect repetitions reinforce the same neural pathway. Practice is like digging a trench to help water flow - every repetition is like scooping out some earth. If the scoop always occurs in the same place, the water will only be able to flow down that one deep trench. If there are shallow scraped grooves all over the place, well, you will never know where the water is going to flow and the result will be a mess.

4. If fingering is the problem (awkward combinations, sharp keys, etc), isolate (reduce size of area of focus), slow down, repeat (and repeat) in a relaxed and controlled manner.

5. If ‘hearing’ the pitch is the problem (e.g. in atonal music), ditto.

6. If range the problem, transpose down to a range that is comfortable. Gradually reduce the size of the transposition until you reach the original.

7. If endurance - which is often related to range - is the problem, transposing might be one answer; you could also build stepping stones by starting with a segment of a comfortable length and gradually increasing the length of the segment. Or, you could split the work up into do-able sections and rest between each; gradually decrease the amount of rest. Example: the horn solo from Midsummer Night’s Dream. You could play it first in horn in Bb basso. This is a kinder setting concerning endurance, but you can still master intervals, expression, dynamics, accuracy. When you can play the whole solo perfectly several times through, start again in horn in C. Continue to the original key of E and then go one better and do it in F. Or: play it in the original E only, but practice phrase length (or smaller) segments punctuated with rest until each is very solid. Progressively increase the size of the segments until the solo is whole and solid.

8. If a leap is the problem, reduce the size of the leap; gradually extend the leap until it reaches the original - and then go one step beyond if practical. If Example: if you’re having trouble with the C”-C”’ slur in Adagio and Allegro, start with a C”-D” slur. Easy, you say. Great. Then C-Eb”. Continue with patience, repetition, and rest until you reach your goal. Variation: practice the octave leap, but start an octave lower: C’-C”. Then Db’-Db”. And so on.

In general, the approach is the same for every kind of problem: work the individual problem chunks, then combine them, playing ever larger and larger sections, ‘knitting’ segments together until the entire piece is ‘seamless.’

Remember that commercial where a person “morphs” (metamorphoses smoothly) into a tiger before your very eyes? Construct a variation that you can do easily and well and use stepping stones (microetudes, metronome, transposition, etc.) to gradually morph your efforts into the final product. It may take time and practice to learn to come up with the right stepping stones at the right time, but after a while it will become second nature. Just remember not to start with the tiger.