If Louis Maggio was from a different planet, Carmine Caruso was from a different universe. He
must have been from "out of town" because he observed profundity in things that everybody else took for
granted, and magically used those simple observations to help a large number of players with broken down
embouchures restore and improve their abilities.
I first looked inside the Caruso book, "Musical
Calisthenics for Brass," (MCFB) back in August, 2001. Other than noticing a few clever analogies, my
main reaction was, where's the beef? There was a short introductory section, followed by some lightweight
"Four rules," (beat your foot, keep mouthpiece on lips, keep airstream steady, breathe through nose)
followed by some exercises, with a little text thrown in here and there, and some biographical notes
(heartfelt) at the end.
It seemed to clearly be one of those "duh" books that most players
would look at once and never open again.
Enter Charly Raymond, who I had developed a friendship
with via the Trumpet Herald forum. He had earlier berated me (privately) for not including Mr. Caruso
in my Reviews page, saying that I hadn't given Caruso any credit for influencing the thinking in my book.
His words surprised me, as I had never read Caruso, and was totally unfamiliar with his pedagogy. But
Charly was so sure of the similarities between methods, that I got interested and did some homework (the
same thing happened when I learned about Ghitalla).
Anyway, when I asked about MCFB, Charly
pointed out that I was glossing over what was actually the ESSENCE of the method: The Four rules, more
specifically, the first rule, which had to do with keeping time.
Charly, a long-time Caruso
student, explained.
"When I first studied with Carmine, I asked him which or the four rules
was the most important. He immediately said 'timing.' It took me a couple of years to understand what
he meant. When practicing, his order was 'Don't think.' Don't think about your lips, the air, the diaphragm,
the corners, the tongue - nothing. Except one thing. He allowed you to think about your foot and concentrate
on your timing. He believed that muscles become conditioned faster by subjecting the demand being placed
on them to time."
Now, this was very interesting! From my perspective, what Caruso figured
out was a way to use our common ordinary rhythmic sense (foot tapping and counting) to bypass the "thinking
mind," (with all of it's fears and biases) and instead go directly into the unconscious mind. In theory,
you become a slave to the rhythm of a precise footbeat, as your body is constantly prompted at each split
second to automatically make the coordinated adjustments necessary to complete the task (play the horn).
There is no time to think (or freeze, or worry) as maintaining the rhythm forces you to act.
The idea of accessing more unconscious mind response to speed up learning is nothing new. Actually,
most embouchure development methods head in this direction, including my own. It is generally accepted
that the unconscious mind is akin to a natural body intelligence which already knows how to do everything,
but is constantly thwarted or distorted by the filters of the conscious mind.
More about the
unconscious mind and filters in a future essay.
To me, the most powerful effect of his process
was how it dissolves fear. Fear is the great multiplier of embouchure problems. What Caruso did was
create a procedure (both in his personality and in the exercise process) where there was simply no room
for fear. By focusing on rhythm only, and by doing the calisthenic exercises as prescribed (without
expectation of results or thoughts of embouchure manipulation), his students were forced to be in the
moment, dealing with the immediate situation.
How important is this? Almost every email question
I receive is based on fear. Since my book is pretty self explanatory, and most players can do the exercises
accurately, I've found that my main email role is to hold a players hand, and reassure him or her that
all is well, especially when tweaking the lip position. Players tend to fear ANY experimentation, because
they've heard so many times that "so and so" is bad, or that "so and so" will harm you. For many players,
the fear then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Caruso knew this. So, he created very effective
exercises and discovered an equally effective way to bypass the psychological barriers of common, everyday
fear, thereby allowing the exercises to do their work.
By the way - although Caruso attempted
to de-emphasize thinking about embouchure, he was very much a lip position guy. His belief about the
mechanics and relative importance of the lips was parallel to ideas presented in "The Balanced Embouchure."
I want to thank Charly Raymond for opening my eyes to the greatness of Mr. Caruso. I recommend
the book, although the organization of it is somewhat vague ( as in not knowing when to change exercises,
how long to spend on each, what order to do them in, etc.). To get around that problem, simply check
out the Caruso forum that Charly moderates, at www.trumpetherald.com.
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