I quit pursuing a career as a trumpet-player in the summer of 2001. This was after a year in the trumpet Master’s program at Indiana University, and as I watched (or, rather, heard) people play circles around me and realized I had technical problems that should have been ironed out when I was 19, and not 23, this seemed like a good point to, as we said, Do Something Else. I’ve written about that collection of neuroses before, but the today’s story is what happened about a month after I put down then horn.
I had a wedding to play. Most trumpeters who last as long as I did develop a repertoire of short works to play at weddings; processionals, recessionals, fanfares, and other such flashy-sounding but not all that difficult pieces. I was no different. I could toss off a trumpet voluntary, put the trumpet back in its case, grab my check and be on my way while the families and friends were still waving to the bride and groom on their way to the reception. It was simple, and all was well with the world. Bridesmaids inevitably swooned.
Without the pressure to make a career out of the trumpet impelling me to practice daily, I did what any self-respecting student would do: I stopped practicing. (I also was taking summer-school classes to get caught up on my musicology coursework.*) This was not wise.
The wedding was for my best friend Michael Cox, whom I’d known since we were both undergraduates at Butler University. He was marrying his childhood sweetheart near Richmond, Indiana. The pianist for the occasion was another of our friends, Greg Sanders, who’s now a professional pianist/accompanist in Indianapolis. This was a labor of love and no one was getting paid, is what I’m trying to say.
The weekend of the wedding arrived, and both Greg and I had driven to Richmond to stay there for the weekend. He and I had rehearsed in Indianapolis, I think, and no major problems had presented themselves: the piece didn’t go very high, and since this processional was basically a glorified march, we weren’t going to lose each other.
At the wedding rehearsal, the processional was fine. The recessional was fine. Maybe I wasn’t as secure as I would have liked, but it sounded bright and happy and vaguely Masterpiece Theater-ish, which is all anyone expects from these sort of things. All that was left was the wedding itself.
An explanation: When you stop playing a brass instrument, your lung capacity plummets. The result is that you can’t play for as long without taking a breath. Since you are breathing more frequently, you are not going to be very efficient with what air you do have. And finally, when you aren’t very efficient, your lips aren’t supported and you press the mouthpiece harder into them in a frantic bid to maintain the pressure they should be getting from the air, from the opposite direction, and they get more tired because they are having a piece of brass ground into them. This is my theory on what happens when brass players stop playing for any length of time, and therefore my theory for what happened next.
Morning of the wedding, spend some time playing scales and exercises, feeling pretty good. In the wedding, sitting with trumpet beneath pew, warm Indiana afternoon. Smiles everywhere. Time to go up to the front of the small church for the processional. No time to tune with the piano because that would be coarse.
First phrase, the one that doesn’t go very high, no problem. Second phrase, the one that ascends to a high A, it’s not a high A. It’s A-ish. Rest of phrase a blur. Third and fourth phrases bear resemblance to processional as written.
Have to repeat entire piece due to bride walking at a pace that must surely rival that of the glacier as it carved its way south through here thousands of years ago. High A this time is more of a foggy bleating sound, like a piccolo, emasculated foghorn with an inferiority complex. All is getting dark as light seems to be receding from the church.
I told Michael after the fact that I owed him a steak dinner, which I was able to follow through on for him and Jeannette 2 1/2 years ago in Dayton, Ohio, where they now live. Dinner was followed by a screening of Talladega Nights. We still keep in touch, and were it not for a work-related disaster that demanded my attention and cost me hours of sleep over the most recent holidays, I would have seen them then. And we could all have laughed over the time Jeannette walked up the aisle to a sound that hasn’t been heard from since.
*I wrote a paper on Motown and the civil-rights movement while sitting next to my apartment complex’s pool that summer, but that’s a story for another time.