Thanksgiving Reflections
Tuesday, November 28, 2023 by Billy Roberts | Reflection
With thanksgiving behind us, I am thankful for many things this holiday season. I’ve enjoyed watching my kids grow and helping them with piano and math. I’ve seen my oldest nephew get married. With horn and voice, I’m finally finding that balance of enjoying music without letting it dominate my life. I would love to have more time each day for piano, horn, and voice, but I’m treasuring the moments I have with family and also reading a lot more. French is going well. I’m not aiming for conversational French at this time. Instead, I’m just enjoying my bilingual Bible and slowly becoming more familiar with it through daily reading and listening to audio.
I’m also gaining a more consistent approach to the breath with singing, horn playing, and speaking which carries over into better sleep and relaxation in general. Although piano gets its own practice time, I’ve begun practicing the horn and voice together. I’ll play for a few minutes, then sing for a few minutes, and so forth. I used to feel like playing and singing were so different in terms of mechanics of the throat that I had very little luck trying to go back and forth between the two in the same session. However, I now believe that if the voice and embouchure are working properly, it should be very easy to switch between the two.
I once had a very well educated pedagogue tell me that a good way to develop embouchure is to take in a good breath through the nose and then play the horn with that set. I had another equally qualified horn player tell me that the nose should not be involved in horn playing, that everything depended on the throat. I can see where both points of view come from. In singing, there is a sensation known as the mask resonance where the voice is placed neither in the nose nor stuck in the throat. I find that if I have that feeling of singing properly, my embouchure is in the right place when I pick up the horn.
I think finding that optimal placement is a model for finding balance in life. So often, we strive to do what we think is necessary in order to meet our goals when all we need to do is slow down and listen to the Maker who sets our lives in order. On Thanksgiving day I listened to Matthieu 6 several times via an online French audio Bible. The same passage I’d heard over and over spoke fresh to me as I heard it in another language. When we recognize that God is the source of everything we need, we find that it is all right there if we will come to him in prayer with thanksgiving.
Summer Reflections
Friday, July 28, 2023 by Billy Roberts | Reflection
As another summer heads to a close, I’m thankful for the extra family time and opportunities for reflection that I’ve had over the past two months. It’s also been nice having the freedom to practice whatever I feel like without a structured routine or deadlines. Growth in some areas may stall over the summer, but being able to explore other interests makes it worth it. While I’ve cut back tremendously on my personal amount of horn playing and singing, I’m really enjoying my routines with piano and learning French.
I’m beginning a year-long certificate program in piano pedagogy in August, and I’m looking forward to being better able to serve piano students as well as gaining knowledge that will carry over to other areas. Teaching in general is a very interdisciplinary field. Gaining a better understanding of teaching in any specialty carries over into better teaching in other areas. Ultimately, it’s all about learning how to communicate and connect with the students. I'm enjoying the journey.
Reflections from Italy
Monday, July 25, 2022 by Billy Roberts | Reflection
This blog is a bit different because I was on vacation with my family for most of the first two weeks of this month. Before we left, I drafted a blog that I titled “Practicing When Fatigued,” where I wrote down thoughts about building embouchure strength through discipline, hard work, and not being afraid to sound bad, within reason, by learning how to push yourself without going too far. However, as I read over the draft last week, my mind was still on Italy. That other blog can wait.
We flew to Rome on Saturday, July 2, and enjoyed two and a half days of walking tours before boarding a cruise ship on Tuesday afternoon. This was the first time that I and my children had ever been to Europe, and we had been looking forward to the trip for months. Our eleven-day vacation consisted of two travel days with long airline flights, five days in Italy, two days in France, and two days in Spain.
As our trip neared its end, I had a strong desire to relearn German, which I had studied in high school, and come back to Europe someday after I had mastered those skills. As I sorted through memories over the next few days, I remembered that the reason I studied German in high school was for its culture of music. However, my heart was gripped as I thought about several homeless people that I had met on the streets of Italy but could not understand what they were saying. It did not take me long to decide that I really wanted to learn Italian, even though it is not as widely used as Spanish, French, or German, the languages that I have had some experience with in the past. I’ve also always thought that Italian is an incredibly beautiful language for singing.
Understanding Italian is more important for me right now than pursuing the study of any other language. After we had been in Italy for three or four days, I caught myself trying to put an Italian accent into some of my English phrases. It just seemed so much more natural and easier on the voice. I feel like with my background, it is the best gateway for me to understand European culture, language in songs, and other Romance languages should I someday want to learn more French or Spanish phrases.
Although I’ve sung in numerous languages over the years, I have to admit that I’ve put more work into pronouncing the words correctly than actually understanding what they mean. Sure, I always like to read through the translations a few times, but in order to really know a song you need to know what each word means as you sing it. Ultimately, I’m hoping that my study of Italian will continue to help me shed the bad vocal habits that came naturally with my Texas upbringing, fully get lost in Italian music the same way that I do when singing in English, and gain further appreciation for the culture of art and music that keeps us in touch with the past even as we move forward into a technology-oriented future.
