Brass Performance and Pedagogy

This complete book presents an approach to playing and teaching brass instruments that is based on the fundamental skills of good listening and good respiratory practices. It emphasizes the importance of developing these and other traditional skills—such as embouchure development, articulation, tone quality, range and stamina—through musical ideas rather than isolating on individual muscular behavior. Careful attention is paid to the natural way in which learning takes place in other skills and shows how such processes may be applied to learning to play a brass instrument.

Chapter topics cover the art of teaching, listening, developing a concept of sound, posture, breathing, mouthpiece playing, the warm-up, slurring, intonation, endurance, taking auditions, playing high pitched instruments, performance anxiety, and professional ethics.

For teachers who deal with brass students at all stages of development.

Keith Johnson is Regents Professor of Trumpet in the College of Music at the University of North Texas. He has been a soloist and clinician throughout the United States, Canada. Mexico, Europe, and Africa. His highly acclaimed first book, The Art of Trumpet Playing, is widely used throughout the world and has been translated into several languages.

Professor Johnson has performed with the Dallas Opera, the Dallas Symphony- the Fort Worth Symphony, the Cape Town Philharmonic, the Mexico City Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, and the New Hampshire Music Festival. He also plays Baroque trumpet with the Dallas Bach Society. Fort Worth Early Music, and the Orchestra of New Spain. Many of his former students hold orchestral and University positions throughout the world.