I do Caruso, but you should not do Caruso.

Just Kidding! Do whatever works for you. There are as many paths to expertise as there are people hoping to get there. But, please don’t have your students do Caruso before thinking about it…a lot.

I once had an undergrad student in a Brass Methods class who was concurrently taking trumpet lessons outside of the class. This student was a total beginner to brass instruments. Within a few weeks of study, he casually mentioned to me that his teacher had assigned “6 notes”, a notoriously demanding little bedrock of the Caruso Method. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never in my life been worked up over pedagogy until this moment. Giving that exercise to a beginner trumpet player is, at best, deeply weird.

I have practiced various iterations of the Caruso Method for about 20 years. Most recently, I did strict Caruso (sequentially, straight out of the book) with Dominic Derasse in New York. Dominic is a powerhouse of a player. A New York gem. He can quite literally play anything in front of him. He was a student of Carmine’s. Whatever the hell Dominic is doing in the practice room is working for him but generalizing the practice materials of experts to the practice of beginners is fraught territory.

Before then, I worked with Laurie Frink. Laurie was also a student of Carmine’s but employed the concepts nimbly with precision. She never mentioned Caruso’s book to me. She would stare at my face a few feet from my bell as I played exercises for her, then lovingly write out and assign a new set of exercises to work on the following week. Almost like a trumpet nutritionist, she would check metabolic output once a week and expertly curate a meal plan for the next week or two. Empathy-forward teaching. She was a gift and I miss her often.

These two both taught versions of Caruso’s teaching that were helpful to me, but in very different ways. Like most pedagogical approaches, the Caruso method is interpreted and carried on in various forms by various people. In particular, Julie Landsman and Carolyn Wahl have taught some of the most successful horn players in the world using the Caruso Method. To better separate such gifted pedagogues from the method itself, I look to Caruso’s writing for a direct view of his thinking.

In the opening to his published book, “Musical Calisthenics for Brass”, Caruso offers perspective from an obviously curious and thoughtful teacher. He thought deeply and intuitively about the role of repetition in motor development. Some of what he writes is right in line with 21st century motor research. At some point in the future, I’ll do a full mark-up of these opening remarks with some links to research.

For this post though, I’ll simply look at the four rules through the lens of some related motor research. The rules (which are really three rules, as the fourth is clearly a subcomponent of the second) of the calisthenics in the book are intended to be followed for each of the exercises in the book:

1. Tap your foot

2. Keep the mouthpiece in contact with the embouchure throughout

3. Keep the blow steady

4. Breathe through your nose

1. Tap your foot.

This rule stands up in 2021. Caruso is transparent about these exercises being primarily coordinative. They are not muscle building activities; they are muscle coordinating activities.

There is plenty of motor research showing the social and musical benefits of rhythmic entrainment. Activity in the basal ganglia and the cerebellum primarily house the timing mechanisms that allow various muscles to fire in a coordinated way over time. Such coordination is central to behavior. Expert brass players have exquisitely organized motor control that is characterized by the precise force of muscle exertion at exactly the right time.  

With this, keeping an internal clock is good. Coordinating the movement of the foot with the movement of the air through an embouchure is clearly positive. Good start.

2. Keep the mouthpiece in contact with the embouchure throughout

This one gets complicated.

First, and perhaps most simply, even if this rule were to offer a clear motor advantage, I’ve seen it misinterpreted by too many players to justify its benefits. The way Caruso writes about this rule, it is clearly not designed to be any sort of isometric muscle contraction (i.e. keep the embouchure engaged to get stronger via hypertrophy). BUT, I’ve seen and heard too many students trying to build strength with this exercise. Aside from the problems that come from habituating a tired embouchure, at best this interpretation misses the point.

The potential benefits of this rule can be understood with language used by 20th century Soviet neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein. In watching the swings of blacksmiths, Bernstein saw consistent physical outcomes (hitting the mallet where intended) despite noticeable variations in the path the mallet took to the striking point. Expert blacksmiths had multiple pathways to accomplish the goal. Each joint involved in the movements (wrist, elbow, shoulder, scapula) could variably coordinate to hit the right spot. Bernstein thought of each joint as a degree of freedom. Much like their use in statistics, degrees of freedom are points of variability. Each point is a part of the process that has freedom to change the outcome.

One way to simplify a complex skill is to remove degrees of freedom. In fact, Bernstein theorized of a freezing/freeing paradigm wherein any learner of a skill naturally reduces (or freezes) degrees of freedom early in learning and over time introduces them back into the skill, (freeing) employing them more flexibly to meet hierarchically more valuable goals. Recent studies suggest that reducing a degree of freedom isn’t quite that simple but reducing the degrees of freedom during training can be a valuable tool in learning design (Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: a constraints led approach).

Pulling the mouthpiece off of the face is a naturally occurring activity that adds variability. It is a degree of freedom. Taking that action out of the process requires the learner to find other ways to get the same outcome. In other words, they begin to notice and use affordances in other processes. In Caruso’s case, when a student leaves the mouthpiece on the lips, they must find a solution to how to get to the next note without being able to remove the mouthpiece from the embouchure. They find a way that involves less movement. They find a more efficient solution.

Once those more efficient solutions are found, they are repeated, encouraging habituation. Then they can be used to accomplish other, more complex goals like playing difficult intervals with ease, control, and ultimately beauty.

This rule could be helpful but is likely most effective with careful and attentive oversight from a knowledgeable, thoughtful teacher. Absent that, this rule is ripe for confusion. If adopted as a part of daily practice over time, repeated iterations of unhealthy habits can be quite difficult to untangle.

3. Keep the Blow Steady

I think about this rule often, waiting for something profound to come to me. It seems so obvious. What the hell else would we do with the blow? Has there been a student who read this and thought “What?! I thought a jacked up, asymmetric, angular air stream was what all the greats used”?

Then I think that maybe there’s something Zen about it. Like telling a living human to breathe as if they had a choice in the matter. But breathing is spectacular if you really pay attention to it. Maybe it’s a koan to produce the great doubt.

The most direct science critique about this rule also applies to most of the entire book: research in motor control shows pretty definitively that learners learn better and performers perform better when they stop focusing on what they are doing with their body, and instead aim their attention at something outside of their body that is being affected by what their body is doing. There is much more to say about how this data contradicts what actually happens in many private studios, but this rule could (and should) be changed to “Keep the tone steady”.

If this sounds like mumbo jumbo, consider that this phenomenon is deeply connected to choking under pressure (which many of us have experienced before). A common manifestation of choking is a “moving inward” of attention. When stress kicks in, many of us start thinking about our breathing or how our lips feel, or we become fixated on what the tongue is up to during a part that we’ve never gotten tongue tied on. We try to force our control onto parts of brass playing that are better left alone. We aim our attention into our bodies. If we’ve practiced effectively, there is no performative benefit to bringing our attention to what the body does or how the body does it. These are processes that should very clearly be left alone.

This means that processes function better when afforded the opportunity to optimize through self-organization.

This optimization has clearly been shown to be more evident when attention is aimed at the outcome of the actions. If I hold a tone and want to learn how to hold my blow steady, my best bet is to focus all of my attentional resources onto the sound of that note (a steady tone is the aural manifestation of a steady blow). When it wavers, if I’m really clued into that waver, my central nervous system (through proprioceptive feedback) stores some information about what my body was up to when it happened. This information is utilized in service of future motor actions aimed at the goal of having a steady tone.

As written, this rule focuses attention inward to the detriment of learning.

Besides this, keeping the blow steady isn’t as simple as just making it a rule. If only it were that easy. While we’re at it, I’ll add “don’t crack G#’s on a C trumpet”. That’ll fix it, right? The other three rules are possible to follow. This one is an instructional goal, not a rule.

4. Breathe only through the nose

As a consequence of #2, this feels redundant.

It’s conceivable that players could keep the mouthpiece on the embouchure and stretch everything out to breathe through the corners while doing so. This may necessitate Rule #4? Maybe Caruso beta tested a version with just the first three rules and one schmuck pulled his corners out every breath.

However this one ended up being in the mix, my thoughts are summed up in #2.

In short, the simplicity of this method adds to its appeal, but the Caruso Method is a complicated way to encourage students to develop optimal habits. Although there is certainly evidence of great players emerging from Caruso study, I’m not convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks. There are far healthier presentations on developing healthy trumpet habits available in the 21st Century. Wiff Rudd’s book, “Collaborative Practice Concepts” is an absolutely delightful place to start.