Over the past few months, along with my extracurricular trumpet playing, I’ve also started to do a bit of trumpet teaching. Helping students quickly improve is immensely vicariously satisfying, as I remember all too vividly my own struggles through the years trying to wrangle beautiful sounds from these little coils of brass.

Oddly, I’ve discovered that much of what made learning to play the trumpet difficult for me has made teaching it vastly easier. While many of the pros I play with now were naturals, I had to struggle for every small step I took forward, and the exercises and approaches that were most helpful to me seem to be similarly successful for other trumpeters – young and old – facing the same problems.

Along with the usual sorts of students – high school kids working their way up the band seating order, or adult players who put the horn down for a few decades before realizing they wanted to come back to it – I’ve also found a couple with considerably stranger stories.

One, for example, heard an NPR piece about the shortage of buglers available to play Taps at military funerals (a problem worsening as increasing numbers of WW2 veterans pass away). The piece mentioned a group called Bugles Across America (to which I belong), that helps family members find volunteer trumpet players willing to play Taps. She went to the site, and decided to learn trumpet well enough to join the group. Somewhere along the way, she also got hooked on the instrument in general, and is now trying to make up for lost time, bringing her beginning-level playing to the point where she can eventually play with small community groups.

Another woman emailed to say she was dating a trumpet player (God help her!), that his birthday was coming up, and that she wanted to try learning some basic music to play as a birthday surprise. I suggested Happy Birthday as well as the relatively simple (and romantically appropriate) My Funny Valentine, then set her to work.

Mainly, though, I’m happiest to see the progress my slightly more experienced students are making. If they keep up their current paces, they should be beating me out for gigs in the not-to-distant future, and I know I’ll be secretly thrilled.