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Aaron Hodgson is professor of trumpet at Western University and recently released the album, Inner Voice. He can be found on the web at aaronhodgson.ca

Aaron recently published a blog post concurrent with this podcast titled, Twisted Sounds. Give it a read!

JN: Aaron, welcome to the show. Get us up to speed with what’s going on in your world right now.

AH: The album just came out in May, 2017 and that’s a big project. It’s on Blue Griffin Recordings. I’m excited about it because it has 5 works on it, 3 of which to my knowledge have never been recorded on trumpet. Schumann Romances, something by Brandon Ridenour called Music for Trumpet and Djembe, and Prokofiev’s Five Melodies which was originally written for wordless voice but is adapted by the composer for violin. All these work beautifully with the trumpet and there’s a couple other exciting pieces on it, and I’m just thrilled that it’s out.

JN: We’re talking about being the best performer we can be on this podcast. And to be the best, sometimes you have to go through experiences that quite frankly are bad. So I start each interview with what you consider to be one of your worst performance moments: a time when you expected to perform well, but it didn’t work out.

AH: For me, there’s one in particular that always stands out. It was a competition I played in 2008. I had just gotten my first job at a university and I had just started teaching there. This was the Montreal Symphony competition, one of the major ones held in Canada. Brass players can compete every third year.

I think because I had just gotten this job, I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself. I created an expectation of myself that I had to play better than I really could. So I went out there and everything was a disaster from the get go. The first piece was the Hindemith Sonata, and for reasons of showmanship, I decided not to tune on stage. I spent the first page of the piece wondering why do I sound so bad? Finally halfway through the first movement, I figured out that the piano was tuned to A=442, and I was just way under the pitch. As soon as I pushed the slide in, everything sounded better.

So the second piece comes up, and I decide I’m going to use a velvet bag as a mute in the slow movement. I realized right before I started that I had forgot the bag. So I had to go back stage, get the bag, come back on stage. I was playing through the sonata, and I went to the final page turn and the only thing that greeted me was an empty stand. My music had fallen apart back stage and I had to stop playing, go back stage, pick up the music, say to the jurors we’ll be starting at rehearsal number whatever, and we played through the rest of the piece.

In that moment, I was completely mortified. I just wanted to crawl into a hole and never be seen again. The funny thing is, the moment that happened, I completely wrote off the competition. After that, everything went great. I played fantastically for the last piece, and they even gave me a little door prize, even though I didn’t advance to the second round.

So it was an interesting moment for sure, but I learned a lot from it. I learned a lot about the expectations I was putting on myself, because I suddenly had a job that I was being unfair with myself about how I thought I should play, and about how others would perceive me that I had a really unrealistic expectation of how people expected me to sound just because I had this job. I know a lot of professionals, they start working and they feel the same thing. That because they have a job, suddenly they need to be perfect all the time. They stop being forgiving with themselves.

Learning how to overcome that was a big moment for me as a professional. So even though the competition was awash, it was a great moment and I learned a lot from it.