Ian Bousfield: Unlocking the Trombone Code Ian Bousfield | Page 6

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Introduction
In order for you to understand my teaching method, I feel that it is important for you to have
some background on my trombone story.
I started playing at the age of seven. I had some lessons at school, but my main teacher was my
father, who was an amateur trumpet player. Looking back, he would basically teach me to play a
hymn tune, then sing it, and then play it and then sing it once again. I would sing with the words,
and then when I played it on trombone, I would have to convey the emotion of those words.
So, that was basically how I spent the first seven years of my trombone career. I was in almost
complete trombone isolation, never playing with others. I suppose I practised for about an hour
a day, with father listening to every minute. There was the odd interlude where I might play
with a local brass band, or in the National Youth Brass Band, but basically I played on my own
and didn’t have any ensemble experience at all. So, when you consider it, that was seven years
of singing and trying to develop a singing style and a singing approach to trombone playing. At
the same time, my mother was an avid and compulsive singer. To me it seemed she sang every
minute of every day for the whole of her life. Consequently, I was surrounded by melody. I
also used to go to bed at night listening to my father playing orchestral recordings on the hi-fi,
so I heard pretty much the entire, basic symphonic repertoire. These are formative experiences:
I can remember quite clearly the warming effect of falling asleep to Rachmaninoff’s Second
Symphony, aged eight or nine. At the same time, I took part in what in the UK are called “slow
melody competitions”, where a village or a brass band would organise a competition to find the
best player of a hymn tune or a slow melody, as the name implies. So everything I did then was
rooted in a melodic approach.
About the age of fourteen, I joined a British brass band called the Yorkshire Imperial Metals
Band. At the time, they were one of the top bands in the country. It was certainly not unheard
of for them to beat the Black Dyke Mills and Grimethorpe Colliery Bands (the aristocracy of
northern British brass bands — have a listen sometime). What the four years which I spent in the
brass band world taught me was about playing chamber music, to an extraordinarily high level.
It also gave me a lot of stamina because I had a very young, and raw embouchure. Given this,
the strength building factor of two rehearsals a week, with fifty to seventy concerts a year, was
great experience. Also, it got me ‘up on my feet’, playing solos on a regular basis. At the same
time as playing with Yorkshire Imperial, I started having lessons with Dudley Bright who went
on to become my successor in the London Symphony but was at the time with the Hallé. I did
not have that many lessons with him between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, but in that time,
he provided me with a firm understanding of how the embouchure and the articulation system
works — the basics, you could say.
Aged fifteen, I won the Shell London Symphony Orchestra Music Scholarship, propelling me in
the directi