Trumpeter’s Delight

This is related to yesterday’s impressions of The Science of Orgasm and to earlier posts on sexual metaphysics and mystical oblivion.

Bright Moments

I don’t know exactly when it first happened to me, but let’s say I was 12 or so. That seems about right.

I was in my room practicing my trumpet. All of a sudden I felt light-headed, warm & fuzzy, everything went white on me, and for perhaps a split second I fainted – it’s hard to tell about these things, especially when they happened so long ago. When it was over, I sat down on my bed – for I’d been standing while playing – and pondered. I was OK, it had felt good, but did I have some disease? Maybe a strange and awful disease? Maybe even cancer, whatever that was?

So I didn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell, after all? Who could I talk to about something like that?

And it happened again. Just how long after that first time, I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping a diary. But soon enough that I remembered the first time. Maybe within a week, a month, probably not much more. Was I sick? And then again. Felt good, but still the worries?

And it’s been happening to me ever since. For fifty years or so there’ve been these delightful moments during trumpet playing. At its most intense I feel dizzy and very light, warm, and bathed in bright white light. Then, a few seconds later, I come down. Still feeling good, feeling strong and rested.

I long ago stopped worrying about whether or not I was sick. I wasn’t. In fact, such ‘bright moments’ are fairly common among trumpet players. It’s something that just seems to happen every now and then. In fact, one can even find more or less standard physiological explanations of it. It has to do, in one version, with constricting the veins in the neck, making it difficult for old blood to leave the head and thus for new oxygenated blood to get to the brain. I’ve also read that it happens when blowing pressure converges on the diastolic blood pressure in the neck arteries; presumably this restricts blood flow to the brain and induces momentary oxygen debt.

Whatever.

Comparison

Let’s set that issue aside for a moment and compare my description of the subjective experience with yesterday’s descriptions of orgasm, you find similar phrases (underlined):

A sudden feeling of lightheadedness followed by an intense feeling of relief and elation. A rush. Intense muscular spasms of the whole body. Sense of euphoria followed by deep peace and relaxation.

The period when the orgasm takes place—a loss of a real feeling for the surroundings except for the other person. The movements are spontaneous and intense.

Basically it’s an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain followed by a period of total oblivion to sensation then a tremendous expulsion of the buildup with a feeling of wonderfulness and relief.

I find that overlap must interesting, most suggestive. But there are obvious differences. Those descriptions of orgasm also talk about “intense muscular spasms of the whole body” and “an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain.” My description didn’t have anything like that.

But then I didn’t describe everything. While playing the trumpet is not the same as having sex, it can be fairly strenuous. Simply getting a sound out of a trumpet is difficult. It takes a great deal of muscular control. Consider the facial muscles, the ones that control tension in the lips. Those muscles are relatively small, they work hard, and one practices long hours to train them to the flexible rigors of trumpeting.

But blowing the trumpet involves more than the facial muscles, for whom trumpet playing is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s about breath, and breath control. That involves the large muscles of the trunk, the diaphragm, and the supporting muscles of the hips and legs. When you take into account the use of the arms in holding the trumpet and the fingers in manipulating the valves, it becomes clear that you play the trumpet with your whole body, not just fingers and lips.

And when you move into the upper register, which is when these bright moments are most likely to happen, that’s when total body tension is at its highest, though, if you want the music to sound like, well, music, with life and grace, there’s got to be relaxation at the center. If all you want to do is make a loud noise, don’t bother with the relaxation. But if you want the resilience and flow of song, then you have to relax. And, at the same time, keep the tension in the trunk.

My point then is simply that trumpet playing, like orgasmic sex, does involve the whole body, and, in upper register playing, it can involve a great deal of tension and strain. And, in my experience, these bright moments are most likely to happen when I am playing a sustained upper register passage, the sort of work that makes the face red, the neck distended.

But they’ve also happened while playing rapid complex, but not particularly high, lines. And, mere effort isn't sufficient. You have to be in a groove, the playing must have life and feel natural, not just playing the notes. In that context, you can do it. On a reasonable number of occasions I've been able to bring on the warmth and lights simply by playing high, or fast/complex, and bearing down on the sound, working with chest and abdomen. But, without the groove, it doesn't make any difference what I do; it doesn't happen.

Which is to say, you can’t will it to happen. You can’t make it happen on cue. All you can do is set the scene, go through the motions, with all your heart and will and soul, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Fake it till you make it

What we have before us, then, is two very different behaviors, trumpet playing and sex, which can produce similar subjective experiences under certain circumstances. Just what’s going on in the case of these trumpeting experiences, who knows? They happen to trumpeters, there’s a bit of lore about them, but, so far as I know, there’s been no scientific investigation of them. Whatever’s going on in the trumpeter’s brain when this happens, that’s a complete mystery. But I rather doubt that anyone would try to argue that it’s in our biological nature to have such experiences. Trumpeting certainly isn’t in our biological nature, so how could certain kinds of trumpet-playing experiences be in our biological nature?

Sure, there’s a biological substrate to trumpet playing, as there is to everything. These experiences happen when this that and the other are recruited into precisely coordinated activity that allows a little ‘spark’ to ‘catch fire,’ as it were, and become amplified into a bright orgasmic moment. It just happens.

And so it goes with sexual orgasms. The brain doesn’t have a central orgasm coordinator whose function is to cause orgasms. When the circumstances are right, they happen.

* * * * *

Finally, I want to note that these bright trumpeting moments are not the same phenomenon as the ego loss I described in It Shook Me, the Light. That’s something else. Sless likely, more delicate, and more powerful.

Finally, if you want to hear delicacy and grace executed from within tension and effort, listen to the trumpeter in this performance of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto (1st and 3rd movements). Astounding!