Today's episode features an interview with trombonist/publisher David Vining, recorded at the 2024 ITG Conference in Anaheim, California.

David was diagnosed with focal dystonia in 2003. In our interview, he discusses his struggles, eventual recovery through holistic movement therapies such as Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and body mapping and exposing the vastly understudied diagnoses and treatment of focal dystonia.

Perhaps the biggest misconception about focal dystonia is that it is a physical problem. While the symptoms manifest in the physical realm, it is a distinctly neurological issue which disrupts musicians' fine motor skills.

David's diagnosis and eventual recovery inspired him to establish Mountain Peak Music, which offers resources and materials aimed at promoting healthy playing and living habits, as well as taking a preventative approach to issues like dystonia.

Episode Highlights:

01:25 David Vining's Musical Journey

04:37 The Onset of Focal Dystonia

05:43 Diagnosis and Initial Struggles

09:24 Exploring Treatment Options

18:34 Movement Therapies and Recovery

25:29 Redefining Embouchure and Global Awareness

26:46 Rafael Mendez a Model of Overcoming Adversity

27:54 Recovering from Focal Dystonia

29:33 Founding Mountain Peak Music

30:19 The Breathing Book and Body Mapping

32:32 Innovative Learning Materials

36:49 Success Stories and Cross Training

45:02 Challenges with High Brass Players

46:42 Final Thoughts and Advice

Resources mentioned:

Mountain Peak Music

About the Guest:

Trombonist David Vining is the founder of Mountain Peak Music, a publishing company devoted to offering innovative, healthy teaching methods for all musicians. Mountain Peak Music represents Mr. Vining’s personal mission, combining his extensive performing and teaching background with insights learned through his remarkable recovery from embouchure dystonia. His Mountain Peak Music publications include the Breathing Book series, Flow Studies, Daily Routines, Long Tone Duets, Trombone Intonation Mastery, Dueling Fundamentals for Trombones, Cross Training for Musicians, The Big Book of Sight Reading Duets, Teaching Brass, and Rangesongs.

Currently Professor of Trombone at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, Mr. Vining has also served on the faculties of the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and the University of Kansas. Professor Vining’s teaching transcends his trombone specialty, covering a wide range of topics appealing to musicians of every discipline. He is equally at home teaching trombone technique, helping instrumentalists and vocalists become more efficient, and helping musicians cope with injuries, among other topics.

Mr. Vining is a dynamic performer who has delivered hundreds of recitals nationwide. As trombonist with the Chestnut Brass Company, he recorded several CD’s and toured the United States and Europe performing recitals, masterclasses, and concerts with orchestras. Currently a member of the Flagstaff Symphony, he has performed with the Cincinnati Symphony, Kansas City Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Vining has appeared on college campuses coast-to-coast in recital and as a guest soloist with ensembles, and recorded a solo CD, Arrows of Time.

Body + Mind + Spirit = Mastery. Now available is a collection of excerpts from some of the most popular episodes of the Trumpet Dynamics podcast featuring the likes of Chris Coletti, Sergei Nakariakov, Manny Laureano, and more.

It's a FREE download available right now on brassmastery.com!

Mentioned in this episode:

MF Lip Grip

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 Hey folks, welcome to the show. This is James Newcomb. I'm glad that you have pressed play on today's episode. Today we have the pleasure of having live in the studio, my remote studio. At the ITG conference in Anaheim, California. And I have with me David Vining. David , is it former or do you still play?

I still play.

Started feeling some symptoms a few years before that. We'll get his full story in just a moment. But he as a result of recovering from focal dystonia, and getting back into a playing shape where he could feel comfortable in his own skin playing in front of people, he founded a company called Mountain Peak Music, which is found at mountainpeakmusic.

com, perfect, mountainpeakmusic. com, and he just so happens to be sharing, we happen to be sharing living space at the ITG conference I'm helping out, Jim Olcott. At the Trompe l'Eau press table. And so we were two tables down, we struck up a conversation and it seems that there's some common, there's some overlap with the mission of this show and the mission of your life and your business.

So let's see where the our dialogue goes. I'm looking forward to this. It's good to have you.

Thank you. Thank you.

So why don't we start with, I gave the very brief overview of your story. Tell us about tell us about your entry into music, the professional realm. And then as much as you're comfortable, you can talk about developing the, or like feeling the symptoms of the focal dystonia and that should keep us busy for a while.

I should think so. Thanks for having me, James. It's a pleasure to be here and I'll give you the abbreviated version of the early days and Much like many of your listeners, I'm sure, I started out in high school band because my brother got to go to Disney World. And I wanted to do that, so I joined the band so I could go to Disney World and I'm a trombonist.

So I played trombone in the state of Florida for a long time. I got my undergrad at Florida State and managed to win an audition directly after undergrad, which is very unusual. I played in a brass quintet called the Chestnut Brass Company. It's based in Philadelphia. And it's a touring brass quintet, and the calling card of the Chestnut Brass is to play on historical brass instruments.

So we had reproduction sack butts and cornettos, and we had original instruments from the Civil War era. Over the shoulder horns, key bugles, it was a lot of fun to play those.

Are they still around? I

believe they're still around. They're not full time like they were when I played with them, but And

they're not well known.

Not as much anymore. I think they might. still play from time to time. But at the time we were touring a lot and got to see the country and it was a real fun, fun way to cut my teeth and learn in a professional setting and play lots of concerts. Anyway From there, one of our, one of our concerts was to play with an orchestra in Ohio, the Lima Symphony, and it's in the world famous, yes, it's in Northwest Ohio, just about an hour south of Toledo.

As it turns out I'm. currently and was I met her at the time. She was the executive director of the Lima Symphony and Leslie is my wife. So when you're a touring musician, it's awfully hard to meet people. And so that just worked out. It worked out really well and so I ended up moving after five years in the Chesna Brass.

I moved to Lima where she lived and Bowling Green is near and I managed to get my master's at Bowling Green at the time. The teacher there, a fabulous player named Paul Hunt, had been waiting to take a sabbatical. And after I finished my master's, I was in the right place at the right time. He took a sabbatical and I got that elusive first year of college teaching experience.

And so I was his sabbatical replacement. And from there I was able to get a job at the University of Kansas. And then from there I went to CCM, Cincinnati Conservatory. And after that Currently, I'm at Northern Arizona University. I've managed to avoid getting the DMA all of these years, and now it's too late.

I consider myself very fortunate. I have, the commensurate professional playing experience. It worked out really well for me. Part of the reason we're here is in the midst of this story. I was playing, I was on faculty at CCM at the time, and I was trying to play a low C, just second space C on the trombone, and it just wasn't centering, wasn't coming out quite right, and of course I did what all musicians do, I went in the practice room and really hard to fix this problem and lo and behold, it got worse and it started cracking.

I couldn't even hit the note after a while. And then that problem spread up and down throughout the registers. And it was very curious situation because of course, normally. Somebody has a problem like this, they relax or they work on lip slurs or some way to just center the pitch. None of those remedies worked.

And he sent me to a neurologist who had a look and diagnosed me with focal dystonia of the embouchure. And he said can't you just play the clarinet? That was his suggestion, which I can laugh about now, but at the time it was not very helpful, as you might imagine. He wasn't a musician, so he didn't really understand the specifics of how important this was to me.

Eventually, I ended up at the Cleveland Clinic, which has a world famous neurology department, and there's a doctor there, he's probably retired now, but Dr. Letterman was an accomplished violinist and neurologist, and he was one of the few who was treating or diagnosing dystonia patients at the time.

And he sat me down and explained what was going on, and explained that dystonia a neurological movement disorder. And my version, and in fact, most musicians get a focal version, which means that it's relegated to one area and with brass players, the embouchure is the usual area. With keyboard, string, wind players, it can happen in the fingers.

Dystonia, when it comes to a musician is typically. Relegated to small, very small movement patterns, like the movement of a finger on a fingerboard or a, an embouchure is in that category. It doesn't typically affect large motions. For example, moving the trombone slide would probably never be an issue.

There is an equivalent in the golf world called the yips. That's a form of dystonia, but it only affects putts, but not drives. It's a good way to think about it. Anyway, Dr. Letterman, who was very kind said, we don't really have a reliable treatment, particularly for ambush or dystonia. He offered to use Botox to deaden the tissue, but he warned me, he said, I, it's hard to calculate the dosage.

It's hard to know where to put it. It spikes after three months and then diminishes. So people who get these injections tend to have them ongoing. And the way he put it was, this was like in the middle of the week, he said, I open the bottle every Friday and I have to use it all. So I'll put you on the schedule, just come back and we'll see what we can do.

And I went home to Cincinnati and My wife, who is the voice of reason through it all, talked me out of it, and I'm glad that she did. She talked you out of it. She talked me out of Botox injections, yeah. In the meantime, I did call another professional musician that I knew had been struggling and had Botox injections, and his advice on the phone was if you've tried everything else and you want to just make sure you've tried everything, go ahead and do it, but it didn't help me, was his advice.

So as it turns out, now that I know a little bit more about it, I'm sure it would not have helped me because Botox of course deadens the muscles entirely and you need some tone to the muscle in order to create an embouchure. So it's a real, it's a real chicken and the egg problem. And so the medical community, I think, to this day doesn't really have a good reliable treatment option for musicians who have dystonia.

I hope I'm not incorrect in saying that, but I'm not totally up to date on the current research. At the time, there was certainly no reliable medical treatment option, which left me with very few options. So what I did was I went holistic and I learned about this technique called body mapping. Which says that the schematic that you have in your head about how you believe you're built and how you believe your body is intended to move, will dictate how your body moves.

It's called a body map. Therefore, if you have an accurate body map, then your movements will be similarly accurate. The vice versa is also true. If you have an inaccuracy, For example, about breathing, then that map will impose itself on your body and you will end up moving in artificial ways, which can be stress inducing.

I want to, body mapping, that's something we can talk a lot about, I'm sure. But to, first of all, I need to clarify that this is not a medical podcast. Thank you. This is a podcast hosted by a brass player, there's four brass players. We will be discussing medical terms, but this is in no way intended to be a show.

Taken as medical advice by any stretch of the imagination. So I just want to make sure that I put that out there. So this is for entertainment. This podcast is primarily for entertainment and educational purposes. Take anything that is said with a grain of salt, but we are hearing a very personal and obviously firsthand account on that.

Of dealing with focal dystonia. How, What is dystonia? I we I've heard that term a thousand times as has everybody else, But I don't think I've ever had it explained to me. Yeah. What is dystonia?

Yeah. By the way, thank you for that disclaimer, and I totally agree, and I don't mean to offer any sort of medical advice on dystonia.

No, and you're just sharing your story. Yeah, absolutely. That's all it is. I'm not a doctor. And so anyway. A good way to think about dystonia is that the neurons in your brain that fire together, wire together, and they form pathways, and the pathways deliver the instructions from your brain out to your musculature, wherever it may be.

In order to enact your muscles to perform particular activity. In someone who has dystonia, those pathways get corrupted in some way. They might get a little fuzzy. A really good way to think about this is some Flute players, for example, might try to push down their middle finger and their index finger comes along for the ride.

Okay. Because those two pathways have somehow been crossed or merged. And so that's a very common way that this can manifest. And one, by the way, footnote, one of the treatment options for someone that has finger dystonia splinting So they'll put a splint on one of the fingers so they try to differentiate the fingers in the brain a little bit better.

So over time it seems like it's just the, there's a sort of a dysfunction. There's a dysfunction, yes, absolutely. Neurons in

the brain. That's right. And it's, my understanding is that it's still a bit of a mystery where it comes from. It seems logical to say that it's a that you have misused your body in some way, that's perfectly logical.

And my own opinion is that might be a contributing factor. However, there are a lot of, in my case, trombone players that I can look at. And in some ways they're doing everything wrong. When you watch them play, yet they sound wonderful, and they never seem to encounter trouble.

It's like that guy that's a hundred years old and is eating a Dr.

Pepper, or drinking a Dr. Pepper, and he's having a steak and french fries every day. What's up with this guy? That's exactly right. And then the marathon runner. He drops dead of a heart attack at 42, exactly like

that. So if there were a, a correlation that were direct and predictable, it would be, it wouldn't be a moving target, but it is because of this.

And so I just personally, I have no, no research to support this, but I do think there might be a genetic X factor in a way that somehow those of us who. have trouble like this tend to be predisposed in some way. I've, of course, tried to help a lot of people over the years. And just as a personal observation, the unifying factor tends to be that they're very driven.

Sort of almost muscular personalities that apply that kind of effort to their playing. Yeah, and in fact I can say that I was like that pre Dystonia. So again, we're only speculating and it doesn't mean that if you're a muscular player you will get dystonia, but I do think there might be some factors that set you up for trouble.

Curiously, Sometimes trouble comes in other ways so that it may look like it is dystonia But it turns out to be something else and they work their way right through it Okay, a lot of players have that in their career, they run into a rough spot They managed to work through it. They iron it out and they're fine, you know with dystonia It looks like it's going to be that But then it gets worse.

And the typical treatment options and therapies and practice strategies just don't seem to work. The reason for that is dystonia is a problem that originates in your brain. It can't be treated externally.

It manifests physically. It

manifests

physically, exactly. Have you ever heard of the term generational trauma?

Someone just talked to me about that at the conference.

You brought up genetics. And that term came to my mind. And for those who are tuning in, generational trauma, I think the most basic definition that I can think of is trauma that has happened, not necessarily to you personally, but to an ancestor, a grandparent, maybe a parent.

They go through a trauma of sorts. And it becomes, through, through the mysteries of the human body, of the human psyche, it becomes a part of your genes. And I'm not an expert on it, so that's the best definition that I can that I can come up with here on the spot but it just made me think.

Maybe there is some generational trauma going on with like you said, you were, you did everything right. Reasonably right. Yeah. He didn't do anything that was off the chart stupid. Physically. I hope not. I don't think so. But but how did this happen to someone who's, by all accounts, has taken care of himself?

And I'm not trying to get into your personal story at all, but I'm just, that thought came to my mind of how does that come into our genetics that way?

Yeah, that's a cryptic. Almost rhetorical question because I don't have any history in my family of Estonia or anything like that So yeah, it's all speculative and when you're in the middle of it Just speaking from experience, you don't care where it comes from.

You just want to get rid of it and get back to normal because most people are probably like I was, I identified almost exclusively as a trombone player. It was my identity. And so there is a psychological element to this that is traumatic in a different way. And when you're in that situation.

It's very cloudy. It's hard to think straight. It's hard to get to the root of the problem because you're so distressed and stressed out about your mortgage and your children and your wife and your future. So yeah, in my darkest days I looked into just changing careers altogether because it seemed like the more reasonable option at the time.

Were you still able to teach at Cincinnati? I was

I was able to teach at Cincinnati. It was not a comfortable situation, not surprisingly, because I couldn't play and my one regret looking back on how I handled it was I should have left my instrument at home. But you know how it is, when you're teaching, the horn's right there and you want to demonstrate, you pick it up.

And that was a mistake, because I gave what I can now identify as very poor models, and I could tell it wasn't going to work at the time. So that's my one regret. I should have just left the horn at home, worked out my issues, and not, brought it into the teaching studio. But in hindsight if that's the one thing that I did wrong, okay.

So just to put this into context, most people who get dystonia don't recover because it's so mysterious. It's hard to know how to do it. It's, the, like I said before, the normal avenues don't seem to work. You're not going to recover by doing what you've always done before. You're not going to recover by doing lip slurs or making yourself stronger, anything like that.

The way that I recovered was treating the source of the problem, which is in your brain, like I said. And the methods for doing that I used are called movement therapies. Movement therapies is a broad term which encompasses the Alexander technique, and an offshoot of that called body mapping, and another different movement technique called the Feldenkrais technique.

system. These are all therapies that are designed not to be invasive, but to help you learn how to function properly in your own skin is a good way to put it. Feldenkrais said, find several ways to accomplish the same task, which is, which really interested me at the time because that seemed like a way through the trees because what I had been doing wasn't working.

So I had to find a way to do it in a different way that would avoid the old aberrant neural pathways. Instead of trying to reconstitute the old pathway, which clearly wasn't working, I tried to cultivate a conduit around the old pathway so that it was related but not the same. Now I'll give you an example.

My Feldenkrais teacher said we need to find another activity that It causes you to spasm, and I said, are you out of your mind? The activity that I found was a Starbucks coffee cup. The hole in the top, when I bring that cup to my mouth, it creates the same environment as bringing the mouthpiece to my face.

So every time I would bring the cup up, I would get the same sort of spasm. So she said, okay, so bring that cup to every lesson. And I'm hooked, but anyway, that's just so I would bring the Starbucks cup and I would take sips from the cup, but I would take sips with my head leaned one way or the other, or with my arm up on the couch or with my legs crossed all things that seem insignificant.

They're not right. So how your body reacts to this motion and then extrapolating that motion to the trombone. So I went from bringing Starbucks coffee cups to bringing my trombone and moving in similar ways so that I would start to retrain my brain and my habitual movement patterns so that they would avoid the old pathway.

It could be, in my case, something as simple as instead of Bringing the instrument directly up to my face, I was bringing it up at an angle.

I was just speaking with I'm going to be interviewing Greg Spence later today. And his his assistant at the table, Barbara, I think it was. They said something very similar.

Now this woman, She's not affiliated with Starbucks, so she's not profiting from this, right? That's correct. Okay. I just have to mention.

That is correct.

Starbucks is the answer. That's right. She's a woman who owns stock in Starbucks. Drink more Starbucks.

So I want to make sure I clarify something because my remedy was a cocktail of things.

Okay. It wasn't just the Feldenkrais that I was just describing. It was also Alexander Technique, which is again a related movement therapy, which is all about freedom in your body, particularly in your neck. So I took Alexander lessons along with the Feldenkrais lessons. There's a technique in the Alexander Technique called Constructive Rest, where you lie on the floor and you learn about how to move your body without the influence of gravity.

That's the point of lighting on the floor.

I was wondering if you could briefly describe, you've mentioned these Alexander technique, which a lot of people have heard of body mapping, which may be a few people have heard of and Feldenkrais, which probably very few people. Can you give us a very brief bird's eye overview of these three techniques?

I'll do my best. I mentioned Feldenkrais really is. It's designed to help you refine your habitual, or change your habitual movement patterns. A good way to experience that is brush your teeth with the other hand, and it will feel really funny. So you're changing patterns in your mind. You're changing patterns in your brain.

You're, I don't know if there's any scientific evidence of this, but it felt to me like it was loosening me up. In order to allow me to establish new movement patterns in order to avoid the old corrupt pathways. That's the Feldenkrais area. The Alexander Technique, of course, is much better known. F.

M. Alexander was a theater person. He was an actor. And he I learned that a free neck can lead to freedom elsewhere in your body, just as a very basic premise. I'm not an Alexander teacher but the thing about the Alexander technique is there are practitioners that are required, and they put their hands on your head and guide you through a series of motions.

I remember visiting a Alexander Technique teacher who sat me down in front of a mirror and guided my head in such a way that I watched myself get taller, and that was eye opening. Body mapping is an offshoot of the Alexander Technique, and the biggest difference is that you don't need a practitioner who puts their hands on you in body mapping.

It's self exploration. It's you refining your body map so you're moving in ways that are intended and that you're genuinely built to move in those ways. Breathing is a big deal. I was under some misunderstandings about breathing and when I learned about the body map and the importance of moving the ribs and the function of the diaphragm, my breathing improved, therefore my air flow improved, and that helped me reconfigure the equilibrium that was necessary between the air flow and the musculature of the embouchure.

In fact, in the center of my retraining was me redefining the word embouchure. into a three dimensional thing, something that requires air and movement. Whereas prior to this, I was more traditional in thinking of the embouchure as the set of your corners and the placement of your lips. Like the old Kleinhammer book with the pictures of the Chicago Symphony trombone section and the visualizers, that was my view of an embouchure.

But as it turns out, dystonia is almost by definition the lack of movement. So for me, redefining embouchure to include movement was part of retraining. That was part of redefining the habit, the movement pattern that I was used to. Instead of thinking the traditional firm corners, flat chin, and set the lips, for me, an embouchure requires air.

And when the air interacts with the tissue, that's an embouchure. Yes. For me, I had to convince myself of that. That was the centerpiece of me retraining.

I hear this word in my mind. You are becoming more aware of what's going on inside the mind.

Put.

Or inside the brain. Yes. And how it's affecting your physical body.

Absolutely true. There's a term in Alexander Technique called global awareness. Global awareness. So you include not just the problem area, but your entire body and your environment and all of the associated things like the ambient noise in the room and the temperature, everything. And your brain works really well when you include all of that in your global awareness.

And when we drilled down to a singular portion like the embouchure, things tend to get worse, not better. But that is most people's instinct when they're in trouble, when what they should do is expand their awareness.

How did we were talking yesterday, I was talking with Malcolm McNabb, and we were talking about he was telling the story of a pretty famous trumpet player named Rafael Mendez, who I'm sure you've heard of.

It turns out that Raphael and his whole family was kidnapped by Pancho Villa.

Oh my goodness. Nobody has ever heard

this story. And Malcolm told this story yesterday. And it, he was telling this story and a lot of really bad things happened. He saw some really bad things. And it made me realize this is why Raphael had that generous, kind spirit.

Ah. I saw the worst of humanity and it made him realize I I don't, I want to be, it made him aware

of

humanity. Yeah, how interesting. And I, and that made sense to me. This is why he was so kind and so generous with his time and why he wanted to invest so much in young people. But it sounds to me like not that you're on the level of a Rafael Mendez, but this unpleasant experience.

Had a good result. First of all, you got your, you got back to the place where you can play and we should examine that in a couple of minutes, but tell us about how recovering from focal dystonia led to the founding of the company

as a profound statement. I really appreciate that. I mentioned before that pre dystonia, I identified almost exclusively as a trombone player.

Post dystonia. I feel like I'm a better person, I'm a better father, a better spouse, a better teacher, because it creates empathy. Pre dystonia, I was a very natural player. Stuff wasn't hard. And post dystonia, I appreciate the struggles of my students and the people who might come to me for help. So yes, I would say Most importantly I'm a different person having gone through it, and I'm very grateful for being able to recover from it.

I'm aware that not everybody does. In fact, very few people do, but part of the result was my desire to share what I had learned with people. But as I like to say, I didn't necessarily want to be the Dystonia poster boy, just to put it in a funny way. Clearly I don't mind talking about it, and I'm all over the internet and I'm happy to help people, but what I wanted was to share broad ideas that would help people become more efficient, but also avoid trouble.

That's my goal. And that's where Mountain Peak Music was born. I had all of these ideas to share, And I had no really good platform in which to share them. And I guess I had been thinking in the back of my mind about entrepreneurship all along the way. And so I have that in my system to begin with.

And in Flagstaff we have the San Francisco Peaks. And my wife and I were driving through town one day, and it was one of those glorious winter days, and the peaks were just rising above the horizon, and they were snow capped, and Mountain Peak came to mind, and that's where the name came from, Mountain Peak Music.

For example, the diaphragm does its work when you inhale. It is the primary muscle of inhalation. Muscles can contract only in one direction. For that reason, they typically come in pairs, antagonists they're called. What that means is that when you exhale, the diaphragm is actually relaxing, so when you move air out of your body, you're using the antagonist muscles, which are the abs and the internal intercostal muscles, which help move the ribs, all of these muscles move together, not to get too far down in the weeds, but it's a pretty good example of how people who say, breathe with the diaphragm.

Maybe I don't mean to be literal, but it's impossible to breathe without using the diaphragm. You use it every time you take a breath. And people who say support with the diaphragm are implying that you exhale with the diaphragm, which isn't particularly true because the diaphragm is relaxing when you exhale.

Now there is something called elastic recoil, because the diaphragm seeks its former neutrality. It's a highly dominant thoracic cavity. What I'm getting down to the weeds here is that knowing the details is very helpful. I'm not proposing you would walk out on stage thinking about your diaphragm any more than you would think about a 5 7 chord when you come to the end of a phrase.

But if you have the background, then you're cooperating with the reality of how you're built, which is a body mapping premise. So the breathing book sets the record straight. So people who use these metaphors and analogies, I'm sure they don't mean any harm, but for someone like me, who's very literal, it can do some damage if you start belly dancing to breathe because you're trying to send the air low, right?

That's a really good example of what Mountain Peak Music is about. We're here to provide healthy ways to learn Maybe innovative ways to learn, as I said before, maybe filling some pedagogical gaps and providing unique learning materials.

Alright, give us some examples of pedagogical gaps.

We have a book called Teaching Brass.

Which is a Brass Methods textbook. And it's actually a pretty cool format because there's a printed book which you bring into class and you play out of, but there's an online component, you log into your account, and that's where all the good stuff is, all the text and images and there's a whole chapter on breathing.

And it teaches breathing based on body mapping. It's not called that, but these are future educators. These are the people who are going to teach our high school students, if they teach them based on anatomical accuracy, we're far more likely to move forward with a somatic or movement foundation that's based in science and the reality, and not some vague metaphor, which gets perpetuated in some of the other resources that are out

there.

My band directors were always saying, use your diaphragm. And sorry, but I'm afraid

and again, not just to acknowledge, I'm sure nobody means any harm by doing this. Usually they're

just

parroting what they were told. And the treacherous part of this is that, of course, youngsters are very literal.

And that tends to stay with them well beyond the years that the band director has any sort of influence. And they don't even realize

it, right? They're so literal just today. . We were in the quiet room at ITG, and anybody who's ever been at an ITG conference knows that there are loud rooms and then there's the quiet room.

And I've always been in the quiet. I had a booth at a conference a few years ago for my, for the podcast too. I was in the quiet room, thank goodness. But they're, those loud rooms are loud. Couple of young guys come into the room today. And there just happens to be an instrument at one of the tables, so they start playing.

And they're told very politely, you're not allowed to play in this room. And wouldn't you know it, two minutes later, we hear trumpet playing right outside the door. And I said, what are you guys doing here? And they said we were told we can't play in the room. So you set up right outside of the door.

Really? But and that's just, it was, I laugh at it, but I thought if I was 19 years old. I probably would have done the same thing.

I'm laughing too, but I'm in the same room as you and it is a tragedy that we've requested quiet rooms so we can talk with our customers. That's a really big part of our, of our business.

Anyway.

Yes. The company started with not surprisingly all trombone stuff since I'm a trombone player and at the time we just franchised the titles by me transposing to the other instruments, but we've learned that's not the best strategy. It's a little unsatisfying and people tend to buy things that are written by people who play their instrument.

And that's again, not surprising. So we've been in the process of. creating second editions and employing authors on the instrument and they'll Trumpify my ideas so to speak and so I think the items that we have now Are much more specific and more effective for that reason. So Now we're at the point where we're not just publishing my ideas.

We have authors who come to us with their ideas yeah, we have a few new titles at this conference and our intent is just to Keep working through things that people bring us that we feel are good and worthwhile and Need to be out there. How

has the message or the mission of Mountain Peak music been received any success stories that you can share?

Yeah, so I Get a lot of inquiries from across the globe from people who are having chop troubles And I have a little sequence of questions that I ask them which I'll get into, but invariably it comes back to some items within our catalog that might be helpful to them. And I'm always careful to say, listen, I'm not here to sell you stuff, but I do know that cross training will help you.

Cross training is an online resource that It features little sound bites of the methodologies that helped me recover. There's a little bit of Alexander Technique, a little Fellenkreis, there's a little body mapping, some yoga, some stretching, and they're just movement breaks. You click on the video and you take a little five minute body mapping break and then you can go back and practice.

It's meant to be preventive. However, if you're in trouble, it can also be therapeutic, I think, if used in the right way. So that's a really good example of one of our titles that was a direct result of what I went through that potentially can help people avoid trouble in the future. The Breathing Book is another good example.

I'm actually currently entering a sabbatical year, in which I'm going to write a book called Body Mapping for Brass Players. And this book will feature chapters for every brass instrument, and I've engaged specialists on each of those instruments to help with their chapters, and there will be photos and videos and information about how to engage with your instrument in healthy ways.

There will be global chapters on posture and on breathing and things that apply to all of us. And then individual chapters for each instrument.

Body mapping for brass players. Yeah. That'll be a good one. We'll have to get back together once that's published and we can talk about it on the show.

For sure.

I'm looking for a publisher now. I'm kidding.

You're vetting publishers.

Shopping publishers. Like personal success stories. You don't have to name names, obviously. Yeah.

Like I said before, when somebody comes to me through Zoom or what have you, we'll set up a, an appointment and we'll meet and talk about what they've been going through and the very first thing that I say is if you are currently Employed by a symphony, you probably should take a sabbatical and take a little time off.

And that's really hard. Maybe they're not in a position to do that, but if they are, they have a much better chance of success. Because what will happen is we'll make a little progress over the course of the week, and then they have to play a concert on Saturday night, and invariably they revert to their old habitual movement pattern.

And the last thing you want to do is reinforce those patterns and make the groove deeper. If because it'll just suck you right in every time you put the horn in it.

What's the

neuroplasticity? This neural pattern that you've established is like a groove. But you can imagine that it's made out of beach sand.

So that if you get close, you'll tumble right in and you can't scramble out. However hard you try. So your only hope is to try again. Just stop and start over. And if you are able to establish an alternative habitual pattern as a conduit around the old movement pattern, then you need to reinforce it many times, at least 10, 000, according to the research, right?

Order to reinforce it enough that it will be habitual enough that you can deliver in that way when you're under pressure. So the way that I did that is once I was in the midst of this retraining and I was using the movement therapies, in the end I coalesced all of that into my own sort of systematic way of getting my 10, 000 reps.

So I chose just, a phrase from a solo that I knew would create trouble. It's a bozza, we all play bozza. There's a piece for trombone that has a little fanfare in it, like all bozza pieces. And it was just in the right register and the tongueyness of it would always create a spasm. So what I did was I started by blowing the phrase without actually making a sound.

So I had the instrument up, I had the mouthpiece on my face, and I was moving the slide in the right way, tonguing, and I would just blow, no sound, and I would satisfy myself by thinking, okay there's no sound, but there's no spasm, and every time I tried to make a sound, I would incur a spasm. Ah. This was my answer, is I had body mapping background, I felt like I was in a good place as far as my psychology of where I was trying to head.

And so I would blow no sound, no spasm, day after day. I thought that eventually I would need to engage my lips. As it turns out, I didn't. One day, after about two weeks of blowing, I went to do my rep on the very same phrase I'd been using, and sound came out. It was very spontaneous, and it felt like I wasn't creating an embouchure in the traditional sense.

It felt like my lips were just getting in the way of the air, is what it felt like. And so that's the same procedure that I use when I work with people. Or maybe there's a variation of it depending on their situation. And I have had some success with low brass players in particular in getting their lips out of the way, having them just blow no sound.

One very important aspect of this is that if they're not holding their instrument, they're not going to get better. Activities away from the instrument can be helpful. Yeah. But in my experience, only when metal touches flesh is it close enough to the end result that you can actually get to the heart of the matter.

You're

mimicking the activity we're actually playing.

Exactly right. When you're laying on the floor, again, that can be very helpful in constructive rest, but it's only tangential. It's only foundational. And in order to actually treat the problem, you have to have metal on flesh. Absolutely. Absolutely.

In my experience, so we do a lot of blow no sound. A lot of

that. A lot of blow no

sound. A lot of blow no sound.

And then also maybe changing, tweaking the, just the way you bring the instrument to your mouth. That can be a, that can be part

of it,

yes. Just breaking up the routine. Breaking up the

routine, redefining embouchure.

Redefining embouchure.

So if you have a history of, remember I talked about how you define embouchure and the old way is stagnant two dimensional. And we redefine it as including the air. Here we are blowing. We're not even worrying about the lips. We're just blowing no sound. So we do a lot of that when we retrain.

And I've had success probably with 25 percent of the low brass players that I've worked with who Maybe have not been in terrible shape when they came to me, but it was clearly they were on their path to You know some serious trouble and we managed to back them out of

it 25 percent

I would say that

No

Not quite so much, and you know this is not the kind of thing where I require them to follow up with me either I think that's too much pressure I'm always careful to say, I'm going to give you what I know, and I'm going to try and modify it to help you, but you should feel free to take charge and modify whatever I give you so that you follow the thing that works.

So I think that's important that the person has ownership over their own recovery, otherwise they're not going to get better. So that's important taking time off, that's important, and not beating yourself up is important, having a good support system around you.

Beating yourself up is important.

Yeah,

mentally and requiring that you play concerts in the midst of retraining. That's not going to work So a

lot of

factors go into it I will be honest and say I've had less luck helping high brass players Trumpet and horn I've tried but The same remedies don't seem to be as effective for those players The way that I say it is, I'm certainly willing to try, but we have to modify the flow rate, obviously.

The principles are all the same, but there's much more of a sense that it's a, there's a finesse about it that is a little more forgiving when you have a wide rim of a tuba or a trombone. Interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to ask, it, it seems to me just on a very superficial understanding, which is what I have it would be more manageable with a bigger mouthpiece.

Yeah. I think

I just had a question on the top of my head. What is it? This happens. Are you pressed for time? Yeah. Because you're looking at your watch. Okay. 3. 30. Oh, you need to go at 3. 30. Okay. Let's just wrap up. I'll probably think of the question. But we have been with David Vining of Mountain Peak Music, mountainpeakmusic. com, and I do my best to not make these interviews with entrepreneurs sound like blatant infomercials. But at the same time I do feel it's necessary to make people aware of these companies and these businesses and the mission and the purpose that they have and this one certainly has a good mission and a good purpose and so I encourage you to check it out at mountainpeak. com. music. com. Dave, do you have any final parting thoughts before we end?

I wish I could think of something profound. I, in the end, what happened to me was unfortunate, but it didn't end up being a disaster because I was able to, I was able to recover and I came out of it. I feel like a better person, a better musician, better teacher. And yeah. I suppose if I had one sort of word of advice, if you are, a mentor or a teacher who has no knowledge about dystonia, then I would suggest that you say that up front and maybe send somebody who comes to you for help to someone who has experience with that because it's a treacherous road.

more damage can be done if you're not careful. And traditional therapies typically don't work. One of the pieces of advice that I got was look at videos of yourself playing, like the old days. And I did that, and it got worse. Because everything that I was looking at were, they contributed to the thing that happened to me.

I would just be mindful that, it's okay if you don't have the answer. Send your students or the people who are asking you for help, send them somewhere where they can really get help and don't just try to make stuff up.

If people want to contact you, say somebody is struggling with this and they want to contact you, is it Yeah,

I'm glad you asked that question, because I have a personal website called DavidVining.

com. DavidVining. com. DavidVining. com, and my entire narrative of what happened to me is on that site, and I have a pretty complete list of resources, books that you can read, and some sound files and things that helped me, which is a really good place to start. And so yeah, I would go to DavidVining. com.

There's also a contact. link there that you can fill out and if you wanted to get a little help perhaps we could get together.

Great. Yeah, wonderful. It's been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit here at the conference and sit down and pick your brain a little bit about focal dystonia.

And I haven't experienced myself and, if the Lord is good to me, then I won't ever. But if I do, I know who to call. Thanks for this interview.

Thank you, James. Thank you so much.