Concone Op. 11 and Why It Still Matters for Trombone
Most trombone students skip the Concone studies. They jump straight to Arban, Sigurd Rascher, or Kummer etudes and call it a day. That works if your long tones are already solid. If your slurs sound like a cat sneezing or your quarter notes in the tenor register arrive three milliseconds late, you probably need something different. The Concone Op. 11 trombone arrangement takes vocal cantabile exercises originally written for voice and adapts them to brass. The result is a set of slow, melodic studies that force you to confront every weak spot in your intonation and legato without any shortcut available. I found this out working with a student who could play a high C with clean attack every time but whose B natural right below it would waver by a quarter tone depending on what note preceded it. Standard Arban slurs didn't fix it because Arban emphasizes flexibility over pitch stability. The Concone study we landed on had him land on that B natural from a G below it, repeatedly, at a tempo of about 66 with no metronome click. He played it for twelve minutes straight, watching the tuning slide needle on his metronome-app tuner, and eventually the note stopped cheating. That is what these studies do. They are not flashy. They do exactly what they say they will do if you actually practice them. Giovanni Battista Concone published a series of vocal exercises in the mid 1800s. Op. 11 specifically is a collection of progressive cantabile studies designed to build smooth phrasing and even tonal production across the voice. The trombone arrangements were adapted later, usually by editors like Bruno Giuranna or various European method publishers, transposing the vocal ranges to sit comfortably in tenor trombone and sometimes bass trombone positions. The music itself does not change dramatically. You are still singing lines on syllables, but now you are doing it through a mouthpiece.
The notation typically uses quarter notes and eighth notes in moderate time signatures. There are occasional grace notes. The dynamics are mostly mf to p, rarely hitting fortissimo. That quiet dynamic range is the whole point. You cannot hide behind volume when playing Concone at the recommended tempos. Any breath noise, any tongue strike that lands too hard, any air stream that varies between notes becomes immediately audible.
How to Approach These Studies Without Wasting Your Time
Start with the earliest exercises in the book. The first few pages are basically chromatic and diatonic stepwise patterns in first position. You might think that is too simple. It is not. I have watched players with ten years of orchestral experience struggle through Exercise 1 for twenty minutes because their third finger slides kept drifting flat on the way up from slide position 1 to position 3. The issue was not finger strength. It was that they were moving the slide too fast relative to their air speed. They needed to arrive at the target pitch slightly before the note, then lock it in with the airstream. I told them to practice just the approach, not the full measure. Play the previous note, pause at the new slide position, tune it, then release into the next note. It sounds mechanical. It fixes the problem. Tempo matters more than players admit. Start at quarter note equals 52 to 60. If you can play the exercise cleanly at that speed with a tuner showing zero movement, then you are actually making progress. If you speed up to 72 before you have clean intonation, you are just practicing being sloppy. I use a visible tuning app on my phone during practice, not as a crutch, but as feedback. After a few weeks you stop looking at it. Your ear catches the drift before your eyes do. is non negotiable. These studies were written for singers. Singers breathe where the phrase tells them to. You need to breathe the same way. Mark your breaths with a pencil before you start playing. Do not improvise breathing the way you might in a folk tune or a pop arrangement. The written breath marks exist for a reason. When I forget to mark them, I end up gasping in the middle of a phrase and the musical line collapses.
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Common Mistakes I See Regularly
The first mistake is treating these like slurred etudes for flexibility. They are not. Flexibility comes from fast passages and articulation work. Concone Op. 11 is about tonal consistency and smooth pitch connection. If you are rushing through them to build speed, you are using the wrong tool for the job. The second mistake is playing them too softly. Some players think soft means unsupported. It does not. A pianissimo note with thin air is not the goal. A pianissimo note with a steady, warm airstream that still carries a full tone center is. If your tone disappears when you drop to mp, your air speed is insufficient, not your volume. The third mistake is ignoring the lower register. Tenor trombone players love the high C. They neglect G below the staff. The Concone exercises force you to play in that neglected zone, where the horn is least responsive and where intonation errors are easiest to gloss over in a performance. I once had a colleague who could not play a clean low B flat in position 4 without the note breaking on attack. We spent three weeks on Concone Exercise 4, starting at quarter note equals 48, focusing only on that bottom note. His low register improved noticeably after the second week. It was not glamorous. It worked.
What the Studies Will Not Do for You
They will not build endurance. They will not improve your range. They will not make your staccato sharper. If your primary goal is to play faster or louder, you should be working on other material. The Concone Op. 11 trombane studies are a supplement, not a replacement for your core technique work. I recommend spending about fifteen to twenty minutes on them per practice session, four to five days a week. Anything more and you are over practicing static material. Anything less and you will not see results. There is also a limit to how much they help if your fundamentals are severely underdeveloped. If you cannot produce a centered tone in first position yet, these studies will expose every flaw but they will not fix everything. You need foundational long tone work and lip flexibility studies alongside them. Think of Concone as the bridge between basic tone production and advanced musical phrasing. It sits in the middle of the roadmap, not at the destination.
Where to Find the Music
The arrangements are widely available. look for editions published by Carl Fischer, Edwin F. Kalmus, or Schirmer. Some versions are labeled for alto trombone as well, so check the range before you buy. The B flat tenor trombone editions typically cover positions 1 through 7, with occasional extended positions in the later exercises. If you play bass trombone, there are arrangements that transpose down a fourth, but most players just use the standard tenor edition and accept the occasional high reach. PDF versions exist on public domain sites for older editions, but be cautious about notation accuracy. I once used a scanned PDF from a questionable source and the page numbers were misaligned, which made it impossible to track my progress through the exercises. Buying the printed edition costs roughly eighteen to twenty five dollars and saves you the frustration. A few publishers also offer digital sheet music through IMSLP if you search for Concone vocal studies and confirm the trombone adaptation is included.
A Practical Weekly Routine
Monday through Friday: ten minutes of long tones, starting at concert B flat below the staff and moving chromatically up to high C, holding each note for four counts, then dropping to a steady mp. Five minutes on Concone Exercise 1 through whichever number your current level requires. Stop when the notes start to sag in pitch or when your tone quality drops. Do not push past that point. That is a sign you need to rest or switch exercises. Sunday is rest day. Your lips benefit from it. The Concone Op. 11 arrangement is not a shortcut. It is a slow, deliberate practice tool that rewards patience. Most players abandon it within a month because the results are not immediate. If you stick with it for six months, your intonation in the middle register improves, your legato becomes more reliable, and you start hearing pitch problems before they happen instead of after. That is the actual outcome. It is quiet. It is not exciting. It is useful.
