The Ultra Performance Musician: What Musicians Can Learn From Trumpet Player and Paragliding Pilot Lisa Verzella
Updated: 2 days ago
Lisa Verzella is a multifaceted professional based in Salt Lake City, Utah, who has built an accomplished career across the distinct worlds of aviation, meteorology, and classical music. I had the chance to catch up with Verzella on a recent trip and was amazed by the many connections between flying and classical music performance.
Aviation and Meteorology
With over two decades of experience, Verzella is an accomplished pilot who has flown hang gliders and paragliders competitively. Her significant aviation achievements include representing the U.S. Women's World Hang Gliding Team in 1998 and 2008, and becoming the U.S. Women's National Hang Gliding Champion in 2009 and 2011. Her passion for flying evolved into a career in meteorology, as she sought to deepen her understanding of wind patterns to ensure flight safety. She earned a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from the University of Utah and now serves as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. In this role, she combines her pilot’s perspective with professional forecasting to mentor others, often creating seminars and technical resources to help pilots better understand complex weather systems.
Music
Verzella has maintained a distinguished career as a classical trumpeter alongside her scientific work. She earned her bachelor's degree in orchestral performance from the Eastman School of Music and her master's degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Appointed to the Ballet West Orchestra in 1997, she has since performed regularly with ensembles such as the Utah Symphony and Opera, the Aspen Choral Society, and the American Festival Orchestra. Her recorded discography includes Twentieth Century Trumpet (1999) and Womyn's Work (2002), an album dedicated to premiere compositions by women.
To start off, who are you and how did you end up balancing a life as a professional trumpet player and a paragliding pilot?
Hello Stephanie, thanks so much for your interest and for including my story in The Ultra Performance Musician! My name is Lisa Lynn Verzella, and I consider myself an adventurer whose greatest joys in life come from performing music in professional groups, both classical and jazz, and soaring up to the clouds with fellow pilots, without a motor, and cruising over miles of terrain far below.
The flying aspect evolved while I was a music student at the Aspen Music Festival, whose main campus is on Aspen Mountain, about a thousand feet below where hang glider pilots launched off Ruthie's Run each afternoon. That first summer, whenever I walked out of my practice room for a lunch break, I'd look up and there they were. I knew I had to do it, and I started lessons soon after.
So I began my soaring career as a hang glider pilot, which is somewhat time- and gear-intensive. I started competing in cross-country competitions around the U.S. and the world, flying for 6 to 8 hours at a time over a course line, sometimes greater than 100 miles. Fortunately, flying fit rather well into my freelance trumpeting life in Utah, as the soaring window happens during daylight hours, while most of my symphony, opera, and ballet performances were at night. I even had time to learn paragliding, to experience the same medium via a lightweight craft with which I could hike up to a launch site.
The true balancing act began when I went back to school for a meteorology degree, atmospheric science being a natural extension of soaring amidst the clouds, about 20 years ago. I emerged with a full-time day job, which still allowed for evening gigs but hampered my opportunities to fly. I managed to sustain all three endeavors for nearly a decade, until I began to notice the stress affecting both my playing and flying skills. Not able to give up either passion, I switched my focus to cross-country paragliding, competing only occasionally, and stepped down from Principal Trumpet of the ballet to section player. The relief was incalculable, and it allowed me to remain at the top of my game in the air and on the ground.
What does preparation and execution of a flight or concert have in common?
Preparation for both flight and performance involves practice and focus. In the same way that I need to perfect an attack or pitch on the trumpet, I need to hone my launch skills to safely leave the ground. If the only time I worked on these skills was in a concert or on the day of the big flight, I'd be leaving too much to chance. Both performance and flight involve risk, so I do whatever it takes to minimize that risk.
The flow of the music has always been relatively easy for me, as is turning in a tight core of lift and ascending to cloudbase (known as thermalling) in my glider. So my most efficient practice comes when I break down the skills in between. For example, finding the difficult passages and working with a metronome on their entrance, exit, and execution is akin to carefully noting thermal triggers, efficiently entering the lift and turning, and exiting before getting too close to the clouds. The exact style in which I want to begin and end a piece of music is as critical as nailing a launch or landing my glider. In each of these cases, practice without focus still leaves everything to luck.
How does flying help you stay relaxed when you play?
Short answer: I'm not going to die if I miss a note! By building skills that allow me to fly more safely, I've managed to better cope with anxiety, which directly transfers to the concert hall. There's no comparison between stage fright and getting tossed around by wind currents thousands of feet in the air.
Does music help you with flying and other aspects of your life?
I'm glad you followed up with this question, because the inverse is true as well. The flow I experience in music is so close to the feeling I get while in the air; it's almost like flying is the embodiment of a symphony to me. And that same dedication, hours a day of practice since age 8, and the evolution of practice through passion, has helped me structure the development of my flying skills to not only stay safe for 35 years of flying, but also to break distance records and achieve countless personal bests along the way.
Musicians spend hours sitting in practice rooms and often deal with a lot of physical strain. What do athletes and pilots do for body care and injury prevention that musicians should be doing too?
As noted by your other esteemed athlete/musician guests, having a solid workout plan is pivotal for injury prevention. I'm a firm believer in cross-training, mixing in lifting and high-intensity gym sessions with mountain biking and yoga each week. And actually not sitting for at least half the time in the practice room, but rather alternating traditional chair time with kneeling chairs and standing up. Being proactive is best; things like physical therapy and learning Feldenkrais-type movements are most helpful before injuries even begin.
When you make a mistake on stage, it feels like the end of the world. How do you handle a mistake when the stakes are way higher in the air?
Again, a great follow-up question to how flying helps me relax onstage! In the air, we try to just make one mistake at a time, and not a costly one. Accidents mostly happen when several things go wrong, like poor weather decisions or not checking equipment carefully. So, just like performing, I can't get caught up in just one error; I just keep moving forward and try to fly as safely as possible.
Staying present is the key in the air, as in performance, though the main difference is the way we get to pivot when flying. If the weather starts to turn bad, I find a flaw in my glider, or I'm just feeling like crap, I can choose to go land. You can't do that during a concert; you just have to keep playing through mistakes, instrument problems, or illness.
Performance anxiety is a huge struggle for most musicians. Does dealing with high-stakes situations in aviation change how you handle nerves before a concert?
Before launch or backstage, breathing techniques help immensely to reduce stress, including the physiological sigh, box breathing, and exhaling four times as long as the inhale to induce a parasympathetic state. I also do a number of weekly breath and mental practices to reduce my anxiety in the air, all of which help me during performance as well. Namely, Wim Hof breathing followed by a two-minute cold plunge a few times a week does wonders for the nerves. Meditation practices such as the full-body scan get me very in tune with my body and breath.
How do you keep your focus sharp when you're dealing with the intense physical and mental demands of both fields?
One aspect of flying that attracts me the most is the requirement of total focus. One of the few times, maybe the only time, I don't think about food or anything else is when I take those first steps in my launch run. Just like performing, there are plenty of butterflies up to that moment, but the second the music begins, it's go-time.
And just like all the other skills for both fields, you have to practice focus as well, mainly to learn what it takes to give you total presence and clarity. Up to the moment I begin the steps that carry me off the mountain, I check my gear, concentrate on what the wind conditions are, and visualize the perfect launch. Seconds before bringing the trumpet to my lips, I breathe in rhythm and hear my entrance pitch, just like I'm on a ramp entering the highway. I tell my students to fill their heads with what needs to happen before they make that first sound, so that they're not even thinking about the audience or their nerves.
When you're out cross-country flying, you have to make fast decisions under pressure. Does that kind of quick decision-making ever help you when you're performing music?
There have been a few instances where quick decisions saved the day during a performance. One time, a valve froze on me just a few bars before a solo, even though I had just oiled everything before the downbeat. I actually turned the horn upside down and spat into the valve hole on the bottom; luckily, that was enough to get it unstuck, and I didn't miss a note! I think those fast-action skills I use in flying help me deal with any kind of unexpected event onstage or elsewhere; it's a kind of situational awareness that gets honed with practice.
How do you manage your energy so you don't burn out from two such intense, demanding passions?
Just as several of your other interviewees have mentioned, good sleep, nutrition, and regular workouts go a long way toward filling up the gas tank. As we age as musicians or athletes, these actions become even more critical.
If you could give one simple piece of advice to a musician who wants to build better mental and physical strength, what would it be?
Find a good personal trainer at the gym and follow a science podcast that focuses on building mental strength. I subscribe (for free) to The Huberman Lab and The Model Health Show to hear about research and advice regarding the mind/body connection and maximizing our plasticity to learn and grow, and I'm sure there are several more sources out there. I also recommend reading psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Barry Green's The Inner Game of Music.
Since you're also a meteorologist, you spend your time studying invisible air currents. Does that help you think differently about air support and breathing on the trumpet?
It definitely helps my awareness of airflow, both on the inhalation and exhalation. My biggest awareness of breath for the trumpet, however, came from the use of a breathing bag—a technique introduced by my teacher and former New York Philharmonic trumpeter Vincent Penzarella. A technique borrowed and refined from legendary Chicago Symphony tuba player Arnold Jacobs, bag exercises involved taking in as much air as possible and playing passages into the bag with very little resistance, which required multiple large, relaxed breaths for each phrase.
Then, by playing the same passage on the trumpet, one releases a huge flow of air that makes the music more effortless and voluminous. I actually think of that process sometimes when I'm in very turbulent air while flying, and it calms me down.
What other lessons can musicians learn from flying?
Similar to performing, flying necessitates intense practice, concentration, and honing of skills involving both mind and body. When one can achieve flow state, a magical experience happens both for performer and audience, or for pilot and glider.
It helps me to remember that the risk involved in flying, or any other high-speed sport, far surpasses that of performing, no matter how terrified we feel about stepping in the spotlight. If we make mistakes on the stage, even ones that might cost us a job, we can pick ourselves back up, learn from mistakes and dive back in. Big mistakes in flying or other high-risk activities may not afford us that opportunity. This understanding enables me to take more chances with my music, to express the beauty of a phrase with less worry about missing a note, and to really go for it, giving the audience a performance to remember.
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