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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

He thoroughly understood the mechanical side of playing the trumpet, particularly as it relates to lip
strength, lip flexibility, and producing the type of tone which is pleasing to the listener.

The first thing he did was to have me change the position of the mouth piece on my lip slightly; then he
had me concentrate on using my lower lip, which has much more muscle in it than the upper lip, and
instead of producing the tone by mostly using my top lip, which I had been doing, he succeeded in
switching my tone production to concentrate on doing it with the strength from my lower lip, and not
my upper lip; then he had a set of musical exercises which he wrote down for me on a plain piece of
paper, and told me to start out every practice period without blowing one single note other than those
exercises that he wrote down for me, which in a short time had greatly increased the flexibility of my
playing, and the tone had begun to change for the better. All of the years that 1 spent later playing
trumpet were probably more pleasing for the listener to hear because of what Mr. Josef Gustat taught
me. As far as tone production, he really made me start all over again.

After a few months the other students in the band at Stetson began to remark just at how much better I
was sounding, and by the time I graduated from Stetson I could produce the type tone on my trumpet
that was accepted, and desirable, in the very highest circles of musicians. Without the teaching I got
from Mr. Gustat, I would have never even been considered to play in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra,
and perhaps not even in the Baylor Symphony Orchestra. This is another one of those sections in my
book that I am afraid has a sad ending. 1 do not recall, as a grown man, actually crying unashamedly, but
after I had been at Baylor University about 3 months, I received word that Mr. Gustat had passed away,
and I can remember crying like a baby. In fact, I get quite emotional thinking about it as I am writing
this book, since all of the success I have had in the musical world, playing the trumpet, I owe to Mr.
Josef Gustat.

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