The most popular horn solo?

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Recently I was looking at a Google stats report for Horn Matters and something jumped out at me. One horn solo in our collection of PDF solos (HERE) had many more downloads than the rest.

Care to guess?

Before scrolling down to the answer, what would you guess?

  • Strauss I?
  • Mozart 4?
  • The F. Strauss Nocturno?
  • Morceau de Concert?

And the winner is …

(Drumroll)

Mozart 3. Which makes sense, it can be played by many horn players (movement 2 was the first horn solo I ever performed) and it is solid music, suited to many auditions or performances for younger horn students. Mozart I’m sure was not thinking it would be such a popular work when he wrote it, but it is number one! If you have not looked at it in a while, it is worth a fresh look.

[And if you learned it from an F part, it is time to revisit it from an Eb part such as we have posted for downloads.]

Speaking of Google, Bing

Finally I would add that Google, which supplied the stats that clearly point to Mozart 3, is a quirky search engine. I moved and rebuilt my model railroad related website (here) over the summer, and despite much effort on my end Google still can hardly find it — but every single page is indexed and comes up easily on Bing searches. So my tip would be don’t just use Google, make use of other search engines, you will get more complete results.

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