Many thanks to a recent post on Horn People (9/22/2025) for pointing out a great Verne Reynolds quote. It’s from page 71 of The Horn Handbook, and is in reference to Maxime-Alphonse book 6. Makes for a great meme (below), I can totally imagine Mr. Reynolds saying this (he was my teacher for my Masters degree), but it also leads to a few thoughts on other etude number 10 examples and more.
Pretty much every number 10 …
When you get down to it, there is no etude number 10 that it is essential to learn. Looking at for example Reynolds 10 and my own tenth etude, they are not going to make much of a difference one way or another.
Really, no specific etude will make or break your career. Lots of etudes cover the same general technical ground.
The elephant in the room: Kopprasch 10
I did not study with Myron Bloom, but I knew a lot of Bloom students, especially when I was at IU. The example I’ve been given is that he could spend an entire hour on the first four notes of Kopprasch 10! Probably several lessons. He had a very specific way it had to sound. You did not go forward until you perfectly mastered that fundamental. “Dee-yuh dut dut!”
Kopprasch 10 perfection is part of an older school “extremely demanding teacher” way of teaching. I talk about this etude a bit in this article:
In brief, though, I’d yet again challenge anyone teaching out there to think about using less Kopprasch and more of something else. There are recent etude publications that are hardly used! Put a little effort into finding and using new etude materials that teach the same general fundamentals.
BONUS: What about Schantl and scale fundamentals?
Speaking of fundamentals, while I’m sure that the Schantl scale book [published originally as just one volume of a 4-volume collection] works you through some important fundamentals, you do need to balance that work with other materials. Just as there are teachers that would have you only work on Kopprasch until you are ready (in their mind) to go on, there are also teachers that use Schantl scales in the same manner. Maybe it’s all you do for a semester of lessons or more!
It’s not a healthy way to practice or to teach. Honestly, I think you might make better progress using a less demanding scale book as part of a larger picture of what you work on. As a student I was worked though the venerable Pares Scales book, and my goal with my own scales publication is for it to be concise and effective.
Ideally you must find some overall balance between fundamentals, etudes, solos, and excerpts. Certainly Schantl as an actual teacher had that balance, as reflected in his overall 4-volume publication. Originally published in 1904, volume I was a book of open harmonic natural horn studies, and volume II is the scale book some players and teachers love. Perhaps the most widely used volume today is volume III, which was reprinted in 1941 in abridged form as Preparatory Melodies to Solo Work, edited by Max P. Pottag. Concluding the set, the primary focus of Volume IV of the Horn-Schule is transposition, and Schantl included for purposes of that study a rather heavily edited edition of 51 of the Op. 6 etudes and 13 of the Op. 5 etudes of Kopprasch, plus some Gallay. Some those Kopprasch etudes and his version of Gallay may be found among my PDF etude collections that are posted here in Horn Matters (go to the PDF page and scroll down to the etudes).
In any case, if your balance is way off, think about making some changes. Do work on fundamentals, but remember that horn playing can be fun, especially if you play more than just scales and etudes.
