Horn Matters | A French Horn and Brass Site and Resource | John Ericson and Bruce Hembd

Among all the various classic horn mouthpieces made in the United States one that has had the most lasting interest and impact is the original FARKAS MODEL. This mouthpiece was produced by Schilke before Farkas became associated with Holton and is not to be confused with later imitations.

Farkas first met Renold Schilke when he was a high school student in the Chicago Civic Orchestra and, according to Nancy Jordan Fako in Philip Farkas and His Horn, with Schilke shared an “extreme interest in how various factors of mouthpiece and instrument design affected performance outcome.”

When Farkas returned to Chicago in 1947 he found that Schilke was making trumpet mouthpieces with extreme precision in a workshop in his basement. According to Fako,

…Phil regularly made the long trip to the Schilke home to work with him…. It was not long before they determined that they wanted to go into business and produce mouthpieces for other than their own use. Now they needed a name, and they decided to call their company Music Products, Inc.

The first horn mouthpiece produced and marketed by Music Products, Inc., was a copy of the one that Phil most often used. He was constantly experimenting, as he would do his entire life. Consequently, at any one time he had a number of different mouthpieces that he was using. There were always five or six mouthpieces on his music stand…. However, there was a certain one which was always his favorite and to which he always returned when he found himself in a particularly difficult performance situation, and it was this mouthpiece that he decided to produce as the “Farkas Model.”

Farkas, with his experience in advertising, produced a brochure to market this new product. In it he shared

I have, with my own hands, made over two hundred mouthpieces, each different in some respect…. in 1949 I made a mouthpiece which just seemed to have “everything.” Day after day I tried it and compared it to other good mouthpieces and every time it triumphed. Therefore I feel justified in saying that this is one of the best mouthpieces that has ever been made….

The mouthpiece in the photo is an example of this mouthpiece. My understanding is they produced 1,000 of these before Farkas became associated with Holton. The block letter stamping FARKAS MODEL is hard to see in photo but is the one way to tell it if is an original.

Holton for many years made and still makes a similar mouthpiece, the MC cup. If the original FARKAS MODEL was the inspiration, the Holton MC has suffered in comparison over the years due to quality control issues. Later in the Fako book she reports of Farkas in 1992 reacting to

…a letter from a horn player who had bought two Farkas mouthpieces which were supposedly the same model he had used for twenty-six years, but were actually “a far departure” from his original. Phil immediately wrote to Larry Ramirez [at Holton]:

…where there is much smoke perhaps there is a fire.

…this seems like an opportune time to make a new cutter for the MC mouthpiece. I will be happy to furnish a Schilke-Farkas for the occasion….

Back to the mouthpiece in the photo, I actually won my job in Nashville playing on this very mouthpiece. I was given it as a Doctoral student, and really liked it for a good while, to the extent that I even made a backbore reamer that matched the backbore and could be used to modify other mouthpieces to this same backbore.

This gets at what the differences are between the classic Schilke FARKAS MODEL and their later Holton cousins. Start with any dimension you wish, the Holton version varied considerably over the years due to reasons hinted at by Farkas himself above.

One other note would be I recall when I was a Doctoral student at Indiana University that Farkas was playing on that original mouthpiece again, which he had Rick Seraphinoff do some restoration work on so that it was still usable.

There are a number of mouthpieces made today that are similar but probably the magic Farkas found with his original prototype is not to be found. If you run across one of these classic mouthpieces give it a try, it may have a bit of magic left in it.

UPDATE: A fine copy of this mouthpiece is now available from Houghton Horns.

One unique and classic line of mouthpieces was produced into the late 1980s by hornist Neill Sanders. Perhaps most remembered for giving a bit more comfort to students with braces, this wide rim horn mouthpiece is one that if you have ever seen one you will remember it. This photo is of an example that I have, a 17M.

When it comes to horn information I have long been a saver. I actually still have the Neill Sanders flyer sent to me postmarked in October of 1984. It contains a complete list of the models available, which included five horn models, five trumpet models, a Flugel model, four cornet models, five trombone models, two baritone models, and four tuba models. The unique thing about the whole line is the rim, which was for all the instruments actually on the wide end of the spectrum and of a reverse peak design. That is, the high point of the rim is at the outside edge so it visually tips inward to the cup. Trumpet soloist David Hickman was at the time an endorsing artist and he explains why he prefers this rim in the flyer.

I prefer the NEILL SANDERS Mouthpiece because of the CONTOUR of the rim. It seems to fit the curvature of the teeth better than other mouthpieces. The angle of the rim creates a smoother connection between rim, cup, and bite of the mouthpiece, improving COMFORT, FLEXIBILITY and ENDURANCE.

The second photo is the front of the flyer, which highlights the main selling points of the mouthpiece. Neill Sanders (1923—1992) was a British player who among other things performed with Dennis Brain and was a very active player in London. In 1970 he came to the United States and he served for a number of years on the faculty of Western Michigan University.

According to the flyer Sanders started selling mouthpieces of this design in 1966. The photo below shows how radical the rim is compared to standard horn mouthpieces.

I used a Sanders mouthpiece for several months in 1983. It was in the period where I was still working out my first embouchure change. To this day I don’t know what really happened but I had what I will just call an event. My perception was it was a slight tear in the lower lip, maybe it was just a bruise. Something happened so that I was in pain when I played. A bass trombone playing brass teaching assistant at my undergraduate school had a Neill Sanders horn mouthpiece, and I borrowed it and used it to try to bridge the painful area. After a few months it healed to the point I could use a standard rim. For this reason alone a Sanders mouthpiece would remain a useful item for any teacher to have around.

They are long out of production but if you want to buy a Neill Sanders horn mouthpiece you are not out of luck, Moosewood for example can make you a copy of their rim to fit his cups [UPDATE: They are out of business now, but Osmun can still make you one, see the comments below]. Also ASU Regents Professor of trumpet David Hickman, my colleague, to this day uses a mouthpiece faced with a rim inspired by the Neill Sanders mouthpiece he endorsed years ago; his signature model mouthpiece currently sold by Giddings and Webster has a very similar rim. The design does live on for high brass.