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Horn-tastic TV Show Themes (I)

Bruce Hembd
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The Tony Randall Show theme.

On a regular basis, this blog gets visits from people looking for sheet music to “this movie” theme or that “TV show” jingle. A superior method for learning a melody where no sheet music is available is the old-fashioned way – by ear.

(Gasp!)

Back in the “old days” television shows had much longer themes than those today. Many times they were fully-developed ideas that lasted for up to one minute. Today, short of the occasional science fiction show, most TV show themes are brief riffs or loops whose sole purpose is to quickly establish a mood and nothing more.

The “motif-theme” to Law and Order epitomizes this trend, with its two-second sound effect that suggests both intense drama and the pounding of the judge’s gavel.

A short-lived series in the mid-70’s called “The Tony Randall Show” featured a very nice horn melody. This (and the “Princess Leia” theme from Star Wars) was one of the first things that I learned to play by ear. The show’s main character was a Philadelphia courtroom judge and the opening credits featured scenes from Philly as the judge was on his way to work.

This theme suggests a traditional British-style march. The Till Eulenspiegel-ish ending is a nice touch.

I have always wondered who the horn player was on this. I presume that it was an LA studio musician…perhaps Vince DeRosa?

Grand Festival of Hunting Horns and Venery

Bruce Hembd
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A blast from the past.

According to history King Charles IX of France (best known for the St. Bartholomew Massacre) died of tuberculosis. According to legend, he may have exacerbated this condition with his over-enthusiastic horn blowing while hunting.

The modern-day French horn has its roots in this tradition, and in an archived article I found at TIME.com from 1956, this tradition was celebrated in a huge event sponsored by Belgian Baron Marcel Schaetzen de Schaetzenhoff.

The Baron invited some of the leading horn groups of Europe to a Grand Festival of Hunting Horns and Venery* held at his 10th century Château of Laarne near Ghent.

The TIME article notes that about 200 hunting horn ensembles existed at the time throughout Europe, and that three French manufacturers produced some 400 hunting horns a year at about $35 apiece.

It was a glorious afternoon for the horn players but a somewhat puzzling one for the modern audience. When they began wandering aimlessly across the chateau grounds as the concert went on, nobody could think of a fanfare to recall them to their seats.

See the source article from the TIME magazine archives.

Humor: The Farkas Photo

John Ericson
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After joining the ASU faculty as horn professor in the fall of 2001 I was honored to get to know and work with one of my predecessors, Ralph Lockwood. From him over a period of years I inherited a number of studio materials from when he was horn professor, the period between John Barrows and Thomas Bacon. Among all the materials, this photo is one of the most precious.

Philip FarkasIt is the great horn teacher and player Philip Farkas (1914-1992). The photo was taken at the 1989 Southwest Regional Horn Workshop, hosted by Lockwood, where Farkas was a featured guest. Found in one of several files of materials saved from the event, I love this photo; it is so striking to see Farkas in this most interesting and warmly funny pose.

In preparation for this post I contacted Professor Lockwood, now retired and living in Columbus, Ohio. He did not take the photo; it seems to have been either taken by an ASU student or by a participant at the workshop, who gave it to Professor Lockwood along with a file of other photos of events at the workshop. On seeing the photo again I love how Lockwood worded it, this photo captures “a moment of whimsy that humanizes yet even more a very great and generous soul.”

UPDATE: The photographer was Karen Teplik. She was one of the artists for the 1989 workshop and may be seen on the right, standing between Ralph Lockwood and William Lane at the event (photo described further here). She had double prints made of her photos and gave a set to Lockwood which remained with the archive from the event. As she explains in her Pinterest note on the photo,

I took this picture of Philip Farkas at the Southwest Regional Horn Workshop at Arizona State University in 1989. I was sitting in the auditorium and turned around to see people, and lo and behold, Philip Farkas was sitting right behind me! As I brought my camera up to take his picture he did this pose.

And even more amazingly, she did not know this photo was a viral sensation of sorts until I ran into her at a horn recital here in the Phoenix area in March of 2014! The image has made several trips through Facebook that I know of and is among the first images you get if you do a Google image search for Philp Farkas. And it remains a fun image by which to remember Farkas, who would have been 100 years old March 5, 2014.

Considering the “Backup” Career while Studying Music

Bruce Hembd
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A second career.

For over a dozen years now, I have been a freelance web developer. It has had its up and downs, but in the dry periods when there are no music gigs it has been a tremendous boost.

When in college, a common perception among some serious students was an “all or nothing” philosophy; that if you are less than 100% devoted to your Art, you are lessening your chances of success and are a “lesser” musician.

This is hardly the case of course and in fact, having a backup career seems like a very smart plan, especially in this current economy.

Then, there is always the unexpected that can happen:

When a Rottweiler attacked Oakland French hornist Erin Vang, her shredded lips and face prevented her from playing the horn for four years. Fortunately, a college double major in music and math paved the way to computers, and Vang worked until recently as a facilitative leader at SAS, a statistical software company.

The full story is here:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/11/entertainment/ca-moonlight11

Exercise: My Lip Trills Stink!

Bruce Hembd
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Some tips on lip trills.

In a lesson with a community college student on a Mozart concerto I needed to explain the lip trill. I demonstrated one – which at one time I could do very well – and much to my surprise, it sounded terrible.

Since the harmonics of the French horn are close to one another in the range above g1 on the F horn and c1 on the B-flat horn, horn players have an unique alternative to valved trills. It is possible to “wiggle” between two close harmonics. It is an effect that when well-executed produces a very elegant-sounding trill.

That being said, it is a technique that needs regular attention. If you don’t use it, you lose it – as I have discovered. To help organize the various techniques I have used to work on trills I created a PDF for myself and for my students.

Dividing trill practice into four areas of concentration, this PDF focuses on starting, controlling, sustaining and refining lip trills.

  1. The “kickstart”
    In a way, lip trills are like controlled yodels or “clams.” These exercises focus on jump-starting the process with harmonic “flips.” For some, using the syllables “O” and “E” help with this exercise. (O-E-O …. O-E-O, etc.) As you go higher the syllables “E” and “Ah” can help.
  2. The “wiggle spot”
    I once read an analogy that lip trills are like a cat walking on the edge of a thin, wet fence. The cat walks on the edge of the fence and wiggles between the two sides. This exercise helps to find that “fence” – the slippery spot between the two trill notes. With the lips only, blur the two notes together as much as possible.
  3. Working the locomotion
    The typical exercises that concentrate on speeding up and slowing down the trilling motion.
  4. “Extreme” techniques
    Flexibility exercises using expanded intervals, and trills in sustained crescendo/decrescendo, long-tone formats.

This PDF contains only the basic outline for these exercises. It is up to the user to “fill in the blanks” – it should be relatively self-explanatory.

The “Tut Tut” Style of Tonguing in Horn Articulation

Bruce Hembd
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Clean articulations using tongue-stopping.

With my very first baby steps on the French horn, my big brother gave me the Dennis Brain Mozart concertos album as a Christmas present. I wore out the vinyl on the record in a short period from repeated plays and ended up going through 3 or 4 more copies after that. I listened to Brain’s playing over and over again, and loved every note of it.

In the liner notes, I remember the author writing about Brain’s preference for the distinctive “tut” articulation. I remember noticing this especially on all his 6/8 pickup notes in the Rondos.

I naturally adopted this tongue-stopping technique through high school and until college. My college mentor insisted that this was bad form – “never end the note with the tongue!” – and so I stopped using it.

The beautiful Cleveland staccato

A few years later I studied with a teacher in Cleveland who called this technique the “beautiful Cleveland staccato.” He advocated using this articulation for almost everything.

While up close it can sound very brutish and coarse, from the audience perspective it comes across as a clean, nicely tapered articulation. The hall’s reverberation blurs the coarseness that is heard up close, giving the notes a nice teardrop shape.

He made a convincing argument. Because the horn points backwards, the otherwise blunt ending to a “tutted” note gets rounded by ambient acoustics.

As a student in Chicago, I noticed that players there also used this technique but with less frequency than my teachers in Cleveland. Nevertheless, there seemed to be something to this technique that made sense and I was convinced of its validity.

To tut or not to tut?

Today I do not use the “tut” articulation for everything of course – it is a bit rough – but in certain circumstances it is the right sound for the occasion. Done in a relaxed manner, I feel that it makes playing staccatos and marcatos much easier (and with fewer clams) when compared to producing the same effect with the breath alone.

Pip Eastop has written an excellent article on this technique that sums up the concept very well.

  • http://www.pyp.f2s.com/html/ttco.htm

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/75466425@N00/189818456/sizes/s/

What is Your Body Really Doing when Playing Horn?

John Ericson
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I have been thinking quite a bit about tonguing and how the body works lately, and had two most interesting experiences yesterday, seeing the X-ray video of a trumpet player and hearing a session by David Vining at AMEA.

First, the video, which was posted as a link from YouTube yesterday morning by Bruce Hembd on the Horndog Blog:

Wild, huh? What it is is a type of video that I don’t believe can be ethically made today, an X-ray of a trumpet player playing high and low and articulating notes, including double tonguing. The video is old and slighty out of sync with the audio but you can get the gist of it really easy. Several first question to ponder:

  • Is the tongue the shape you thought it was?
  • Is it moving in the direction and to the place you thought it was?
  • What does the tongue do in different registers?
  • How about that double tonguing?

Then, in the afternoon I went to the AMEA In-Service conference and attended the session “Breathing for Musicians” by David Vining, who is the trombone professor at Northern Arizona University. The focus was on gaining a physiologically accurate picture of how breathing works. The experience was again very much like seeing the X-ray video, as a major point was many if not most of us have only a vague notion of where exactly our lungs and diaphragm are and how they work. To go through all the points of his presentation would be beyond what I can post in the blog but a few bullets I carried away:

  • Breathing is a composite movement
  • Good breathing involves rib movement
  • All movements are connected
  • Air drives the tongue

Want to know more? Vining recently published a book that I purchased from him yesterday, What Every Trombonist Needs To Know About the Body. Covers it all and much more with many great illustrations, I am finding this publication most interesting, would be very worthwhile for every hornist to read.

Whistler’s Embouchure

Bruce Hembd
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On embouchure formation.

A recent post at Julia Rose’s blog makes an interesting observation about horn players and their thoughts on embouchures.

It’s a shame that the trumpet world can talk about embouchure experimentation openly, while in the horn world it gets shot down as blasphemy.

I wish that as a teacher I had x-ray eyes like Superman and I could see inside a student’s embouchure … but alas, I do not and can not.

[ Pictured above-right: a variation of Whister’s Mother. Click the image for a larger view. Who is in the wall picture? ]

While some teachers and players may like to think that they have definitive answers for everyone, the truth is that there are only general guidelines. The specifics of embouchure exist in a state of flux; facial muscles, teeth and oral cavities hidden behind the flesh can vary greatly from person to person, there can be no “one size fits all” approach.

Most agree on the general mechanics and setup of the embouchure, yet there are many disagreements on the finer specifics – for example, when it comes to issues like air stream direction, lip roll and mouthpiece pressure. I like very much this term “balanced embouchure” as it implies a standard dictated by equilibrium.

Imagine for example two tight-rope walkers, one wieghing 100 pounds at 5 feet tall, while another weighs 250 pounds and is 6.5 feet tall. Would these two walkers be expected to use the same balance bar, walking pace and foot technique? What if it were a very windy day on the tightrope?

While their general techniques may be similar, their internal mechanics will differ because of their different physiologies.

For this reason I prefer a less rigid, less analytical approach to embouchure. Individual physical differences – in the teeth, lips, jaw shape, etc. – can greatly affect whether a particular “embouchure school” will work for a particular student.

With this issue, I imagine that our string, keyboard and percussion colleagues are at a distinct advantage; everything that is involved in producing their sounds may be seen and analyzed with the naked eye.

While there are some trouble signs to watch for, there is no “one size fits all” method that works equally well across the board. If you are a student looking for solutions to embouchure concerns, bear in mind that there may be more than one answer.

With an astute teacher as a guide, it may take time and patience to find the right balance.

 

More Lessons Learned from Cats

Bruce Hembd
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Kitteh needs a LOL cat caption.*

Other lessons?

con’t from yesterday…

Metaphorically speaking:

  • Don’t poop where you eat.
  • If it smells funny don’t eat it – walk away.
  • Bury things that stink like poop.
  • Did I mention already that naps are good?

*Yes, this picture is yet another Photoshop trick :- ) Please submit any ideas for a LOL Cat caption in the comments below!

Lessons Learned from My Cats

Bruce Hembd
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Big things in little packages.

Tigger-Poo and Mr. Tribble were rescued as kittens from our local Humane Society. They are members of our family and we affectionately call them our “furry children.”

Many times though I pick up on little things that relate to my professional, horn-playing endeavors.

Concentration & patience

Mr. Tribble has a “fresh water” addiction.

Never mind that his water bowl already has water in it. If a fresh, cold glass of water is within his field of vision he will stoically and quietly stare at it – obsessively, as if he expects it to move. If I thoughtlessly walk away from that glass for more than a few seconds, it would be no surprise to find cat whiskers in it when I return.

Sometimes I have lapses in concentration while performing – I daydream. This usually happens during long tacets or rests. I lose count and then miss an important entrance. In some of the operatic repertoire I perform, long resting periods are part of the job.

On another level, Mr. T teaches me that sometimes being a pessimist or an optimist is irrelevant to an opportunity. Being patient is more important.

The glass is neither half-full or half-empty – it is just there. For Mr. T, it is nothing but wet, refreshing, chop-smacking goodness.

Whining at the food bowl

Tigger-Poo has a similar problem as Mr. T, but his malediction is the “full bowl” syndrome. No matter how many nuggets remain in his food bowl, it is never enough and he is always whining and loudly complaining for more or something different.

Too many times have I caught myself at a job complaining about this thing or that, while I should be thankful for the work that is directly in front of me. As a freelance musician it is a important to be thinking about the next opportunity, but in the meantime it shouldn’t distract me from the joys of the current opportunity.

Take a nap

Cats spend about 20 hours of their day and night sleeping and napping.

Naps are good, especially before playing Wagner or any opera longer than 3 hours.

Have fun; love what you do

Even in middle age, Mr. Tribble and Tigger-Poo love to wrestle and chase each other around the house like kittens. Mr. T has a special affection for his curved scratching post, while Poo likes to smack around his glowing light-ball.

Every day is new with discoveries – for each other and their toys. (It probably helps that cats have poor short-term memory.)

Even when performing Tosca or Marriage of Figaro or Beethoven’s 5th Symphony again for the “up-teenth” time, I should approach as if it where the first time – with fresh eyes and with a child-like wonder.

More?

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