A hilarious video.
A colleague pointed this video out to me posted recently by Jeffrey Curnow, the Associate Principal Trumpet of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the Arizona Opera, we use sound shields on a regular basis in the pit. Our trumpet and low brass guys got a big giggle out of this.
A bit of free association.
During rehearsals of Verdi’s Rigoletto this past weekend, I had a stream of free-associative thought during a long period of rest. It was a bit like the popular trivia game, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Our guest conductor is fairly meticulous about giving clear cut-offs for note releases. Many conductors that I work with take this for granted. While I would like to say that the Arizona Opera Orchestra is on par with the Met and can consistently release unison chords together, we are not.
Sometimes we need a little extra help from the podium and with this guest conductor, his clear cut-offs are helping us to play a bit cleaner than usual. This detail – releases – is one of the basic elements that distinguishes the great from the good.
Along this line of thought, my mind wandered to lessons with Milan Yancich at Eastman. He always insisted on calling the end and the beginning of a note as a “release.” He had strong reservations about the term “attack,” insisting that it encouraged students to overuse the tongue for note production.
Triggering the imagination
“Imagine a bathtub full of water,” he would say, “with a rubber stopper in the drain. You reach in with your finger and pull out the stopper, and the water rushes out.” I like this metaphor for tonguing for several reasons – it gets the imagination going and it gets one thinking more about air flow and less about the tongue.
I recall an old Canadian Brass video where a similar water metaphor is illustrated. One of the musicians turned on a water facet and to demonstrate tonguing, took a table knife and made slicing motions through the stream of water. The water still flows at a constant rate, the video explained, and is only temporarily interrupted by the motion of the knife.
“It’s not an attack – it’s a release,” Yancich would exclaim when I would hammer out overly-aggressive articulations. When he sang along in lessons, he accentuated the beginnings of notes with a “pull-back” gesture, rather than the typical stabbing gesture. It was like he was pulling a trigger or yanking a rip-cord on a cannon.
Mind over matter
I find that a little dash of technical information accompanied by stories and metaphors can help students much more than a boat load of technical details.
Sam Pilafian remarked once in a warm-up class that we needed to “breath through our knees.” What fantastic imagery to get us thinking about proper breathing technique without getting into the specific mechanics of breathing!
In the hands of a wordsmith, metaphors, imagery and wordplay can help produce the correct technique and inspire the right state of mind – all at once.
…oh…uh…back to the Rigoletto rehearsal … “psst … hey,” I whisper to a colleague…
Where are we?
This week in the pedagogy class we focused on warm-up routines. One old standard discussed was the “Heavy Routine” found in Embouchure Building for French Horn by Joseph Singer. A classic publication from 1956, when I was a student I recall some of the big players or at least wannabe big players used this routine. While I stuck with a version of the Farkas warm-up then, the Heavy Routine was presented as sort of a badge of honor, that if you were capable of playing this routine at all you were great.
Today I had a lesson cancel and it was a light day so I decided why not try the Heavy Routine? I had not done it in years.
It starts on page 31. The text begins,
This series of exercises has been devised to aid in the building up of (a) still greater stamina and endurance, [and] (b) increased security in the high register, particularly in regard to endurance.
Sounds good! We could all use both those things. It starts out with an exercise I would never have done first by choice, on high range attacks, but with the recommended five-minute rest afterwards it was OK. Then we come to page 32. It is a long tone study that is quite strenuous followed by this text.
MANDANTORY REST. 30 Minutes Minimum.
The 30-minute rest felt good about then!
The routine itself is sort of a cross between extreme Caruso and extreme Brass Gym. On page 40 he makes it clear how much rest is required after each routine. And you will need the rest I think.
I made it through but I have to say my chops have felt better at the end of a warm-up. Which is probably why after the last exercise it says “then 30 Minutes Rest before any further playing!” I think I will stick for now with a somewhat lighter Caruso and Brass Gym inspired routine I have been doing since the summer. But it was an interesting experiment.
Debunking a misguided popular phrase.
Those that can’t do, teach.
Occasionally this saying (or a close variation) pops up in casual conversation. It is a saying of unknown origin which more-or-less suggests that teachers are failures.
The implications of this phrase are many:
Any professional (in any field) has probably heard this phrase in one variation or another, at one time or another. In the classical music profession, it is usually meant to say that teachers are failed performers.
Teaching is one of the few professions that requires a higher education, yet it is commonly suggested that those who take that career path are inferior in some way. This is mostly untrue of course – a myth perpetuated by misguided cynicism and pessimism.
Teaching is an occupation not only requiring a college degree but also a variety of acquired social, pedagogical and psychological skills. A teacher is required to be any numbers of things at any given moment, including:
Being a teacher, whether it be a college professor or classroom teacher, requires more than the standard Bachelors degree, but still many view it as a profession for dropouts or people with inferior skills.
A typical “anti-teacher” anecdote is one about incompetence – teachers who teach topics related to professions in which they have never been employed. Of course, strong and weak examples can be found in any profession, whether it be teachers, musicians or politicians.
Yes, the issue of incompetence may occasionally be true but more often, it is not true – or it is an irrelevant argument.
To a skeptic I would suggest this:
If you feel that teachers lack knowledge in what they teach and how that applies to the real world, then you are perhaps missing the point of education. Education is not about memorizing and regurgitating information as needed at a future job.
The teacher’s ultimate role is to help students learn how to be smart enough to figure out things on their own – to teach themselves.
A classic quote I use to counter the “those that can’t do, teach” quote is from one of the greatest teachers in history, Aristotle.
It is:
Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
One of my DMA students sent me the link to this eBay auction tonight, for a rare Alexander that can be yours for only $50,000! Check out the link before the auction closes to get in on the action:
UPDATE: That link is dead. But to give you a hint of what the uberhorn (actually, universal horn, my student came up with the uberhorn term) can do, it is an instrument that could be set up as a double horn in basically any two keys from high F to low F and much more! Check out the big photos. It is a rare collectible to be sure but I have to think if this was a really good idea in horn design that more than three would have been made. Hurry, the auction closes today! Only $1,500 for shipping!
UPDATE II: It did not sell!!! ;-(
It would be interesting to try this one out, to see if it is possible to miss notes on it or not.
UPDATE III: It is back! Bid or buy it now for $45,000!
UPDATE IV: No bids again! Maybe it is not worth as much as the owners feel it is.
UPDATE V: I added an image of this instrument from the Horn-U-Copia.net site. All kidding aside, this is an interesting instrument and concept, and as this page remains one of the more frequently visited on the site perhaps there is a market for something of this general type.
While this topic came up in a sectional last week, it is actually a topic I have meant to post on for quite some time, that of tunable mutes.
Why use a tunable mute?
Better quality horn mutes are always tunable, a feature not seen on the mutes of other brass instruments. Why this is has to do primarily with the variations seen of hand position and bell sizes. A player with a more covered position will for example need a “flatter” mute. The idea is that the mute is tuned in such a way that you can put it in and it is in tune and you need give intonation no further thought. Every good horn player should have one of these.
How do you tune a tunable mute?
Most commonly tunable mutes are Rittich style mutes in the shape of a tall cone, as in the photo. Inside there are a pair of telescoping tubes with a “tongue” that sticks up that is used to move one of the tubes. To sharpen the mute you pull the tongue toward the small end and to lower the mute you push it away.
How often should you tune a tunable mute?
When you get it in tune you should be good to go but in reality with a couple good drops to the floor the mute will go out of tune. It is always a good idea to check it before a performance.
Any brands you especially like?
There are a number of good options out there but among my students TrumCor and Ion Balu mutes are used most commonly.
Why are they usually black?
For a darker tone.
Ha ha, OK, so what is that other mute in the picture, the brass one?
That is a stopping mute. It is used to substitute for hand stopping and is extremely useful in low range stopped passages and for loud stopped passages. Every good horn player needs one of these also.
Introducing Venus von Hilf.
A recent article – “Too Hot to Handel” – at Playboy.com features a voting contest for the “sexiest babes” in the forefront of classical music. Among them are opera singers, violin soloists and … an orchestral oboist?
Discovering this article timed perfectly with a discussion in my household about sex in classical music marketing – does it work or does it cheapen and demean the medium as a whole?
The main discussion points:
One of the oldies but goodies.
I just noticed (!) that John Ericson’s Horn Articles Online has hit its ten-year anniversary – a noteworthy accomplishment that deserves attention and praise.
Back in the mid-1990’s – the “old days” by Internet standards – only a handful of horn-related web sites with content existed. They included:
Today, there are numerous horn-related web sites.
Horn Articles Online stands out from the pack with its tremendous depth and detail. In the ‘net-verse, web sites come and go on a regular basis; John’s web site not only has survived over the years, but continues to build with rich content. His blog is a resource that I check in on almost daily.
A big congratulations to John for ten years!
Dr. Ericson’s “Simpson transformation” created using the Simponizer.
UPDATE (from John) 4/2025. The site had a good run — 1998-2025! — but it is sadly no longer online. Well, technically it is still online, but you need to be affiliated with ASU and logged into My ASU. Effectively it is gone.
A big thank you to all who found it useful over the years! And especially thank you to Bruce Hembd for some critical initial encouragement with the project of building the site in those early days of the Internet.
There is nothing new about clam-xiety.
A great deal of attention has been flagged here recently on the issue of cracked notes on the horn – otherwise known as “clams.”
History shows that there is nothing new about “clam anxiety” as this review from 1953 shows:
To a sympathetic audience, a French-horn player is often the object of grave solicitude. Even the best of them sometimes lip up confidently for a Wagnerian horn call only to burble or clonk out a sound like a moose cough.
This is the opening sentence in an old TIME magazine article. It continues later with quotes from concerned audience members:
“He’s tempting fate,” warned one nervous woman from her seat. … “It’s miraculous,” said another listener. “You’re always afraid he may not be perfect this time, and he always is.”
And just who are they talking about?
It is none other than Dennis Brain of course, in a review of a festival concert headed by composer Benjamin Britten.
Born into a family of horn players, Brain apparently took great care to take of his lips; according to this article he reportedly had them insured for £10,000, which at that time I imagine would have been an extraordinary amount of money.
Just breathe
There can be many reasons for a case of the clams. For myself, air speed and embouchure control (my “chops”) in tandem play a factor in the “clams” – especially after a breath.
I would venture to guess that 75% of bloopers occur after a breath. If the embouchure, after opening wide to take the breath, is not snapped back into a solid playing position, the “clam factor” can go off the scale.
Dennis Brain was known for his breath (and clam) control and he most likely learned this from his father Aubrey, who was also know for amazing breath control.
There is a story that Aubrey once bet a violinist that he could sustain a note longer than the violinist could. The violinist drawing out one stroke as long as possible lost to Aubrey, who held one note for 75 seconds.
Pretty amazing!
The most delicate and controlled pianissimo I have ever heard by the way, is in a 1926 recording by Aubrey Brain. An expertly remastered recording of the Brahms Trio, Op. 40 at Sotone.com is something to be heard. The recapitulation of the main theme is nothing short of sublime. And in the age prior to splicing and editing, there is not one sour note to be heard. The Mozart concerto on this CD by the way, is regarded as the very first horn concerto ever recorded.
The complete TIME article: