Below are yet more, somewhat random Hornist Hamster memes. Can you find the Robert Schumann quote? Enjoy!
Mistakes are made by fools like me, but …
And again, the Hornist Hamster meme theme is one of many you can generate online and is the subject of an entire website.
I have seen the following meme go around Facebook several times:
As a horn teacher I have to say this meme, while it sounds like good advice, is very wrong.
Sure, long tones are important, but only to a point. Yes, it is a skill to master. But essentially they are weight lifting for your chops. They end up being a part of many warm-up routines. The reality is I rarely work on long tones after the first minute or so of my warm-up routine. It is not as though you can’t achieve the same effect of training your lips by playing real music.
A mouthpiece change however can make HUGE differences in every aspect of your playing. It can take you from sounding like a good student to a pro in literally an instant. It can improve your tone, your high range, your low range, your endurance. Everything.
I really worry about teachers who don’t actively work with students to search out a better horn and a better mouthpiece, as both hugely impact the ability to reach a high level on the horn. Telling students to do long tones in this instance is just lazy teaching, ignorance. Some horns really need a European shank mouthpiece to focus the high range, for example. There are so many variables to balance and you can only get there through thoughtful, guided testing.
In short, no teacher can inspire your high Bb to speak better if it is just a bad note for your combination of horn and mouthpiece, and long tones alone won’t get you to the highest level of horn playing either. You need the right equipment.
And mouthpiece choice is a topic I think most horn students intuitively know is an important one, as one of the most popular article series ever posted on this site is the below by Bruce Hembd, on choosing a French horn mouthpiece. Get reading, there is a lot of information on the topic in Horn Matters.
Regular readers of Horn Matters know that Bruce Hembd and I both count Verne Reynolds among our former teachers. In an prior article I highlighted ten things I learned from Reynolds, and from that article you will note that, at least in the time frame we were at Eastman, he was certainly a stern, “old school” horn teacher.
Somewhere between then and now the “Hornist Hamsters” meme was created. There is an entire website devoted to these memes, in fact.
I have posted in Horn Matters a couple memes I generated on this theme previously, and I recently set a few of the words of Verne Reynolds with this meme. As memes go I think they are pretty effective ones, such as the following example:
With that, the following is a small collection of similar memes, respectfully submitted in memory of a man very significant in my life. They are all either direct quotes from his book The Horn Handbook or things he said in lessons around the time we were in school. Enjoy!
Click on any image to enlarge.
If you enjoyed these, you might browse the entire Photoshop & Memes category and look around. Below are some highlights:
It it that time of year here in America, when families typically get together during a holiday from work to share food and stories at the dining room table. It is an annual tradition where the opportunity to express thankfulness for family, life, and spiritual matters can be taken.
Along this line of thought:
First and foremost, I would like to extend a hearty and sincere “thank you” to you, the reader of Horn Matters. Without your dedicated following, the articles on this web site would be something akin to shouting down a long, dark hallway.
Since instituting our updated site design last month, our traffic and Facebook followers have exploded. Your readership is the wind in our sails.
Second, a big thanks to our third-party advertisers. Your support helps us to keep the lights on and the electricity running.
Incidentally, we do have a few remaining advertising slots available, and so if you are interested please contact us. Available spots include two areas on the home page – currently occupied by banners for the PDF Library and University of Horn Matters – and in the footer area of all article pages.
For this category I would include the International Horn Society, the many fine, custom horn makers that keep experimenting with designs and equipment, and the fellow writers out there that continue to provide the horn community with rich and informative content. It is truly amazing how the state of our art keeps moving forward at an almost exponential pace.
Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of horn-related content appearing on YouTube. So much so that it is hard to keep up. Thank you to the many contributors who have taken the time to create and upload so much useful content.
A few outstanding examples would include:
A number of items have come in for review, and to start catching up on that today we have two 2013 products of interest.
First up is the CD Jan Koetsier: Music for Horn performed by James Boldin. This wonderful CD contains the following works of Koetsier, all either never or rarely recorded:
Most of this music is completely new to me and I have to wonder why?? These are wonderful works, beautifully performed in a quality CD well worth buying. Do check out this CD and the works included in the collection, they are gems. It is available from many sources but the Amazon listing is here and direct from MSR Classics here.
The other 2013 publication I wanted to go back to and briefly highlight are the three volumes of horn solos for younger horn players composed by Ricardo Matosinhos. Published as Pequena Suite [Little Suite] numbers one, two, and three, he has created a very nice set of solos with piano for younger players. If you teach younger students and are tired of the OLD standards out there that make use of the same, limited range, these original works are certainly worth looking into. Movement titles include “Hello Siegfried!,” “Penta Blues,” “Drunkard’s Dance,” and “Heroic Rondo,” giving you an idea of the general styles and variety. They are published by AVA Musical Editions in Portugal.
Tying the present article together, a longer review of the Matosinhos publication may be found in James Boldin’s Horn World website, the review being by, you guessed it, James Boldin, the soloist on the Koetsier recording!
And be looking for more reviews of this type again in Horn Matters soon, we will aim to have brief and longer reviews of items of interest posted every few weeks.
Over the past several months I have posted a series of articles about the production of a new brass trio CD, as I think the process is a bit mysterious to many readers and it is an interesting one.
The first steps involved exploring potential literature. In our case the very first step was one of my predecessors at Arizona State, Ralph Lockwood, gave me some years ago a set of trio folders for the combination of horn, trombone, and tuba. We ended up recording three of the works that were in those folders (the Bach, Issac, and Schmidt) and the rest are either works we found that worked well or are new arrangements or commissions! But that jumps ahead a bit in the process. We first rehearsed and recorded,
Then we edited….
Then the project was mastered…
And then it went off to Summit Records for production. The full program is:
RAUM Relationships for horn, bass trombone and tuba
GOTTSCHALK The Dying Poet, arr. Geese
REICHA Selections from Trios, Op. 82 and Op. 94, arr. Ericson
HARMON Silhouette
NEHLYBEL Trio, adapted by Douglas Yeo
J.S. BACH Wenn Sorgen auf mich Dringen from Cantata No. 2, arr. Lockwood
SCHMIDT Sonatina
MCMILLIAN Fleeting Visions
ISSAC Selections, trans. Singleton
FERGUSON Table for Three at Chez Janou
And that is a very brief overview of how a CD is made. With there being many people to thank, most especially those being my wonderful colleagues Douglas Yeo and Deanna Swoboda, who perform brilliantly on this recording.
It is just out now, available “everywhere CD’s are sold,” and if you want to buy direct from me I have them at Horn Notes Edition. , but, UPDATE: contact me for price and shipping, USA only. I believe it is the best brass trio CD out there, if the project sounds interesting give it a listen!
One of my strong interests is the history of horn pedagogy, and over the years I have accumulated quite a number of interesting horn methods from the 19th century.
The Otto Langey Tutor is little known and most likely not used anywhere today. Otto Langey (1851-1922) was a cellist and educator who published quite a few method books in a series of publications, including one for the French horn. The edition I referenced was copyrighted in 1892 and is the “New and Revised Edition” of the Tutor.
Elements of the Tutor are identical to materials found in the Oscar Franz method, but most of the publication is unique. In terms of comparable horn publications of the time I think the most unique thing is the fairly extensive group of orchestral excerpts. Those are of course very dated now, but still the Tutor has two sections that are very worth a look at today.
The 15 “Various Duets” are a nice little set and are made available here as a short PDF document. Nothing real fancy here, most are somewhat generic and by uncredited authors, but it includes works of Schubert and Weber in the mix. Good duets for reading with friends or with students!
The other PDF I have created is of the 12 “Grand Studies.” These make a nice set too but not an easy set! These are fairly advanced, challenging etudes. Most of the credited etudes are by Belloli, one is credited to Gallay, and the others are not credited — but for sure two (numbers 8A and 11) are Gugel etudes. Readers are welcome to chime in with guesses as to the authors. They cover a wide range and would require the development of strong chops. Curiously, there is as published no etude No. 9! (But #8 is a compilation of two etudes, the 1st half is Gugel, transposed up a P4). I have added a [9] at the break point.
I have included at the end of my PDF version a nice “Thema with Variations” by Belloli (which was also published in the Tutor), rounding out the collection.
These both may be downloaded for free from our Horn Matters PDF Library or directly from the links below:
Be watching for more short collections like these of materials from obscure 19th century publications, materials that are still of use to the horn teachers and players of today.
One common question relates to the “A” valve seen on most single Bb horns and descant horns. The central question would be “what is the purpose of placing the horn in the key of A?”
Normally valve is usually used and tuned to be used as a stopping valve, such as in this prior article:
I have noted that when I show students how a stopping valve is used on a single Bb horn or a descant horn they are often quite impressed. What is great is that you can tune it to put your stopped notes right in place, there is almost no reason to play stopped notes out of tune with a stopping valve set correctly. Why this feature is not more commonly seen on double horns probably relates to weight and complications of construction.
That all being said, there is another potential use of this valve. Let’s say you are playing a work in E with a fast technical passage, such as La Gazza Ladra overture by Rossini.
What you would do is depress the valve so that it takes your horn down a half step (from Bb to A) and then you can play in E as if you were in F, with your normal fingerings. So instead of fingering a B scale you finger a C scale but it sounds a half step low, as a B scale.
So back to the Rossini excerpt, you would with the A valve down finger the passage with the relatively simple finger pattern of a C major figure instead of having cross fingerings to deal with. This can also be accomplished on a double horn with slide extenders; Schmid horns are set up so you can accomplish this effect with the slides as constructed, in fact.
If the prospect of de-tuning your horn into an A horn does not make sense, don’t worry about it too much. It probably helps me that I studied a lot of natural horn along the way to be able to visualize playing a valved horn in a key other than nominally in F.
But the stop valve feature is still really worth having! Check it out if you never have before.
One question that comes in periodically is about a type of double horn that seems to have been constructed to have the valve slides in the wrong places.
I first ran into one of these back when I was in high school and indeed they do look a little odd. The first one I saw was an old Sansone, but you are just as likely to run into an old Holton, their “pre-Farkas” model.
For example this instrument, the photo being linked from the very interesting horn-u-copia site. Look closely, the Bb horn valve slides are “on top,” they are in the slots where normally you put the F horn valve slides. And the F horn slides are “below” in the place where normally the Bb valve slides are. I think the general idea was that this design was easier to get the water out of the valve slides.
It is somewhat arbitrary which “side” is built as the top, but we all know that the F side is usually on top, for aesthetics.
If you put the slides in “correctly” for a standard double horn these horns won’t play remotely in tune. If you are testing a double horn and this is the case, consider that it might be one of these vintage horns.
To see what you have if you are not sure, pull out for example the first valve slides, push down the first valve, and see where the air comes out with the thumb up and down. If it is this design it will be clear pretty quickly.
Perhaps some maker will revive this design? It would stand out from the crowd and, in terms of water removal, it is not necessarily a bad idea.
