Many years ago, at the home of Philip Farkas, I held in my hands a copy of the mouthpiece of Dennis Brain. Farkas was actually at one point (before his association with Holton) working with Schilke and Brain to potentially market a copy of his mouthpiece. My main memory is the small inner diameter and the thin rim. These two elements are parts of the puzzle of all that made his playing great.
Farquharson Cousins was a student at the Royal Academy of Music at the same time as Dennis Brain, playing alongside Brain a number of times. In the second edition of On Playing the Horn he recalls,
Dennis Brain’s mouthpiece was, by modern comparison, a small affair. The old silver threepenny bit (which hornplayers used to carry as a measuring device) would not even lie in the cup, but stood, so to speak, half out of it. This I verified on several occasions as Dennis sometimes experimented with different mouthpieces, but (let me hasten to add!) always the same rim. (The type that used to be known as the ‘Busby’ mouthpiece – named after Tom Busby, a well known London horplayer of the 1920s).
This mouthpiece above would appear to have that same rim. It is possible it either came to Arizona associated with the Hawkes piston valve horn owned by Arizona State University, or was a find of the horn professor at the time that horn came to ASU, Ralph Lockwood. I’m happy to have it for sure.
About that Hawkes horn …
This short section is based on materials formerly posted in Horn Articles Online, moved here with the 2025 demise of the site, as the information was linked from this article and is relevant to the topic. And for sure I talked about the below in the presentation that the rest of the text is extracted from, as I had this horn there for demonstration purposes.
This Hawkes horn has been dated to have been made around 1916. This horn takes crooks just like an orchestral natural horn and has crooks with it for E-flat, F, G, A-flat, and A with a short, 1/2 step coupler and short and long tuning slides. This is the type of valved horn used widely in England (and France) up until around W.W.II. It is in great shape. The bell and bore are very much like that found on the typical natural horn. The bell has a garland, and the tone is much more like that of the natural horn than that of a modern horn.
While it is fun to test, without a strap to assist in holding it I can’t play this instrument for more than five or ten minutes at a time as a valved horn. The left hand position is quite uncomfortable; it has to do with the angle of the action of the pistons. On the plus side it plays well as a natural horn and the crooks work on both of my other natural horns. Crooked in F it sounds very much like a natural horn and in B-flat it has a sound that begins to get over toward the sound of a classic mellophone, which it also resembles.
[I’ll also mention that the 3rd valve slide is not on correctly in the photo, it should be reversed, tucking in under the 2nd valve.]
Back to the mouthpiece …
It is marked Hawkes & Son London with the letter B stamped on side. The inner diameter is very small and would only suit someone with quite thin lips. It fits the crooks on the Hawkes horn well and tightens up sound production, but does not fit a modern horn, especially not one made for a European shank mouthpiece such as the Alexander horn later used by Brain.
The second photo shows the rim compared to the more modern rim of a Holton XDC [chosen because it was handy, and has a representative modern rim]. Where the differences come in has to do with sound and sensitivity. It has a small sound but is at the same time very sensitive and must have fit his unconventional embouchure very well.
The above is a portion of the text of a lecture-recital presented at the 2011 International Horn Symposium in San Francisco. The reference on the information that Farkas/Schilke planned to sell a copy of his mouthpiece is from the Nancy Jordan Fako book on Farkas. For more on the horns Dennis Brain played and on the IHS session I presented see this article.
UPDATE: A longer article was published several years later as “Dennis Brain’s Horns,” The Horn Call 46, No. 2 (February, 2016), 31-34. Also, it is my understanding now that the mouthpiece with the “B” is certainly a Busby mouthpiece like Dennis Brain used. They were somewhat variable in terms of dimensions, but all with that very small inner diameter.
For me (as a guy whose day job is in web design and development), the most
I recall a time when I was playing second horn for the summer of 1987 with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra (a great experience) when the first hornist for part of the summer, Peter Kurau (then assistant principal horn, now full time at Eastman) let me gently know that I needed to be aware of this and nip a bad habit in the bud. I had a habit when I missed things to do something with my left hand, I believe something like clenching it and sometimes hitting my bell. Try it, it feels sort of good in a way but it potentially distracts other players; you have to learn to control yourself. (David Angus, third horn in the RPO, was principal horn for the second half of the summer; Rebecca Root took off to play at Chautauqua, and Eli Epstein had left to join the Cleveland Orchestra).
