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

Featured today is Dr. Rose French, a very active performer and teacher here in the Phoenix area. Now more than ever you need to not only play horn well but be entrepreneurial and take full advantage of the opportunities you have.

JE: Starting with today, where do you perform, where do you teach?

RF: Besides the Mill Ave Chamber Players, I am the Principal Horn of the West Valley Symphony and perform regularly with the Arizona Opera, the Phoenix Symphony, Tucson Symphony and the Orquestra de Baja California. I am a member of the Phoenix Chamber Brass, which does a lot of performing in the area as well.

I currently am the horn professor at Grand Canyon University and teach humanities courses for Arizona State University and for the Maricopa Community Colleges. I’ve developed two online courses for the community colleges, which really gives me greater flexibility to work on projects and perform. I just started my tenth year at Rosie’s House and have a private studio. I have taught at the Interlochen Arts Academy, and this summer will be returning to the Northern Arizona University music camp and to Germany for the Saarburg International Music Festival.

Mill Ave Chamber Players will also be hosting a chamber music camp at Paradise Valley Community College June 9-14th, which I am really excited to announce. I’ve been wanting to have a summer chamber music camp in the valley for a long time.

JE: Your guest master class last semester at ASU was great, you clearly have not only a gift for playing but also for teaching. One thing I tell people about you is that when you came to ASU for MM study (which continued through a DMA) you were probably the most motivated student I have ever had in terms of getting your name out and getting teaching and playing gigs. What advice would you give students who are starting a MM in a new city?

RF: A friend told me, “if you play for free, no one will ever pay you to play your instrument.” I took it to heart and decided that when I moved to Arizona, if I had to take any job that wasn’t music related I obviously wasn’t talented enough to stay in music. So before I moved to Arizona, I researched all the orchestras, music academies, and music stores and called or sent my resume to each one of them. I moved to Arizona with a suitcase, my horn, and two boxes of books that I mailed to a friend in Tucson. By the end of my first week in Arizona I had a job teaching band at a Catholic high school, a job teaching music lessons at a music academy, and at Rosie’s House, where I still teach today. My first orchestra job came not long after that.

The thing I didn’t do, that I would recommend is to contact the principal horn of all the orchestras in town and play for them to get on their sub list. Pretty obvious thing to me now, but then it was not on my radar.

JE: Right, play for the principal horn although be sure what you play for them first is really ready, to make the best first impression if you are new in town. Another thing you did far beyond that of the average student was start a music ensemble that still exists and is active. Tell readers more about this.

RF: Mill Ave Chamber Players (www.millavechamberplayers.com) was started in 2007 with an entrepreneurial grant from Arizona State University. This grant enabled me to form the ensemble, get a LLC, and do some outreach concerts. The original goal of the ensemble was to have an ensemble that was completely self-run with each member having an external responsibility to keep the ensemble running.

Laughable, I know, but in the wake of what was facing myself and my friends at the end of a terminal degree: not many full-time job options, the ensemble was formed with the idea of having artistic and performing freedom by creating our own opportunities.

We’ve received grants from the City of Phoenix to be a part of their ArtSpace Afterschool Program. I taught students about the different classifications of musical instruments using vegetables! It was a great experience, and a great opportunity to make a musical experience for schools with little resources. We’ve partnered with Rosie’s House and Phoenix Children’s First Academy, the largest school in the nation for homeless children to perform outreach concerts and held an instrument fundraiser to purchase two horns for students at Rosie’s House.

This year we were awarded a grant from the City of Glendale to keep a 25-year-old series running. The “Live at the Library” is a multi-disciplinary performing arts series that has been offered free to the public for the past 25 seasons at Glendale’s Main Public Library. Until the 2009-2010 performance season, the “Live at the Library” series offered these quality programs every Thursday evening from November through May. Due to significant staff and budget cuts, the library was forced to dramatically reduce the number of programs offered. These free public concerts provide people of all ages a great opportunity to develop their audience skills, as well as affording retirees, young families, the disabled, and group-home residents easy access to a wide variety of exceptional performances.

We’re also now the presenting artists of a new chamber music series at the Peoria Center for the Performing Arts and are in our third season of a morning series in Sun City.

This season we were the only classical music ensemble that was a part of the CALA (Celebración Artística de las Américas) International Festival, where we performed an entire concert of music by Latin American composers. In March we will be traveling to California to perform with the Pacific Arts Woodwind Quintet at the University of the Pacific to premiere “Three Pieces” for woodwind dectet by John Steinmetz, with Steinmetz performing.

JE: You also won a paid position working for the International Horn Society. Describe the process of winning that position and what your duties are today.

RF: I applied for this new position that was created out of a need for exhibitors to have a consistent experience as part of the annual International Horn Symposia. Often this job was relegated to a student and every year exhibitors and advertisers had to deal with a new person, someone usually inexperienced at putting on such a massive undertaking. When you have people and businesses spending a lot of money to get to an international event, it’s essential to give them a professional experience in return.

Besides running MACP, I had experience running the business side of a violin shop for about four years. I used this as my platform for why I would be a good candidate: understanding both the logistical side of running an instrument business and having the experience of running a chamber music ensemble I thought applied directly to the needs of the position.

The first year it was not a paid position, but showing the jump in revenue and new exhibitors that attended the symposium, the Advisory Council was convinced that this should be a paid position and that I should also manage all advertising contracts that were part of the International Horn Symposia. It’s been a fantastic experience for the most part: I have been a part of the past five symposia and worked with some fantastic hosts.

Beyond the job itself, I have had the opportunity to listen to and take lessons from some of the best artists hornists in the world. I hosted a regional horn conference in 2012 and I think the success of that event was largely due to already knowing many of the exhibitors and hornists who came to the event.

JE: To close, what other projects do you have going on in your busy and multi-faceted career now?

RF: Last year I had my first book published: Rangesongs [see review here; purchase here], and am currently working on two other horn-related method books that I hope to have finished by the summer. I find the topic of teaching beginning and intermediate students really underdeveloped and that we lack a lot of good material for students of that age. I am hoping to change that!

All this makes it difficult to write a bio, but I really love what I do and think it is the new reality, not just for musicians, but for many in the work force. What I love about what I do is that every week is different, I get to travel, meet new people, and have rewarding experiences as a performer and teacher. I have a very rich life!

A recent link on Facebook pointed me to a great article, “A Little Leitgeb Research” by Michael Lorenz. One thing I have been very aware of for years is that there is a lot that needs to be questioned in older sources of horn information. Lorenz moves the topic forward quite a ways with regard to Joseph Leitgeb. His article begins,

Owing to the wonderful pieces Mozart wrote for him, the hornist Joseph Leitgeb (1732-1811) ranks among the most widely known wind players of the classical era. And yet Leitgeb’s published biography is rife with gaps and misinformation which is not only caused by a number of misunderstandings and the scarcity of 18th-century sources, but possibly also by the fact that horn players not always make the best biographers of long deceased hornists.

The article is framed in such a way as to correct the many factual errors in the entry on Leutgeb written by Reginald Morley-Pegge in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Such as that New Grove has his first name wrong, the story about the cheese shop is a total myth, etc., backed up with great research from original source documents.

In preparing this article I sent the link to a trusted source and he had the same reaction as me, that the horn world needs real musicologists who can dig through libraries and archives to straighten out horn history. What makes it worse is that it is the New Grove article we are talking about and the author is an icon among horn historians. Morley-Pegge influenced many later sources, with for example the short article on Leutgeb in the IHS website at present repeating basically every factual error. People tend to take the words they read in sources as facts, but facts are facts and much published information in the older horn history literature needs corrected.

This portion of his concluding paragraph in particular gives important insight and general context.

Our modern day image of musicians as highly educated and well-read artists has little to do with orchestra musicians of Mozart’s time, who although ranking among the greatest virtuosi of their days, by no means were educated and highly cultured individuals. They much more resembled extremely skilled craftsmen, sometimes akin to savants, than what we nowadays consider musical artists. The general lack of education and the very limited writing skills of Viennese orchestra musicians, who in their level of education are comparable to excellent handymen, are the reason for the complete lack of contemporary reports and statements from a musician’s perspective on Mozart’s music. Viennese orchestra musicians rarely left handwritten personal documents and Leitgeb was no exception. This guy was a one-track specialist of horn playing who certainly excelled in no other skill such as cheese making. Mozart’s making fun of him may well have been related to Leitgeb’s complete lack of extramusical education.

Have things really changed? It could still be argued that many horn players more resemble “extremely skilled craftsmen,” and don’t strive to be much more than “a one-track specialist of horn playing.”

At the very end of the article Lorenz notes that “This blog post presents only a small fraction of my research on Mozart’s favorite horn player. A much more detailed publication will have to appear in print.” I for one very anxiously await that publication; so much horn history needs revisited, older sources such as Morley-Pegge and Fitzpatrick are seriously out of date and chock full of inaccuracies and simplifications. Again, read his article in full for much more (link below).

• A Little Leitgeb Research

Working on the articles that became the “Hornmasters” series in Horn Matters, one name and method that had been unfamiliar to me was that of Harry Berv. Just a few days ago a fascinating remembrance of Berv by a former student was posted, and to begin, I highly recommend reading this article! It is a very warm glimpse into his teaching method — all that teach or aspire to teach should hope to be remembered like this.

• My Mr. Berv

He wrote a great method book, A Creative Approach to the French Horn, that sadly is long out of print and not referenced much today. I say this as, honestly, it really is a better method book than the Farkas book. The Farkas book dates to 1956 and the Berv method was published in 1977. Berv was then 66 years old, at the end of long and very distinguished career as a member of groups including the NBC Symphony under Toscanini, not to mention also drawing on years of teaching a wide variety of students including in the pre-college division at Julliard.

A lot of quotes from Harry Berv are found in Horn Matters. Rather than list them all, start at this search result and surf or go to this article as a great starting point:

• Hornmasters: Harry Berv on Fingerings

I don’t know if I had even ever seen his method before some dozen years ago when I was given a copy with some other music. The dedication reads

To my students
whose needs made me aware

What I love about his book above all is he is unafraid to just lay down what he thinks on many technical subjects. Perhaps he had a Farkas book and thought many topics in it were wrong, I don’t know, but it is written in such a way that you never get the sense that he attacks him or anyone else. He just tells it like it is, based on obviously working with many, many students over many years.

As already noted, this book is out of print. But copies are out there and it is worth the effort to track down with an inter-library loan. To close, he had this to say in his Preface, words we could all stand to ponder.

THE FRENCH HORN is the most intricate, difficult and demanding instrument of the entire brass family. Its complexities are great and its challenges numerous. Only determination, patience, discipline, and a properly maintained reserve of physical strength will overcome them. But for the individual who faces and conquers its challenges, the rewards are great.

In this book I describe the paths I have followed in working to master this singular instrument. It is above all a practical guide; I feel it can greatly help the serious horn student who has at least a rudimentary background in theory. I have also tried to make it useful to the instructor—to place at his disposal the results of my years of teaching students at all stages of development. Finally, it is my hope that this book will be of interest to the professional hornist who would like to compare his own concepts of playing and teaching with those of a colleague.

To the horn student reading these pages I must stress that no book alone can guarantee the mastery of your instrument. Only by means of great persistence, hard work, and considerable self-denial can you achieve this goal. But to the student who promises this kind of effort, and faithfully does his best to deliver it, I can at least in good conscience add this: Probably you are one of the happy few who can learn to play the French horn!