14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Technique
This one is straightforward: do everything you did in Tech Project 2A: Major Power Scales again, this time changing one note. Instead of 1 2 3 4 5, use 1 2 b3 4 5, i.e. make it minor.
13 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Technique
Tags
French horn, horn, Horn technique, Power Scales, scales, Technique
We will bounce back and forth between valveless and valve tech projects. Thus, this time we will look at some valve work. Anybody play piano? We are always interested in stealing, uh, learning from other instruments and genres outside of the classical, and for this project we are going to borrow from the piano and alloy a basic bit of piano technique with a basic bit from educational psychology/physiology on efficient learning.
How do you eat a head of broccoli (assuming you wanted to)? Take the head and mash it into your face and start working your jaws? Or break off a sprig, chew it, swallow, and repeat until the head is gone? The first choice might be tempting because you are attacking the whole thing, and isn’t bigger (longer, higher, deeper, louder, more more more!) always better? OK, that was mostly rhetorical. Although you take on only a little when you go sprig by sprig, the small bit approach is indeed more efficient and thorough.
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Technique
The operating system of the horn is the overtone series. [OS = OS!]. We will henceforth use the abbreviation OTS for overtone series, partly to avoid any confusion with the common use of OS meaning (computer) operating system (isn’t the alphabetical coincidence fascinating…), but mostly as a shorthand way of conveying information (which is what abbreviations are). More such shortcuts are to follow. I know, it’s sometimes annoying to have to learn new stuff, but think of how much faster you were able to work at the computer when you learned the basic keyboard commands like (on a Mac) Command-P for print, Command-C for copy, Command-X for cut, Command-V for paste, Command-S for save and so on – instead of having to reach for the mouse each time. Although new ways always have a learning curve, once you get used to working in a more efficient way, it’s hard to go back to the old way. Bear with me and learn some (possibly) new conventions (some outlined in the last post) and you will enjoy having both the understanding of the processes and the efficiency of the procedures. You will be able to apply them to your own playing and introduce them to your students right away.
The Overtone Series
Although we were all raised from Day One on the horn on playing with valves, control of the horn in fact is first and foremost the acquiring of control over movement around the overtone series, that is, all those notes that you can play with any one fingering. That’s what makes horn so challenging. Piano: one fingering, one note. Clarinet, one fingering, one note. Guitar: one fingering, one note. Horn: one fingering, 16 notes! Sounds like musical mission impossible, which may be why method books try to skirt the issue by going to valves right away. But, as the saying goes, the obstacle is the path. Horn players (and all brass players) need to confront this music elephant in the room right away and every day to start acquiring real control of this beautiful beast from the get-go. Putting valve work ahead of OTS work dulls the sense of where the center of the notes are and what you have to do to get there.
03 Tuesday Jan 2012
I was going to do Tech Project #1 today, but I was not able to figure out how to insert a jpg file of music manuscript (I wanted a line of manuscript, but when I tried, the insert was always of the whole page with a tiny line of manuscript). So while I figure that out, it’s probably a good idea to make you familiar with the terms and procedures I like to use in describing the tech projects. I will repeat them later, but here is a first brief exposure.
HORN – I don’t mean that thing in your lap, exactly. The definition of a horn that is useful in our tech study is: A horn is a length of tubing. Thus, the concatenation of metal in your lap is not one, not two, but fourteen horns. Each fingering combination gives you instant access to a different length of tubing. The lowest horn is a B Basso horn (F:123). The highest horn on the F side is the F horn, naturally. The lowest horn using the trigger is the E horn (T123), but we never use that fingering or the next one up, the F horn fingered T13. T23 gives us the Gb horn, a half step above our open F horn. The highest horn is the Bb alto horn: T:0.
02 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Technique
Tags
I don’t know about you, but my diet over the holidays now seems to have consisted largely of cookies, and with the beginning of the New Year comes the revving up a regimen of a new diet and more exercise. It will take some time to work off all those cookies, but as I lumbered around the track this morning, the idea of a new beginning gave me some ideas on how I/we could turn over similar new leaves in horn playing for the New Year.
My idea was Tech [technique] Projects. It’s easy to set up a daily routine that goes over all the basics… and then sit on it for the next forty years. Once you get it down, it’s easy to breeze through it every day as well as getting a sense of personal virtue for doing it. Nothing wrong with a quick brush-up on what we already can do, but life is more interesting and personally enriching if it has some obstacles in it, so to speak, i.e. stuff we can’t quite do yet.
Enter our New Year’s Tech Projects. You are free to make up your own, but I have decided to throw out some ideas as the weeks and months scrolls by. Tech Projects will be focused work on some limited aspect of technique.
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Information on horn
Gift giving time may be over for now, but it’s never to early to stock up for next time or special occasions. Let’s start the New Year with a list of “treats” for horn players, i.e. new, interesting, or otherwise off-the-beaten-brass-path items that could serve as presents, stocking stuffers, or ‘just because’ surprises.
•French Horn Custom Snap Stamp ($39). Decorate your holiday envelopes, stationery, gift tags and greeting cards with this custom horn stamp.
•Free dissertation (download pdf file online): Perspectives on Auditioning: An Examination of Professional Horn Players on Auditioning by Manfredi Guglielmo, 197 p. Hot off the presses: December 2011. You’ll have to print it out if you want to stuff a stocking…
29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in Improvisation
What are holidays for but to do stuff that you couldn’t get to during the semester?
Horn Insights has cast a fairly wide net (check out the Category Cloud) because I am interested in all kinds of things, starting with horn, but expanding outward into all things music, education, creativity, and so on.
One larger chunk of thought and activity for me in music is what might be called my hobby, but let’s be charitable and call it my research interest (one of them, anyway) – for want of a handier name, that rara avis, that oxymoron, contemporary classical improvisation. I’ve sprinkled occasional posts here on that subject, but the time has come (vacation time) to give this subject its own space, although I won’t rule out including future posts on it here when they have more directly to do with horn playing. I may also either copy or transfer some improv posts here to the new improv blog.
The blog is: Improv Insights (http://improvinsights.com).
I am taking on a partner: Evan Mazunik, my long-time collaborator (2 CDs, many concerts and workshops). Evan is a superb improvising pianist who has lived in NYC for about the past 5 years, and he also happens to be one of the top Soundpainting conductors in the world, with his own ensemble, Zaha.
We are just getting started, just starting to generate content, but have a look, or better, have a regular look.
We also want to make this new blog more than just a blog; we want to make it a gathering place for those interested in the subject, and, to that end, we will be seeking contributions from various experts on the subject.
We also LOVE questions. If any of this intrigues you but you haven’t had much experience in it yet and would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to send us a question. If you have a topic that you would like to see developed more, let us know.
One feature that we hope will draw your regular attention is our Game of the Day. We will post (probably not every day, but fairly often) an improv game that you can use in your own playing, probably immediately.
A good bit of the focus of this blog will also be on pedagogy. Improvisation is tremendously useful in all kinds of teaching, so we want to discuss and feature this prominently.
New things in the New Year. All the best to you!
21 Wednesday Dec 2011
Tags
aural training, Christmas carols, Creativity, horn, horn lessons, improv games for classical musicians, Improvisation, Musicianship, playing by ear
Christmas time is the only holiday that brings with it its own soundtrack: all those songs from the Renaissance tunes like What Child Is This to the pop/kitschy songs like Rudolph… Other holidays can have evocative music (romantic for Valentine’s Day, patriotic for 4th of July, scary for Halloween, and so on), but only Christmas has its own library of songs. The bad news is that it’s pretty much the same tunes every year and they get played to death in any/every public venue. The good news is that they are almost all really good tunes and that, even after endless overexposure, they are still fun to play or sing and nice to listen to.
We classical musician types are, however, missing out on one terrific experience that these songs could provide if only we would do it: playing them from the ear and the heart rather than from the printed page. The tunes have been ground into our chromosomes since our earliest goo-goo gah gah time – it’s pretty impossible to live in this culture and not know them extremely well. So they are prime material for figuring them out on our instruments by ear. So here’s a pre-New Year’s resolution: every day figure out a new carol of your choice on your instrument. Start with your most familiar key (usually C, for major). Figure out what scale step the first note is. And begin! You may miss a note here and there, but you can fix that on subsequent times through.
25 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Classical Music, Creativity, Expression, Interpretation, Listening, Musicianship, Performance, Practicing
I just played in an orchestra concert that was devoted to the vocal talents of Steve Lippia. The music was bouncy, joyous, delightful swing and standard tunes that were the core of the late Frank Sinatra’s repertoire. Steve Lippia’s vocal channeling of Ol’ Blue Eyes is so dead on that were Frank alive, he could have a case for aural identity theft. I loved every minute of it. I had played the same concert a year or two earlier with a different orchestra and loved it then, too, but this time I got to thinking…
Thinking about master jazz vocalists like Steve Lippia or his source, Frank Sinatra – what they do and and how they do it. While I was sous-chef-ing for a splendid Thanksgiving repast yesterday, I used the laptop to tune in to Pandora to a newly-created Frank Sinatra channel (as I am doing at this moment). As I’m sure you already know, a Pandora channel takes your general selection for a theme and then, like a radio station that your wealthy parents own and dedicate to your personal whims and tastes, plays only pieces in that genre (more or less; it occasionally explores the outer limits of what might reasonably be included in that style). So as I chopped, diced, sliced, stirred, and cleaned-up, I got to listen to another assorted stream of that style. Most of it was Frank, but there were appearances of others, including Ella, Mel, Tony, Louis, Dino, Bobby, Nat, Bing, Ray (even), Michael (B.), and more.
11 Friday Nov 2011
Tags
One thing that anyone involved in arts education should keep in mind is the ancient dictum: When you talk to squirrels, talk a lot about acorns.
The education of musicians (maybe other arts as well, but I only know about musicians) has a number of Mount Rushmore-sized gaps in it that are neither easy to see (tradition and habit blind us) nor easy to fix (Ocean Liner Curricula, i.e. tradition, habit, vested interest, etc).
One gap is the lack of sufficient and useful training (especially early on) in the aural side of musicianship: sound before sign (or symbol) learning, improvisation & composition (thinking in music), and so on, which contain powerful motivators, learning tools, and build adaptability into the musical DNA of the musician to be able to survive and even thrive in this century (instead of being ready for the 19th as our current education prepares us, mostly). This part is a matter of ossification of attitudes and the status quo – just try to squeeze a new course into the curriculum no matter what the merits – no time, no room(s), it’s not what we’ve done before, the excuses go on and on. The climate is getting colder, but the dinosaurs see no reason to change anything, we’ll have a committee study the matter and then forget about it.
