Accompanying in concertos

Hounslow Symphony Orchestra had their autumn concert last weekend. One of the pieces we played was the Hummel Trumpet Concerto, with Hilmar Hauer as the soloist. The Hummel is a very spectacular piece for the soloist, especially with all the cascades of notes produced in the last movement!

During the final rehearsal in the afternoon, our conductor John Andrews made a very good point in respect of how the orchestra should play when accompanying the soloist. He said that we shouldn't follow the soloist, because if we follow him, inevitably we will be behind him.

Instead, we have to accompany him, i.e. remain alongside. That involves anticipating to some extent what will happen next in order to make sure that we play at the same time. It is a very good point, and in fact can be extended more generally. When playing in a group, you don't just follow the conductor (if there is one). Instead, if you don't have the tune, you accompany whoever does, just as if they are a concerto soloist. You have to listen and anticipate.

It takes concentration, but if instead you rely solely on following the conductor, you are also hoping that everyone is following the conductor the same distance behind. That's not a safe bet. Conductor or no, you have to listen, and anticipate, and accompany.

Only when you have a solo can you stop accompanying, you take the lead and express yourself by deciding how to shape the phrase, in terms of speed, articulation, dynamics and style. And everybody else then has to accompany you! You want the other players to do that right, so they deserve the same courtesy from you when they have the tune.

And be aware that even when you have the tune, you are not necessarily solo. Another of the pieces we played was Haydn's 104th "London" Symphony. The horns have the tune in a few places, but only for 2 bars in the slow movement are they actually solo. In all other places in the piece, the horns are doubled by other instruments. If you have the tune but are not solo, then you still have to be thinking in a semi-accompanying sort of way to make sure that you are matching with the rest of the players sharing the tune.

Christopher Irvin on composing his horn concerto

Christopher Irvin has just finished the first draft of the concerto, the third movement is in the post to me. Now all I have to do is get is transcribed on to the computer, and eliminate all the inevitable typing errors!

Here is his description of the process.

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From the moment Jonathan tentatively requested a horn concerto at the rehearsal for SEA BREEZE in Edinburgh this summer my mind was immediately activated!

The first stage was to rough-draft the entire three-movement piece. This is worked out at the piano in an improvised format directly on to manuscript. Some of the ideas are from previous efforts - this acts as a springboard. Once a theme is chosen, the journey begins. New ideas, or variations on these themes, follow on quickly. Often a new theme appears from nowhere. On a good day there is real joy when a memorable melody materialises.

From these doodlings it is then necessary to create a three-line short score (instrument + piano). First-idea jottings (usually the best and often quickly forgotten) are then preserved. Selecting the better ideas is creative, and requires me to listen to the piece imagining myself as a member of the concert audience. The short score is orchestrated and chord symbols added.

Using landscape format manuscript paper, the score is then framed : horn placed above the strings and below the percussion. I work in 2B pencil which is ideal for subsequent photocopying. I know much erasing is par for the course.

The thirty-two pages (movement one) of score are laid out with a melodic through-line divided between the instruments. The solo horn is written as played. Previously, I'd written horns in concert pitch. However, I'm now learning about the best register for the horn and transposing as I go. I try thinking like a horn.

Key progression is another important consideration. I create a short-score only to find the orchestra is in an uncomfortable six flats. I do this section again but it's still in five flats. However, the tempo at this stage is slow and there should be no problems for the players.

The first page is orchestrated - a whole morning's work. Experience has taught me that on a normal day (with other things going on : e-mails/business/telephone calls) at best three pages of full score are manageable. A concerto requires less orchestral writing, of course, but progress still is on a similar pattern. The mornings are best, or the small hours, when total quiet is possible. The acoustic piano is nearby, and a keyboard with headphones. The scoring and harmonisation are a fused process.

I'm not able to work on the score (beyond my obligatory one page) every day in depth, so progress seems slow. However, a weekend of four days does the trick and I can live and breathe the piece. There is a musical blockage, when a change of key just doesn't work, but by coming back to it after a few hours the impasse is resolved.

The draft score is 'completed'. Bar numbering is added. A thorough read-through is now essential before photocopying - phrasing/dynamics/missed bars and so on. Hopefully nothing too awful! Movement one done. Two
more to go!

The response to the first movement has been very positive ('tuneful' and 'playable'). Enhancing the part by re-aligning the horn to its 'singing' register requires a few adjustments. Articulation issues are also discussed. The end doesn't work, so a new one is composed and sent by post (alas the postal strike still lingers on).

Start gathering my thoughts 30 Oct. for second movement, and framing the entire piece the next day. On this occasion I have a complete piano short-score to follow. First four bars take ages! Slowly build up the movement a page or so a day (if I'm lucky!). Adjustments to refine the harmonic structure is very time-consuming. Dynamics checked as I proceed.

Other musical projects crowding in : I started a choir at the Little Theatre in Hebden in October and we're working hard towards our annual Christmas Concert. A four-horn version of a new orchestral piece to be performed in June needs to be proof-read, and other pieces are in preparation requiring attention!

Draft score completed 11 Nov. and despatched the next day. I describe this movement as a 'wistful lullaby'.

No time to pause : straight on with movement three! This is to be a 6/8 rondo-type, with a core 4/4 slavonic-like 'heroic' tune followed by a cantabile theme. I've upped the horn part, being more confident of the required register.

I map out the form of the movement in my head whilst waiting for a train at unlovely Littleborough station (near Rochdale). The next day (Sunday 15th Nov.) the entire third movement is drafted - simple melody line, chords and orchestral jottings. The draft is then transposed for suitability for the horn. I'm working in keys that, for me, are unusual e.g. A-flat minor (which is very sonorous).

Start framing movement - but deciding on the keys causes a delay. Modulating from one theme to another requires much trial and error! A sense of classical key relationships helps. From Nov. 20th framing is complete, and the slow orchestration of pp50-79 starts. I try hard to make the opening page matter! Have to break off to arrange Sullivan's 'Yule Log March' for oboe, clarinet, violon and piano (for a rehearsal and concert I'm organising on Jan. 10th). After days of work I've completed just 45 seconds! I need to press on. The central section requires very careful treatment, so the (hopefully moving) rather melancholy theme can speak simply with just light accompaniment.

I have a day school (I play oboe) on Beethoven's 5th with the Leeds Summer Orchestra (!) so no work possible for a little while...

On the Sunday I get bogged down, and only complete seven bars.

However, despite a sudden head-cold, I'm on a roll and the concerto is completed over the weekend of Dec.5th/6th. I check the horn part carefully, making sure that tacit sections are kept to a minimum. I'm at the stage of photocopying and despatch.

After the actual despatch I have a holiday feeling!

A new horn concerto!

I'm all excited!

Following the success of Sea Breeze, Christopher Irvin has agreed to write a horn concerto. For me! Hopefully I can get one of my local orchestras to put it on, I've been making some enquiries.

The first draft of the first movement arrived in the post earlier this week, and I've transcribed the solo horn part on to the computer, and I had a practice of it today. It is quite something to have a first chance to play a tune or a piece that nobody has ever played before.

It isn't finished yet, not by a long chalk. Chris still has to write the last two movements, and the first movement will need some tweaks. Chris is an oboeist and hasn't written for solo horn before, and so there are inevitably going to be teething problems as he gets used to what does and doesn't work on the horn. Thankfully, Chris seems very happy to get feedback from me about this - it will make for a much better performance if awkward bits which are harder than their effectiveness justifies can be smoothed out and made more characteristic of the horn.

I've sent him 3 emails so far with comments and suggestions. For instance there are some passages that need to go up an octave so they will sing out better, some adjustments to articulation I'd like to make here and there, one or two awkward corners that can be cleaned up to make them more effective.

But overall, the solo horn part definitely works as a piece and I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest of it and getting a chance to perform it! It starts with a jaunty theme in 6/8, a change of mood with a legato tune in 4/4, then a Slow Valse followed by a rousing recapitulation of the opening theme.

Now to get the orchestration transcribed on to the computer, so I can hear the harmonies and accompaniment.

I'm going to blog on a regular basis as the piece gradually takes shape. At the earliest, I would expect to be able to get a first performance for it sometime in the 2010/2011 season. Such is the time it takes to get a piece of new music composed and performed.

Sea Breeze - getting a new work to its first performance

Be nice to composers! Composing music is hard work, and I have the greatest of respect for those who do it. It is a kind of creativity I just don't have the talent for and have never developed the techniques for, but without composers, performers (both professional an amateur) would have nothing to play. We need composers and we need new composers to create new music.

A painter can create an entire artwork unassisted, and present it to the world only when he is satisfied it is entirely complete. A composer is dependent on others to show off his work, and does not know how the performers will make sense of the work, and whether they will be able to communicate that sense to the audience. It is tremendously hard work getting a new piece of music ready for its first performance!

For the St Clements Wind Ensemble concerts this summer I persuaded Christopher Irvin to compose a wind ensemble piece for us. I first came across Christopher when playing in the Boots Orchestra in Nottingham. In November 2008, the Boots Orchestra gave the first performance of his suite "Love Child". I very much enjoyed it, it is very much in the tradition of British light music as exemplified by composers such as Eric Coates. So on the basis of "nothing ventured nothing gained", I asked him if he would be interested in producing something for wind ensemble. I said I was pretty sure I would be able to get it performed, and described a bit about St Clements Wind Ensemble.

And Christopher did express interest. I sent him a recording of the arrangement I had made the previous year of the Brahms Serenade No. 1 in D, which I had arranged for 13 wind instruments (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 4 horns, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon). We exchanged a few emails about what sort of instrumentation would be appropriate, and we settled on a double wind quintet - 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons. I suggested that he could if he wished use any of the conventional doublings - e.g. flute doubling piccolo, oboe doubling cor anglais, or clarinet doubling bass clarinet. In the end he chose to use just one of those - and had the 2nd flute play piccolo for some of the time.

To my astonishment a package arrived in the post only a few weeks later, containing a full manuscript score of "Sea Breeze". I'll let Christopher Irvin take up the narrative in his own words.

SEA BREEZE was conceived as an orchestral concert piece. I wrote it during June and July 2008 - not much in August, and completed it in September (first draft dated 6 September 2008).

From roots in Hebden Bridge, I helped form a theatre company with Freda Kelsall (TV writer, playwright and theatre director) originally to produce locally. Very soon we were touring, and accepting commissions to write and produce for nearby areas. A new piece MR PUNCH AND THE PIRATES was a commissioned family entertainment presented at the Venn Street Arts Centre, Huddersfield for Kirklees Council for Christmas 1989. It contained all that a Local Authority might think suitable for a Christmas entertainment. Only ours was to be a little different- set on the end of a pier where the arcade characters come alive and save their workplace through a series of madcap adventures. It provided excellent possibilities musically. A revised version was produced as part of our summer repertory season at Sheringham, Norfolk in 1991. We expected to stay a year or so, but ended up doing twelve seasons.

After such a long period, the tunes I could still remember vividly from this show were the ones deserving development. A printed vocal score produced at the time also helped. This was one of the first of my efforts in composition to find its way into print. To have what is essentially a short-score to hand was a great boon. Starting from absolute scratch can take forever.

On a manuscript block I created a one-line medley, with chord symbols and some immediate orchestration ideas. These primary ideas are often the best.

The whole piece was then framed on landscape-sized manuscript paper in 2B pencil . A ruler and eraser are always to hand. A one-line allocation of parts is then made. Once this has been achieved there is a moment when the task at last seems a distinct possibility.

And then the real graft begins! A page at a time is orchestrated- usually no more than two, or possibly three a day. With a vocal score as a guide, harmonisation is less arduous, except that I can't resist tinkering with my original. It might seem that more pages a day could be possible - but a some point the mind cuts off. On a normal day there are the usual e-mails/ business calls and the like to field. Occasionally I have the house to myself for a day or two and progress is more sustained.

I take the photocopied manuscript with me to Southwell in November, just before a rehearsal of my new Concert Overture LOVE CHILD to be premiered by the Boots Orchestra, Nottingham. I sing it through to the conductor, John Sheppard, who suggests I work up the jaunty hornpipe (which opened the second act of the musical play).

At the rehearsal later that evening, I'm asked by the first horn, Jonathan West, if I have something suitable for his London-based wind ensemble.

I find myself later that week with my brother and his wife in Warwickshire. They're out at work all day, so I sit at the piano thinking how to proceed. And, as if by magic, a NEW little tune materialises, with chromatic shifts, that fits in perfectly. The piece is now ready for re-scoring. I beaver away and present John with the manuscript of DECK DANCE after the premiere. John subsequently gives me the go-ahead to have the piece set. This complex task (score and parts) is done in the new year by my publisher and editor Robin Gordon-Powell.

With the expanded hornpipe it is now necessary to re-format the original SEA BREEZE manuscript. Quite a task.

Jonathan gives me some pointers as to the format required for his group. Thinking the full orchestral version of SEA BREEZE will otherwise atrophy, I decide to arrange it for the St. Clement's Wind Ensemble as a double-wind quintet (or decet). This is a relatively straightforward task, although allocating string parts to wind is a challenge. I find the bassoons are playing far too much. And as an oboist I have to resist giving the oboes all the best melodies! I sign the piece off on 9th December 2008.

The manuscript is photocopied and comb-bound, and sent to Jonathan West who acknowledges safe arrival on the 13th.

This was far faster than I had anticipated, but even so, it posed something of a problem. Christopher works using pencil and paper, but if we were going to be able to produce parts from the score, it really needed to go onto the computer. So I set to the task of transcribing the score (all 64 pages of it) onto computer using the Finale music editing program. I had limited time available - I have a day job and other musical activities, so this took me a few months. But eventually it was finished in June of this year, and I sent him back a PDF of the score and a MIDI file so that he could have a listen. I warned him that there may well be several misprints in the computer version, either from my own mistakes, or from the fact that the staves he was writing on were rather small and sometimes I couldn't quite tell whether a note was intended to be on a line or in a space.

On listening to the MIDI file myself, I was sure the piece would work - it had an end-of-the-pier feel to it, a sound that reminded me of the organs that are frequently on fairground merry-go-rounds. I was looking forward to having a chance of playing it. It would instantly bring back childhood memories of seaside holidays for just about any British audience that heard it.

Time was now getting short. If we were going to put it on in Edinburgh in August we would have to get a move on with editing. I got a list of necessary changes from Christopher and then sent the score on to our conductor Michael Round. At this point, we made the decision that we would definitely perform the piece in Edinburgh in August. The decision could not be delayed as programmes and publicity material had to be prepared for the concerts - you don't do a world premiere of a new work and not bother to put it on the publicity material!

Michael is a very experienced professional pianist, musician and teacher, and has done several arrangements for SCWE in the past. He identified a number of playability issues and also further misprints which Christopher and I had missed. But August was approaching, so I was very busy entering all the corrections onto the computer. But at some point we had to call a halt so that I could make a set of parts from the score and send them out to the players.

In principle, creating a set of parts is simple, you just tell the computer to split the score up, and it is done. But in practice it is not as easy as that. For wind players, you have to consider page turns. Wind players all need to have both hands on the instrument when playing, and so page turns have to be made to coincide with at least a couple of bars rest. I managed to do that for most instruments, but there was one point at which it turned out that the bassoons were playing without a rest for about a page and a half, or about 150 bars, and there was no remotely convenient place to turn. In the end I set the page turn at a pause, and told Michael that in the performance he might have to make the pause a bit longer!

This is always a potential problem when arranging a piece for a smaller group than it was originally written for, and I had had similar issues when arranging the Brahms Serenade - the bassoons end up playing the viola and cello parts and have no rest at all.

Michael continued to make edits to his copy of the score, and we finally all assembled in Edinburgh on August 11th for the first rehearsal of the piece together. The first part of the rehearsal was spent making pencil markings in the parts of further changes that Michael had made, correcting further misprints and giving individual players a few bars tacet here & there to make it easier to turn pages and to catch breath and recover their lip. Although Michael is a pianist, in the time he has spent conducting SCWE he has grown wise in the ways of wind players!

We had 2 days of rehearsal, on the 10th and 11th, to prepare 4 concerts, on the 12th, 13th and 14th of August, plus rehearsals on the day of the concerts themselves. We spent about half a day on the 11th on Sea Breeze, and some time in the afternoon of 13th at St Marks Unitarian Church prior to the performance.

In total we did 4 concerts. On 12th August, we did a concert of quintet music at St Marks. On 13th August we included the larger pieces in the programme, the first performance of Sea Breeze, the Mozart C Minor Serenade, and an arrangement for wind ensemble of the Mozart Fantasia for Mechanical Organ.

On 14th August we played two concerts in Canongate Kirk, a lunchtime concert where some members of the group played solo pieces with piano, and an afternoon concert where we repeated the programme from the previous day, including the second performance of Sea Breeze. Then, tired but happy, we all repaired to the pub for a well earned drink and then off to a restaurant for a celebratory meal.

But the work on Sea Breeze was not yet finished. To make it ready for publication, we still needed to incorporate the latest changes and corrections to the score and generate a new corrected set of parts from it. This was finally completed on 1st October.

You can listen to the concert recording of the Canongate Kirk performance. The acoustic in Canongate Kirk is very resonant, and this is reflected in the recording itself. But it is the best we can do so far!

If you like it, you can buy a copy of the score and parts from here.

I think it is a delightful piece, and I'm sure SCWE will put it on again sometime. Thank you Christopher. We all really enjoyed rehearsing and performing it!

Music teaching in the UK

Over on Horn Matters, Bruce Hembd has put up an article about transposition.

In the course of the comments, I've discovered something I didn't know before, that compared to the UK, there appears to be almost no common structure to the teaching of instrumental music in the US.

So, I thought it might be a help to describe the UK system of music education. For the time being, I'm going to ignore class music in schools. Hopefully I'll be able to come back to that in a later article. And I'm also going to leave for the moment the structure of youth orchestras in Britain. Again, I hope to deal with that in some future article. Here I'm going to talk about the graded exam sequence defined by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, or ABRSM for short. There is a very similar scheme run by Trinity College of Music. I'll ignore them for now. The Trinity exam system is the same in general principles and differs in some details from the ABRSM exams. However, I'm more familiar with the ABRSM version, so I'm going to describe that.

A bit of history first. The ABRSM was founded in 1889 as a joint venture of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, to create an examining body ‘inspired by disinterested motives for the benefit of musical education... which would genuinely provide a stimulus and an objective for a high standard of achievement’. Over the years, the number of different grades has increased (it was originally "Junior" and "Senior") to the present structure of eight grades normally taken during high school and diplomas and degrees at college level. These days, over a quarter of a million candidates now sit ABRSM practical exams each year in over 90 countries worldwide.

There is a syllabus for a plethora of different instruments, but the overall structure of the graded practical exams is much the same on all of them, so I'll use the horn as the example. In the UK instrumental music teaching, from the very earliest level, is normally carried out in one-on-one individual lessons, usually for about 30 minutes each week. The teacher will enter the pupil for the exam when he thinks the pupil is ready. There is no set time interval between the exams, and no age at which you are required to take them - you take each one as you are ready for it. This means that anybody can take these exams, from very young children (children as young as 3 or 4 have taken Grade 1 on their instrument) to adult learners. The exams are run three times a year by qualified examiners who visit all over the country and internationally.

Each exam, at every grade on every instrument, has a common structure, consisting of the following:

• Three pieces, each chosen from a list defined in the syllabus for that instrument and grade. The candidate (or more usually, the candidate's teacher) can choose which piece from each list to prepare. The three lists each contain pieces in of contrasting styles and periods, so that the candidate has to learn a variety of styles - baroque, classical, romantic, modern - in the course of progressing through the grades.
• A selection of scales, of a range of keys and degree of difficulty appropriate to the instrument and grade.
• A set of aural tests of difficulty appropriate to the grade.
• A sight-reading test of a piece of difficulty appropriate to the instrument and grade.

Each piece is worth a maximum of 30 marks. The scales and sightreading test are each worth 21 marks, and the aural tests are worth 18, for a total of 150 marks. The pass mark is 100, you are awarded a Merit if you get 120 marks and a Distinction for 130 marks.

One thing is immediately obvious. You can't pass on the pieces alone, even if you play them perfectly. You must be able to get marks on the other items as well.

So, for Grade 1, (the complete horn Grade 1 syllabus can be found here) the candidate would be expected to be able to play each of the following scales from memory.

• C major scale, one octave up and down, slurred and tongued.
• A minor scale (either harmonic or melodic at the candidate's choice), one octave up and down, slurred and tongued.
• C major and A minor arpeggio, one octave up and down, slurred and tongued.

In the exam, the examiner wouldn't actually ask for all of these, he would pick a representative selection, for instance, C major scale slurred, A minor scale tongued, and C major arpeggio tongued.

The aural test requires the pupil to be able to hear and recognise musical elements. At grade 1, the pupil has to be able:

• to recognise whether a simple tune is in 2 or 3 beats to the bar, and to clap the pulse in time to the music,
  
• to sing back (in time and at pitch) a short phrase of three notes,
  
• to recognise and describe a rhythmic change between two versions of a 2-bar phrase played by the examiner,
• to recognise and describe various elements (e.g. loud/soft, crescendo/diminuendo, legato/staccato) in a short piece played by the examiner.

The aural tests are common to all instruments, and get progressively more challenging as you go through the grades.

The grades get successively more difficult, to grade 8 where the pupil on the horn would be expected to perform three pieces such as

• the 1st & 2nd movements of Strauss 1,
  
• the last movement of the Hindemith Horn Sonata, and
  
• the 5th & 6th movements of the 1st Bach Cello Suite arranged for horn.
  

Scales would include all major, harmonic minor, and melodic minors slurred, legato-tongued and staccato in 2 octaves up and down (some in 3 octaves), arpeggios in the same set of styles 2 octaves in all keys, chromatic scales in the same set of styles 2 octaves starting on any note, some whole tone scales, dominant seventh arpeggios and diminished seventh arpeggios. The aural tests and sight-reading tests are comparably challenging, and the sightreading test includes a requirement to play at sight a grade 6 sightreading test piece transposing into Eb.

Nobody is required to take these exams, but most instrumental music teachers use them. There are a number of advantages to using this exam structure.

• It provides a series of graded challenges and targets for the pupils to aim for
• In doing so, it ensures that teachers put general musicianship including scales, hearing exercises and sightreading into their teaching as well as new pieces.
• Pupils are prepared to learn the scales and do the sightreading because they accept them as being necessary to pass the exams.
• It provides a shorthand for knowing the level of achievement a pupil has reached. You know that if they have got to Grade 3, they will be ready for a junior orchestra at high school, Grade 5 means they are probably ready for the senior orchestra at high school and/or the local youth orchestra, Grade 7 or 8 would be required to hold a first chair position in the local youth orchestra, and a high mark (a Distinction) at grade 8 indicates that the pupil may have the ability to go on to music college as a performance major.
• You can get some general idea of the quality of a teacher by knowing what sorts of exam results they get.
  

The potential disadvantage is that unimaginative teachers (encouraged by pushy parents) may tend to "teach to the exam" and not explore other aspects of technique and musicianship. My view is that unimaginative teachers will probably always be with us, and if they are going to be unimaginative, at least get them unimaginatively teaching a syllabus that includes scales, sightreading and listening, so that a reasonably rounded technique is taught to the pupils.

In addition to the practical exams on the different instruments, there are theory of music tests, also going through a series of grades. No pupil may take an instrumental exam at grade 6 or higher without having passed Grade 5 Theory.

Theory tests are written examinations. At grade 5, you need to be able to do the following

• Know time signatures, including simple time signatures (2/4, 3/4 etc, compound time signatures (6/8, 9/8, 6/4 etc) , and irregular time signatures (5/4, 7/4 etc) and the grouping of notes and rests within bars of these time signatures
• Know treble, bass, alto and tenor clefs and have the ability to recognise notes in all these clefs, convert a passage from one clef to another, and transpose a passage to/from the key of Bb, A or F
• Know scales and arpeggios for all keys up to 6 sharps or flats, and all simple or compound intervals from any note
  
• Know the tonic, subdominant and dominant chords of any key, in root position and any inversion, and the ability to identify these chords in progression in the various standard cadences
• Be able to compose a short 8-bar tune either for a specific instrument given the first few notes, or to write a tune for some words. In both cases, instructions for articulation, tempo and dynamics must be included.
  
• Recognise and name a variety of musical symbols and translate a range of Italian musical terms.

The complete syllabuses for both instrumental and theory exams are available here.

The ABRSM examiners work all over the world, and not just in Britain. The standard required for the grades had risen progressively - the Grade 8 pieces are now significantly harder than they were 30 years ago when I took it. In my day it would have been just the first movement of Strauss 1, the first or last movement of a Mozart concerto, and an unaccompanied piece or study noticeably easier than the Bach Cello Suite - perhaps study 96 or 100 from the Anton Horner book. The standard has risen by equivalent degrees in other instruments as well.

I've lived with this structure all my musical life. It baffles me that there is a substantial part of the world that doesn't have something broadly equivalent.

Can somebody explain the American system to me?

Why I decided not to be a professional musician

I've loved music almost as long as I can remember. I started having piano lessons when I was 5, with a delightfully kind and gentle teacher called Mrs Lyndon.

Both my parents were keen amateur musicians, my mother was a music teacher teaching violin and piano, and who played viola. My father was a keen amateur clarinettist, who took up the instrument at the age of about 14 as a result of being incredibly impressed by a radio broadcast of the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, and deciding he wanted to play music like that.

My brother and sisters all learned instruments - my brother learned violin, my older sister the cello, and my younger sister also learned the violin, She has gone on to become a professional player. My younger sister was always going to be a violinist. As a baby she would sit in when my mother was giving violin lessons, and when she was still under 2 years old, we found her upstairs one day playing a pair of knitting needles as if they were a violin, and holding the "bow" with the correct grip! A very small one-eighth size violin soon appeared for her.

As a child, I had eczema on my hands (it cleared up when I got older) and the skin would crack and bleed. So playing a stringed instrument was out of the question for me, it would have hurt to press the string against the cracks in my skin. But my parents were keen for me to learn an orchestral instrument, so when I was about 8 or 9 they invited some friends from their local orchestra round one afternoon to play some wind quintets. When they stopped for a coffee break, I was invited to have a blow through each of the instruments and see if I could make a noise.

Afterwards, they asked me which I liked best, and I told them the horn. Apparently (I have no direct memory of this myself) when asked why, I said "It's nice and curly". A horn was bought and lessons arranged.

And so I learned, and by the time I was 15. I had passed the Grade 8 exam. In Britain, a high mark at Grade 8 is the standard needed to have a reasonable chance at getting to music college. But it never occurred to me to try. There wasn't much music at my school, and I was never the regular 1st horn of my local youth orchestra, there was a girl a year ahead of me who got the 1st horn seat - she want on to study at the Guildhall School of Music and then became a music teacher. A year behind me was Andrew Clark, who got into the National Youth Orchestra at a fairly young age (something I never managed to achieve), and I was told that he would jump ahead of me as 1st horn when the girl ahead of me left to go to college. But my National Youth Orchestra audition was very helpful to me - the woman running the orchestra told me I needed top level lessons and put me in touch with Douglas Moore, who in his day had been principal horn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I had private lessons once a month with him for several years.

So I assumed that I wouldn't be up to the necessary standard if I couldn't even get to 1st horn in my local youth orchestra. I studied maths & science for my A-level exams at school, and went to university at Kings College London to study electronic engineering.

Then a very strange thing happened. In the first week of term, I went along to the initial open rehearsal for the University of London Orchestra. There were 12 horns there. Not much chance of getting in, especially as I discovered that 3 of those present had been in the orchestra the previous year. But nothing ventured, nothing gained - I went for the auditions. I thought I might have an outside chance of being 4th horn or assistant - "bumper" as it is called here.

In the first audition everything was running late, nearly 2 hours late. But nobody seemed to know precisely how late it would be. So I kept trying to keep warmed up for 2 hours, so I would be ready to go in to the audition at any moment. And it was a disaster, my lip was pretty much gone by the time I finally went in. I played the first movement of Strauss 1, and cracked absolutely every top Bb.

Nevertheless, to my great surprise, I was called back for the second round of auditions - we were down to 7 players by then. Still a chance of being 4th or bumper, I thought. In the second audition, the conductor asked me what had happened to all the top notes the previous time, and I explained that I had been trying to keep warmed up for 2 hours, and my lips were tired by the time I had finally got to the audition. He seemed to accept that, we tried the piece again, and this time it went much better. Still in with a chance I thought. We were all asked to wait until the last of the auditions was done, and the conductor would announce who had been accepted immediately after.

He made me first horn! You could have knocked me down with a feather. It hadn't occurred to me that I was even in with a shout at it. The first concert that term was very challenging. Beethoven's Egmont overture, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. Gulp! From having been in the open rehearsal, I knew that there was a very prominent and high horn solo in the first movement, going up to a top B.

And the concert went pretty well - I got the top B, though I was very glad to come down from it afterwards!

In my second year at Kings, I decided that I wanted to try for music college and see how good I could really get. I had been continuing to improve, and I wanted to see what the limits were and whether I had what it took to become a professional.

This rather worried my parents initially, they thought I wanted to drop out of my engineering degree immediately. It hadn't occurred to me not to go on and finish it. In my third year, I auditioned for the postgraduate performer's programme at the Royal College of Music, and got in. Douglas Moore was the principal horn professor and he became (or rather remained) my teacher there.

I have immense gratitude to old Dougie Moore, as everyone knew him. He was a fine player and an truly excellent teacher. He had himself learned from Aubrey Brain, father and teacher of Dennis Brain. He had performed the Britten Serenade with Benjamin Britten himself conducting. When he taught me the piece, he put pencil markings in my part saying "That is how Ben told me he wanted it." I couldn't have had a musical education that was closer to the core of the British school of horn playing. It was a tremendous privilege.

But in my two years there, even though I was still learning and greatly improving and enjoying every minute of playing I could get, I gradually became disenchanted with the idea of taking it up as a profession.

First there was the simple maths of it. I counted how many professional orchestras there were in Britain, and multiplied by 5 to get the approximate number of salaried professional horn players there were in the country. I counted up the number of music colleges, and made an estimate of the number of horn players graduating from them each year. I worked out that there were enough horn players coming out of the colleges to fill every salaried horn job in the country about every three years. Assuming that a successful player would occupy one or other of those places for perhaps 30 years, it meant that I needed to be in the top 10% or so of those graduating from college. I didn't think I was in that top 10%, and there were limits on the amount of extra practice I was prepared to put in, which might (and on the other hand might not) be enough to get me into that top 10%.

Also I was beginning to find that the company and conversation of music students was a bit limited. When I had been a Kings, it was possible in the bar to strike up a conversation on almost any topic under the sun. Many were the drunken rambling philosophical arguments I had had with students of all subjects! But at the RCM, conversation was essentially limited to two topics. The first (a perennial student favourite) was gossiping about who was getting into bed with whom. The other favourite topic was discussing how badly this or that student had played in their recital last week. It got discouraging, and I concluded that I didn't really want to spend the rest of my working life with these people. It wasn't really quite as limited as this, but I did miss the wider range of conversation.

So, I decided that I would go back to the engineering. I got myself a job in the telecoms industry, and joined the ranks of amateur players.

And I have never regretted doing so. That decision was right for me - I would not have been suited to life as a professional musician, I'm interested in too many non-musical topics. But I'm still very glad I went to the RCM and spent those two years there.

First, it meant that I could make the decision to walk away, fully informed as to what it was I was walking away from. Had I not given it a try, I might have spent my life wondering at the back of my mind if I could have made it as a professional horn player. I now know without any doubt that it was not for me.

Second, it refined my horn technique to the point that there is nothing in amateur music making that frightens me. Put anything on the stand in front of me, and I will tackle it as best I can. For both those reasons, I count my time at the RCM as a great success.

My sister occasionally plays with the chamber group Harmoniemusik. A few years ago, they invited me to join them for a series of concerts they played at a little festival in Cornwall. The pieces I joined in for were the Dvorak Serenade for Wind, the Mozart Gran Partita Serenade, and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 18. Most of the other players were regular London professionals taking a busman's holiday, and playing some music they wanted to have a go at. I wondered whether I would be able to keep up with them, and whether it would stir up any discontent at not having gone in for the profession.

And I found my answer to both questions. I could keep up with them - I was in no way the weakest link. And I was very glad to go back the day job afterwards and had no desire to resurrect a music career.

Going over to the dark side

Talking a bit more about conducting, at last year's York Orchestral Course, I decided to try my hand at a little bit of it myself. I had made a wind ensemble arrangement of the Brahms Serenade No. 1 in D and I wanted to try it out and see if it would work.

Conducting is fun! The power!!! You change a bit the way you wave your right arm, and people play differently, they get faster or slower, louder or softer. Not just one player, but lots of them, all at once! And you don't have to worry about accidentals or wrong notes - they are all the players' fault! It is easy to see how conducting can encourage megalomaniac tendencies.

I hadn't ever conducted before, but have played under a great many conductors, including one or two from the top rank. Before I took up the stick for the session, I had a think about what I have found makes a good conductor for amateurs and/or students, the characteristics of those conductors I had most enjoyed playing for. (I wouldn't presume to know what makes a good conductor of professional musicians.) This is what I came up with and tried to apply.

• You must have a clear beat. In particular, the downbeat has to be easily distinguishable from the other beats, and your arm must keep moving in some reasonably predictable way so that when doing accelerandos or rallentandos, the players can easily see by how much you are speeding up or slowing down.
  
  
• People like to play. So let them. Speak as little as reasonably possible and conduct as much as possible. In many cases, fluffed notes and entries can be sorted just by running the passage again, if necessary more slowly once or twice to let people overcome panic over a difficult passage. The players usually know which notes they have got wrong, there is no need to labour the point.
  
  
• Dynamics can often be handled on the fly either by a larger or smaller beat, by gestures with the left hand to the players concerned, or by a quick word while continuing to play. Only on relatively rare occasions do you need to stop and talk to the players about what they should play, for instance to assure players that they really are supposed to be off the beat relative to their neighbours.
  
  
• If someone gets lost, if at all possible try to help them back into place without stopping the whole group. That can be by giving them a clear cue at their next entry, singing their part for a bar or two or calling out a rehearsal letter when it comes up. If they get repeatedly lost at the same point, briefly point out some musical landmark they can use for navigation before running the passage again.
  
  
• When asking for changes in how people play, describe them as just that - changes. There's usually no need to say they were playing wrong, even if they were. Protect their dignity by phrasing it in terms of how you want it in order to get the best from the group as a whole. This applies particularly when asking people to play quieter. Where necessary, blame the composer for writing inappropriate dynamic markings, unless he/she is alive and present!
  
  
• When starting a new piece or a movement for the first time, announce the speed and the number of beats before you start, and if this changes partway through the movement, say at the start what you intend doing at that point, or call it out a few bars ahead while playing.
  
  
• As far as familiarity with the piece will allow, look as little as possible at the score and as much as possible at the players. Particularly at entries, players are incredibly reassured by a bit of eye contact when playing.
  
  
• Be encouraging. Take the trouble to praise a particularly good bit of playing by an individual, a section or the group as a whole, or a significant improvement in a previously dodgy passage. People like to be told when they have finally started to get things right.

All the above is not about deciding what you want to get them to play, this about how you cajole them into playing it. Much of the work of the conductor is done before you ever step up on to the rostrum. The players may be sight-reading, but the conductor must know the piece already. He must know what speed he intends to take it, he must know the style he wants, must know what pauses and changes of tempo are needed, who is playing the tune at any moment, who will need to have their entries cued.

And for any substantial piece, the conductor is the person who has to decide on the interpretation, what he wants to try and communicate to the audience through the music. He has to set the vision.

I knew the Brahms pretty well - it takes a lot of effort to write music, even when you are merely arranging rather than composing something original, and I had been working at this arrangement on and off for months. So I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to achieve.

I explained to the players my absolutely limitless inexperience at conducting, and asked for their tolerance if I got myself mixed up. But it went very well, I really enjoyed it, I discovered several points where the arrangement needed to be improved.

And the players seemed to enjoy it as well. A couple of them came up to me afterwards and said that I had a nice clear beat, and they wouldn't have guessed it was my first ever attempt at conducting.

Largely the same group got together the next day to play the Mozart Gran Partita Serenade for 13 winds, and asked me to conduct again. Again, I have played it many times, so I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. At my basic level, Mozart is quite easy to conduct, in that the tune generally keeps to the same speed once it has set out, and there aren't large numbers of corners to turn in terms of tempo.