Horn Thoughts

Any horns in Hillingdon?

2012-02-01T14:55:00.000Z

If you're a horn player, you live in Hillingdon or anywhere in west London or thereabouts, and want to join an orchestra, please let me know by emailing me at jonathanwest22@googlemail.com. The Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra needs you!

Mendelssohn Nocturne

2011-12-31T02:28:00.000Z

On November 12th, Hillingdon Philharmonic played a concert - 3 movements from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the Overture, Scherzo and Nocturne), Bruch's 1st Violin Concerto and Beethoven's 4th Symphony.

Bob Paxman, former owner of Paxman Musical Instruments, Britain's leading manufacturer and seller of French horns, died during the summer after a short illness. Paxmans have put up a tribute to him on their website. Bob was a regular member of our audience at Hillingdon, and would always come round and say "hello" and "well done" to the horns after the concert. This was our first concert after his death, and Stuart, our other regular horn, suggested it would be good to dedicate the Nocturne to Bob, since it is mostly a horn solo. I thought that was a wonderful idea, and so Stuart arranged with the conductor and the chairman that there would be a short announcement at the start of the concert about Bob Paxman and his connection with the orchestra, and how the Nocturne was being dedicated to his memory.

So, I played the solo and made it sound as beautiful as I knew how, to show the audience what a wonderful instrument the horn is and how much horn players need good instrument makers in order to produce those beautiful sounds. At the end, Stuart put his hand on my shoulder and quietly said "Bob would have enjoyed that."

Strauss at Brent

2011-12-11T01:28:00.000Z

I've been horrifically busy since the last week of October, with work, a huge eruption of publicity on the child protection issues I've been dealing with over on my other blog, and with three concerts that I took part in in November. So this blog has been rather neglected, as far as writing about music is concerned I've had to restrict myself to making an occasional comment over on Lyle Sanford's Music Therapy blog.

But I have been meaning to write for some time about the concert on 9th November at St John's Wood Church, which the Brent Symphony orchestra incredibly kindly dedicated to the memory of my parents. I played the solo horn part in Strauss 1, and my sister Joanna played solo violin in Tchaikovsky's Sérénade Mélancolique.

With everything that had been else that had been going on in my life, my practice schedule was shot to hell. I had been intended to play the Strauss from memory, but in the end regretfully decided that I shouldn't take the risk. Playing the music from memory looks very impressive, but I take the view that the sound and expression of the performance is the most important thing, and that I was more interested in making it a good musical experience for the audience than showing off my memory skills. So to allow me to avoid stressing about the notes and give the most possible brainpower to the music, I decided to have the music available, on a stand in front of me but fairly low down, where I could refer to it if I needed to but where it wouldn't get in the way of the audience seeing me. It was a compromise that worked. As an orchestral musician by long experience, I have a prejudice towards thinking that memorisation of pieces is a greatly overrated skill!

At the first rehearsal with the orchestra, a couple of weeks before the concert, we discovered that the tempo was dragging. It was only after the rehearsal that I twigged what was going on. I was being an orchestral musician, and I was following the conductor's beat. But he was being a good conductor and listening out for what the soloist was doing. And so we were both following each other and getting progressively slower and slower!

This was a problem easily solved. At the other rehearsal, on the day of the concert, I deliberately turned more away from the conductor and towards the audience, and decided just to set the speed for myself and leave it to the conductor to catch me. By turning away, the conductor's beat was no longer in my eye, only just visible in the extreme corner of my vision, and so the temptation to revert to orchestral beat-following technique was minimised. Also, in the time between the two rehearsals I had put together a few thought on how I intended taking the piece, and emailed them off to the conductor Lev Parikian. These are the points I wrote

1st movement, maybe just a tiny bit faster than we took on Wednesday. I think that was mainly my fault - a lifetime's habits as an orchestral player means that I stick to the conductor's beat. I'll try and lead a bit more.

Opening cadenza: while I will pull the tempo about, the last 2 minims will be in strict tempo, so you can beat those and I'll match you.

After that, the first movement is pretty much in strict tempo. I'll be doing expression by means of articulation and dynamics.

2nd movement, again maybe a tad faster. If I feel it's a bit slow to start, I'll push it on a bit at my second entry, 6 bars before un poco accelerando.

The countermelodies in the clarinet and bassoon can come out as much as you wish - they are 20 feet further from the audience, and it's an additional item of interest in what would otherwise be a straightforward and slightly boring repetition of the tune.

Initial tempo for the last movement was fine.

At the 4/4 section where the cadenza comes back, I will pull back quite a bit at the un poco calando.

Lots of rubato at Mit freiem Vortrag. I'd like to start the rit a bar earlier than written and pull back the tempo a lot by the time we get to the Lento.

The poco piu mosso will be a little bit faster than the rest of the movement, but not very much. I think it is more important that the notes can be heard than that the audience are terribly impressed with it appearing to be taken at meltdown speed. Very little if any rall at the end, only the minimum necessary for me to accent the last 4 notes.

Lev briefly wrote back saying that was really useful. And by and large that is how we took it in rehearsal. I was really fantastically pleased with how the rehearsal went. Everything seemed to gel. A horn in my hand, a fine orchestra behind me, a nice resonant church acoustic, and Richard Strauss. Heaven!

It was such heaven that I probably pushed it a bit harder than was entirely wise in the rehearsal, and so my lip was a bit tired towards the end of the performance. Not enough that any of the audience would have noticed, but just enough to feel a bit uncomfortable. As an amateur musician I get so few chances to play a solo with orchestra. Lesson learned, I'll know better next time, if and when next time arrives.

I think there were sixteen members of the family in the audience. As far as I can remember, it was the largest assembly of family members for any event other then weddings and funerals since my grandparents had a party for their golden wedding anniversary over 30 years ago. They came from as far afield as Glasgow and Southampton. For the first time in years (apart from weddings & funerals), all six of the grandchilden of my Grandma and Grandad West were present. It was a tremendous support having them there.

And the concert went magnificently well. The orchestra started with Schubert's Rosamunde Overture. Then Joanna went on and played the Tchaikovsky absolutely beautifully. She's recently got hold of a magnificent old violin, and in her hands the warmth of its tone completely filled the church.

Then I had to go on. It had been agreed beforehand that I would say a few words about the two charities the concert was in aid of, the Thyroid Eye Disease Charitable Trust and the Alzheimer's Society, and their connection with my parents. And then we had an A to tune to and we were off into the concerto.

And I was really pleased with how it went. If I want to be hypercritical, yes, one or two notes were cracked. But none of the top Bbs, they came out clear as a bell, and I felt that they weren't sounding strained in any way, the acoustic of the hall was supporting me well. And I I got fairly well into a "flow" state where I felt able to become the music, without having to worry much about the notes. Although the music was on the stand in front of me, I barely looked at it. In the first movement the tone was singing out over the orchestra, I was getting the dynamic range I wanted, the slurs were coming smoothly.

I've always found the first part of the slow movement more difficult than the notes would suggest. In performance, the movements follow on after each other without a break, so there isn't all that much time to catch you breath and rest your lip during the orchestral interlude at the end of the first movement before you're off again. The first part of the slow movement is a bit of a test of endurance and smoothness - you want it all to remain fairly quiet because of the need for the contrast with the second theme, but you daren't risk any of the notes not actually sounding, and it still all needs to sound over the admittedly very quiet accompaniment an also of course appear to be effortless. Audiences have no idea how much work goes into making music sound effortless! But I had to increase the effort and concerntation to make sure it all went well.

And then there is the second theme. With a crescendo from the orchestra, you burst out into major key and a truly heroic mode. I took it almost loudest I could make it without the tone turning brassy. I kept a bit in reserve so I could I add just a bit of brassy edge along with additional volume for the G natural at the climax. And then it all winds down quite quickly to a recapitulation of the first theme.

There's one great advantage to Strauss 1 which Lev mentioned at the end of the performance. It doesn't outstay its welcome. Some violin concertos have a slow movement that is as long as the whole of Strauss 1. They wallow. The music is undoubtedly wonderful, but sometimes you wish there could be a little less of it. Not so with the slow movement here. First theme, repetition with countermelodies, second theme, recapitulation, and you're done. Just as well, because then there is the third movement...

The third movement is a wonderful romp. Although it has heroic moments in it, for the most part the words to describe the mood are playful and relaxed. There's lots of expression you can put into the dynamic markings, lots of play into the quavers and smooth relaxation into the slower tunes. You let the flutes through in their little countermelody.. And the tension gradually rises until you break out into the final cadenza "Mit freiem Vortrag", at which point you are in full heroic mode again.

Then the danger is that you run away with yourself in the final passage. It goes faster than the rest of the moment, but it is all too easy to let it run away from you. So even while I was enjoying the cadenza to the max, a voice was whispering in the back o my head "not too fast in the next bit, don't let it get away from you!".

The whole of the last section is essentially one long crescendo.No dynamic mark is given at the start, and even though it is marked con bravura, it needs to start no louder than a solid soloistic mp. Then you can start each phrase progressively one notch louder until you get to a climax with the top Bb. Then you drop down to p again, and then do a much faster crescendo all over again to the end.

And it all went to plan. I didn't overspeed in the last passage. and I got to the end with a great flourish!

I probably lost a pound or so in the course of the performance, just from sweat and nerves. Playing a solo concerto in front of the orchestra is decidedly a different proposition from playing a solo passage from within the orchestra. You are far more exposed, far more on show. You're also standing which is somewhat unfamiliar (though less so for me because I always stand when I practice at home).

But I'm very pleased with how it went. I think that I did justice to the music, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. It was a wonderful way to honour and remember my parents. I think they would have approved.

My playing for the evening was over, but the orchestra's wasn't even half done. They had Bruckner 4 to play after the break. and they did exceedingly well. Although the piece has only 4 horn parts, they used six horns, bumpers on the 1st and 3rd parts, and they made a glorious sound all together with the heavy brass.. At the end I went up to them and shook all their hands and congratulated them. Bruckner is very hard work for the horns.

Lessons to learn. No matter how well a performance goes, there's always something you can take from it with the aim of making it even better next time. Next time I would want a less disrupted practice schedule prior to doing a concerto, and I would go a bit easier in the final rehearsal to conserve my strength for the concert. As a soloist I need to lead rather then follow the conductor, and to remember to do that from the very start of the first rehearsal. There's always something you can hope to do better next time.

Musical decisions

2011-09-28T10:43:00.000+01:00

Lyle Sanford has recently written the following on his Music Therapy blog

Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line.

This is a very useful realisation. This "sculpting" of notes is not merely something which happens from one note to the next, but you can also change the character of a note during an individual note of any significant length.

You can think of the tempo (including rubatos), tone, volume, pitch and attack as five entirely independent variables which you can can adjust in order to get the musical effect you want.

The number of possible permutations you can choose from is huge. Music notation only gives you the merest clue as to the appropriate combination in any particular circumstance. The rest you have to work out for yourself.

So how do you decide what is the right thing to do?

The first thing is to realise that you actually have a choice. The second is to acquire sufficient technical control over the different aspects of playing that you can vary all these things independently at need. I've described before how to control tone and volume independently of each other, which are probably the hardest two items to separate.

Once you have the technical control, you then need to understand how to use it musically. It's quite hard to describe in words how to do this.

The dots on the page give you the pitch and a general idea about tempo, volume and attack. There may be indications that rubato is appropriate. Notes may have slurs, tenuto marks, accents, staccato dots etc. Very occasionally you'll get some kind of instruction about tone, e.g. dolce or cantabile. But with staccato for instance, you have a considerable choice as to how short you make the staccato and how much of an attack you put into it. With crescendos and diminuendos, you can decide how far you will change the volume, and you can also vary the rate of change of volume during a crescendo. On a long crescendo, I'll quite often save up most of the change of volume for the last bar or two. The notes are just a general description, it is your job to turn them into music.

There is a lot of tradition involved in this. When you are a student, this is one of the concepts your teacher should be introducing, whether or not you realise it at the time. In your early years playing, you sit next to people who have been doing it for longer, you absorb how they do it and you mimic them, consciously or otherwise. Gradually you learn enough to be able to make your own decisions about this, so you aren't merely copying what you have been taught or shown. As a result, traditions change over time, as each new generation of players finds its own approach.

And you also have realise that if you are playing in a group, the sound you produce is part of a composite tone in combination with the other players. For instance the horn can used to warm up a cello tone such as in the opening of Dvorak's 8th Symphony. And there is an amazing moment in Mahler 9, where horns 1 & 2 play a note fortissomo diminuendo, and horns 3 & 4 play the same note piano crescendo, but handstopped. So the overall effect is of a more or less constant volume, but a gradual change in tone colour as the handstopped note takes over from the open. (It's four bars before figure 13 in the first movement, if you want to look it up.) So your choices about how to play any passage also have to be made in the context of what is going on around you.

But ultimately you are there with the mouthpiece to your lips and an audience in front of you, and only you who can decide how you will play the next phrase. Realise that you have a decision, and do your very best to make it sound musical.

Brent Symphony Orchestra memorial concert

2011-09-02T21:16:00.000+01:00

My parents, Roger and Janet West, were members of the Brent Symphony Orchestra for many years when they lived in London, until the family moved to Norfolk in 1975. Dad was first clarinet and Mum led the violas, and she would play piano or celeste whenever one was needed for a piece.

In a way, I owe my existence to that orchestra, since my parents met there. They had both attended the inaugural Edinburgh course of the Rehearsal Orchestra in 1957 without meeting, and when my mother came down to London to study at the RCM, Harry Legge, who founded the Rehearsal Orchestra, asked if she would like to come and play in his London orchestra, the Harlesdon Symphony Orchestra as it was called in those days. (The orchestra has been renamed a couple of times in subsequent years as borough boundaries and names have changed, but is now settled on the name Brent Symphony Orchestra.)

She was very willing to join, provided somebody could give her a lift to rehearsals from her digs in Putney. That was arranged, and Dad, who lived that way, was asked to provide the lift! They married about three years later.

I remember one time when they came back home from a rehearsal in fits of giggles. Harry had said something unprecedented for a conductor.

"Violas, you're too loud. You're drowning the trombones!"

When I came back down to London in 1980 to study at university, it was natural to go along to Brent and renew the family acquaintance with the orchestra, which was still being conducted after all those years by Harry Legge.

It so happened that the first rehearsal I went to, neither of the regular horns was there, so there was just me and another new player at her first rehearsal. So we sat ourselves down on 1st and 2nd horn and got on with playing. In the course of the rehearsal, Harry muttered to nobody in particular "Horns turn up - all sounds fine. Horns disappear - still sounds fine!" I was a regular for a while when I was a student, and have occasionally depped for them in the years since.

My mum died in 2003. When my dad died last Christmas, I of course told the people running both orchestras - Rehearsal Orchestra and Brent. Mum and Dad had a great many dear friends in both orchestras, and although few if any of them are still regular players, some of them still keep in touch and come to the concerts.

So I was very touched when Heather Raybould, orchestral manager at Brent, contacted me earlier this year to ask if they could dedicate their November charity concert to my parents' memory, with the proceeds going to a charity associated with them. And she also asked if I would like to play a solo with the orchestra.

I replied immediately, saying I would have to consult with my brother and sisters, but that the answer would undoubtedly be "yes". It was eventually arranged that I would play Richard Strauss' First Horn Concerto, and my sister Joanna (a professional violinist) will play Tchaikovsky's Sérénade mélancolique. In the second half, the orchestra will play Bruckner 4. The concert will be on November 5th, at St John's Wood Church, Lord's Roundabout, NW8 7NE, 7:00 pm. Do please come if you are nearby.

I'm extremely grateful to the Brent Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Lev Parikian for coming up with the idea of remembering my parents in the way, and providing me with an opportunity to give a musical tribute to them. Quite apart from the fact that they were wonderful parents, I learned an awful lot musically from them, when I was Growing up musical. And they in turn learned a great deal of their music, especially orchestral technique, from Harry Legge and the Brent Symphony Orchestra. So it will be a tribute to the orchestra as well as to my parents.

As for the charities to benefit from the concert, I've chosen two.

The first is the Thyroid Eye Disease Charitable Trust, because my mother suffered from thyroid eye disease in her later years, which curtailed her music making because of the double-vision it caused. Her particular talent was for piano accompaniment, in particular sight-reading. And you can't sight-read with double-vision, you can't tell which line the notes are on!

The other charity is the Alzheimer's Society, which deals with all varieties of dementia. Dementia is what finally carried off my father. I hope that any money raised can contribute towards finding a cure both diseases.

Gulda Cello concerto

2011-09-01T22:36:00.000+01:00

I had a whale of a time on the Edinburgh Fringe with St Clements Wind Ensemble. We had a fantastic programme for our two concerts in Canongate Kirk.

We started with arrangements by Michael Round for wind ensemble of three Debussy piano preludes: "General Lavine - Eccentric", "Canope" and "Les collines d'Anacapri".

Then we played the three movements with tenor solo from the Schoenberg chamber arrangement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. "Mahler" and "chamber music" don't naturally sit in the same sentence. One associates Mahler with huge orchestral forces - his original orchestral version requires 3 flutes, 1 piccolo, 3 oboes (1 doubling cor anglais), 3 clarinets, 1 Eb clarinet, 1 bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contra), 4 horns, three trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, celesta, harp, mandolin, sundry percussion and strings to accompany the two solo singers. So a chamber arrangement for string quartet, double bass, wind quintet, piano, harmonium and percussion (1 player) really ought not to work at all.

And yet it does. Admittedly, in the opening to the first movement "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde" the strings are sawing away madly and can't much be heard above the wind and percussion, but it settles down after that, and you learn something about Mahler which isn't instantly obvious from the large orchestras he asks for. For quite a lot of the time, he uses the forces available in order to construct ad hoc chamber ensembles in varying combinations. And so, Das Lied can be played with a chamber ensemble, you just have to change round the instrumentation. And that is what Schoenberg did with the first movement (the rest of the arrangement was finished off by Rainer Riehn).

Then we played an arrangement for double wind quintet I have put together of Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, partly because it is the bicentenary of Liszt's birth this year, and partly because I just plain like the piece, and think it is unfair that pianists have so many good tunes that other players don't get a chance to have a go at! No smaller group would really work, because there are times when the piece is all down in the bass, and I need 4 or 5 instruments capable of managing that range, and sometimes both hands are up around the top of the treble stave. Of course, I gave the opening rather portentious tune to myself to play as a horn solo, but tried to make sure just about everybody had some interesting stuff, and I was really pleased how well it all seemed to fit together.

The last piece in the programme though was the highlight as far as I was concerned, Friedrich Gulda's Concerto for Cello and Wind. On one of the cello forums a contributor has described the piece as "A pioneering work of jazz-rock-classical-marching band fusion". Although it sounds like he's taking the mickey, that is actually a very good and accurate description. It is a completely mad piece, but absolutely tremendous fun to play.

The instrumentation is eccentric. Solo cello, flute doubling piccolo, 2 oboes. 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, drumkit. The guitar and double bass have to be amplified, and so does the solo cello for the outer movements.

The first movement (Overture) opens in big-band style, with a cello riff over percussion accompaniment with an occasional interjection from the brass, and then with a trill and a cadence the mood changes completely, with a gentle tune in the woodwind, taken over by the solo cello with the first horn. Another trill and we are back to big band style.

The second movement (Idylle) starts with a slow gentle chorale for lower brass, the first horn taking the tune initially, before the cello repeats it. And then the mood abruptly changes again into an Austrian ländler, the oboes and clarinets yodelling up and down, before the cello takes over, and the chorale returns for the end.

The third movement (Cadenza) is for unaccompanied solo cello, nearly 7 minutes of it, and Gulda seems at times to take the piss out of over-long and elaborate romantic cadenzas, and also out of the kind of "squeaky gate" music that was all the avant-garde in the 60s and 70s (the piece was composed in 1980)

The Menuett has a renaissance dance feel to it, and also rather reminded me in tone and style of Rondrigo's Fantasia para un Gentilhombre.

The Finale alla Marcia is a rather mad marching band, the horns and trumpets are given full license to make the most raucous din possible "Stürze hoch" (bells up) and the cello has notes flying in all directions. There are elements of Sousa that are entirely recognisable. At one point it all quietens down into repeated chords and it sounded as if the tenor soloist from the Mahler ought at this point to come in singing the Toreador song from Carmen! There is passage designed to sound like a steam train, there are trumpets playing mariachi style. The whole thing is just gloriously crazy. You can't do this piece justice if you merely try and play it, you have to completely throw yourself into it.

We nearly weren't able to perform it at all, as our intended soloist Johannes Osterlee went down with tendonitis a week or so before the concert and couldn't play, necessitating a frantic search for a replacement. We were really lucky to get Thomas Carroll to step in at such short notice, and he played the piece with incredible verve and vigour, and he deservedly had a standing ovation from the audience for both performances.

I can't remember when I last had such a huge grin plastered across my face at the end of a concert!

Bob Paxman

2011-08-08T13:03:00.000+01:00

I've just seen the following notice on Paxman's website.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Bob Paxman.

Bob passed away after a short illness on the morning of Monday 25th July.

A tribute to Bob and information on a service to celebrate his life and achievements will appear here as they become available.

Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family at this time.

Bob Paxman was a director of and until 2000 the owner of Paxman Musical Instruments, the world-famous manufacturer of horns. In 1993 he was awarded the MBE for services to music and industry.

I met Bob a few times, he would come and listen to the concerts of the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. He would always come round and say "hi" and "well done" to the horns afterwards.

A thoroughly nice man, and a great loss to the world of the horn.

A student experience of Stockhausen

2011-07-18T13:10:00.001+01:00

When I was a student at the Royal College of Music in London, one of the professors strongly held the opinion that no potential professional musician should go through college without having played some "modern" music (i.e. something atonal or similarly unpleasant-sounding). Like the music or loathe it, I think he had a good general point, in that musicians owe it to the composer to give a new piece the best possible performance, and to be appropriately trained to do so.

Anyway, one term, he managed to arrange for the college symphony orchestra to play Stockhausen's Carré. (Carré means "squared" in French.) This was a square piece, for 4 orchestras positioned in the 4 corners of the hall. The conductors stood in the corners facing inwards so they could see each other and coordinate the beat, and the orchestras faced outwards each towards their own conductor, with the audience in the middle. Each orchestra was a couple of desks of each of the strings, a varied selection of woodwind & brass, an 8-voice chamber choir, and pretty much a full symphonic percussion section. Maybe a keyboard or two thrown in for good & useless measure.

The piece hadn't been performed in London for 15 years. We soon discovered why.

I can honestly say that this is the only piece I have ever played where for the entire duration of the music I couldn't actually tell whether I was playing the right notes or not. The singers had tuning forks more or less permanently to their ears to try and help them pitch their notes. There were really no cues you could take from the players around you.

The students rapidly took a fairly lighthearted approach to rehearsals, to the annoyance of the professors. There was a harpsichord player in the 4th orchestra, who rapidly cottoned on to the fact that nobody could hear her over the percussion, and practised Bach and Handel throughout the rehearsals.

We all assumed that nobody would want to come & hear this junk, even though RCM concerts were free for the public. When we filed into the hall for the concert, we were astonished to find the place absolutely packed with people standing in the gallery.

We later discovered that someone had publicised the concert in a modern music magazine, and because it was so long since the piece had been played in London, all the atonal music junkies had come to hear it. In London, there are just about enough Stockhausen fans to fill a medium sized concert hall if they all turn up on the same night.

Anyway, all went fine in the performance, we made a raucous din for about 30 minutes. The problem came towards the end. The conductor of the 4th orchestra got lost and out of time with the other three. As a result, in the 4th orchestra we finished about 30 seconds early.

Nobody noticed. We got a standing ovation and a rave review from the Times music critic.

Sometimes, less is more

2011-07-17T22:51:00.000+01:00

I had a thoroughly enjoyable concert last Friday with the Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra. As it was the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the orchestra, the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Hillingdon Choral Society and the conductor's 60th birthday, the choir and orchestra held a joint concert. it was a bit of a celebration all round, with the programme full of "lollipops". We had Walton's march "Crown Imperial" and Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4", Parry's "Blest Pair of Sirens", Vaughan Williams' "Toward the Unknown Region", and the the second half, the overture Die Fledermaus and lots of favourite bits from the operas.

But for me, the most satisfying moment musically was during the quiet second theme of Pomp & Circumstance No. 4. Elgar starts the piece in typically bright and celebratory mood, but the second theme is a slow stately dignified march.

The first violins, all 4 horns, and the first clarinet share the tune, all marked piano. Wind players in an orchestra so rarely have the tune, that when it does appear the temptation is always to play the tune as if it is a solo. But it isn't necessarily so, and this is a case where it isn't. This particular theme is owned by the first violins, the horns and clarinet are there just warm the tone a little bit and smooth it out. So the horns (all 4 of them combined) need to be quieter than the violins.

In the final rehearsal, I realised that the balance wasn't right, that one or two of the horns were playing a solo piano. I briefly explained that we needed to be quieter as it wasn't our tune, we were just supporting the violins. In the concert, they got it exactly right, with just enough sound to support the violins, and it sounded wonderful!

St Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh

2011-05-14T23:19:00.002+01:00

The programme for St. Clements Wind Ensemble in Edinburgh this August has now been worked out. And it is a very ambitious set of works!

Friedrich Gulda: Concerto for Violoncello and wind band. Soloist: Johannes Oesterlee

Mahler arr. Schoenberg/Rainer Riehn: Das Lied von der Erde (chamber version)

Liszt arr. West: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

I've just been having a listen to a recording of the Gulda. It is weird, but sounds great fun! Part chamber work, part jazz, part town band, part cello concerto. The instrumentation is flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, tuba, guitar, double bass, percussion, solo cello.

The Mahler is more familiar. I've not played Das Lied von der Erde before, but I have played various of the symphonies and other song cycles. Schoenberg started working on a chamber arrangement of the first movement, but never competed it, and the conductor Rainer Riehn finished it and the other movements in 1980. I remember hearing it at a late night concert in the Usher Hall in the Edinburgh Festival about 10 years ago. The instrumentation is 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/Eb clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium/celesta, percussion, solo mezzo soprano & tenor.

Mahler normally goes in for pretty huge orchestras, he commonly asks for 6 or more horns in his symphonies and lots of woodwind. So one would expect a chamber version of one of his great works to lose so much that it is unrecognisable. But strangely, it does seem to make sense in this smaller arrangement. But having had a listen to a recording of it, I can tell that I will have a lot of work to do, and will need to be in tiptop condition to make it through. Mahler is hard work when you are merely one horn in 4, 6 or 8, it is going to be much harder when I'm the only horn!

The Liszt is a bit of a romp. It is my own arrangement for double wind quintet of the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, with the 2nd flute playing piccolo throughout. Ever since the music was used for a Stella Artois beer advert featuring ice-skating priests, I've been meaning to make a wind arrangement of the piece, and I was prompted to get on with it by Maren Heidemann (who runs SCWE), since this year is the 200th anniversery of Liszt's birth. This will be the arrangement's first performance.

The concerts will be on Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th August 2011, at 5pm
Tickets £10, (concessions.£7) at the Fringe Box Office
and on the door at Canongate Kirk, 153 Canongate, (Royal Mile) Edinburgh EH8 8BN (Venue 60)

If you are in Edinburgh for the festival, do please come and see us!

Student attitudes at the London College of Music

2011-05-07T21:44:00.000+01:00

I've been asked to play a concert with the LCM (London College of Music) Community Sinfonia, performing Shostakovich 5th Symphony at St Barnabas Church in Ealing on May 11th.

On Saturday, there was a day of rehearsals at LCM for the concert. And I was quite frankly appalled at the attitude of many of the LCM students to the rehearsal.

About half the strings didn't turn up at all. I learned that about 8 or so students had originally said they would take part, but had simply not arrived for the rehearsal, with no reason given. The conductor had smoke coming out of his ears, he was so angry about this! And he had every right to be.

The rehearsal was supposed to start at 10am. I arrived with 10 minutes to spare, and found that there were only 3 or 4 people in the rehearsal hall. Various people rolled up over the next half an hour, and we finally got started about 10.20. More students quite casually strolled in even later, not apparently concerned about the fact that they were seriously late. One wind player didn't arrive until the afternoon rehearsal at 2pm, he apparently had had a party the previous night and had overslept. By not being there, you impede the conductor's ability to sort out balance and timing, and to ensure that instructions about beats and tempi need be given out only once. You waste other people's time by not being there when you should.

There was a lunch break from 1pm to 2pm. I was ready in my seat at 2pm, but again, many people were missing. The leader of the orchestra didn't return from lunch until 2.10, and three of the four flutes appeared at 2.15. While exceptional traffic or transport problems can make you unavoidably late for the start of a rehearsal (though you should always allow enough time for all but the most exceptional of conditions), nothing justifies you being late back after a break.

Then there was the attitude to rehearsals. It was quite clear that since the previous rehearsal 10 days before, few of the students had made any serious attempt to practice their parts. And I suspect even fewer had attempted to listen to a recording of the piece to find out how it went. This meant that they frequently got lost and couldn't find their way back again.

Shostakovich 5 is not a simple piece of music. It has complex rhythms and harmonies, and abrupt changes of speed. In the first movement, there are places where the tempo suddenly doubles or halves. Even when the conductor explained exactly how he was going to handle one of these transitions, still it almost always happened that somebody had not listened or understood, and carried on at the old speed. Also on many occasions, players just put their heads down and concentrated solely on playing the notes, giving no regard to whether they were going at the same speed as the conductor's beat. Sometimes there were three tempi going on at the same time. However many or few notes you play, you must go at the same speed as the conductor. Any note played at the wrong time is a wrong note!

Not knowing your part, when you've had ample opportunity to practice, is just not acceptable. As a new young musician starting out in the profession, you will need to be able to compete with people who have performed a piece 20 times, and play it as well as them. Shostakovich 5 is one of the standards of the orchestral repertoire, and this is an ideal opportunity to get to know it when there is no serious pressure. As a student, you should be lapping up every single opportunity to play every piece of the standard reportoire you can get your hands on, so that you don't have to sight-read it professionally. Even though I'm only an amateur, I have played Shostakovich 5 before, more than once, so I do know how it goes. But even so, I had a listen to a recording to remind me about it, since it is a few years since I last played it. It is a courtesy to the conductor and the other players to be as ready as you can be.

If you are a music student wanting to take up music as a career, your task at present is to learn how to be a professional musician. That involves doing more than practicing concertos. Many student musicians (especially violinists and pianists) imagine that they are going to become international soloists, and so will spend their whole careers playing the Tchaikovsky or Sibelius concertos. Phooey. There are about 30 international soloists on the violin in the whole world. There are more violinists than that in any major orchestra. If you are going to make it at all in professional classical music, you are almost certainly going to be in an orchestra. So you must take orchestral technique and rehearsal etiquette seriously. Otherwise, you will wreck your career before it has even begun.

Now, I'm just a former music student who chose not to go into the profession. I only play as an amateur. But even so, I have some tiny influence: for the amateur orchestras I play for, I help with fixing extras, and I keep a list of names and phone numbers for the purpose. Nothing about Saturday's rehearsal has given me any reason at all to get out my diary and take the names of any of the students. For the most part, I simply couldn't trust most of the students present both to turn up and to play, even to the standard necessary to manage an amateur concert on one rehearsal.

Now, suppose I had instead been an amateur player who, instead of leaving the music profession altogether, had gone into music administration, and was involved in fixing extras for one of the major London orchestras. It isn't uncommon after all for those in music administration to have studied music and to have kept it up in an amateur way after they gave up the idea of a professional playing career. If I were in that position, I would have quite likely taken an even dimmer view of proceedings than I actually did, and I might well have decided to made a note of names for the purpose of making sure that they didn't ever play with the orchestra I worked for. Those students' professional careers would have been seriously damaged even before they left college. Such a waste of so much time spent studying, all gone because of a failure to do something as simple as get back from lunch on time.

As a musician, whether you are professional, amateur or student, you are on show all the time you have your instrument with you. In performance and even in rehearsal, you never know who will hear you and see you. So you need to try and make a good impression at every opportunity.

There are far, far more students graduating from the music colleges than can possibly be accommodated by the music profession. Many years ago, I calculated that on the horn, there were probably 10 times more students graduating than there was space for in professional orchestras in Britain. That ratio will vary a bit from one instrument to the next, but it serves to indicate how cutthroat the competition is.

That means that orchestras and other employers need very little excuse to decide against employing somebody. Even outstanding musicians won't get employed if they can't be bothered to turn up on time and prepare their music.

Saturday's rehearsal at the London College of Music was a perfect example of how not to approach the music profession. If any students who were or should have been at Saturday's rehearsal read this, then I have to say that you need to either change your attitude or abandon any idea of playing music professionally, because you just won't make it if you carry on as you are, no matter how well you think you can play concertos. In fact, if you can't be bothered to turn up on time, you won't make it in any profession, never mind one as competitive as music.

Contradictions and meanderings

2011-04-06T22:55:00.000+01:00

James Boldin has recently published an article on his blog, in part about playing softly. In it he quotes various authorities on what you need to do to play softly.

They are all agreed on the importance of it, and the need to practice properly, but they have remarkably different ideas about what you do to physically produce soft notes. There are flat contradictions between the different visualisations involved. Everyone has their own idea as to how it is all working, and some of these (possibly most of them) are physiologically wrong. And yet they all work for the people concerned, since they are professional players and teachers who have definitely mastered the art of soft playing.

This is a real problem with wind teaching. Almost everything about wind playing is either happening internally within the body or in minute and outwardly almost imperceptible changes in the embouchure. It sometimes makes me wonder how anybody manages to learn a wind instrument at all!

I don't know "how to play the horn". All I know is how I play the horn. I could describe how I play softly. But would it be of any use to anybody else? I've seen and heard and read so many conflicting ways you should go about playing the horn. Some I agree with, many I don't. I have a few approaches that I haven't heard mentioned by others. They seem to work for me - I claim nothing more for them.

There seems to be such disagreement as to what is going on. If we all disagree, we can't all be right and most of us are wrong. But then there is great disagreement in the best approach even for such apparently simple things as teaching children how to read. And yet most of manage to learn it somehow.

So that's why I've tended to talk here more about musical aspects of horn playing rather than the technical aspects of producing the sound. I've no reason to regard my own particular synthesis of ideas on horn technique as being superior to anybody else's. But musicality is talked about less than technique, and so I feel there is a gap to be filled there.

Brent Symphony Orchestra centenary

2011-03-31T22:43:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking part in Brent Symphony Orchestra's centenary concert. I'm not a regular member of the orchestra but I have a family connection with it which goes back to before I was born!

The concert was a pleasure on a whole number of different levels. The orchestra is to some extent responsible for my existence, my parents first met as a result of both playing in the orchestra over 50 years ago. (My dad played clarinet and my mum played viola, and were both members for about 18 years, until we moved to Norfolk in 1975.) It was really nice to be able to make a contribution to their centenary.

I was also a regular member of the orchestra myself in my student days about 30 years ago. Harry Legge was the conductor both when my parents were members and when I was. He had been a member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (also playing viola) under Sir Thomas Beecham and Rudolf Kempe, and had learned a lot from both of them as to how to run an effective rehearsal. There are still a few members of the orchestra who have been members continuously since I was there in my student days, so it was a pleasure to meet up again with some old friends. Among those present was the complete horn quartet of the orchestra from my student days.

I well remember a particular occasion from those days. I was at university at the time, and Harry Legge phoned me towards the end of the Easter term. He said "How would you like to get the horns together to do the Konzertstuck next term?"

I gulped, and said "You're joking!". He assured me that he wasn't, and told me to phone round the other horns and see if they were interested in having a go, and get back to him once I'd spoken to them all.
So I phoned each of the others, and in each case got precisely the same reaction from them: "You're joking!" Once I got past that, we decided to have a go together, just the four of us, and see if we could get anywhere near it.

The piece is of course almost impossible to play. But we decided that this was quite likely to be the only opportunity in our whole lives to have a go at it. So we decided to have a bash. I suspect our performance contained more enthusiasm than accuracy!

The centenary concert was also a pleasure in terms of the music we were playing. The mainstay of the concert was Mahler's 1st Symphony. I was playing "bumper", or assistant 1st horn. David Perchard, the first horn of the orchestra then and now, said that I shouldn't regard it as bumping, but more of a jobshare, since there is so much to play. Mahler 1 requires 7 horns, so with the bumper we were 8 in all. We were organised in two rows, and I was in the front row. Usually the horns are at the very back of the hall, over to the left as the audience sees them, and from that position almost all of the orchestra's sound is coming from one direction. But with a second row of horns behind, I really felt surrounded with sound. It's wonderful!

Lev Parikian took over the orchestra whan Harry Legge died, and remains the conductor to this day. He conducted the centenary concert and did a very fine job of it. In the rehearsals, he made a very important point about the Mahler symphony. It is scored for a huge orchestra (4 flutes, 4 oboes, 4 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 7 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, 4 percussion players across a variety of instruments, a harp, and as many strings as can be mustered. All those players can make a very big sound. But there are occasions when Mahler writes ppp dynamic markings, and he expects it all to be extremely quiet. It is the contrast beween these extremes which adds to the excitement of the piece.

It's hard work getting an amateur orchestra to play quietly. The players all want to be heard so that they can assure themselves that they are playing the right notes! But there are moments in this piece where if you can hear yourself, you are playing too loud. I don't know if Lev felt that he completely succeeded in getting us all to play as quiet as he wanted, but his exhortations in that direction certainly made a difference.

I think my parents would both have approved.

Learning how to play transposed parts

2011-01-19T00:12:00.012Z

If you play professionally, or even if you play in an amateur way in a community orchestra,you are going to come across horn parts in keys other than F. When you do so, you have essentially two choices. Either you write every such part out for horn in F, or you learn to transpose at sight.

But it might be that sight reading even in F is a bit forbidding - it is for quite a lot of people. So to be able to read parts in other keys may require that you improve and combine two separate skills - transposition and sight reading.

Sight reading frightens a lot of people - many think that it is a black art only mastered by professionals and not to be vouchsafed to mere mortals in the amateur world. Certainly professionals have to have a high degree of mastery of it, but decent sightreading skills are not beyond amateur players. I have described before how to go about learning sightreading.

Now, for transposition. Writing out transposed parts in F is a good idea in terms of understanding how transposition works. Different people have different ways of thinking about it, but I favour the simple interval method.

Consider for example horn in D. D is down a minor third from F. Most transposing parts are written without key signature, effectively in C major. So down a minor third from C is A. You're now in A major instead of C major. In the part written out in F, write in the A major key signature (three sharps), and then write out all the notes a third down. All the sharps and flats will organise themselves automatically as a result of the new key signature, except for where there are accidentals in the original part, which you have to deal with by hand.

For accidentals you look at the newly-written transposed note before the accidental is applied. If it is a natural, all is simple, just write in the same accidental as in the original. If it is a sharp or flat as a result of the key signature, then what you need to do is change the note by a semitone in the same direction as in the original part. So for instance, if you have an Ab in the original part, moving down a third changes it to F-something. Because of the key signature, A natural goes to F#. Ab is a semitone lower than A natural, so the transposed note must also be lowered a semitone, from F# to F natural. So you write a natural in front of the F.

If you do all that right, you now have a part correctly written out in F. The same principle applies to all the other different keys. The only thing different is the interval and therefore the key signature. These are the most common transpositions.

A - up a third, add 4 sharps to the key signature (to E major)
G - up a second, add 2 sharps to the key signature (to D major)
Eb - down a second, add 2 flats to the key signature (to Bb major)
D - down a third, add three sharps (to A major)
C - down a fourth, add one sharp (to G major)
Bb basso - down a fifth, add one flat (to F major)
Bb alto - up a fourth, add one flat (to F major)

I've left out of that list transposition from horn in E. There are two possible ways of thinking about E transposition. One is to just flatten every written note, the other is to go down a second and add five sharps to the key signature. Both methods work perfectly well, and have the effect of lowering pitch by a semitone.

Of course, notation software such as Sibelius or Finale can do all this automatically, with you typing in the part as written, and then having the software perform the transposition for you. But if you are ever going to transpose at sight, you need to work out how to do it for yourself by hand with pencil and paper.

Now, if you're going to progress from transposing on paper to transposing at sight, three things are necessary. One is that you have got your sight-reading good enough that you don't panic about it. Second, you have to be familiar with your scales and arpeggios and key signatures, and third, you need to have understood thoroughly how to do the transposition on paper.

Then what you do is practice slowly sightreading orchestral parts that have been written for horn pitched in various keys. You'll notice that, particularly for 2nd & 4th horn parts, often almost all the notes are in the C major arpeggio. So if you know your A major arpeggio, transposition at sight from D becomes much easier - you just play the equivalent notes of the A major arpeggio. Give or take an octave, that is only 3 notes that you need to learn!

As the parts go higher, you get more notes of the harmonic series, but again you will relatively rarely see written notes that aren't part of the C major scale. So if you know your A major scale, you're still in good shape. Again, the same principle applies to the other keys. So, transposing at sight is much easier if you know the relevant scales and arpeggios.

As for where to go to get horn parts to practice transposition, I can recommend the IMSLP website. Perhaps start with some of the Mozart symphonies. IMSLP has horn parts available online for some of them, I'd recommend you start with the most famous ones, symphonies 38-41. Then try the Beethoven symphonies.

The value of music education

2011-01-14T17:01:00.001Z

There's an article on the Guardian website today What's happening to the future of music education? about the future of music provision in the education system in the UK, amid concerns as to whether the government will cut provision in order to save money. Dr Peter Thompson of Sheffield University has commented with an example of the value of music provision, even for those who do not take up music as a profession. His comment is worth reproducing here in full (edited only to remove typing errors).

Back in the bad old days of the 1970s I was a pupil at Whitehawk County Secondary School in Brighton which was rated as one of the worst schools in Britain on one of the worst council estates. I got into serious trouble more or less constantly and did things which, if I were to have been caught would almost certainly have led to custodial sentences. Then I joined the school brass band which had free instruments, free tuition and provided an alternative outlet for me. I ended up joining the army as a junior bandsman and that trajectory was what got me an education and a purpose in life so that I am now a senior academic at a Russell Group university. I owe it all to the music opportunities I had at that school back when I was 11 when there was bugger all else on offer. Cutting music provision is not only a culturally philistine move but will also keep many children in the outer darkness of hopelessness.

Even if you describe this in purely economic terms, this is a staggeringly good investment. Thomson has been saved from a probable life of crime and hopelessness which would in all likelihood have been a substantial drain on the public purse, and instead is a respected academic who has made his own substantial contribution to society, in the taxes he has paid and in the contribution he has made to educating subsequent generations.

This is what music is about, this is what it can do for people.

My father, Roger West

2011-01-11T15:57:00.000Z

Over on my other blog, I have published the tribute I gave to my father, Roger West, at his funeral yesterday, 10th January 2011.

The emotion of music making

2011-01-07T15:06:00.000Z

Last month there was an article in the Guardian titled 'The pull of love' – or why music can be a quasi-spiritual practice. In it, there got to be a bit of a discussion of various aspects of performance, and I'm going to pull out some of the comments I made there, clean them up and put them here.

The commenter jeremyjames made this comment

Incidentally, I asked a horn player chum which frightened him more - the beginning of Bruckner 4 or Mahler 5. He said whichever one he happened to be playing!

I've played both, and if it is to be done well, the solo at the opening of Bruckner 4 is one of the most dangerous moments for a horn player in all classical music. The entry is fairly high, so it is very easy to "crack" the opening note. You can reduce the danger by playing the opening note louder, but that destroys the ethereal effect of the opening. If you do that, you are merely playing the notes and have abandoned the music. The note almost mustn't actually start, instead the audience should realise that it is there when previously it wasn't, but not notice the transition from nonexistence to existence.

The horn player will always be sweating a bit at the start and his concentration will be needle-sharp at the instant of playing that first note. After the first note, you can relax a bit. You know you can do it and the rest of the solo will go OK.

Then savvymum, with whom I've had many enjoyable and stimulating conversations on the Guardian website, made this comment:

I hope he's going to help me explain the difference between listening to music and playing it. There is also the world of difference between playing the piano and playing orchestrally. Not only are different skills needed to sit and rattle off your Rach' and Chopin, but the subjective feelings and critical skills are different., when you are a solitary player. Joining in with a good symphony orchestra is a different ball game, which requires a further set of skills, and a different mindset when you play.

Anyway Jonathan might be able to put the meat onto the bare bones I've laid out here.
I don't think playing is a semi-spiritual practise, and I bet Jonathan and I have done enough of it over the years, so I reckon we know what we're talking about. Sure, I get a feeling that I can't get elsewhere, and it fulfills me in a way that nothing else quite does. In fact I admit to being so bad, I can't live without it, as it actually is my life being a musician.

I could hardly turn down such an invitation!

Great musical performance (or even just pretty good musical performance) requires that you get into the emotion of the work. There is an interesting thing about emotional thinking.

One can simply experience the emotion itself. Almost everybody can do that, and this is all that audiences really need to be able to do to enjoy a good performance.

Then you can also be aware of the emotion in a detached part of your mind, and have some idea as to whether the emotion is appropriate. A surprisingly large number of people haven't really twigged how to do this.

And then you can also direct your emotions, turn them on and off to a degree under conscious control in order to communicate. Very few people are adept at this, but some degree of this skill is essential for musicians.

But it isn't much talked about. Partly this is because it is so hard to put into words. Talking about instruments and techniques is so much easier. Partly it is that few people would understand what you are saying.

Some people, when I talk in this way of awareness and control over emotions, comment that if I'm forever analysing things this way, I can't possibly feel the emotion fully itself. The reverse is true. The additional awareness allows you to have a much richer experience on more levels. You don't feel the emotion any less fully, but the other aspects of the experience are available to you as well.

And when that is wrapped up in a musical performance you are participating in, so you are engaging your motor control skills to produce the music, and your empathy and awareness so you keep up with everybody else, you can get into a state described by the psychologists as flow, which in its more intense manifestations can give you such a sense of euphoria that you can be walking on air for days after. And that gets communicated to the audience, who (hopefully) experience it as a great performance.

If there is no emotional engagement by the musicians, they are concentrating solely on the notes, even the most untrained listener will recognise that there is "something missing" from the performance, even if they can't articulate why.

But the emotion isn't all you have to do.The thing about playing music is that you have to think emotionally and technically at the same time, at very high speed and with great precision. You have to know what emotions you want to convey, but you also have to be concerned at some level with the technicalities of extracting the sound for the instrument, and you have to be highly aware of everything that the other players are doing, so you can be sensitive to what their emotions are and fit in with it all. So collaborative music making requires great skills in empathy as well.

While there's a lot of grinding practice needed to acquire the skills necessary to do all this, the performance itself is a spur of the moment, no going back, flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience. You launch yourself into the piece as if you are a canoeist in rapids, and there's no way out except to navigate the obstacles and reach the calm water at the end. And the water won't stop for you while you work out how to get round some particularly forbidding rock that is right in the middle of the stream!

Occasionally you will founder on that rock, and a performance will go horribly wrong. That is part of the fear and excitement - you never quite know what is going to happen. And for an audience, this is the key difference between listening to live music and listening to a recording. Live performance is exciting, not only because you can see what is happening as well as hear it, but because it is happening now and you don't know what is coming next.

Different kinds of tone

2010-12-13T19:01:00.000Z

One aspect of horn playing which I feel is inadequately stressed is control over tone colour and how this can contribute to the effect of the music you are playing.

Generally, as you play louder, your tone will get more of a buzz, more "brassiness". Sometimes this is desirable, but sometimes not. If you are playing a solo in a Brahms or Bruckner symphony, what you want is a projected sound, one which will carry over the orchestra but not be brassy.

So the fundamental of tone control is to be able to vary the volume and vary the amount of brassiness independently of each other.

Once you have acquired that kind of control, then you have to make a decision as to how much brassiness and volume to use in any particular context. Choosing the context involves considering the ensemble you are playing in, the period of the music and the composer, and the intent of the composer at any specific moment in the piece.

Let's consider the effect of ensemble on tone first.

Wind quintet and other small wind or wind/string chamber groups
This is the grouping where you need to go easy. A light airy tone is required here. Very rarely will you need to produce a volume higher than a solid orchestral mf, even where the part is marked ff. You are working with only a small number of other instruments, and the horn tone is already distinctive. Your basic tone/volume combination for a wind quintet should have a minimum of brassiness and be several notches quieter than you would use in orchestral playing.

From that foundation, you can project (more volume but no more brassiness) when you have a solo line, or occasionally punch out with more brassiness for special effects. But this should all be relative to the basic tone for the group.

Brass quintet or other brass ensemble
A brighter brassier tone is required here. The problem for the horn in a brass quintet is to match the clarity and brightness of the forward-facing bells of the trumpets and trombone. So you need a bigger tone with more buzz to it, and the notes need to be tongued more sharply to match up to the other instruments. But don't overdo it - you still want to sound characteristically like a horn and not an inferior sort of muffled trombone.

Orchestra - classical composers
I'm thinking Mozart and Haydn here, maybe earlier Beethoven as well, where you have a classical-sized orchestra of strings, double woodwind, 2 horns, 2 trumpets and timpani. No heavy brass. Generally, you need your wind quintet tone here, but with a bit more volume and oomph behind it to match up to the larger number of players involved. But remember that in these sorts of pieces, the horns are usually providing inner harmonies and only occasionally solo lines. So you are blending in and need to keep the volume down accordingly. Only occasionally for fanfare-style interjections to you add in a bit of brassiness for a special effect.

Orchestra - Romantic composers
Brahms, Bruckner and the rest. There is now a full section of heavy brass in the orchestra - trumpets, trombones, and sometimes a tuba as well. They will usually provide the fanfare stuff when needed - so you match up to them brass quintet style when required. But when playing solo or blending with the wind and strings, you go for the smoother tone of the non-brassy sounds, but with the volume increased if appropriate to match up to the larger string section you may be with. So your basic sound is smooth but with more weight behind it.

A note about Bruckner - the correct tone for Bruckner a rich and round and mellow with no brassiness at all - even in loud passages with the rest of the brass. Bruckner's loud bits should generally be thought of in terms of a chorale. Think of the sumptuous sound that a really good massed choir can produce. That's what you should aim for in Bruckner. The number of cases where you should allow more brassiness in his symphonies are vanishingly rare.

Orchestra - Modern composers
20th century music tends to have more astringent harmonies to it, and the tone colours required change correspondingly. You have to judge this according to the nature of the piece and the composer. For Elgar you would would have a tone not much different from Brahms. For Shostakovich you will spend a lot of time playing with a deliberately brassy tone as far removed from Bruckner as it is possible to get.

Wind Band/Military Band
Generally more volume. Massed ranks of clarinets will generally produce more sound than massed ranks of strings. Hopefully the conductor will have enough about him to be able to demand a proper piano from the band where necessary. Without strings, a wind band's range of tone colours is more limited, and so dynamic contrasts become more important. Don't worry of you feel that you can't be heard most of the time. You probably can't, and this is intentional. But you are still contributing to the overall effect. Remember that the horns are still mostly doing their usual thing of blending into the middle of the harmonies. It is just that horns inside a predominantly wind sound will be less obvious than horns with strings. Don't succumb to the temptation to blow louder so your unique contribution can be heard (even though it is only afterbeats).

Experience will gradually tell you what sort of tone is required in any individual situation. And if you aren't sure, then you work on the basis that you do what the principal horn is doing and blend with him/her. If you are the principal, then you ought to be able to think about this and make a decision. The decision you make will probably be different to some degree from what I would do in the same circumstance. That's fine, that is part of you finding your own voice and interpretation. But actually make a decision to vary your tone according to circumstances, in order to broaden your expressive range.

About "bumping"

2010-11-07T13:00:00.002Z

In the UK, the assistant 1st horn is colloquially called the "bumper". The origin of this usage is a mystery to me, but that is what we call it.

I was asked to bump for Brent Symphony Orchestra's concert last night: Dvorak's "The Noon Witch", Elgar's Enigma Variations, and Brahms 1st Symphony. I was returning a favour to the first horn there, who had come along to play at the Hillingdon Philharmonic's Russian concert last month. It gives me an occasion to talk about bumping and using a bumper.

First about bumping itself. You are there to make life easy for the first horn. That is your sole purpose. So you play whatever is required of you. If you regularly bump for the same player, then you will gradually develop an understanding of each other, and as bumper you will learn almost without verbal communication to know when you need to play. If working with a player you don't know, it's a good idea for the principal to mark in the part when he or she wants you to play. It will take 10 minutes or so before the rehearsal. If you are being brought in for just the last rehearsal, arrive early so that there is time to do this.

If you have been called in to bump, it is probably because it is a heavy programme for the principal. Therefore he may need to pace himself duriuing the rehearsal. That means you might be asked to play more in the rehearsal than in the concert itself. I understand this isn't unusual in a professional situation, but it's a bit hard on the bumper in an amateur setting. It's not unheard of but it is less common.

As bumper, you will find yourself playing tutti accompanying blending passages, so the principal saves his lip for the solos and more prominent parts. So you will find yourself mostly playing when some or all the other horns in the section are also playing. So for that time, you are leading the section. You are setting the tone and the style, and they should be matching you as they would if the principal were playing. That's what good ensemble playing is about.

But you have to remember also that the passages you have been given as bumper are almost all going to be where the horns aren't prominent, where they are accompanying and blending in. So you must do that as well.

And also, you have to adjust your playing to the style of the principal. listen out for his tone, for his style of doing dynamics and articulation, and you match that as far as possible. The idea is that unless he is actually looking in your direction, the conductor shouldn't be able to tell whether it is you or the principal playing.

I've both bumped and played principal when I'm making use of a bumper, and making use of a bumper has given me an insight into what I ought to do when bumping for somebody else.

When you are principal and have the luxury of a bumper, make effective use of him. In an amateur setting, you want the bumper to be willing to come and play for you again, so it is wise to be fairly generous with the number of notes you assign to the bumper. And that helps you save your lip for the solos, which is what your own performance will be judged on. You may have to adjust things a bit according to how experienced your bumper is and how much endurance he has. But as a general rule the idea is to err on the side of giving the bumper more ratther than less to do.

Broadly there are three main ways in which you can use a bumper.

First is for him to play less exposed passages so you can relax and prepare for later solos. A classic example of this is in the first movement of Shostakovich 5th Symphony. There's a major horn and flute duet about halfway through the first movement, where the horn part goes quite high, up to a high B, played piano. Not long before, there is a very loud tutti unison passage for just about the whole orchestra. The principal can easily drop out and leave that to the bumper.

The second way is for both the bumper and principal to play in a loud tutti passage, particularly if there is an accent at the start, or something else where the impact of an additional horn will heighten the effect.

The third way is where there is a long loud high tutti passage, and it's essentially impossible to get through without taking a break. Tchaikovsky and Siibelius symphonies are particularly notorious for this sort of thing. The approach here is to arrange to take alternate sections of 2 or 4 bars. Mark up the part accordingly. When you have a passage like this, it is good practice to play the two bars, plus just the first note of the other person's two bars. The aim here is to ensure that there is no gap between one person finishing and the other starting. A doubled note every 2 bars or so will not be noticed, whereas a gap will be noticed.

Bumping isn't so much fun as playing your own part, but if you are a young player starting out on your career, take every opportunity to bump that you are offered. It is great experience. You get to see (and play part of) principal horn parts. You get to see at close quarters how a more experienced player approaches the major solos in the repertoire. Watch and listen and learn from it, against the day when you will be required to play the same solos yourself.

An all Russian concert

2010-11-02T02:12:00.003Z

In October, I played the first concert of the season with Hillingdon Philharmonic. Obviously a brass player has got at the committee, because we had a very brass-heavy programme of Russian music: Shostakovich's Festive Overture, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (the Ravel orchestration), and Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony.

It got complicated some time before the concert. The other regular horn player in the orchestra dropped out as he had an RAF Association Band concert the same evening, so I had to draft in extras from neighbouring orchestras. Even that didn't go smoothly, one of the players I booked had to drop out because she had sliced open and seriously injured a finger in her left hand. But even so, we had a good strong section.

I've known Pictures for a long time, I first played it at about the age of 15 in the Norfolk County Youth Orchestra, so I knew that it requires some odd instruments. Fortunately my daughter Katie plays the alto saxophone, needed for "Il vecchio castello", so she was booked for the concert, and played her solo very well! (I'm biased of course, I would say that, but it happens also to be true.)

I also knew that the tuba solo in the "Bydlo" movement goes impossibly high by tuba standards - it reaches a G# above middle C, which is ridiculous writing for a tuba. Tuba players normally bring along a tenor tuba or euphonium to play that movement. I remember a time many years ago playing the piece with the Norwich Philharmonic, and the tuba player booked for the concert didn't know about the solo, and simply couldn't play that high and hadn't brought a tenor tuba along. So I mentioned this to the relevant committee member and suggested that they check whether our regular tuba player had a euphonium he could play for that movement. He didn't, so we booked a euphonium player from a local brass band specifically for that movement, and I wrote out the tuba part for the movement transposed into Bb basso in treble clef, which is the normal brass band notation for a Bb euphonium. Written out that way, the top note of the part is a written Bb above the treble stave. That's pretty high even for a euphonium.

As for the horns, I decided as soon as the programme was announced that this would absolutely need five horns, that I would need an assistant. Sometimes you can manage without, but not for a programme with this much sustained heavy work for the brass. Apart from me, all the horns were extras brought in for the day, so I was free to arrange the horns as I thought fit. I played 1st for everything, but I arranged for everybody else to swap round between the two halves of the concert, mainly so that nobody would have to "bump" (be the assistant 1st horn) for the whole concert, and also so that nobody would have to cope with playing the high 3rd horn part for the whole evening. In amateur orchestras, I find that a bit of swapping round of parts helps maintain the interest for everybody.

For this concert, especially as we had an afternoon rehearsal on the same day, I knew I would have to pace myself. The big solo in the second movement of the Tchaikovsky was in the second half of the concert, and there were big brass chorale finales to both the Shostakovich and Mussorgsky - the Great Gate of Kiev at the end of Pictures is a real lip-shredder. So I decided to make as much use of the bumper as possible. More or less anything loud and tutti I simply handed over to the assistant to play. For instance, I left almost the whole of "The Great Gate of Kiev" to the assistant, just playing an occasional 4 bars to give her lip a chance to recover.

Even with this pacing, including leaving significant chunks of the Tchaikovsky first movement to the assistant, I found that my lip was more tired than I would have liked when I got to the big solo in the Tchaikovsky. No individual bit of the solo is technically unduly difficult, but put together it is very challenging for two reasons. The first is that it does go on for quite a long time, and so your technique and endurance have to be up to the job of making the end sound as impressive as the start. The second and more important challenge is that you have to fill a wide expressive range. The solo has to sound beautiful - romantic, relaxed at times, more urgent at others. It has to sound continuous even though you have to take breaths from time to time. And it has to sound effortless, as if the encumbrance of actually having to extract sound from the instrument is a mere triviality.

An important aspect of the solo is that Tchaikovsky has been quite detailed in his markings, for dynamics, articulation, phrasing and changes of tempo. For instance, there is one ascending scale passage where for the first five notes are marked mezzo staccato with dots and slurs, but the last three notes have dashes instead. It's a deliberate change and you have to reflect it with much fuller note lengths and more legato tonguing. And if you do that, the effect is romantic and magical!

Also there are stringendos, rubatos and a tempo marks, so the speed gets pulled around quite a bit. For all practical purposes this is a horn concerto for a few minutes, so the conductor will follow you whatever you do. So you have to decide how much you are going to change speed and precisely when. Remember that although you are solo and the conductor has to follow you, you can make it easier by making your tempo changes smooth and gradual so he can conduct in a way so that the speed changes don't flummox the rest of the orchestra. But most important is that you have to decide on the shape of the solos - where exactly are the climaxes, how will I reach them, how much do I do in terms of speed and dynamic variation? Where will I breathe so you can achieve all this? What am I trying to say here?

This requires practice at home. You don't want to be improvising this at the orchestra rehearsal. The rehearsal should merely involve making minor tweaks that occur to you as a result of hearing it with live orchestral accompaniment. Every note of the solo is deserving of thought as to how it will be played, and if you are going to wring the maximum expressiveness out of it, some at least of the notes will be a bit risky. Such is life as a horn player.

My daughter Katie doesn't often play saxophone in an orchestra, most of her orchestral playing has been on the cello. So she isn't all that used to having a situation where the conductor cues you, and if you don't play, nothing happens because nobody else is doubling you! She told me afterwards that she finds that a bit unnerving. Welcome to my world! Orchestral wind players just have to learn to deal with it.

Summer concerts completed

2010-08-29T14:04:00.004+01:00

Well, the summer concerts have gone pretty well. I was a bit under-practiced for the St Barnabas Last Night of the Proms. I'd had a dreadful cold for the previous week and so had had far less energy to practice than I wanted. Some of the accuracy went as a result and I cracked more notes than is customary for me. But the audience still seemed to like it, and I was pleased with my solo "Spanish Ladies" in the Sea Songs.

The organisers are interested in having St Clements Wind Ensemble play a concert there next season, so that's something to work out.

Then in August St Clements Wind Ensemble did their annual trip to the Edinburgh Fringe. We played two concerts, the same programme both days. And very unusually for me, I had never performed any of the works before.

We started with an arrangement by Michael Round for wind ensemble (double wind quintet) of Mozart's Sonata in D Major for 2 pianos. Michael made enough of an effort at matching how Mozart might have arranged it that he wrote the horn parts out in D and in G, and used only notes that could have been reached by hand horns. He commented to me in a break in rehearsals that when he started writing the parts out in F they "just looked wrong". It worked very well. I'm looking forward to hearing the concert recording, and I don't doubt that we will play it again, especially as it has the great advantage of requiring two flutes, unlike any of the Mozart Serenades for wind. (The leader of our group is a flautist, and understandably likes to programme pieces that she can take part in herself!)

Next up was the Spohr Grand Nonet, for violin, viola, cello, bass and wind quintet. It was clearly intended to be a work following in the tradition of mixed wind and string chamber pieces such as the Beethoven Septet and the Schubert Octet. I'd had a run through the piece earlier this year with another group, but had never performed it befoe. It's not the absolutely greatest of pieces of music, but well worth an outing from time to time. The largest problem is balance. With only 4 strings and 5 wind in a very resonant acoustic, there was always a need to keep the wind from overpowering the strings.

After the interval was Lyle Sanford's Timepiece for wind quintet. This was the only piece we played without conductor, and we also chose to perform it standing, partly so we could turn to face each other more easily and coordinate the beat, partly to make us more visible to the audience. All three movements together are only about 10 minutes, and even the heavier instruments such as horn and bassoon can be held standing for that length of time. Lyle had been tremendously helpful prior to the concert in terms of providing information about his intentions and in his willingness to let us shape the interpretation the way he felt it should go.

I have to say it was a delight to play. It's not unreasonably difficult, though the the irregular time signatures in the first and third movements do take a bit of getting used to. The time signatures are 7/4 (approx moderato) for the first movement, an Andante 3/4 for the second, and a 10/8 (3+3+4) allegretto for the third movement. For all that the harmonies and structures are determinedly conventional. The first movement starts with a kind of "ground bass" apreggio rhythm in crotchets on the bassoon, with a slower tune played on the upper woodwind. Sometimes the tune is solo, sometimes as a chorale of two or three instruments, sometimes there is a chorale with a faster countermelody. It's necessary to be alert to when you have the tune and when you have to blend into the background. Towards the end, variations of the faster countermelody are taken as a solo for each instrument in turn before a final determined restatement or the initial ground bass rhythm on all instruments.

The second movement is a peaceful, perhaps slighly mournful slow dance in 3/4, remining me very much of a sadder version of one of Satie's Gymnopedies. It had that steady stately sort of pace about it. it starts with the rhythm being established on horn and bassoon, and a slow tune above. Sometimes the rhythm disappears and you have lines based on the tune weaving in and out of each other, and sometimes the underlying rhythm returns.

The third movement has a Rondo feel to it. I don't know if you're allowed to have a Rondo in 10/8, but this certainly feels like one! The sadness of the previous movement is banished, the feel is light and airy and wholly happy. The structure is similar to the first movement, the rhythm is established as an arpeggio passage in quavers (initially on the flute) and a slower tune based on dotted crotchets and crotchets is passed around from instrument to instrument every couple of bars or so. There are a couple of tricky passages in the middle where the flute, oboe and clarinet each take a quaver of the tune for three bars, a technique called a "hocket" (I had to look up that word in a musical dictionary when Lyle used it in an email - I had never come across it before!)

To my mind, this piece is a real find. The five of us who played it all enjoyed working on it, and we got lots of positive comments from the other members of the group, both about the piece and the performance, and similarly from those members of the audience I spoke to afterwards.

Thank you Lyle! I very much hope to play this piece again sometime.

The last piece was the Brahms Serenade No. 2 in A. This requires the oddest combination of players. Two flutes, piccolo (last movement only), 2 each of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, and a string section consisting of violas, cellos and basses. No violins! So it's sort of for half an orchestra. And for all that it a sumptuous glorious music, it is vary rarely performed. It doesn't have the fame of his symphonies, it's not quite a chamber work, it falls through the cracks. But it is absolutely authentic Brahms with soaring tunes and lush harmonies. Serenade is exactly the right title for it, it definitely has that evening singing feel to it.

Summer concerts

2010-07-26T10:14:00.006+01:00

Summer brings a change of pace from the usual round of orchestra concerts. I find myself taking part in more chamber music. This summer is no exception.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join players from Ealing Symphony Orchestra in their end-of-season chamber concert in St. Mary's Perivale. It happened to be on the night of the World Cup Final, so the audience was a bit thin, but never mind. I took part in a performance of the Strauss Suite for Winds. As the church is very small (seats about 100 max) and the Strauss uses 13 performers (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 4 horns, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon) the loud passages really raised the roof! It's a thoroughly happy and optimistic piece, with some lovely delicate touches, especially in the Gavotte. And to think that Strauss was less than 20 years old when he composed it!

On Friday August 6th I'm taking part in the St Barnabas Last Night of the Proms. I'm playing in an arrangement of the Fantasia on Sea Songs. it promises to be a very jolly occasion. Sometimes classical musicians take themselves far too seriously, and I think these kinds of concert are a wonderful corrective to that.

But the main summer event for me, as it has been for the last few years, is St Clement's Wind Ensemble's concerts on the Edinburgh Fringe "Airy Delights". We are playing in Canongate Kirk on 19th and 20th August at 5pm.

This year the big piece we are doing is Brahms' Serenade No. 2. The instrumentation is a bit between that of a chamber ensemble and an orchestra. It requires 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 each of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, plus violas, cellos and double bass. But curiously , no violins. As far as I'm aware, there isn't anything else scored for quite the same group of instruments. This means that it doesn't get performed all that often, which I think is a great pity because it has some lovely music in it. I've listened to recordings but never played it before, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Taking advantage of the fact that we will have some strings with us this year, we are also playing Spohr's Grand Nonet. Again, an unjustly neglected work. I've had a run through this with friends, but never before performed it. This is one of the joys of playing chamber music if the majority of your playing is in an orchestra - there are all sorts of little gems to be found that you don't come across in the normal run of playing.

Michael Round has made an arrangement for double wind quintet of a Mozart Sonata for 2 pianos, which should be a thoroughly enjoyable and tuneful addition SCWE's repertoire of larger wind chamber works. Some people get a bit sniffy about arranging chamber works for groups other than those which the composer used. This of course is nonsense, composers themselves have re-arranged their pieces for all sorts of groups. Beethoven and Brahms both made arrangements of their symphonies for piano 4 hands, movements from Mozart's great Gran Partita serenade pop up again in one of his flute quartets, and abbreviated versions of the Beethoven Septet also exist as arrangements by the composer himself as a piano trio and as a string quintet. There's no reason to think that the composers would disapprove of others making arrangements for different ensembles, provided it is tastefully done. In pre-recording days it was a way of providing additional opportunities for their music to be heard.

And we are doing a couple of wind quintets, one by Ketil Hvoslef, written in 1964, and also Lyle Sanford's Timepiece. I'm particularly looking forward to doing Timepiece, partly because I enjoy doing first performances and first UK performances, bringing a new piece to an audience, partly because it is an enjoyable piece and a worthwhile addition to the wind quintet repertoire, but mainly because of Lyle Sanford's obvious delight in seeing that the piece will be performed and his willingness to trust us on performance details. I hope that when he hears the concert recording he will still be as happy!

Brent Symphony Orchestra

2010-07-23T16:45:00.005+01:00

Next season sees the centenary of the Brent Symphony Orchestra. In past times it used to be called the Willesden Symphony Orchestra, and before that I believe it was the Harlesden Symphony Orchestra. Because it used to be set up as an evening class nominally run by the local authority, it had to keep changing its name with each local government reorganisation.

In a way, I owe my existence to that orchestra. My parents met as a result of my father being asked by the orchestra's conductor Harry Legge to give my mother a lift to and from rehearsals, when she came down to London to study for a postgraduate music teaching diploma at the Royal College of Music. I also played in the orchestra under Harry Legge when I moved to London to study at university.

Members of the orchestra are compiling a history of the orchestra with the aim of making it available for sale during the centenary season. If you have ever played in the orchestra, or any members of your family have ever played in the orchestra, and you have anecdotes of events there, particularly from more distant times, please drop me a line at jonathanwest22@googlemail.com, and I'll put you in touch with those compiling the history.

Parallels

2010-07-13T15:56:00.003+01:00

I've just seen the obituary for the former BBC commentator Robert Hudson.

I have no memory of hearing him on the radio - he retired over 20 years ago. But some of the things in the obituary have struck me as having parallels with music making.

He made copious notes on every player that enabled him to fill the gaps in play easily. But, as he wrote in his 1993 book, Inside Outside Broadcasts: "Names are all very well and instant recognition is essential, but give a cricketer a mop of red hair and a cap slightly askew, and he begins to come to life."

It begins to come to life! If you make that happen, you can make an occasion memorable. As musicians we have to prepare, but we also have to find ways of bringing the music to life, to bring out emotions in the audience.

The other point concerns his meticulous preparation.

Hudson ... was well known for his radio coverage of state occasions – royal weddings, Remembrance Day services, investitures, funerals and five royal tours in 32 different countries. He commentated on 21 Trooping the Colours and would prepare for two weeks beforehand by interviewing every key figure. He would then make notes to himself on postcards, all written out in different coloured pencil. He would include everything from individuals' names to the times when he should not speak, such as when music was due to begin or the brigade majors would bark out their orders.

Two weeks of preparation, for one live broadcast (albeit a long one). It doesn't normally occur to us that commentators have to prepare as assiduously for a match as the sportsmen participating in it. So spare a thought for audiences who have no idea how much preparation goes into a concert. It is supposed to sound effortless, so you can hardly blame the audience for thinking that no effort was involved!

Growing up musical - 2

2010-07-09T19:29:00.003+01:00

My parents moved to Norfolk when I was 12, and within a couple of years they started the Brundall Music Club.

This was quite an ambitious undertaking, and it just happened to be the right place and time for it. The idea was to put on nine concerts a year, one a month except in the summer. The concerts were given by amateurs (mainly members and their friends) for members. The concerts were held in the main hall of the village primary school. Nobody was ever paid to perform, though the club would pay for music hire for larger pieces on occasion.

It helped that my parents had rapidly acquired lots of good contacts. They were both playing in the Norwich Philharmonic Orchestra, and so had a ready supply of orchestral musicians who were interested in playing chamber music. The village already had an excellent church choir, who would also put on concerts as the Brundall Singers.

By that time I was playing the horn in the Norwich Students Orchestra, and so we also had a supply of good young musicians.

And John Barnett, the head of music at Thorpe St Andrew School, the nearest high school to the village, on the east side of Norwich, also turned out to be very keen on the idea.

Of vital importance to the success of the club was the fact that my mother was an outstanding accompanist and sight-reader. She probably played in over 3/4 of all the concerts - but very rarely as a soloist. It meant that if anybody had some pieces they wanted to put on as part of a programme, but needed an accompanist, she was available for the purpose - two short rehearsals was usually all that was needed to bring the piece to concert readiness.

So for about the next 10 years, through high school, university, and postgraduate studies at the RCM, I had a friendly audience of 100 or so happy to listen to anything I happened to be working on, and an accompanist capable of tackling the piano part of anything I might try!

For the first or second concert of the club, I got together a wind quintet from the Students Orchestra. We played Malcolm Arnold's Three Shanties, and a Haydn Divertimento (the one that includes the St Anthony Chorale, which Brahms famously did a load of variations on).

And we also put on all sorts of wind and strings or wind and piano chamber music. On different occasions we played the Beethoven Septet, both the Mozart and Beethoven quintents for piano and wind, the Schubert Octet and various other chamber works. I played brass quintets at the club with some local brass players.

But it was the chamber music in groups that included one or both of my parents that I remember most. It is from them that I learned most about the art of playing in chamber groups. The need for eye contact to co-ordinate changes of tempo. Working out who has the tune at any moment and has to be followed by all the others. Learning how by gesture to start everybody off in a way that they all know what speed is being chosen. Knowing how to gesture to end the final chord of a piece. Learning about how to maintain a steady tempo even through difficult passages - because the rest of the group can't stop and wait for you! (Learning how to cheat in those difficult passages and miss out a note or two so that you can keep up.) Learning whan you are accompanying and should play a notch or two quieter than the written dynamic.

And most importantly, the sheer fun of playing in a small group where you can all make a contribution to the interpretation. Where the other players are genuinely happy to congratulate you on a solo passage played well.

Quite often, when I was visiting home from university, I would be met at Norwich station by one of my parents with the words "Oh good, you have your horn with you. There's a Music Club concert this weekend, and somebody has dropped out. Do you have some music with you we can put on?" So, I would rehearse with Mum whatever I had been working on in lessons, and we would perform it on the Saturday evening. Because she was such a good accompanist, and I had had lots of training in chamber music through performing things at the club, whatever piece we had to hand wouldn't take much rehearsal to put together.

I have in my head vivid memories of perhaps a dozen concerts out of the hundreds I've played over the years. Two of those vivid memories are from the Brundall Music Club. One was that initial wind quintet. All the players were very good (at least two went on to become professional musicians) and a music teacher in the audience afterwards commented to my mother "that was good enough to be broadcast". It all just seemed to fit.

The other occasion was a time when, as sometimes happened, we got ambitious and tried to put on a larger work. The head of English at Thorpe St. Andrew School was a fine tenor, so with John Barnett conducting, the head of English singing the solo tenor part, me on the solo horn part, and strings made up of members of the club supplemented by friends and members of the Norwich Phil, we put on the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I worked on the piece for a good long time with my horn teacher Douglas Moore prior to the concert. He put into my part all sorts of markings (I have them still). As he wrote them in, he would say "this is how Britten asked me to play it". The horn part is exceedingly difficult. At one point there is a pianissimo crescendo entry on a top C. And I nailed it in the performance! There is no recording of the Music Club performance. Probably just as well - it might turn out not to be as accomplished as my memory fondly has it. But that day and for some weeks afterwards, I was walking on air.

Growing up musical

2010-07-07T23:14:00.007+01:00

I've mentioned in a previous blog the inspiring conductors who have been an important part of my musical upbringing. But I haven't mentioned the most important two people who formed my musical outlook - my parents.

They met as a result of both attending the very first Rehearsal Orchestra course in Edinburgh in 1957. The following autumn, my mother came down to London to study at the RCM for a postgraduate music teaching diploma and they both played in the Harlesdon Symphony Orchestra (now called the Brent Symphony Orchestra) under Harry Legge - one of my inspiring conductors.

My father started learning the clarinet at the age of about 15. At the time (during the war) his school had been evacuated away from Coventry (which was bombed heavily, destroying the cathedral) to Lincoln. One evening he heard on the radio a performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, and was completely blown away by the Allegretto, starting with a simple rhythm all on one note, and then developing all kinds of variations around it. He instantly decided that he wanted to be able to play that kind of music. It being wartime, no new musical instruments were being made, but his parents managed to find a second-hand clarinet for him to learn, and arranged lessons for him with a local teacher.

My mother learned the piano from an early age, and carried off all the prizes for years in the piano classes in music competitions in and around her home town of Fleetwood in Lancashire. She was very tall, the tallest in her class at school, and the head of music at the school asked if she would like to learn the viola. Mistakenly thinking it was a double-bass she would be learning, she accepted with alacrity, to be somewhat disappointed by the outsize violin she was given!

So, my father was a keen amateur clarinettist and my mother was a music teacher, teaching violin and piano and playing viola and piano. All four of the children learned musical instruments: my brother Matthew learned the violin, my elder sister Barbara the cello, and my younger sister Joanna also the violin. (She has gone on to become a professional musician in London.)

I started on the piano at the age of 5, under a wonderful teacher by the name of Mrs Lyndon. Then when I was about 8, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me also to learn an orchestral instrument. At the time, I used to have eczema on my hands, the skin was very dry and would crack and bleed. So playing a stringed instrument was out of the question for me, as it would have hurt to press the strings down with my fingers.

So one weekend my parents got together a wind quintet from players in their local orchestra, and invited them round to have a play through some music. When they stopped for a coffee break, I was invited to have a go on each of the instruments and see if I could make a sound on them.

Afterwards, I was asked which instrument I liked best. I said "the horn", and on being asked why, I apparently answered "it's nice and curly". On such small things are lives changed! In due course a horn appeared and lessons were started with a local teacher.

In those days, both sets of grandparents would visit us over Christmas every year, and the Christmas day routine would always be much the same. A special Christmas breakfast including half a grapefruit with a glace cherry on top. Then church, followed by Christmas lunch (turkey and all the trimmings), opening of presents, and then the family would put on a Christmas concert for the grandparents. We would play Christmas carols arranged by my father for the available instruments, and we would play whatever solo pieces we had been learning.

The photo above was taken during one of those Christmas family concerts when I was about 8 and had been learning the horn a few months. Back row left to right are my father, my mother and my brother Matthew. Front row is me, and my two sisters Joanna and Barbara.

Note my unconventional posture, resting the horn on my crossed legs. It was a heavy Chinese single F instrument, and it was too heavy for an 8-year-old to lift and play for any length of time. It was some time before my teacher insisted that I learn to play with the instrument held up properly.

My younger sister was about 2 1/2 in that photo, and had not long started learning the violin. As a toddler she liked to sit in on Mum's violin lessons, and was found upstairs one day playing a pair of knitting needles as if they were a violin, and holding the "bow" with the correct grip. A 1/8 size violin was soon found for her, which she is playing with great concentration in the picture!

So playing music and especially performing music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I don't get performance nerves because I started performing when I was far too young to realise that people did get nervous about it. My parents never made a big deal of performing, it was just something you did. And of course, I loved people telling me how well I had played!

I joined my first youth orchestra at the age of 9. I think I was the youngest there by a couple of years, certainly the youngest horn player by a much larger margin. I remember the first piece I ever performed with the orchestra - the March from "Caractacus" by Elgar. Sitting down, my head only came up the the shoulders of the other horn players.

On going to high school at the age of 10, I was immediately drafted into the school 2nd orchestra and the school brass band. I remember my confusion on my first brass band rehearsal. We were playing Liberty Bell, and the horn part was written for an Eb tenor horn, and so was in in Eb. I had never come across this before. (For those of you unfamiliar with British brass bands and their instruments, the Eb tenor horn looks like a young tuba, it is pitched in Eb, has a tube length just over half that of the F side of a French horn, and is played using trumpet fingerings).

I brought the part home, and asked what I could do about this. Dad told me "Just this once, I'll write the part out for you in F. But after this, you will have to learn to transpose!" And that is exactly what I had to do.

Playing in groups - chamber music

2010-05-23T19:00:00.000+01:00

When you play chamber music, you have to take much more responsibility than when you are in an orchestra or band. There are fewer players and no conductor.

So, you have to work out together how you are going to play the piece, you have to decide collectively how you will interpret it. You don't have a conductor deciding on the style of playing and the structure that he wants to convey to the audience.

It is easier to do this as a group if you spend some time getting used to playing as a group. It may be that a leader naturally emerges, but it is rare for the leader to become as dominant as the conductor is by definition. So everybody has a right and even a duty to make their contribution.

The first and most obvious point is that since you don't have a conductor giving you a beat to look at, you have to look at each other to coordinate the beat. In orchestra, you should always have the conductor visible in the corner of your eye, but in a chamber group, you have to have all the other players within your field of view, so you can look at whoever is leading at any moment.

Even if an overall leader of the group emerges, individual players have the task of leading at different moments. This can be because they have the tune, or because they are in a position to control a rallentando, or to lead off after a pause. In small groups, everybody is a leader for some of the time.

If you are not the leader at a particular moment, you have to know who is and make sure you are looking at them and following. If you are the leader, you must make it entirely clear what you are doing, by gesture, by eye contact, and if necessary be describing your intention in rehearsal before running the passage.

Go to any concert involving a small group of professional musicians. It doesn't matter whether it is classical, jazz, folk, or anything else. Watch carefully and see how much they depend on eye contact with each other. See the interactions, see who is leading and when. See how quickly they move from one leader to the next. And see how much time they spend looking at each other rather than at the music.

That deals with coordination, but without a conductor, you also need to work out interpretation. What style are you going to adopt, what phrasing will you use? In preparing for a piece, you have to decide and agree on articulation and phrasing. You have to agree on balance, on style. You have to decide which line is prominent and who is accompanying. And you have to push your ego down and dedicate yourself to the music, to making sure that your collective performance is as good as you can achieve.

Even in chamber music, as a horn player you spend most of your time doing what you do in an orchestra. You fill in the middle of the harmonies and you blend. You have prominent solos more often than in an orchestra, but even so, you are solo far less often than the upper woodwinds. You'll get asked back to a group based on how well you blend with them, not on how prominent you can be.

Playing chamber music is hard work. It is physically hard. In orchestra you can expect to be resting for 2/3 of the time, but in chamber music you will be playing for at least 2/3 of the time. That means that in a chamber concert your lip will have to last for twice as many notes as in an orchestra concert.

Playing chamber music is mentally hard. If you have twice as many notes to play, that is twice as many notes to learn. And you have a far higher proportion of solos and exposed entries. So the proportion of the music that needs dedicated practice is far higher, because you should spend most of your practice time on the exposed bits, and especially the exposed difficult bits.

And finally playing chamber music is emotionally hard. If a chamber group is going to last, then you have to have a good deal of musical and personal respect for your fellow players. You have to allow them to take the lead at times. You have to accept them when they have an off day or an attack of the grumps. And you have to be appropriately grateful when they accept your off days as well. You have to come to common ideas on tuning, phrasing, balance and style. And most of all, you have to be able to communicate on an emotional level with your fellow players if you are going to bring out the full depth of the music you make together. All of this requires a degree of emotional maturity needed in few other professions.

Vikram Seth once wrote An Equal Music, a substantial novel about the musical and romantic travails of the second violin of a professional string quartet in London. Seth is very good at communicating the love of music that occasionally tips into obsession. But his string quartet are such prickly individual characters that they would never last a year together in real life, even though two of the four are brother and sister.

Playing in groups - interpreting dynamic markings

2010-03-19T22:33:00.003Z

When you are playing a solo with piano, you do the written dynamics, scaled to whatever size of room or hall you are playing in. Fitting in isn't much of an issue.

But when you play in a band or orchestra, the temptation is always to play out a bit in order to be heard over everybody else. So everybody plays a good solid mf even in the soft passages, and when they notice even that doesn't get through, they play a bit louder still! As a result, all dynamic range for the group disappears, leaving no audible distinction between passages which are nominally soft and those which are supposed to be loud.

There are some general rules that you have to follow when playing in orchestra or band.

If you are playing accompaniment, play two notches quieter than the written dynamic. So for instance if there is an instruction in the part to play mf, you play p.
If you have a long held note as part of the accompaniment, start it 2 notches quieter than the written dynamic and then immediately drop one further notch. Long notes are boring. They are part of the texture, but absolutely must be lower in dynamic than the moving parts.
If you are sharing the tune, play the written dynamic.
Hairpin instructions for brief crescendos and diminuendos should be exaggerated. They are there for a reason, and so they have to be discernible to the audience. But an exaggerated crescendo has to be matched with an equally exaggerated diminuendo to return you to your original dynamic.
If you aren't principal horn, make sure you aren't playing louder than the principal - match whatever he or she is doing if you are playing similar stuff in harmony together.
If you are solo on the tune, play one or two notches louder than written, probably with a "projected" tone.

This is the basic balance for a large group. If everybody in the group gets into the habit of doing this, the sound texture suddenly acquires a beautiful clarity. Details become audible that couldn't be heard before. The conductor can then make individual adjustments - he can choose to ask individuals to bring out items of interest, e.g. countermelodies or rhythmic flourishes.

This is especially important in band rather than orchestra. With an orchestra, there is quite a bit of variation in tone colour available between the strings, the woodwind and the brass. With band, the string tone is unavailable and you just have wind sounds (plus percussion and perhaps string basses). So the range of tone colour variation is significantly reduced. All the more important to give the audience more variation in dynamic level, otherwise the performance becomes very boring and one-dimensional.

But this requires a degree of trust. There's no point playing accompaniment quietly unless everybody else is willing to do the same. So you are dependent for the effect on everybody agreeing and remembering to play the accompaniment softly. Until a group is used to doing this, it may mean that the conductor has to keep reminding you.

In both band and orchestra, the horn players spend most of their time blending into the middle of the harmony. That's the nature of being a tenor instrument. At one point you'll be joining with the woodwind, at another you'll be adding warmth to a cello tune, and at another you'll be with the brass for a chorale. But in many pieces, in the principal horn may be lucky to have 8 bars of solo. I've played plenty of pieces where the horns have less than that.

Blending is what horns mostly do. They form a tonal cement that glues together harmonies and provides an element in a wide variety of composite tone colours. It might not sound all that glamorous, but at least you have a separate part each. Have a thought for the second violins just in front of you in orchestra. 12 or 16 of them all playing the same notes, even less opportunity for individual expression. They rarely play the tune but are stuck in the middle of the harmony. And they have more notes they have to practice.

Playing in orchestra or band is about teamwork - and just as in a sports team each player has his or her own defined role, so it is in an orchestra. You can choose to be good at the role or not. If you want to become a professional, you have to understand and accept the role. If you are an amateur, you may surprise yourself how much pride you can gain from doing your bit as well as you know how.

Playing in groups - obvious starting points

2010-03-18T12:08:00.003Z

I'll start with some obvious points - ones which ought to be self-evident, but often aren't.

Practice your part
You'll play better in a group if you've practiced your part at home. Practicing an orchestral part at home doesn't mean ploughing doggedly through all the notes. It means identifying the difficult bits and practicing those so that they don't cause you to panic in rehearsal or performance. For instance:

Difficult entries
Solos
Awkward slurs
Passages with breathing issues
Complex rhythms

Ideally, have a listen to a recording before the first rehearsal, with a copy of your part in front of you. The purpose of that is to identify any exposed bits that will need practice, and to get an idea of the speed the conductor is likely to take it.

If you can't do that before the first rehearsal, then go over the part as soon as possible after it.

Take the example of Brahms 2, which I played with Hillingdon Philharmonic last month. You can take a look at the first horn part here. Things to practice here are as follows:

The opening solo
The forte passage before B, and the quavers after
Getting the rhythm right and steady for the repeated syncopated notes between E and F
The solo just after the 2nd time bar
The high notes in the passage after K
The exposed passage of the first 2 bars of L
This big solo after M
In the 2nd movement, the solo at A
The solos at C, after D and after E
In the third movement, the opening solo
The entry before C
In the fourth movement, the entry after I
The passage at M
The entries at O
The last 17 bars

Depending on your level of achievement, there might be other passages you feel you need to practice as well. What I've mentioned above is all the exposed bits that absolutely must be right, plus any other awkward moments.

The proportion of a piece that needs detailed practise depends also on what it contains - how difficult the piece is overall, and what proportion of your part is exposed.

It is very useful to be able to efficiently prioritise your practice like this - you improve the most important things in the least possible time. If you're a professional (or want to become one) then this saves you a lot of time, given that you will get through a tremendous amount of music in your lifetime, and if you are an amateur, then you probably have a busy life to lead apart from your music and your practice time may be limited. Use it as efficiently as possible.

Be ready at rehearsal
Make sure you arrive before the rehearsal is due to start (ideally about 15 minutes before), and that you have your instrument, a pencil, and eraser, your music, your mouthpiece, a music stand, and a bottle of water if you need it. Also make sure that you have oils and (if your valves are string-coupled) spare strings available, just in case you find that have you to do some maintenance or running repairs.

If you are professional or a student, you should have warmed up at home beforehand. That's not always possible for amateurs who go straight from work to an evening rehearsal. If you are in that situation, develop an abbreviated 2-minute warmup that you can do in a corner before the rehearsal starts. My short warmup consists of a few long notes, followed by slurred arpeggios using all key combinations, just to get the lips moving. You will work out from experience what works for you as an effective short warmup.

Make sure you can see the conductor
In order to watch the conductor, you have to be able to see him. Make sure your seat position is such that your view of the conductor isn't blocked by the head of a tall person sitting in front of you. You need to have an uninterrupted view of the conductor's face and of his beat. Both are equally important.

Position your music stand and adjust the height of it so that with your normal playing position you can see the music comfortably and see the conductor over the top of the music with minimal movement of your eyes and without having to move your body. Ideally, you should be able to look at the notes and be able to see the beat with peripheral vision at the same time.

The common mistake is to position your stand too low. This has two adverse effects. First, it means that you tend to slouch in order to see the music properly, and second it increases the angle between the music and the conductor, making it much harder to see the conductor while you're reading the music.

I'll talk more on watching the conductor another time. But the first prerequisite is that you can see him comfortably.

Are you sitting comfortably?
Especially for amateur groups, rehearsal venues are often less than ideal, and that includes the seats. If you have a regular orchestra you play for and you know the seats are a problem, bring a cushion or something which will make the seat more comfortable and make it easier for you to maintain a good playing posture. Don't moan about the seats, do something.

Playing in groups

2010-03-17T19:11:00.003Z

Looking back on my musical education, it seems to me that there is a very important aspect that was not taught me by any of my teachers, but which is vitally important to good music-making, whether as a professional or as an amateur.

This aspect is the art of playing in groups: in orchestra, in bands, in chamber groups, or as a soloist with a piano accompanist.

There are skills to be learned about playing in groups that are entirely independent of your technical capabilities on your chosen instrument.

In a way, I'm lucky, both my parents were fine amateur musicians (and one was a music teacher), and they involved me in amateur music making at quite an advanced level throughout my childhood, and I remember them offering ideas about playing in a group whenever I described problems. I suspect that I obtained a larger part of my musical education by that means than I previously realised.

Group technique is not something that is much taught. Looking back on it, it was something which the teachers at music college hoped that we would sort of pick up as a result of rehearsing pieces in orchestra, but rehearsal technique and group playing was not discussed as a separate discipline. I'm coming to think that it ought to be.

So in the interest of passing on whatever might be useful of what I've learned, I'm going to do some articles over the next few weeks on orchestral and group playing.

Fast pieces and difficult rhythms

2010-03-17T10:44:00.004Z

Some pieces are just plain hard to play. Too many notes! Too many awkward rhythms.

Amongst amateur players, it is (incorrectly) assumed that you have to try and play all the notes in your part in orchestra, and (equally incorrectly) that the thing which distinguishes professionals from amateurs is that the professionals can and do play all the notes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, professionals will play a higher proportion of the notes, but in this context what really distinguishes them is an absolute ruthlessness in cutting notes that are unplayable so that they can keep together.

When you play a fast passage, if it isn't a solo it often doesn't matter that you don't play all the notes. What does matter is that you keep up with everybody else, and that the notes you do play are in time.

Most important of all is that whatever is on the first beat of the bar must be strictly in time, and any entries must be strictly in time. You drop out or modify whatever you need to do in order to make sure you stay with the rhythm.

Is this cheating? If you choose to call it that. But if you do this in rehearsal, and even in performance, there is a good chance that nobody will notice. Probably not the conductor, and certainly not the audience. But they will all notice if you are struggling behind the beat because you can't play all the notes fast enough.

The score is not holy writ. It does not have to be rigidly adhered to. The performance is what matters, the performance is the work of art. The sound you produce is what the audience has paid to come and hear. Give them the best you can - which means amongst other things making sure that everything you play is in time with the rest of the group.

This concept is really strange to a surprising number of amateur musicians. I've given some thought to why this is. It seems to me that a number of factors are at play here.

Amateurs generally haven't had a musical education that has gone quite as far as that which professionals have undergone.
The art of cheating is only taught at a fairly advanced level, so as not to encourage people at too early a stage to abandon attempts at improving their technique.
So, the art of cheating is not really taught to people who occupy most places in amateur orchestras.
When professional come in and supplement the ranks of an amateur orchestra, they are usually technically so advanced that the amateurs don't even notice when a bit of cheating goes on. They are so bowled over at what the professionals can do.

So this is directed a bit to conductors of amateur groups. Where necessary, explain to your players that cheating is OK, that if there is a choice between playing all the notes late and keeping time while playing only some of them, that you really want them to choose keeping time.

It will take time to get them used to the idea that by dropping notes they are actually playing better. But the overall result will be worth it.

You have to watch and listen!

2010-03-16T17:10:00.003Z

At orchestra yesterday evening, we were rehearsing 3 pieces, all of which are very tricky in terms of rhythms and changes of speed.

In Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, there are several places where there is a huge rallentando before the speed returns to what it is before.

In Elgar's Sea Pictures, we have been told about several passages marked colla parte, where the singer will be pulling the speed about. We've been warned that we cannot possibly know until the soloist arrives what speed these passages will go. So the conductor has been trying out various speeds to get us to practice following him.

Ravel's Piano Concerto In G has a number of places where the speed changes quite suddenly, and also a great meny places where things happen off the beat to varying degrees.

I'm not going to name the guilty parties, but there was a definite tendancy among a number of players to select a tempo for themselves, and then put their heads down and plough on regardless of what the conductor was doing.

In Romeo and Juliet, there was one point where the horns are playing triplet quavers during a huge rallentando. I could see how far the conductor was slowing down, it was a loud passage, so I decided very confidently, loudly and deliberately to follow him to the point where the final quaver was about a quarter the speed of the beginning of the bar - just to show the other players what needs to be done to keep with the conductor. There were several other passages where the horns aren't involved, where the orchestra came out of the end of the rall probably a beat or more ahead of the conductor. They just weren't looking.

During the coffee break, several people came up to me and said how nice it was to have an utterly solid horn player in the orchestra. The compliments of course are very nice, but the compliment would be greater if they would copy what I'm doing and coordinate their tempo with the conductor and the rest of the orchestra.

There are two aspects to this.

First, you must watch the conductor at all times. Your music must be positioned such that you can always see the beat out of the corner of your eye, and you have to be ready to react. It is only by watching the conductor that you get advance warning of changes of speed. If you don't look at the conductor and respond to his gestures, he loses all ability to shape the interpretation.

Second, you must listen, and make sure that you don't rush quavers, or get ahead of the beat that everybody else is playing. If you have a sudden single note to play, you have to listen and make sure it happens in the right place. For that you have to be able to hear what the rest of the orchestra is up to so that you come in right.

It's part of teamwork - the performance is scrappy if we don't all play together.

Raising the tone 3 - Fitting your tone to the music

2010-03-02T19:12:00.010Z

The most immaculate control over your tone quality is no use to you unless you have an idea as to what sorts of tone should be used and when. This takes us back to musicality, which I've discussed in previous posts. You can't discuss musicality much in abstract, it is best considered with particular examples in mind.

As it happens, I played Brahms 2nd Symphony last weekend with Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra, and it includes one of the great orchestral solos for horn, towards the end of the first movement, and a solo which happens to be perfect when considering how to use tone as part of your expression.

Here is the solo in full. (The part is for Horn in D.)

It starts off piano and dolce, growing out of a very calm mood that the music has reached at this point. The horn is accompanied only by held string chords played piano, so the horn provides the only movement here. The mood is calm bordering on serene. So the tone colour needs to match this.

So it needs the lightest of attack on the first note, barely tongued at all - the note should emerge rather than specifically start, and the tone should be as smooth as you can make it, not the slightest hint of any brassy edge. The tone doesn't need to be dark, there is no foreboding here. Everything should sound perfectly relaxed over the top of a A7 chord in the strings held for the first 2 bars.

Then things start to get a bit darker. The accompaniment goes into an E minor chord and then progresses though a number of keys, all minor, and the horn starts a crescendo. The solo is gradually rising in pitch, in dynamic and in speed with the stringendo. There is a sense of urgency about it, even perhaps of menace or danger. The tone colour needs to reflect this. More volume gradually of course, but also a bit more of a brassy edge to it. Not too much, just enough to help contribute to the urgent mood.

The sense of danger increases through the stringendo, especially in the bars which start with a crotchet rest for the horn. The attack on the crotchet following needs to be much firmer to put a stress on the 2nd beat of each bar - each 2nd beat is starting at a new and higher pitch and so adding to the urgency, so stress it, give it a harder tone to go with the attack, and come off a bit for the slurred note following. At the same time, the accompaniment is getting louder and moving faster to add to the effect.

And then you come to the held written Ab, marked forte. This is the climax of the phrase, and it has to sing. The instant you hit the note, you are still in urgent mood, but at this point that accompaniment suddenly ceases to move. It isn't quite a happy chord it stops on - it is a diminished 7th underneath the horn, but the sense of running from some great danger suddenly passes. The horn has triumphed over its enemies! So the Ab should have a firm attack and an edge to the tone just for the instant of the attack, and then immediately the tone should turn into a big mellow sonorous sound, and everybody in the audience can go "Ahhhh!". The volume needs to be held throughout the note. The strings reduce to piano over the next 2 bars, leaving the horn in heroic possession of the battlefield.

And then we can start to relax. There is a diminuendo over the next three bars, followed by a final flourish ending on a concert D with a perfect cadence underneath in the strings. Everything is now perfectly happy and relaxed and the mood restored to the serene state it had at the start of the solo. The instruction to the whole orchestra as the solo ends is in tempo, ma piu tranquillo, "in time but calmer". You match this with your next entry (still quite prominent) after 4 bars rest. The music retains this serene mood as the movement gradually winds down to its ending a minute or so later.

The solo isn't the greatest technical challenge - it isn't particularly high or loud or fast. But it is a great musical challenge. By means of tone colour and expression you have to communicate serenity, danger, heroism, relaxation and tranquility in quick succession to the audience. Few solos call for such an expressive range in such a short time.

Let's consider a couple of other items. Here is the opening to Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto.

It is fortissimo for all four horns in unison. In the 2nd, 3rd and 4th bars, there is nothing else playing except for a brief but huge orchestral chord on the 2nd beat of each bar. This is clearly an heroic call to arms for the contest between piano and orchestra that is about to begin. (It is such a great tune that it is amazing that Tchaikovsky never bothers to repeat it in this form again.) You need a big bold brash sound with a firm decisive attack on each note, and each quaver needs to be held for its full length. Quite a bit of brassiness is perfectly appropriate here.

And now for something completely different. This is the opening of Bruckner's 4th Symphony.

The piece starts with the strings ppp holding a tremolo chord in Eb, and the horn comes in on the dominant of this chord. "Immer deutlich hervortretend" literally translated is "always clearly protruding" (The score actually has the instruction "ausdrucksvoll" or "expressively" on the entry). So, your sound has to be clearly heard, but that isn't going require a great volume over strings playing as quietly as they know how. So there's always going to be a risk with this solo. The mood is calm and serene, and your entry has to be the same. So you can't tongue it heavily, even though a light entry greatly increases the risk of a clam on the opening note. You have to minimise this by having the note visualised before you start. It's a semitone higher than the oboe's tuning A, an octave higher than the note initially held by the first violins, and the dominant of the opening chord. Whatever technique you use for obtaining a pitch reference for the entry, make sure that you concentrate really hard for it!

The tone has to be as clear as spring water and with hardly a care in the world. This entry is not easy but you must make it seem the easiest and most natural thing in the world to play on the horn. With Bruckner even the loud passages don't require a brassy edge to them, they require a big fat sonorous sound to them, but this passage is not loud. The Bb semiquaver must be deliberately and accurately placed, and the slur back to the F has to be perfectly smooth - you must practice this until you can completely eliminate any risk of hitting any intermediate harmonic on the way up.

The Gb of the second entry has a slightly darker harmony under it, but you don't need to take much notice of that. Just concentrate on giving the Gb the same tone as the opening F. Everything resolves back into Eb major when you return to the F.

The last entry is lower in pitch and lower in volume, and the strings at last start moving around and becoming more prominent, even though nominally still ppp. Let the last note fade to nothing. After that, the passage is repeated with 1st flute, 1st oboe and both clarinets sharing the tune you have just played.

Raising the tone 2 - controlling and changing tone colour

2010-02-28T21:00:00.003Z

Changing the "tone colour" can greatly increase the expressive range of your playing. Here, I'm going to concentrate on the mechanics of tone control and production, rather than on the decisions about when and how you fit each technique to the musical circumstance.

Part of the problem with describing this on the horn is that none of it is very visible. For stringed instruments, there are obvious externally visible changes you can make. These include:

Playing at the heel of the bow or at the tip
The width and speed of your vibrato
How close to the bridge you have the bow
How much pressure on the string you have
What speed you move the bow
Which string you play on
What angle you hold the bow - affecting how much hair of the bow is touching the string.

And this is just how you can affect the tone of sustained notes. There is in addition the whole business of the attack, how you start a note, whether you start the bow motionless on the string or you have the bow already in motion when it comes into contact with the string, and how hard and at what angle you bring it down.

Similarly, there is a surprisingly wide range of tones you can get from percussion instruments such as the timpani. Here, you can change tone by means including the following

The type of drumstick you use - you get great variation in tone from differences in weight, material and hardness.
Where you strike the drum - different distances from the edge can have quite different effects
The manner in which you make the stroke - what speed and weight you put into it

I claim no expertise in either string or percussion technique beyond what I have picked up as an interested spectator and fellow musician, fascinated with how players of other instruments go about their business. Both string and percussion technique have their own vocabulary for their tone production techniques, and I've found that conductors are reasonably familiar with them, and know roughly what to ask for when they want a particular tone colour, especially from strings.

The point is that the techniques are visible, and have a vocabulary associated with the actions you take to achieve a tone, so it is relatively easy for both string and percussion players both to talk about tone techniques to each other, and to teach them from a relatively early age.

But it is a bit different for wind instruments. The techniques for changing tone colour do exist, but they aren't visible. They consist of changes in air support, in minute changes of muscle position and tension, and for the horn changes of the position of the hand in the bell. It is far harder to say "change such and so by this amount to change the tone in that way", because neither the teacher nor the pupil can see what is going on. Because the changes aren't visible, they are visualised instead, and often quite inaccurately.

This has bedevilled the teaching of wind instruments for ever. And as a result, the common vocabulary has tended to grow up not so much about techniques, but rather about effects. Wind players have a range of words they use to describe subtle differences in tone colour, in much the same way as the Inuit have many different words describe different varieties of snow.

But there are some things you can say. On the horn for instance, having the right hand closing the aperture of the bell a little more produces a darker, more velvety tone, whereas opening the right hand produces a brighter sound. Tightening the lips and reducing the aperture, and increasing the air pressure to compensate trends to produce a more "brassy" edge to the sound, whereas relaxing the muscles a bit and allowing more airflow with less pressure tends to produce a more mellow "projected" sound.

And just as you can vary the attack as a string player by how you place the bow on the string, so you can do the same in wind playing, by how you tongue a note. You can vary where on the roof of the mouth the tongue rests, how fast you move it, and how much of an excess of air pressure you allow to build up behind the tongue. All of these things will affect how the start of the note sounds.

Each wind instrument has its own techniques. They tend to have a certain amount in common, in that they are for the most part concerned with intimate control over air supply and embouchure. But the effects do vary a significant amount from one instrument to the next, given the differences in the basic mechanics of sound production.

But the first and most important thing to realise is that you can gain conscious control over your tone, as distinct from control over your dynamics. You can decide how you sound as well as how loud. The second thing to realise is that differences sound much greater to you than they will sound to the audience having been attenuated by distance. So if you want variety of tone to feature in your repertoire of expression, then you need to be able to produce exaggerated changes. Only if the variation seems comically overdone to you will the audience be able to notice much of a difference at all.

Most professional horn players are well familiar with this, but I'm surprised at how many even quite good amateurs haven't quite grasped the concept of tone control and variation as a deliberate tool of expression.

IMSLP

2010-02-22T23:16:00.004Z

The International Music Score Library Project is a most wonderful resource. It aims to be a comprehensive online library for out-of-copyright music.

Until recently, it had concentrated on getting as many public domain scores online as possible. But now it has also started putting orchestral parts online as well.

This has proved particularly useful for me this week. At Hillingdon Philharmonic, we were short of a horn for our concert this coming weekend. So I asked around friends, and fortunately a very fine horn player whom I've known for many years was available, and so I've asked her to play 3rd.

But she'll only be able to attend the final rehearsal on the day. So she asked if we can get the music to her so she can practice it ahead of time?

For two of the pieces we are playing in the concert, that's now extremely easy. I just gave her the links on IMSLP to Brahms' Academic Festival Overture and to Brahms 2nd Symphony. all she need do is download and print the appropriate part. For the symphony, somebody has even written out the horn parts in F! (Originally, the 1st & 2nd parts are in D, B natural basso and G, while the 3rd and 4th parts are in E and C).

That's two thirds of the problem solved. Then all we needed to do was get a copy of the part for Walton's The Wise Virgins scanned and emailed to her. All done within 24 hours of her agreeing to play!

I'm playing 1st for the symphony this weekend, and so I decided to take a look at the score to check out what else was going on around my solos that I ought to make myself aware of. IMSLP again - the score is available. And I found a couple of things that were useful. For instance, the famous solo for horn in H in the slow movement isn't actually quite solo - I'm doubled by the first bassoon. I never knew that. So I'll have to listen out for the bassoon and make sure we are in tune together.

In the first movement, in rehearsal I had been finding myself miscounting my entry 3 bars before K. So I took a look at the score. In my part, I have the timpani part cued for 5 bars before the horn entry. But a quick look at the score quickly revealed where I had been going wrong. The cue is correct, it is just a bit misleading. For the first 4 of those bars, the violins and cellos are still quite busy, and I wasn't hearing a quiet roll on the timps. It is just the final bar before the entry that is a timpani solo. So I'll get that right next time.

In the third movement, the opening allegretto grazioso passage has a barline pause about halfway through. The 1st horn is the only instrument articulating the last quaver before the pause. The oboes and clarinets are playing crotchets on the beat, while the horn is off the beat. So it's not a mistake that you're left on your own there. You just have to have the nerve to play it.

These are the sorts of things that easy access to score the can really help with. It only takes a few minutes to look this up - provided that the score is available. And it saves rehearsal time.

And more generally, it is quite an education to have a listen to a piece with the score in front of you - it opens your eyes to all sorts of clever effects that the composer has done which you don't notice merely from the sound - either from in the audience or from where I sit over on one side of the orchestra. If you want to be a musical musician, then taking a look at the score whenever you get the chance is very important. It allows you to compare the notes with the music - and see how other players have phrased and articulated passages.

Raising the tone

2010-02-21T19:08:00.003Z

This is what I hope will be the first of a series of posts on tone - techniques for achieving it, working out what you should be looking for, how to control it and whether, when and how you should try to vary it when playing different pieces and different passages.

The Yahoo and Memphis horn mailing lists have innumerable discussions on how this or that mouthpiece or leadpipe with help "improve" a horn. The implication is that this improves the horn's tone, or at least that this is one of the improvements made.

But just what exactly is good tone?

Of course, in words it is impossible to define. You have to listen to good players (both live and in recordings) and decide for yourself who you admire and want to emulate.

In the early days of learning, the most important role model in this respect will be your teacher. But I would encourage even quite young pupils to listen to lots of classical music for solo horn and for horns in orchestra, mainly for enjoyment, but also in order to absorb ideas about good horn tone.

I was greatly influenced by the fact that at a young age I was bought an LP of Dennis Brain playing the four Mozart concertos with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Karajan. My younger sister, who is a professional violinist, was similarly influenced by a LP "Party Pieces" for violin and piano with John Georgiadis on the violin, bought for her when she was aged under 5, but had already been learning for 2 years.

So the first aim of a student player with regard to tone is gradually to refine your tone to a point where it is a passable approximation to the "ideal" tone based on what you hear from those players who inspire you.

Ideas of optimal tone do vary from place to place, though not as much as they did perhaps 80 years go. Internationally available recordings, better instruments, and easier travel around the world have ironed out many regional differences, which is perhaps inevitable but still is a pity. It can be quite illuminating to hear an old recording of Debussy played by a French orchestra on narrow bore piston valve horns with their distinctive sound, or to hear a Russian orchestra playing Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov with the horn solos played with quite a wide and pronounced vibrato.

These days, the variation in tone is much less, vibrato seems to have largely fallen out of fashion everywhere, and what we seem to have now internationally is the German sound, with relatively slight variations of tone colour - a bit brighter in France, maybe a bit darker and heavier in the US. But the variations are such that horn players can move all over the world and fit in to whatever orchestra they can get a job with, and quite easily adapt their sound to the local norms.

But a student is not going to have that refined a tone in the early days. It will start out being quite rough and "buzzy" and won't appear to have much resonance. No matter - it will improve with time as the student hears more music and develops musically and physically. If the teacher knows what he is about, he will help the process along by making sure effective technique is taught, and that the pupil's embouchure and breathing are working OK.

Part of learning a good tone is opportunities to perform in a larger space at every possible opportunity. Many teachers arrange pupils concerts where each pupil in turn gets up on stage and plays whatever piece they have been learning. This is invaluable, it teaches so much.

First, if a pupil gets used to playing in public when he is of a sufficiently young age that he doesn't know he is supposed to be nervous of performing, then it is quite likely that he will be immunized against the worst excesses of concert nerves for evermore - not only when playing, but for other public occasions - speeches etc. Even if you don't continue to play even as an amateur once you finish school, this is a skill and a confidence that you never lose.

Second, pupil concerts tend to mix the older and the younger pupils - and so the younger ones get to hear what they will be aiming for next. Hearing a boy or girl a couple of years older than you playing a piece that is just beyond you is great. It feels reachable, unlike the Olympian heights scaled by professional players. And the better tone achieved by the older players forms part of the aims of the younger ones - though neither is consciously aware of it at the time.

Third, playing in a larger room gives opportunities for the teacher to explain and the pupil to try out producing a projected sound, so that the people on the back row will be able to hear clearly what is being played. This will be useful for when the pupil finally gets to the stage of being ready to join the school orchestra or band.

Joined a new orchestra

2010-02-13T23:20:00.002Z

I've now joined the Hillingdon Philharmonic as a regular player. I've deputised for them a couple of times before, most recently at the concert in Coventry Cathedral in October.

The regular first horn there has very decently invited me in as joint principal horn, and we've come to an amicable agreement that he and I will divide up music between us so that for each concert so we each play first for some of the time.

The next concert is at the end of this month, and consists of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture, William Walton's ballet suite The Wise Virgins, (which is an arrangement and re-orchestration of various Bach pieces, including Sheep May Safely Graze, and one of the chorales from the St. Matthew Passion), the Bach Concerto for 2 violins (no horns in that), and finally Brahms 2nd Symphony.

He's invited me to do 1st for the symphony, while he plays 1st for the other half of the concert. Both halves of the concert have some wonderful solo moments for the horn, so I would have been very happy with either half.

The symphony if famous among horn players, in that it has a prominent solo in the slow movement for "Horn in H", which is German for horn in B natural basso. It is the most awkward possible transposition, down a diminished 5th. So you have to read down 2 lines, and put a sharp in front of every note except B.

That would be reasonably challenging if the part were a straightforward Mozart-style part sticking basically to the harmonic series written in C major. But Brahms expects the horns to be far more chromatic than that, and includes A flats, B flats, E flats and D flats in the part. (You can see it at the IMSLP website).

This next bit is addressed to high school students who hope to become professional horn players one day. You must learn your transpositions. This particular movement is so famous that I know of some people who have written out the part in F. But horn in B natural, while relatively rare, is by no means unheard of (I've also played Schumann's Rhenish Symphony which also has passages for horn in B natural).

Professional orchestras are chronically short of money, so it is entirely possible that you would have to play a standard of the romantic repertoire with just a single rehearsal on the day. That means you either have to know the piece well beforhand, or be able just to play it, transpositions and all, as well as people who have been around for 20 years and have played that solo a dozen times or more. You cannot afford to be flummoxed by transpositions.

Inspiring conductors

2010-02-12T23:47:00.009Z

Lyle Sanford has been musing lately on the autocratic habits of conductors and the childlike and dependent attitudes of some amateur musicians.

I've come across my share of autocratic conductors, and there are of course famous examples of such people at the top reaches of the profession - Fritz Reiner was a notorious martinet for instance.

But from my experience here in the London area both of the orchestras I am or have been a regular member of and those for which I've deputised from time to time, conductors of amateur orchestras do seem to recognise that their continued employment depends to some extent on making the rehearsal experience rewarding and enjoyable to the players. You do hear of an occasional conductor who drives his players to tears but inspires great loyalty because of the results he achieves. But here, this seems very much to be the exception rather than the rule.

I suspect that this in part is because there is a huge oversupply of wannabe conductors compared to orchestras available for them to conduct. Your average amateur orchestra is perhaps 60 players, and it requires just one conductor. And many conductors run a number of amateur orchestras, each meeting on a different night of the week. If you take a look at the London page of the UK Amateur Orchestras listing website, you'll see that conductor's names often pop up 2 or 3 times.

Outside London, this is less common because of the longer distances to travel. But within London, this does put the orchestra committee at a great advantage - if the orchestra finds itself disliking a conductor, there are always plenty more where he (it is almost always a "he") came from. This means that a conductor has to work much more by encouragement than has perhaps been traditional in the past.

But I think it is also partly due to the example of their predecessors whom they themselves have learned under.

I've long since lost count of the conductors I've played for. I've mentioned here a magical occasion on which I once had the opportunity to play under the baton of Simon Rattle, but generally I find myself comparing any conductor against three that I regularly played for in school and student days. On the few occasions that I've had the opportunity to do a bit of conducting myself, these three are the ones I model myself on.

The first was Fred Firth, who conducted the Norwich Students Orchestra. I played under him for about 2 years from the age of about 13 to 15, when he retired. One one occasion after that I played under him in a series of performances of Verdi's I Lombardi which he conducted with the Norfolk Opera Players.

He wasn't the first conductor I played under or the first orchestra I played in - I joined my first youth orchestra at the age of 9 in London before my parents moved to Norfolk, but I don't remember all that much about the conductor there. Fred Firth was the first conductor to inspire me. He had a broad Lancashire accent that shone out of his mouth every time he spoke, even though he had lived in Norfolk for decades. The kids in the orchestra were willing to follow him anywhere - and we followed him through some very tricky pieces - things which I would regard as difficult even today. Kodaly's Hary-Janos suite, the Elgar Cello Concerto, Delius Paris: Song of a Great City, and Sibelius' 1st Symphony are four works that come to mind. By the standards of the 1970s, this was quite daring repertoire even for an adult amateur orchestra, let alone a set of high school kids.

Next was Lawrence Leonard. When I was at high school, the Norfolk County Youth Orchestra would meet twice a year for a one-week residential course at Wymondham College in the Easter and summer holidays. I loved those courses - though I was utterly exhausted at the end of them. Lawrence had a most amazing fund of anecdotes and would keep us all in stitches of laughter telling us real or imagined stories of his musical adventures. I didn't know it at the time, but Lawrence had been the conductor of the Morley College Orchestra, which transformed itself into the Hoffnung Festival Orchestra for some utterly hilarious concerts in the Royal Festival Hall called the Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival. An idea of the fun to come was in the announcement given by the Festival Hall's general manager T.E. Bean, at the start of the first concert.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have to ask your indulgence for an announcement. Owing to circumstances over which the LCC [London County Council] and the management of the Hall have no control, tonight's programme will be given exactly as advertised.

The concert included such items as A Grand, Grand Overture by Malcolm Arnold, which included three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher among the required instruments, and a Concerto for Hose-pipe and Strings, with Dennis Brain playing a garden hosepipe with a horn mouthpiece in one end and a funnel on the other.

This was all before I was born, and I only learned about it later, but gives an idea of the sort of fun that he could be. Anyway, Lawrence was also inspiring to us. He was a cellist as well as a conductor, and during rehearsals would grab the principal cellist's instrument and demonstrate what he wanted in terms of an effect or style - whatever instrument he was speaking to.

He was always a good sport. On the last night before the concert there was a tradition of "follies", an informal concert of light-hearted pieces by members of the orchestra. One year I got him to agree to do Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue. It is a perfectly good fugue, except that it is entirely spoken and there are no notes in it. It starts like this.

Trinidad!
And the big Mississippi
and the town Honolulu
and the lake Titicaca,
the Popocatepetl is not in Canada,
rather in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico!

So I got Lawrence to start alone on stage. He made a huge performance out of tuning his cello, and then put it to one side, and said "Ladies and Gentlemen. Trinidad! And the big Mississippi..." The other three of us taking part in the fugue each started our own part from our seats in the audience and made our way up to join him on stage.

On another course, he had been very critical of one of the violinists who had something of a tendancy to fling himself about when playing and to use too much bow. On Follies night, Lawrence performed John Cage's 4' 33" (arranged for solo cello), with an excessively serious expression on his face. Halfway through, the errant violinist called out "Lawrence, too much bow!", and everyone completely fell about laughing. Lawrence's expression didn't even crack!

Lawrence Leonard also got us through some very tricky pieces. Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrushka suites, Brahms 2nd Symphony, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherezade, Sibelius 2nd Symphony are highlights I remember. All before I was 18. We played Petrushka in a concert in Kings Lynn at the end of one course, and just as we reached the passage where the horns are playing a quaver passage slurring up and down alternate notes, an ambulance drove past the outside the hall with its two-tone siren going - in a different key but at about the same tempo!

The third conductor I particularly remember was Harry Legge. He was a founder member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (playing the viola) under Sir Thomas Beecham. He was in a way responsible for my existence. He set up The Rehearsal Orchestra, as a residential course during the Edinburgh Festival in August 1957, (it has been run there every August since) and my parents met as a result of attending that very first course. Probably nearly half the professional musicians in Britain have been through the Rehearsal Orchestra in their student days and so a great many of them knew Harry. It meant that at his local amateur orchestra in London, the Brent Symphony Orchestra, he was able to get some of the most amazing soloists to come and play with the orchestra. I remember Moura Lympany playing a Rachmaninov concerto, Robert and Raymond Cohen playing the Brahms Double Concerto together, Nigel Kennedy playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto (and staying on with his girlfriend to listen to us play Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony in the 2nd half). I first played for Harry in the British Youth Wind Orchestra (now the National Youth Wind Orchestra) on a tour of Canada and the US in 1977. When I was in London at university, I played both for the Brent Symphony Orchestra and for various of the Rehearsal Orchestra weekend courses in London. I remember in particular in one weekend getting through not only the whole of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, but also Bartok's Kossuth as well (which requires an almost identically huge orchestra).

Harry had played under many of the greats, particularly including Beecham and also Rudolf Kempe, who succeeded Beecham as chief conductor of the RPO, and so he knew precisely what he wanted from an orchestra, and got it without much fuss. He modelled his rehearsal technique on Beecham's, basically working on the principle that you speak as little as possible, and let the players play the notes as much as possible, eventually they become familiar with what you are trying to achieve.

It's noticeable that all three of these conductors who had a great musical effect on me were ones I first played for before I was 18. They were playing great and difficult and inspiring pieces of music, requiring the utmost concentration from both conductor and players. None of them worked by shouting at the orchestra - except under extreme provocation. And they were all hugely loved by their players. They, along with my teacher at the RCM, Douglas Moore, provided me with my musical education. What I know of music I know largely as a result of having played it for them. I count myself incredibly fortunate and privileged to have had not just one but three such outstanding musical role models.

John Williams and Star Wars

2009-12-17T21:25:00.005Z

Been busy with the day job and haven't had much time to play anything lately. I've decided that while I'm slaving over a hot keyboard, I'm going to listen my way though the whole of my music collection. It'll take quite some while!

The most recent stuff I've been listening to has been Star Wars soundtracks.

I know a lot of people get very sniffy about film music, they think it's not real music, that it is merely derivative. Well maybe it is derivative at times, but the best of it (and John Williams does write some of the best) is extremely good.

For the most part the instruments used are straightforward romantic symphony orchestra stuff, an orchestral line-up which would have peen perfectly familiar to Mahler or Stravinsky or Richard Strauss. He doesn't often go in for electronic instruments or other effects.

Williams clearly knows his classical music repertoire and composition techniques. In listening through the soundtracks, I have heard Wagnerian leitmotifs, Mahlerian orchestration techniques using harp and celeste for a "magical" effect, marches obviously inspired by Elgar, passages which are definitely a homage to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, bits which could easily have been a Tchaikovsky finale, battle scenes that sound reminiscent of Shostakovich, references to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a couple of choral passages that remind me of Rachmaninov's Vespers, references to Neptune from Holst's The Planets, even a passage or two which sound as if they could have been taken from Ligeti. (You may not think you know any Ligeti. But if you have ever watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you have heard passages from at least 2 of his pieces which were used in that film.)

And of course Williams writes some stonking good horn tunes - romantic tunes for solo horn, and heroic ones that sound as if they are being played in unison by a section of 8 or 12 horns. And he is also clearly familiar with the technique of creating composite tone colours by combining several different instruments in different octaves on to a tune.

Marvellous stuff. It is possible to hear all these references but still recognise the whole as being authentically original Williams. It has brought a smile to my face from hearing all those good tunes, and especially each time I recognise another classical reference. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he has deliberately slipped in an occasional direct quote from another piece as a sort of musical joke just to see if anybody will notice.

People have asked me whether it spoils my enjoyment of music that I find myself analysing it while listening to it. The answer is not at all. The fact that I know something about music doesn't any any way impair my enjoyment of a good tune. I wince at a bad or unmusical performance, but in that respect the only difference between me and somebody who doesn't have musical training is that I'm in a position to put into words why I'm wincing. I'm able to appreciate the performance even more because I understand something of the effort and artistry that has gone into it - both from the composer and the performers. And recognising references and quotations in pieces adds to the enjoyment of music - it is like unexpectedly meeting an old friend!

EDIT: Doh! After this post was up for a month, I realised that I had said "Lutoslawski" when I meant "Ligeti". It is 2 of Ligeti's pieces which are in 2001. I've gone back and changed it.

Accompanying in concertos

2009-12-09T16:46:00.003Z

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

2009-12-07T13:29:00.004Z

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.

==============================

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!

2009-11-01T17:41:00.006Z

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

2009-10-27T19:35:00.009Z

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

2009-10-26T16:53:00.001Z

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

2009-10-24T00:13:00.000+01:00

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

2009-10-22T23:00:00.000+01:00

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.

Playing for one of the greats

2009-10-22T13:06:00.000+01:00

I thought I would balance the previous article about a bad experience with a conductor, with one of my very best experiences of working under one of the greats.

I've been a regular participant in the Rehearsal Orchestra for many years. They run several weekend courses during the year, and a week-long residential course in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh International Music Festival. The participants are a mixture of college-level music students and good amateurs, with regular London pros as the paid principals of each of the string sections. For the one- and two-day weekend courses, they intensively rehearse a really big work and then put on an informal performance of it (they call it an "open rehearsal") at the end, and friends and relations are invited to come and listen.

One weekend in December 2001 was very special because the orchestra's patron, Sir Simon Rattle, had agreed to conduct a course.

He was in London that month conducting Parsifal at the Royal Opera. It is about the most exhausting thing to do, the opera lasts about 5 hours. As a rest from that on his Sunday off, he came to coach us for a day on Bruckner's 9th symphony - not a small work by any means!

I was playing first horn, so there was plenty to do. Bruckner wrote a lot of notes for the horn, and this piece requires 8 of them - and it seems like he uses them all most of the time!

Simon Rattle was lovely. The first thing he said when he stepped onto the rostrum was how wonderful and nostalgic it was to be back. (He played percussion in the Rehearsal Orchestra when he was about 14, and says he learned a lot from it.) He did everything possible to put a large number of very nervous and overawed amateur musicians at their ease.

Even so, I spent the first 45 minutes as nervous as anything, and at that point I gave myself a good talking to, and told myself. "Jonathan, there is absolutely zero chance of Simon coming up to you in the break and saying 'Jonathan, you're just the person I need to join the horn section in the Berlin Philharmonic!', and even if he did, you would turn him down, because you long ago decided against a musical career. So nothing depends on this except your own enjoyment of it."

And with that, I decided just to go for the notes and entries, and if I split an occasional one, then at least I'm trying to make it sound good and musical. And it worked. I felt myself relax and my tone opened out.

It is fascinating to watch a real master of his art at work. He spent most of the first hour or so working mainly with the strings. Normally wind players more or less fall asleep when the conductor is working with the strings, but not this time. It was riveting seeing how he took their sound apart, and then gradually, one technique at a time, he built the tone into what he wanted specifically for this composer and this piece. Pizzicatos with the fleshiest available part of the thumb or finger. Tremolando only after nearly a full length of bow. Wider vibrato than they had ever used before. Lots of bow. Very specific instructions as to when to use the heel of the bow and when to use the tip. At one point called out "Anyone found not playing at the heel at this point will be taken out and shot!"

Immediately after the first forte entry of the heavy brass, he stopped the whole orchestra and turned to them.

"Brass, that was a wonderful noise! Absolutely perfect for Shostakovich. And I don't want ever in my life to hear it again in a Bruckner symphony. The sound has to be rich and round without the slightest hint of a cuivré to it. Let's try it again."

I turned to the other horns and whispered down the line. "Horns, that means us as well!"

It wasn't just the techniques he was asking for, but he made it clear what he wanted in terms of the overall breadth & warmth of the sound. At one point he said "In this passage, I want the biggest, fattest tone you can manage. I want a full Orson Welles of a sound. Maybe even 7/8ths of a Marlon Brando." There were references to The Simpsons. "Imagine you are Bart Simpson having to write lines on the blackboard. Write 100 times 'I will not diminuendo on the down bow in Bruckner'."

At one point, he said "The main purpose of the conductor is to make himself unnecessary. You're now going to prove that. You mustn't rely on me and the beat, you have to listen to each other. Just to show you can, I'm going to start you off here, and you carry on without me." He started us off and then folded his arms, and grinned evilly at us, managing cues simply by looking at the relevant person and raising his right eyebrow. And we listened to each other, and we stayed together. After a minute or so, he stopped us and said "You know, conducting is one of the great fake professions..."

By listening to him working with the strings, it became clear to me the sort of tone and style he wanted from the horns as well, so my listening to him working with them hopefully saved him the bother of telling me. At one point he said to the orchestra (just after I had played something not quite in time). "You have to count and listen. I am not going to do anything as mundane as beat time just to make it easier for you to put semiquavers in the right place, I've more important things to do with the music." Sure enough, we did count, and we did listen, and we did (mostly) get the semiquavers right.

And in the course of the first hour or so, he transformed the tone and sound of the orchestra from what we were in fact (a pretty good amateur group) into a sound that to my ears would not have disgraced a regional professional orchestra.

He had some nice stories as well. He said that on one occasion when he was a student, he was coming into the Festival Hall to listen to Sir Georg Solti rehearse a Bruckner symphony with a major orchestra. He was just outside the door when he heard Solti screaming something at the orchestra. He opened the door and heard Solti absolutely apoplectic with rage shouting "TRANQVILLITY!!! AT ZIS POINT VE MUST HAF TRANQVILLITY!!!"

It's hard to describe the complete feeling of confidence that working with a master can bring to you (once you overcome the terror of his reputation!) Normally, with an amateur orchestra, the conductor is expected to keep a clear beat, and make sure that he looks at you and gives you a cue if you have a solo entry. You tend to get nervous if that doesn't happen. Somehow though, with Simon Rattle, I felt perfectly confident making solo entries without a cue, without much of a beat, and while he was looking very pointedly at the double-basses, right over on the opposite side of the orchestra. I don't know how he does it, but it works!

In the third movement, there are some passages which are just the 8 horns (or rather, 4 horns and 4 Wagner tubas. Horns 5-8 change instruments for the last movement) and almost nothing else apart from quiet strings, with first horn taking the tune. It was wonderful being able to let the tune soar out over the top of all that rich sound.

Talking to the other players over a drink afterwards, everyone was walking on air. The curious thing was that, every person I spoke to seemed to be convinced that in the informal concert at the end, Simon Rattle seemed always to be looking at them personally for the entire duration!

This is what playing for a great conductor can be like. People who can instil this kind of confidence in their players can completely transform a performance through the sheer force of their personality. This is what conducting should be.

How not to get on in an orchestra

2009-10-21T22:47:00.001+01:00

When I was about 15, the much-loved conductor of my local youth orchestra retired. He was an inspiring character, and managed to get us unscathed through some quite complex pieces such as Delius' Paris:Song of a Great City, and Kodaly's Hary-Janos Suite.

Unfortunately his successor wasn't nearly so good. We were rehearsing Brahms 4 for our first concert under him, and making pretty heavy weather of it. The problem was that this conductor had no rehearsal technique. He talked a lot rather than letting us actually play through things, and he didn't talk very loud, so only the front two desks of strings could hear him for most of the time.

On one occasion, he endlessly repeated the strings in some passage in the slow movement. The wind had all pretty much gone to sleep. When he finally continued, without having given any warning to the wind that this time we would be going on, the horns didn't come in for their entry, which didn't please him.

By this time, I was getting really, really pissed off with him. So after the coffee break, I decided to time him. I had a stopwatch feature on my wristwatch, and so I set it running whenever he was talking, and stopped it whenever we played. In the 50 minutes of the 2nd half of the rehearsal I timed him talking for 32 minutes. The remaining 18 minutes included a complete run through of the 3rd movement (about 5 minutes) at the end.

So at the end of the rehearsal, I went up to him, in front of all the other kids, and told him that he had been wasting everyone's time, and that he had been talking for about twice as long as we had played, and that it was no wonder we weren't making much progress. I told him that I had been timing him and gave him the figures I had collected.

In retrospect, I'm mildly surprised he didn't hit me, I got him that cross. While I didn't swear at him, I'm sure I made it perfectly clear that he didn't have my confidence or respect. In turn he complained that I had wasted time in the first half of the rehearsal not being ready for my entry. I told him that I had given up all hope of us ever reaching it, since he had been endlessly repeating the strings without there being any obvious improvement, and that he had warned nobody that we were going on that time. I told him that we were all getting thoroughly bored with this piece. He asked me to write down what I wanted to play instead and to write down my complaint and bring it in to rehearsal next week.

I told my parents about it when I got home, and they advised that I simply write a list of pieces I would like to play, and not make any reference to the other part of the complaint. This I did.

He was most put out that I hadn't put in a formal written complaint. It turned out that he had complained about me to his boss, the County Music Advisor, and requested that I be thrown out of the orchestra.

I already knew the County Music Advisor a little, his son also played horn and was second horn to me in my school orchestra, and so I had met him at school concerts. I suspect that this was critical to the subsequent turn of events. I learned afterwards the he had dealt with the matter with exemplary efficiency. He asked the conductor whether I was right in what I had said about him spending a lot of time talking. On getting equivocation for a reply, he simply said "Well, you had better make sure he has no reason to complain about it again." And that was the end of the matter.

The conductor did improve his rehearsal technique, though he never managed to become all that good. But our performance of Brahms 4 at the end of term was pretty dire. But I don't think he ever forgave me, and he avoided rehearsing the horns at all in full rehearsals - he left it to the brass section coach to rehearse anything that needed improvement.

It took me some years before I began to like Brahms 4, because of its association with my experience of playing it in the youth orchestra. I only started to like it again when I next played it at university, and had to my astonishment been made 1st horn of the University of London Orchestra. But that's a story for another day.

The quality of the conductor really can make all the difference to how a group performs, but if you are stuck with a bad one, be a bit more circumspect about how you deal with him than I was. I was right in that he was rehearsing us extremely badly. But it was because I was right that he couldn't cope with me being there and tried to get me thrown out. If things get really bad with a conductor, you shouldn't tackle him alone. See what others think, and if you can get support, have a delegation of several of you approach him. That way, he can't pick you off one by one.

In the case of my youth orchestra conductor, I now realise that there was a much better way to handle the issue. I should have kept my lip buttoned until I got home. My parents were both experienced amateur musicians, and it would have been a simple matter to have one or other of them arrive early to pick me up the following week, come in and listen for themselves to the rehearsal for a while, and then write to the County Music Advisor describing their impressions. A letter from parents could not have been wished away as easily as a complaint from a child. But I was young and foolish, and I acted without thinking things through.

As it happens, it all turned out well, but if the County Music Advisor had not known me, or had shown a bit less backbone, I would have been out.

Endurance in orchestra and band rehearsal

2009-10-20T19:37:00.001+01:00

Lyle Sanford has been describing problems with endurance in band rehearsals. His lip went entirely in one - he called it a meltdown, an apt turn of phrase.

His situation is in some ways particularly difficult. He's not been learning the horn all that long having taken it up as an adult, he's in a community band rather than an orchestra, and he is the only regular horn player with the band, which means that when he stops for a moment to let his lips recover, so do the afterbeats because nobody else is playing them.

I've played in bands occasionally, and wind ensembles, and it is much harder work physically than playing most orchestral repertoire. Band horn parts are notorious for not offering much rest from a relentless succession of bars of afterbeats. Most orchestral pieces have quite long periods when the strings are playing alone or with just one or two woodwind. The strings have far more notes to play than the horns. If a horn part for a symphony has 8 pages to it, we normally think of that as being a good beefy part. But that isn't much compared to the violins. For instance the first horn part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony is 12 pages, and that is regarded as a heavy blow. The first and second violin parts each have 20 pages, with far more notes to a page. So the horns don't play continuously, and almost always have some fairly lengthy rests.

The first movement of Beethoven 9 has 547 bars, in which the 1st horn has 105 bars rest. That is a pretty high proportion of playing by the standard of most orchestral pieces. The second movement has 1004 (extremely rapid) bars, in 384 of which the 1st horn rests. The 3rd movement has 153 bars of which 42 are rests for the first horn, and the 4th movement has 940 bars, including 460 bars of rest. So the principal horn is resting for between 20% and almost 50% of the time in any movement, and the rests are for the most part very conveniently distributed in chunks of between 2 and 32 bars. Short enough to keep your interest, long enough to allow your lip to recover. And yet this is regarded as a big piece where the first horn in a professional orchestra would expect to have an assistant to share the load.

Of course, there are orchestral pieces which are even more taxing. If I have to play a high horn part in a Mahler, Bruckner or Shostakovich symphony, I'll do extra endurance work ahead of the concert to make sure I can get through it without my lip going.

But the proportion of rests in the horn parts for many band pieces is far lower than is normal for orchestral horn parts. And as a result, it is common to double parts, especially the high parts. It is simply necessary if the principal horn is not going to collapse into a heap on the floor by the end of the concert. Six horns in a band is not uncommon, with the two high parts both doubled. That doesn't mean that both the players play the whole part all the time. It means that it can be divided up so that one player is playing at a time in softer passages, one player plays at a time for solos, and both can play in the loud tuttis without having to belt it out too hard.

You are no use to anybody in a rehearsal if your lip has gone. You are a definite liability if you allow your lip to go during a concert. Therefore you absolutely must find a way of lasting through the rehearsal, and if you have a final rehearsal on the day of a concert, you must leave enough in reserve at the end of the rehearsal to be able to survive the concert as well. A conductor might scream at you for leaving things out in rehearsal, but he'll be even worse if you lose your lip in the concert itself.

If you are still learning, or if you are an amateur with limited time for practice and therefore limited time in which to build up your lip strength, you have to learn how to husband your resources. You have to pace yourself. Even professionals do that, but because they have greater reserves of strength, they come up against their limits less often. Here are a few tips & tricks that players use.

Solos and exposed passages take absolute priority. They must be right, and you must have enough lip for them. You know which passages are important. Save yourself for them. It is by those exposed passages that your contribution to the performance will be judged and appreciated by the audience
Very loud tutti passages don't necessarily need to be played very loudly by you. If the whole orchestra or band is blasting away, the difference between you playing ff and mf will almost certainly not be noticed. So play mf and preserve your lips for when you have an exposed passage.
If you have a long series of afterbeats, for instance in a march or a Strauss waltz, you are unlikely to be the only person playing. You can leave out a bar or two here & there and nobody need be any the wiser. You can rest in a bar in which there is a big loud flourish in the tune.
Afterbeats aren't all that interesting, either to play or to listen to. You can play them fairly softly, no matter what dynamic marking is written. A good conductor will encourage the accompaniment to play softer to make it easier for the players with the tune to come through without having to force their sound. This is a matter of general musicianship - if you are accompanying, you should generally play one or two notches softer than the written dynamic, and if you are solo you should play one or two notches louder than written, and you should do this without needing to be told by the conductor. Since the horns don't play solo all that often, it means you get to save your lips a bit more.
Even if your part is not being doubled, you can arrange with your fellow players in the section to take rests at staggered intervals so that you don't all stop at once. Arrange this quietly amongst yourselves, there is no need to bother the conductor with it. What he doesn't know won't worry him.
If the band is short-handed until the final rehearsal on the day of the concert, then you (and the conductor) just have to accept that there may be gaps from time to time in the rehearsals until the extras arrive. Better that than for you to have to be silent for the last 20 minutes or so because your lip has been reduced to the strength & consistency of wet cotton wool.
In the final rehearsal on the day of the concert, leave out as much as you decently can, and avoid playing anything at all louder than mf. Then you hopefully have enough lip left to give full volume for the concert. The whole purpose of the rehearsals is to be in a position to play as well as possible in the concert. If you wreck your lip by being overenthusiastic in the final rehearsal, you defeat this objective.

Most conductors understand that wind players in general and horn players especially have limits to their endurance. So long as you try to be reasonably musical in terms of selecting the least important moments to drop out, the conductor will usually be sympathetic. Some conductors forget sometimes though, and it may be necessary to have a gentle word in the coffee break to remind him or her that there are physical limits as to what can be done on the horn.

Some conductors explicitly tell the horns and brass to play down in the final rehearsal in order to save themselves for the concert. I enjoy playing for them - they understand what it takes and are sympathetic to it!

In a future article, I'll describe some things that can be done in when practicing to extend your endurance.

Chance meeting

2009-10-18T16:23:00.000+01:00

Coventry went fine - it was in fact more of service than a concert, so no audience applause. I don't think I had been in the building since I was about 12 years old, and I was surprised at how much of it I remembered.

The choir gradually got used to singing together - they were an assembly of church choirs from nonconformist churches up & down the land, and weren't all that used to singing regularly in a large group together (there were about 400 in the choir in total). They also weren't used to playing with orchestral accompaniment. About the first thing said by some of the sopranos in the front row of the choir was to complain that they couldn't hear a thing apart from the horns in front of them! (The conductor chose not even to reply to them.) But the choir got better during the rehearsal and in the service itself, they managed to produce a really good rousing sound in a a few pieces, particularly the Mendelssohn Hymn of Praise.

But the trip was additionally worthwhile for a conversation I had with one of the other horn players between the rehearsal and the service. I had met Anne Harrow for the first time just the previous fortnight, when we had been called in as extras to play the Dvorak Serenade with Ealing Symphony, but I hadn't had much opportunity to talk with her then. There was a longer interval after the rehearsal this time, and we got chatting about music and musicians we both knew. And it turned out that she, like me, had been to the Royal College of Music and had in fact done her Masters degree there.

She described the subject of her masters dissertation, which I found quite fascinating - it was on the techniques and strategies used by horn players to pitch their note for an entry. Apparently she had devised an experiment to try and work this out, and then had interviewed and run the experiment with about 60 horn players, including some London's top professionals as well as various students and amateurs. And it seems that the top players do approach this in a way different from mere mortals.

She's promised to see if she can dig out a copy of the dissertation and let me read it, and when I do so, I plan to write more about it. If there is a technique that works for the best professionals and it isn't getting taught to students, then that seems to be something of a pity. I'm not going to rely on my memory to describe the various techniques she described (except that I do recall that she mentioned that Tony Halstead's method was entirely unique to him!). I would rather wait until I read it and then be able to describe it all with more accuracy.

There's always something new to learn, if you keep your ears and mind open and ready to receive it.

By the way, I also spoke briefly to organist Rufus Frowde to say how much I had enjoyed his playing. He was really enjoying playing on the magnificent organ in Coventry Cathedral. He showed me the cover of the book that included one of the solo organ pieces he was playing, (something like "Modern pieces for organ, book 15"), and it turned out that the cover was a picture of the ranks of pipes of the Coventry Cathedral organ, and those precise pipes were right above our heads! All extra inspiration.

Choir and orchestra

2009-10-11T19:09:00.000+01:00

There's something very special about playing in a big choral work. I find that I enjoy playing in an orchestra when it is accompanying a choir more than I enjoy playing in an orchestra when it is accompanying a soloist in a concerto.

The members of the choir are of course almost always amateurs - you could never afford to make up a massed choir of professional singers, the cost would be absolutely prohibitive (though sometimes I wonder what sort of a sumptuous sound could be produced by such a choir!). So all the singers are amateurs like me - they sing for the love of the music, and they take part in a large group for the joy of sharing their music with others, both fellow singers and the audience. That enthusiasm is wonderful to see and the warmth of the massed voices makes for a beautiful sound.

Then there is the fact that the choir is placed behind the orchestra. As a horn player, I'm almost always at the back of the orchestra, so I'm usually not actually surrounded by the sound when the orchestra plays alone. When I have the choir behind me and most of the orchestra in front, there is something incredibly exhilarating about being right in the middle of everything.

And choral music is usually perfect for producing wonderful horn parts - horns sing in a way very similar to the human voice, so composers who write good choral works usually are also able to produce gorgeous horn passages as well!

With concerto soloists, there is always a degree of separation - the soloist is projecting his or her sound out into the audience, and so the players behind in the orchestra often hear relatively little of the soloist. And even in some wonderful concertos, there is often a significant amount of accompaniment that consists of little more than a few occasional quiet chords here & there while the soloist dazzles the audience with his technical prowess. With a choral work, there is a much more equal partnership between choir and orchestra.

As it happens, on October 17th, I'm taking part in my second choral concert in consecutive weekends. The Hillingdon Philharmonic Orchestra are short of a horn player when they travel up to Coventry Cathedral to accompany the massed choirs of the Free Church Choir Union in their 2009 festival "Praise and Thanksgiving", and have asked me to join them for the trip.

I've not been in Coventry Cathedral for some years. My grandparents lived in Coventry and my father was brought up there. As a child visiting my grandparents on holiday I visited several times. The 14th century Gothic cathedral was burned to the ground in the German bombing raid of 14 November 1940, which devastated most of the city. The present cathedral replacing it was completed in 1962.

I've never before had the opportunity to perform there, and I'm looking forward to it. Cathedrals are really the proper places to perform big choral works, there is something about the increased reverberation of sound round the building compared to most concert halls that makes them ideal for this kind of music. Also, many choral works are based on sacred texts and it seems somehow fitting to perform them in surroundings that reflect that content.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem was commissioned for and given its first performance at the consecration of the new cathedral. In between the standard offices of the requiem mass, Britten very powerfully includes settings of poems of the poet Wilfred Owen, including "The Parable Of The Old Man And The Young", based on the Old Testament story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his first-born son to God (Genesis 22:1-14), but with an ending reflecting the senseless slaughter that Owen witnessed in the trenches during WW1.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Coventry Cathedral has included a very strong peace and reconciliation element as part of its ministry in the years since the war, and Coventry has formed cultural links with Dresden, a city even more dreadfully bombed in 1945 in the closing months of the war. I visited Dresden a few years ago on a musical tour, and had a chance to visit Dresden's Frauenkirche. Like Coventry Cathedral, it was destroyed in the bombing. Rebuilding started after the reunification of Germany and was finally completed in 2005, and representatives of the city and cathedral of Coventry were present at the reconsecration ceremony. I visited a year or two later. It is a beautiful building and the people of Dresden have an obvious and great civic pride in it. Let us hope that the joint work of the people in both cathedrals will eventually contribute to bringing an end to all wars.

Lots of Brahms

2009-10-07T17:10:00.000+01:00

This weekend, I'm in a scratch orchestra going down to Uckfield in Sussex to accompany a choir singing the Brahms Requiem, and also to play the Brahms "Variations on a theme by Haydn".

I haven't been given the part yet, and in fact I don't yet know which of the 4 parts I will play. With this group it apparently gets sorted out on the day.

But I can still take a look at the music. I already have a copy as a result of having bought several volumes of the Orchestra Musician's CD ROM Library. For any music student, professional player or even keen amateur, this is an absolutely invaluable resource. The CD contains scanned copies in Acrobat PDF format of the complete horn parts of just about all the major orchestral works that are out of copyright. All of Brahms orchestral works are in Volume 3, and so I can print out parts for all 4 symphonies, both piano concertos, the violin concerto and double concerto, the Requiem, all the Hungarian Dances in orchestrations by various composers, the Alto Rhapsody, both Serenades, both concert overtures, the Haydn Variations and a couple of other works. And on the same CD ROM are the major orchestral works by Chabrier, Chausson, Chopin, Franck, Lalo, Liszt, Offenbach, Sarasate, Schumann and Suppe. All for about £15 for that volume. There are 11 volumes so far published covering everything from Auber to Wagner, via Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, Dvorak, Haydn, Mahler, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and many many more.

If you are likely to get called up to play unfamiliar works with unfamiliar orchestras, then at least if the piece is out of copyright you can print out the part and take a look beforehand.

I've played both these pieces before, but it never hurts to take a look and re-familiarise yourself with the part. Even though I only play for fun, as far as I'm concerned this is part of taking a professional attitude to music and performance. Even though I'm not getting paid, the audience will be paying to hear us, and they deserve the best performance I can manage.

So, a quick look at the horn parts for the Requiem reveals initially that there is the usual range of transpositions. The 1st part starts in F, then is in "tief Bb" for the 2nd movement. If you aren't sure what "tief" means in English, look it up, there are plenty of German-English dictionaries online. And in doing so, you learn that "tief" means "low". So the transposition is Bb basso, down a perfect 5th. It becomes obvious in the passage at letter I which goes up to a written top C, which would be a super-high F if the part were Bb alto. Brahms never wrote so high for the horn. The 3rd movement is in D, the 4th in Eb, the 5th in D, the 6th in C, and the 7th back in F.

Interestingly, the 3rd & 4th horns have different transpositions from the 1st & 2nd. 3 & 4 are tacet for the 1st movement but are in "tief C" (C basso) for the 2nd movement and tief Bb for the 3rd. Brahms was never all that keen on valved horns, so wrote transposing parts for hand horn as far as possible, though he wasn't above including notes in the parts that are not on the harmonic sequence! And that in fact is the major challenge of this piece - the horn parts have all sorts of odd notes and accidentals. Your transposition really has to be secure to play this confidently.

I've been transposing since I was 10 years old. In my first year of high school, I was put into the school brass band playing 4th horn, and in the first term they were playing the "Liberty Bell" march. But British brass bands don't normally use the french horn (though military bands, a completely different kind of ensemble, do). Instead, brass bands use the Eb tenor horn, which looks like an young tuba. So the part in front of me was for 4th horn in Eb. I took the part home, slightly flummoxed and showed it to my parents. My father (an accomplished amateur clarinettist) said "This one time, I'll write the part out for you in F, but after that, you're on your own and you will have to learn transposition." And that is what happened, and I have been transposing ever since when required. And it can be quite a useful skill, because it means that in any kind of group, if they are short on some instrument within my range, I can just pick up the part and transpose as needed. Bassoon, tuba, euphonium, saxophone or even trumpet parts get played from time to time.

But being good at transposing requires that you keep practicing - keeping the knowledge well-oiled. So I'll take a look over the parts and check out any awkward notes. For instance, the 1st horn part in the 3rd movement (horn in D) has Cb and Fb and Ab, which are certainly not notes you would commonly see in a transposed part. A quick fingering check of the offending passage will be needed - the last thing you want is to see such odd notes for the first time in the final rehearsal, and panic as you work out what the note transposes to!

If you don't know which part you are going to play, it is always a good idea to look through the lower parts as well as 1st. Of course, you need to be prepared if it turns out that you are on 1st chair, but you also don't want to look silly if you are on a lower part and there is a tricky passage which trips you up. And I notice that the 2nd part does have one or two such passages. For instance the 4th movement (in Eb) has a 2-octave descending arpeggio passage down to a pedal C that looks as if it might be quite exposed (Brahms does a similar trick several times in the 1st Serenade). So that will need a bit of a look.

Then there are the Haydn variations. This is the famous "St Anthony Chorale". Brahms provides a simple orchestration to the initial theme, and then goes off into a total of eight variations and a finale. With some of the variations, you do need to listen very hard to work out what relation they have to the original theme! But you don't really need to know in order to enjoy listening to the piece. More transposition - horns 1 & 2 are in tief Bb, and horns 3 & 4 are in a mixture of F and Eb.

1st horn has occasional solo fragments, and has the tune for much of variation 4 . The horns are all prominent in variation 6. Horn 3 has what looks like some prominent moments in variation 3, and variation 7. If you don't know the work already, a dead giveaway for an exposed passage, even if not marked solo (they often aren't) is the instruction espressivo, (often abbreviated to espr). And sure enough, that instruction is in variation 7 in the 3rd horn part. Horn in F at that point, so no difficulty with transposition, but it will need to be projected. I'll have a look at that as well.

The main thing with Brahms though is the overall style. Brahms' music for the most part is extremely gentle. He doesn't often go in for the loud climaxes of Tchaikovsky. But he really understands the horn and how to write for it. He writes gorgeous horn parts, which demand a particular playing style, including the following characteristics.

Smooth projected tone in the exposed passages, usually very legato. Avoid any kind of brassy edge to the tone.
Clearly articulated (but not aggressive) staccatos where required.
Accents don't need to be too aggressive. Ping them and fall back, you don't need to exaggerate and you need to play them within the context of your smooth tone colour.
Careful blending into the background when the horns are not solo.
Forte sustained notes should generally be given a bit of an accent to start with and then drop back to mf or even mp. Sustained whole-bar notes are not the most interesting things to listen to, so you must give the tune (whoever is playing it) a chance to come through.
"Hairpin" markings need to be scrupulously observed and if anything a little exaggerated, but make sure that having increased in dynamic you drop down again properly during the decrescendo. Often a pair of hairpins is intended to bring out just 2 or 3 notes to the foreground before you return to being an anonymous part of the texture. Do that without the conductor having to tell you (both the crescendo and decrescendo), and you can save a good deal of rehearsal time which can be spent on trickier stuff. The conductor will be grateful.

The overall message is that you coax the sound out of the instrument, you don't force it. This is musicality for playing Brahms. Other composers have different requirements, but this is what Brahms asks for.

And how do I know this? I've played most of Brahms' orchestral works, and partly from what the conductor says, and partly from listening to the music itself, this is what I've discovered about it. As you become familiar with a composer's style, you think yourself more or less automatically into that style when you get a piece of his to play. Players of the other instruments will express in slightly different terms what is needed of them to make their own particular contribution to the overall sound. But I suspect that all will think generally in terms of the smoothness of the tone required and the blending that is needed.

Beethoven Rondino

2009-09-30T22:49:00.000+01:00

I've been asked to play with Ealing Symphony Orchestra this weekend (their regular first horn is busy elsewhere), for a special concert to honour Spencer Perceval, who became Prime Minister 200 years ago this year, and was assassinated in office 3 years later, the only British Prime Minister to have been killed in office. He came from Ealing, and a plaque dedicated to him is being unveiled on Saturday October 3rd at 7pm in All Saints Church, Elm Grove Road, followed by a concert in his honour, during which the local MP Stephen Pound will give a short talk about him. If you are in the area, do come along - tickets are just £4.

I'm playing in 2 pieces, the Dvorak Serenade for Wind, and the Beethoven Rondino for wind octet. I've played the Dvorak many times, it's a staple of the wind ensemble repertoire, but I've never got round to playing the Beethoven before, though I've heard recordings of it. I haven't been given the part yet, so I decided to print off the score from IMSLP. (IMSLP is an absolutely wonderful resource if you need to study any out-of-copyright music. I can't recommend it highly enough.)

And it is a delightful little piece with some very prominent horn parts - a fact made very clear because Beethoven puts the horn parts on the first 2 staves of the score, followed by the oboes, clarinets and bassoons.

Keeping with my recent theme of musicality, I thought I'd write a bit about how I approach this piece when practicing. Technically the piece is not overly challenging, but it will need to be played musically if the audience is going to enjoy it.

So, first things first. The piece is Andante, obviously intended to be a steady 4 quavers to a bar. It is in Eb major, and the horn parts are written transposed in Eb. It's a nice gentle speed for a horn tune - very characteristic of the instrument. It's the sort of speed in which many great horn solos have been written. Unless the group uses a conductor, the horn will lead off and so has to set the initial speed. It mustn't go too fast, otherwise the 2nd horn will murder me when he has to play demisemiquavers later in the piece, but it mustn't be allowed to drag. A nice steady walking pace, perhaps quaver=80 or thereabouts.

The first horn has the tune for the first 8 bars. It's a nice simple tune, 2 four-bar phrases, in each phrase the first and 3rd bars are repeated and the 2nd & 4th bars have a little variation. From all the slurs everywhere, it is clear that everything has to be very legato. This is a singing solo, the sound has to be projected but smooth and with the appearance of not being overly loud. The 2nd bassoon has a countermelody in the bass, and the 2nd horn and the clarinets are providing harmonic filling.

So, there are various choices I have to make with the opening solo.

Breathing: From the fact that there are tenuto instructions on the crotchets in bars 1 & 2, it is clear that there should be no break for breath after either crotchet. That means that I must take the whole of the first 4 bars in a single breath to give continuity to the phrase. Beethoven reinforces the point by putting in a nice quaver rest at the end of bar 4. That quaver is in fact tacet for the whole group. There's no mistaking how you are expected to breathe.

Grace note: Should the grace notes at the start of bars 2 & 4 be on the beat or before? Just before the beat seems to me to sound much better, it allows the 4 semiquavers to be nice and even, and trying to co-ordinate an on-beat grace note with the staccato bassoon quaver seems unnecessarily awkward. So ahead of the beat is what I'll do, unless the conductor or the group overrule me in rehearsal. Music making is a group activity - you work out together what is best and will achieve a good performance.

Dynamic changes: There aren't any marked dynamics apart from the initial p, but should anything be done beyond a steady piano throughout? Looking at it, I'm inclined to put a bit of a crescendo into bar 5 to make the first half of the 2nd phrase a bit stronger, then then drop down a notch for bars 7 & 8 to make a bit of an echo. It just provides that bit of variation to keep the audience interested.

2nd clarinet and 1st bassoon take the tune for the next 2 bars, and 1st oboe and 2nd clarinet take it for the following 2 bars, after which there is a tutti forte recapitulation of the opening phrase. Although the 1st horn is marked forte in bars 13-16, and only piano when it has the tune in bars 1-8, you shouldn't play much louder, since you don't have the tune and are providing harmonic filling. The extra sound will come from all the other instruments taking a step up in dynamic and this being the first point at which all 8 players and playing at once.

The next 8 bars for me just contain some repeated semi-staccato semiquavers, pianissimo. 1st clarinet has the tune, everyone else is accompanying. I'll need to listen out carefully to make sure that the dynamics match (so the clarinet can come through without forcing) and also to match the length of the staccato notes - we will want all 5 instruments with those semiquavers to be doing them in the same style. Although the semi-staccato marking is only written in full for the first bar, it is clearly intended to be played the same to the end of the passage.

After the repeat, the oboe takes the tune, and 1st horn has an arpeggio passage. This isn't tune, it is a combination of supporting harmony and rhythm. I think I'll play the semiquavers a bit detached (we will be in a church, the acoustic will probably be a bit muddy) and then the quavers more legato.

The horns are mostly doing supporting stuff for a while, so all the principles I wrote about in the articles on the Eroica apply here, until we come to the double bar and the second subject.

At this point it all gets a bit darker as the piece modulates from a carefree Eb major into a much darker Bb minor. (The key signature isn't changed to reflect this, but you can work it out from the extra accidentals written in.) 1st horn has the tune again, but the accompaniment is even more pared-down than at the start - just 1st bassoon & 2nd horn playing quavers. There's no supporting rhythm, just a bit of harmony below. The tone and phrasing has to reflect this darker mood.

The first 8 bars are 2 repeated 4-bar phrases. In other circumstances I might consider echoing the 2nd set, playing it quieter for a contrast, but it doesn't seem appropriate here, the tension is intended to build through the next 8 bars which have a similar rhythm but are a tone higher. So I might do the the very slightest crescendo through the whole 16 bars to maintain this slight sense of menace, and drop back to pianissimo for the semi-staccato detached quavers in the 17th bar after the key change.

Although it's not written in to the horn part, the pianissimo is clearly intended to last only 3 notes, and the solo piano to return on the high G crotchet. The sf markings on the Ab notes are not major accents, it is just leaning into the note a bit, everyone does it the second & third times.

And with a pair of hairpins on two crotchets, we return with relief to the sunlit uplands of Eb major and a recapitulation of the original tune, with some small variation in the notes of the tune and a much busier accompaniment including 1st bassoon playing an Alberti bass below you. It's very important to make the recapitulation sound like a homecoming. The audience have been on a difficult journey, but they are back home safe now and can rest & relax.

The horns are now mostly supporting for a while, though 2nd horn has a busy demisemiquaver arpeggio passage for a few bars, which will probably be easier played all with 1st valve on the F side.

And we finally come to the coda, where the whole group shuts up and it is just the two horns with the tune and a bit of harmony. It's the same tune as at in the first 4 bars of the piece, but there is now a nasty twist - the 2nd & 4th bars of the original phrase are now repeated, marked con sordino. Definitely an echo effect intended here, but it is going to be tricky to get mutes in and out so quickly.

This is perhaps the earliest use of the con sord instruction for horns in Beethoven's work - about the only other example that comes to mind is the closing solo in the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony.

But enough of history, there is still the need to work out how to play the con sord passages. For the 1st horn part, the answer to me is fairly straightforward. Even with the mute on a cord round my wrist, there's not time to swap between mute and hand. I don't want to play the open bars with the mute half-inserted, I don't like the effect on my tone. So I'm not going to attempt to use the mute, I'm going to play those bars handstopped. I can get a nice echo effect that way. But the second horn is also con sord, and playing in a much lower register, going down to a pedal C (actually Bb once you take into account the transposition). Handstopping doesn't work so well down there. Quite how we will address that is something we'll have to work out in rehearsal. There are various options available, and we'll have to see which works best for the player concerned. If I were playing it, I would be inclined to handstop the first con sord bar, and then handstop the first note of the next one, and just play the remaining two quavers (the low G and the pedal C) as quietly as possible, but not stopped.

So there you are. It's a small piece. It doesn't have the grandeur or drama of the Eroica symphony, but it has its musical and technical challenges, and I hope the audience will go home thinking "I hadn't heard that Beethoven piece before. It was rather beautiful, I'd like to hear it again sometime."

Musicality and musical content

2009-09-25T23:23:00.000+01:00

Lyle Sanford has been pondering on my musings on musicality. The interesting thing about his response is how it veers between expressing resonance for the ideas I'm trying to express and very perceptively noticing how much I haven't yet found a way to describe.

One thing that fascinates me is that he makes a number of wonderful points about how to play with more expression, and how to avoid breaking the spell the music is casting, without going into the nature of the expression or the spell. ... His post tells how to make pieces of music express their content, but not how to ascertain the nature of that content.

And that is a very good point. As an orchestral musician you aren't really required to think too much about the content - you have the dots on the page and you play them. I commented about this on the Memphis horn list a year or so ago.

"I suspect that a surprisingly large number of orchestral musicians (even at a professional level) regard their work as a craft rather than an art.

By that, I mean that they regard their task as beginning and ending with the mastery of their particular instrument and playing the notes in whatever fashion the conductor requires of them. They aren't much concerned with musicianship and interpretation, they leave that to the conductor."

It triggered a heartfelt response from Wendell Rider

I love the comment in JW's post about leaving the musical part to the conductor! So true and so pathetic. Conductors? They have been bottom-lining for so long they haven't got any music left in them. Fortunately for them, the performances are now judged only by the "perfection index," which simply requires the right notes at acceptable tolerances of dynamics and rhythm. Just read the reviews. Those have been bottom-lined too. We have lost our way.

I don't think things are quite that bad, but having seen friends and family who are professional musicians (I decided against a career in music and have never regretted the decision), I can see how the work and the unsocial hours and the travelling and the sheer repetitiveness of playing the same stuff over and again can get people down after a while, and cause them to take a rather cynical attitude to the work they do and the music they play. I'm lucky, I'm an amateur, there are few orchestral pieces I have ever performed more than half a dozen times, and the performances usually come sufficiently far apart that the piece is fresh each time I return to it.

But there is something else about playing in an orchestra. It is that you are part of a crowd. As anyone who has participated in songs at football matches knows, when crowds are involved, music takes on a whole new dimension, even if the participants are entirely untrained at it. Nobody can possibly be unmoved when the whole of Anfield stadium is encouraging Liverpool to greater efforts by a full-blooded rendition of "You'll never walk alone".

If I recall correctly, Brian May (lead guitarist of Queen) once commented about how he loved playing big stadium concerts, because of how he could affect the emotions of such a huge group of people merely by making movements of a quarter of an inch with a finger of his left hand. of course, he would be able to tell he was doing that unless they responded to him and he could see and hear them.

Most of my most exhilarating moments in music have come when participating in a large-scale performance (though not in a stadium!), usually of a thoroughly romantic work, where all is going well, and everyone is playing just that bit better than they realised they could, and I'm surrounded by this tremendous pulsating energy, this wall of sound, and I know I am making my own small contribution to it. The total seems so much more than the sum of the parts, it is so uplifting.

When playing in a large group doing well, all kinds of instantaneous feedback and adjustment is going on between and among the players, who are responding to each other and not merely to the conductor. And this happens far too fast and unconsciously for anybody to be able to describe in any kind of detail exactly what is going on, even after the event. I know (sort of) what is going on, because I see it and I hear it and hopefully I do it myself, but it's a devil of a job trying to describe it. I have a habit of analytical thought from my scientific training and my work as a computer programmer, so I'm perhaps in a better position to try and describe it than professional musicians who are far better than me at it in almost every way. I can perhaps detach myself a little bit and look on it from a perspective not available to many professional musicians.

It is one of those things you just have to learn by taking part and getting better at it. You hear and you instantly adjust in order to fit in with the overall idea or emotion that is being collectively expressed through the music. And in doing to, it can make your heart sing.

Lyle goes on to say:

High level players are expected to play any piece put before them well and musically and with whatever spin a conductor wants to put on it. I guess the assumption is that when played coherently and correctly, any piece will convey the content the composer intended.

It helps if the players have an idea of what they are about in terms of the composer's overall intention, but surprisingly it isn't always necessary. Earlier this year, a local orchestra I play in included Michael Tippett's Triple Concerto on one of their concert programmes. Tippett writes uncompromisingly modern music. The solo parts (violin, viola and cello) have a great many notes, far more than the orchestra can really hear and relate to. Rehearsing the orchestral accompaniment felt like trying to solve a particularly fiendish cryptic crossword. There were so many changes of time signature, changes of speed, odd intervals and rhythms that in the orchestra we were fully occupied with the technicalities of counting, hitting the right notes and not getting lost. Talking with the other players during the coffee breaks, I found that they all were finding the piece difficult and not all that rewarding to rehearse. I suspect that this feeling came from the fact that they weren't able to perceive the overall structure, and so couldn't properly understand how their own contributions were supposed to fit. I suspect also that very few of them could have expressed that aspect of their dissatisfaction in words.

And yet, come the concert, friends of mine in the audience (including some who had rarely been to a classical concert) found the piece very powerful and stirring and enjoyable. It seems that sometimes the composer makes his intentions sufficiently clear in the score that as an orchestral musician you don't have to do much more than accurately play what is written and keep together.

In chamber music, you have to take much more responsibility for the shape and structure. You need to be able to understand the emotions being conveyed, nor merely in the choice of speed and phrasing and dynamics, but for instance in invoking the sense of "returning home" when the movement comes back into the key and theme that it started out with. You have to have some understanding of the journey you are leading the audience on.

And if you are the conductor of an orchestra, you of course have to have even more idea what you want to achieve. Deciding what shape the performance will take and inducing the orchestra to follow you along the road you lead them on is the your one and only task. You produce no sound at all during the performance (or at least, that is the idea!) but without the conductor, no coherent performance is possible. I may write a bit more on conducting another time.

"8 Simple Rules" for playing in an orchestra

2009-09-14T15:07:00.000+01:00

8. Make sure that you have everything you need with you at rehearsal
That includes instrument, mouthpiece, music, stand (unless supplied by the orchestra, if in doubt bring your own), pencil, eraser, and any mutes needed for the works to be played.

7. Be sure you know whether repeats are in or out, and mark them in the part
You don’t want to bring a rehearsal or concert to a halt because you get this wrong and make a solo entry 40 bars out of place.

6. Check your transposition
It is embarrassing to bring the orchestra to a halt because you didn’t notice that the part is in E and made a solid entry a semitone out. Clarinettists have an equivalent special rule – always make sure you start a piece with the correct clarinet in your hands. For everyone else, the nearest equivalent rule is to check your clef and key signature.

5. Don’t gossip
Music is a small world, and all gossip will ultimately get back to the person you are gossiping about. And that is the end of any prospect of them phoning you to ask you to do a gig. If you can’t say something nice about a person, remain silent on the subject.

4. Keep to the same speed as the conductor
Getting behind or ahead of the beat is far more noticeable than playing a few wrong notes, or even missing a few. Getting out of place like this fosters uncertainty among everyone else – do they follow you or the conductor?

3. Don’t be late
Being late to rehearsal is far more noticeable than merely not playing all that well. It is also very unprofessional. Being late to a concert is even more so! If you are a student, get into a good habit on this right from the start - it will be noticed if you don't, and that can end a career even before it has properly started. If you are an amateur, it is a courtesy to your fellow-players to be on time for all rehearsals.

Occasionally circumstances make it impossible to get there on time. If you know ahead of time that you will be unavoidably late, then try and let somebody know. If you are a student or professional, don't just try, make very sure that you succeed. Make sure you have your mobile phone with you when travelling to a gig, and make sure you have a note of the relevant numbers so that you can call ahead in emergency.

2. Don’t argue with the conductor
Especially if you are right and he is wrong. He will hold it against you for ever more.

1. Don’t play in the rests
Playing when you should be silent (such as in a general pause) is far more noticeable than being silent when you should be playing. There is absolutely no hiding who is responsible when this happens!

And yes, I have broken all these rules myself at one time or another, and have learned from bitter experience how important they are. I try very hard not to do it again.

On "cheating" when you play the horn

2009-09-13T18:10:00.000+01:00

Not all horn parts are actually playable. Not all composers have enough of an understanding of the horn in order to write horn parts that are practical in terms of the effort and the technique required to achieve the desired effect.

Among the composers and arrangers I have spoken to, they are mostly only too happy to have you make minor adjustments to the part if it achieves a fairly close approximation to their intended effect and enables security to be enhanced.

So you shouldn't hesitate to do the same if you come across a part from a composer who is dead or otherwise unavailable for consultation. You do what is necessary. You find a workaround. You cheat.

A typical example is from "Limoges", the 7th movement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (orch Ravel). The passage I mean is available at the Horn Excerpts website.

At this point, the whole orchestra is playing demisemiquavers (32nd notes). The horns aren't particularly prominent. If your double-tonguing isn't good enough to keep up, it doesn't matter all that much, you really don't need to play the demisemiquavers.

Many many years ago, I was playing the piece in the Norfolk County Youth Orchestra. We were all trying our best to do the double-tonguing but falling a bit behind. The conductor Lawrence Leonard called out to us "Horns! You're late! Do something about it!"

I leaned across to the first horn and said "Let's just play semiquavers - he will never be able to hear the difference." So that is what we did next time round.

Lawrence's response was "Horns, that was marvellous! What did you do?"
I called out "We're not telling you!"

Other cheats you can do:

Change the slurring as appropriate to make the passage more secure.
My teacher Douglas Moore was very keen on the technique of "soft-tonguing", tonguing a note for security, but so gently that nobody in the audience would particularly notice that the note wasn't legato. This works particularly well for wide slurs of a sixth or more.

Shorten a note in order to take a breath.
This is such standard practice that it almost doesn't count as a cheat.

In rapid tongued passages, slur an occasional pair of notes, especially at the start of a bar.
You may be astonished at how much easier this can make a passage. And the conductor would far prefer an occasional note pair to be slurred than for you to get behind the beat because you can't tongue fast enough.

If the passage is covered by other players, simply leave one or more notes out!
This is a perfectly valid approach. A few years ago, I did a short course with the Rehearsal Orchestra, we did Mahler 6 over a weekend with an informal performance at the end. I was playing 1st and had no assistant. I knew that my lips would never make it to the end unless I rested as much as practicable. So for much of the weekend, I listened out for passages where I was doubled by one of the other horns (usually 3rd or 5th), and I marked my part indicating notes that I could safely leave out.

The conductor congratulated me over a drink in the bar after the performance and asked how my lips had managed to last the weekend. I explained what I had done, and how even with notes left out, I had been running pretty much on empty by the end of the performance. He hadn't noticed anything missed out, and said that I had been extremely sensible to conserve my energy.

Take notes up or down an octave.
This won't do for solos or exposed passages of course, but if you are in the middle of the texture, nobody is likely to notice. But only do this as a last resort if no other measure will serve.

Use alternative fingerings in rapid passages.
You can do this even if it results in an occasional note using a harmonic that is somewhat out of tune. The note will flash past so quickly that nobody will hear the tuning.

Hand over a note or two to another player
If you are principal and have an assistant, then you can freely do this as much as you want. But even without an assistant, don't hesitate to hand over some notes to another part if that for instance gives you time to negotiate an awkward page turn, or grab a vital two bars rest to give your lips a break and to catch your breath.

Alternatively (and this works particularly well if you are playing on music that has two parts on the stave) you can have 1st and 2nd swap parts for a few bars to give yourself a bit of a break by playing the lower part. For instance, in Strauss waltzes, I'll frequently suggest that the horns swap parts for the repeats. It gives me a break and gives the 2nd horn a more interesting time. It's important that these swaps are marked in to the part so you don't find yourselves accidentally playing in unison!

You may notice that all of these tricks or cheats have the same sort of effect - they sacrifice some degree of rigid adherence to the written music in order to maintain the spirit of how it should sound. The score is not intended to be a work of art in its own right, it is intended to be a set of instructions or guidelines for the performance which is the work of art. Don't confuse the two.

And if you think this is not proper horn playing, fine. Get your technique good enough that you don't have to cheat. But no matter how good you get, I can guarantee that you will one day come across a passage that just doesn't work as written, and you will have to make some adaptation. Better that you know ahead of time what sorts of things will work. Everybody cheats to some extent. Think of it as exercising musicality.

A bit more on musicality

2009-09-11T19:19:00.000+01:00

It seems that I can never be satisfied with just one post on a topic, I always have to go back for another bite at it.

I found that my inability to describe how to achieve musicality was a bit troubling - surely I can do better than that!

And I've concluded that there is one concept I mentioned in almost throwaway fashion which holds the key.

Mimicry.

There are lots of definitions of "mimic", but I'll just take this one from the Free Dictionary

To copy or imitate closely, especially in speech, expression, and gesture.

A lot of music and dance is mimicry. Country dances where everyone is in step with each other, jazz jamming, little children learning nursery songs and all clapping their hands together at the same time. They are all forms of mimicry.

Paul McCartney hearing a skiffle band and wanting to take up guitar. Karaoke, people playing air guitar, professional orchestral musicians following the gestures of a conductor. Me hearing a recording of Dennis Brain playing the Mozart concertos and wishing I could do that. All mimicry in their own different ways.

Mothers and babies smiling and giggling at each other are a very important kind of mimicry. Not for nothing do we call such activities "getting in tune".

And music lessons. You are learning how to play what the teacher tells you, but more importantly shows you. You are learning to mimic your teacher. Not just in technique, but also (if your teacher knows his business) in style, in musicality.

Of course, musicality isn't quite just mimicry. Once you develop beyond a certain level, you learn not merely to imitate from one source, but to borrow from several, so that you develop your own unique and personal synthesis in your style of playing. You develop beyond merely doing what your teacher tells you to do and decide for yourself what will make a good shape to the next phrase you play.

But those decisions aren't based on the kind of rational thinking that enables you to calculate your monthly budget. The information you process is too extensive and amorphous for that. In essence, you are drawing on the experience of all the music you have ever heard or played in your life before (whether you consciously remember it or not) and as a result you decide that a phrase should be shaped in just this way, with the emphasis just there.

And you know, without quite knowing how or why, that doing it just that way will cause sadness, joy, excitement, calmness and a whole range of other emotions to be experienced by the audience. You induce them to mimic the emotions you express.

Musicality

2009-09-08T15:58:00.000+01:00

Some time back Lyle Sanford asked in passing if I might write a bit about what I understand of this topic.

And I’ve thought and thought, and it is difficult. Musicality is one of those things that is very hard to describe and very easy to recognise. It is the ability to entrance an audience with your playing, to perform in a way that brings out all the best of the composer’s intentions, that blends sensitively and apparently effortlessly with the other players in the group, that knows when to drop into the background and when to come to the fore, and adds that little personal touch all of your own that makes the performance unique.

But how on earth do you go about describing how to do it? And still more to the point, how do you go about acquiring it? Anybody who wishes to become a professional player is going to have to be able to display abundant musicality – orchestras aren’t in the least bit interested in automata who can reliably hit a top C every time but can’t put feeling into the solo from the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s 5^th Symphony.

So I decided to do a websearch and see what others have said on the subject. There is surprisingly little. I came across a contribution by Hans Pizka. It is about the only thing I found on the web that was concerned with expressing musicality in performance, which is curious given how important it is.

Some of this abilities can be acquired by hard work or simple experience: rhythmical training, ear training, recognizing forms knowing the works very well. Exact memory for music is a good tool also, but requires some analytic memory. Feeling for forms & the interaction between forms can be developed by great experience in the arts, in all arts, which can be acquired by visiting museums, reading encyclopaedias, specially about the classical arts from Egyptian arts to Greece & Rome. So one gets a feeling about esthetic.

That’s a good start. It describes the kinds of things you should be looking to do. Hans of course also described various pre-requisites – a good ear, mastery of the instrument etc. Hans also has the poetic effect well described.

If you listen to certain chords, and it starts running down your back icecold, and your flesh begins to creep, that's where musicality starts. If you listen to music, and you feel like flying in outer space, that's where musicality starts. If you listen to music, and you become angry or sad, that's where musicality starts. And if you are able, to bring others into the moods said above by your playing, well, then you are a musical musician.

Spot on. But Hans doesn’t describe in any great detail how you go about improving your musicality. He’s been a professional player for so many years that it doubtless is entirely natural to him by now. But us lesser mortals do need to think about it a bit more.

So, let me see what I can contribute that might hopefully be of some use.

Unless you are playing entirely solo and unaccompanied (rare for a horn player), you must listen to what is going on around you. Whatever you are playing, in whatever kind of ensemble, you have to fit in. You can’t fit in if you can’t hear or don’t listen to what else is happening. You need a certain amount of ego in order to have the nerve to get up in front of an audience and play, but ultimately that ego has to be dedicated to the music. You are there to serve the music, the music isn’t there to make you look good.

You have to have enough familiarity with the music (and mastery of the instrument) that you aren’t worrying merely about the notes. You need to have mental effort available to think about how you will play a passage, not merely which notes come one after the other.

You have to have an idea in your mind of what you want to achieve. You must have a picture in your mind of how the phrase would sound if all your technical limitations were suddenly to vanish away. Depending on the style of the piece, you may decide that the climax of a crescendo will happen just there, or that those staccato notes will be just so long and accented by that much.

Then there is mimicry. When playing, it will often happen that you repeat a phrase played a few seconds before on another instrument. Match the playing style as best you can.

You can plan for musicality a bit beforehand, (I’ve described examples of that in the articles on the Eroica.) You can mark in breath marks to ensure you don’t run out of air at the vital moment. If you are principal horn of your orchestra and you have the luxury of an assistant, you can pass off passages to the assistant to play alone so that you are rested and ready for the key solos. You can practice slurring and fingerings so that technical limitations don’t get in the way of the music. You can mark in planned crescendos or rubatos, or additional accents or tenutos you intend making.

But all these markings should be regarded as general guidance rather than fixed instruction, because ultimately it is down to the inspiration of the moment and the conditions at the time. Even between an afternoon rehearsal and the evening concert conditions can change. The temperature of the hall may have risen, the acoustic will be different because of all the extra bodies present, and the conductor in his excitement may take the piece at a somewhat different tempo. So you have to instantly adjust how you take a phrase to fit the circumstances.

But how do you decide what adjustments you should make to tempo, dynamics and phrasing in order to sound musical? There I can help less, certainly very little in an article like this which isn’t looking at a specific piece of music. Sit me next to another player who wants help with a passage, and I can make suggestions. Put me in charge of an amateur orchestral horn section and I will get them playing musically together. But I’m not quite sure how I do it. I know what to say in any particular circumstance, but I have no idea specifically where it comes from in any particular case.

But I think it is more general than that. I come from a musical family. My parents were both musical, my father a keen amateur clarinettist, my mother a teacher of violin and piano. All four children of the family learned musical instruments, and my younger sister has gone on to become a professional violinist. I started learning the piano when I was five and the horn when I was eight or nine, and continued with regular lessons until I was 23. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t playing or listening to music of one kind or another. I’ve absorbed it through my pores and it is deeply ingrained in me now. And I suspect that this is ultimately the secret to musicianship. You have to love the music and immerse yourself in it, and eventually you just know how a piece should be played.

And that learning never ceases. When I was a student, my teacher made me learn the Richard Strauss 2^nd Horn Concerto. Technically it is extremely demanding, pushing most students to the limits of their abilities – I know it pushed me to the limits of mine. But its musical idiom is a bit strange and it takes some getting used to, especially the first movement where the horn part appears to wander aimlessly about without ever quite managing to break into an actual tune. As a student, I just didn’t like the piece. I didn’t get it. Of course, my teacher marked in various crescendos and decrescendos and rubatos, and I dutifully got louder and softer and slower in the indicated places. But if I have to be honest, I was faking musicality, I didn’t actually have any kind of conception as to what I was trying to achieve overall.

But since then, I have been exposed to much more music than I had known at the time as a student. I’ve performed in Mahler and Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies, I’ve played through Wagner operas, Tchaikovsky ballets, Dvorak and Richard Strauss tone poems. All of these are part of the musical landscape into which Strauss placed his concerto, and understanding them helped me to understand it. Relatively recently I played both the Strauss Sonatinas for Wind, which he wrote at around the same time as the second horn concerto. The first horn parts of the Strauss Sonatinas are at least as technically challenging as the solo part in the 2^nd horn concerto. But playing the pieces in a group, and seeing how the horn part fitted with everything else, I finally began to piece together how the concerto is built, since it is in a similar style. Looking again at the solo horn part, my teacher’s pencil markings make sense to me at last. Now, in the unlikely event that anybody would ask me to, with adequate preparation I think I could put on quite a musical performance of the piece. It’s only taken 30 years since I first looked at the music.

Musicality matures, like a fine wine.

Performance etiquette

2009-08-30T16:59:00.000+01:00

An issue that came up in the Yahoo mailing list a while ago is how quickly you lift your horn up and put it down at the start and end of a passage. It turned into a more general discussion of performance etiquette.

My view is that the number of bars ahead you need to be ready depends to on the speed of the music. I generally aim to have my horn ready, with me looking at the conductor a few seconds before I make an entry, so that if the conductor decides to specifically cue me, he can make eye contact and be confident that I am following him.

As for putting the horn down at the end of a passage and start of a rest, this very much depends on circumstances. Normally, I keep the horn up for a second or two after I finish a passage, just to make sure that the horn is completely steady until I have thoroughly finished the last note of the passage. It is too easy to crack the last note of a passage because you are already getting set to put the horn down.

If there is only a few seconds rest until the the next passage, then the horn will stay up and ready, but I might take the mouthpiece off my lips for a moment. If the rest is longer, I will slowly and calmly put the horn down until it is next needed.

There are exceptions of course. For instance, the horn will go down very quickly in the following cases:

If I have only a short rest in which to turn a page
If I need to empty the horn and don't have much time

The horn will stay up at my lips for a longer time in the following cases:

At the end of a movement, until the conductor puts his baton down and relaxes
At a general pause, until the conductor starts the next passage

These last two cases and the "slowly and calmly" bit perhaps need a bit of explanation, because they have no direct effect on the sound you produce.

If you are playing in a concert, you are providing a visual spectacle as well as an aural experience. As far as possible, your movements when not playing must not distract members of the audience from their enjoyment of the music and of the playing of your colleagues. So you avoid sudden movements where possible, and when there is a silence, a moment of stillness
in the music, you absolutely must not break that stillness visually or aurally by making any kind of movement at all.

Although this really only applies during concerts, it is good to get into the habit of doing it all the time in rehearsals as well so that it comes completely naturally to keep still where required on the concert platform.

Why avoid unnecessary movements when not playing? Primarily to avoid distracting the audience (who are after all paying to enjoy the performance). Doing the same in rehearsal is simply good practice - i.e. practicing doing it right. If as a result you reduce the causes of distraction of other players, so much the better.

I take the view that whether the players are being paid or not, the audience is paying to listen, and that they therefore deserve the best performance the players can put on, in all aspects. This might be thought of as a small detail, but it is a detail which is easy to get right, and good performances come from attention to a succession of small details.

Chamber music and watching each other

2009-08-17T17:17:00.000+01:00

I've just come back from a week of music-making up at the Edinburgh Fringe. The concerts were very enjoyable though the audiences were disappointingly small.

I was playing in St Clements Wind Ensemble, and we played a mixture of wind quintets and larger pieces.

For the larger pieces we mostly used a conductor, except for the Mozart Serenade in C minor which is rhythmically sufficiently straightforward not to need one. For the quintets we mostly didn't use a conductor, except for the Ligeti Bagatelles, which is extremely complex. If you get asked to play this, ask for the part ahead of time, listen to a recording, and don't accept at all unless you can reliably slur a 5th up to a piano top C.

One delightful piece we played was Swansea Town, a set of 8 folk tune variations by Gordon Jacob. Each variation was in a different style and often at a different speed. We had a variety of time signatures - 4/4. 6/8, 2/4, 5/4, 3/4 and one variation that had alternate bars in 2/3 and 3/4.

With a piece like this, the key to success (or at least to staying together!) is how you manage the transitions from one variation to the next. We worked out who should lead us off at the start, and then we worked out who had the tune (or alternatively the fastest moving part) at the start of each variation. That person was given the job of acting as leader for that transition, and waved his or her instrument to indicate the new beat. Everyone else had the job of watching the leader for that moment to ensure that we all stayed together.

There were also occasions where it was important that two particular instruments came in together. For instance, in a short bridge passage between two variations, the horn and clarinet made an entry together while nothing else is happening apart from a held note on the flute. So we marked our parts to remind ourselves to look at each other at that point.

The Mozart Serenade in C minor is a lovely piece - a staple of the wind ensemble repertoire. The instrumentation is a pair each of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons. The same sort of technique is used to ensure we all stay together. The first oboe most usually leads off, though on one or two occasions it is the first clarinet.

As a horn player you are rarely leading, instead you are normally doing what you do in an orchestra - blending into the middle of the harmony. In the absence of the conductor, you have to do two things. One is that you have to listen extra carefully to what is going on, and second you have keep in sight in the corner of your eye whoever has the lead (usually first oboe or first clarinet) and make sure that you are following whatever they do, and keeping up with whatever they signal about pauses and or changes of speed.

In other words, you have to follow the conductor, just as in an orchestra, but the conducting duties get spread around the group. Even if no particular transition is imminent, keeping an eye on whoever has the tune is still a good idea. They may well want to do some slight rubato or expressive phrasing, and it is so much easier on them if they know the rest of the group is watching and will catch any temporary changes of speed.

When rehearsing chamber music like this, one of the important things to do at any transition is to decide who is leading at that point. You agree together how the transition will be done, e.g. how long a pause will be, or what a new speed will be. The designated leader then takes the responsibility of signalling the change, usually by waving the instrument in some discernible way. And the rest of the the group have to look and follow.

At a transition, mark in your part who is leading and therefore who you need to look at. If you are leading, then mark that in as well, so you remember to give the indications that everyone else is relying on.

The other key point about chamber music is that there is usually only one instrument with the tune. If you can't hear the tune clearly, you are too loud, even if marked forte. The horn can easily drown the other instruments in a quintet if you put your mind to it, and being the only brass instrument in the group you have a distinctive sound that comes through very easily. So except when you have a solo, all the dynamics need to be scaled down by one or two notches. So for instance a passage marked f should generally get about the same volume you would play mp in an orchestra. In the whole set of our concerts last week, there were really only two points at which I felt at liberty to let rip. One was a glissando to a top A in the first movement of Ibert's Trois pièces brèves, and the other was the end of one of the Ligeti Bagatelles where the last two or three bars have the horn marked fffz. For everything else, even where the horn was quite prominent, I was always calculating the volume appropriate to my part's place in the group.

This does lead to challenges. It means that you have to often play very quietly in the upper register, with all the dangers of clams that entails. Of course, you practice as as much as you can to minimize them, but don't lose sleep over an occasional one. The odd clam will be forgiven, playing too loud so you unbalance the ensemble will not. If you do that you simply won't get asked back.

Just intonation vs Equal temperament

2009-07-31T16:28:00.000+01:00

This isn't really quite about horn playing, but it quite clearly and obviously is about music - and if you want to be a good horn player then you must also be a good musician as well. And if you want to be a good musician, you have to have some kind of understanding of pitch and tuning.

So here's another way of understanding how scales work, and why equal temperament is a compromise that makes notes sound equally "nearly" right in all keys.

First of all, understand that for two notes an octave apart, the higher note is twice the frequency of the lower. For a true perfect 5th, the frequency ratio is 3/2. A perfect 4th is 4/3. All the intervals of the major scale can be expressed in terms of these whole number ratios (i.e. positions in the harmonic sequence relative to the key note). The example of C major scale is as follows Each note is described in terms of its frequency ratio relative to the C at the bottom end of the scale.

C 1/1
D 9/8
E 5/4
F 4/3
G 3/2
A 5/3
B 15/8
C 2/1

Now, if you look at a different key, G major for instance. All these frequency ratios above apply, but relative to the G at the bottom of the scale. But the G itself has a frequency ratio to the original C. So let's see what these ratios work out as when you multiply up.

G 3/2
A 3/2 * 9/8 = 27/16
B 3/2 * 5/4 = 15/8
C 3/2 * 4/3 = 2/1
D 3/2 * 3/2 = 9/4 (halve the frequency to go down an octave = 9/8)
E 3/2 * 5/3 = 5/2 (down an octave = 5/4)
F# 3/2 * 15/8 = 45/16 (down an octave = 45/32)
G 3/2 * 2/1

Now, compare these with the notes that are common to the C major scale. G, B, C, D and E have precisely the same tuning. But A does not. In C major with just intonation, A has a ratio of 5/3, or 1.6667. In G major, the frequency ratio is 27/16, or 1.6875. So in G major, A is slightly sharper than in C major (assuming that G is tuned to be 3/2 relative to C).

As you work your way through the various scales, you find that for every single scale, just intonation gives you different frequencies for some notes as compared to other scales which have those notes in common.

Now, if you are singing, or playing a stringed instrument without frets, then this is not a problem, you can sing or play in just intonation for whichever key you happen to be in and you can make the necessary adjustments as you change key. But it is a bit of a problem for a keyboard instrument. You can't instantaneously change the tuning of the a proportion of the strings whenever a piece modulates into another key! This mean that if a keyboard was tuned to just intonation in one key, it would sound distinctly odd if you play a piece in a key that is distant from it.

Enter equal temperament. I'm not sure anybody knows who invented it, but Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei) was one of the first recorded advocates of it. It took a while to catch on, but by the time of Mozart, it was universally used for the tuning of keyboard instruments. Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier in order to demonstrate the possibilities of "well tempering" which was a form of nearly-equal temperament, showing that a single keyboard instrument could play reasonably in tune in all 12 major and minor keys.

True 12-tone equal temperament, which is what we generally mean by the phrase these days, works on the principle that an octave is divided into 12 exactly equal semitones. By equal, that means equal in frequency ratio. But if you divide a 2:1 ratio into 12 equal ratios, you don't get integer ratios. The frequency ratio is 2^1/12 or about 1.059. This is not an integer ratio - you can't get a pair of integers where you divide one into the other to get exactly 2^1/12.

Now, when you compare the integer ratios with the frequencies obtained by equal temperament, you find that there are some differences. The following list gives you the difference in cents (100ths of a semitone) between equal temperament and just temperament for the notes of a major scale. Negative numbers indicate that just intonation is flat relative to equal temperament, positive numbers indicate that just intonation is sharp.

C 0
D 3.91
E −13.69
F −1.96
G 1.96
A −15.64
B −11.73
C 0

There are some quite substantial numbers there. The difference between just and equal temperament for an A is almost a sixth of a semitone. That is easily discernible.

The Wikipedia entry on Just intonation includes some sound samples which enable you to compare chords using just intonation with equal temperament. (You will need to have a player that can play OGG files to listen to the samples.) If you compare the sound sample that plays a scale and then various triads in just intonation, and then the sound sample that plays the same scale and triads in equal temperament, you will probably be able to hear some "beats" in the equal temperament version that aren't present in just intonation. So the advantage of equal temperament is that everything sounds about as good in all keys, and the disadvantage is that in all keys, you lose a little bit of harmonic purity through the frequency ratios of chords not being true harmonic (i.e. integer) ratios.

Now all that horrid maths is out of the way, you still are left with the question of how do you tune your horn?

And the answer has to be that because tuning varies, if you want to eliminate beats, especially when the horn section is playing as a quartet, you need to listen to and adjust if necessary every note you play. What is more, you can't assume that a particular adjustment (e.g. of hand position) will work the same way in two different pieces, especially if they happen to be in different keys. And then again, if you are playing with a piano, you are going to have to adapt to its equal temperament, whereas if you are playing the Beethoven Sextet (for 2 horns and string quartet), making the tuning sound "right" will involve something very close to just intonation.

Tuning is a dynamic thing - you never achieve a perfectly tuned instrument because the tuning varies according to circumstance, from piece to piece and even within a piece when the key modulates. You have to stay on your toes all the time.

How flat is that open E on the F side?

2009-07-30T20:47:00.000+01:00

Of course, it depends.

But if you make the assumption that the horn is in tune for its C (which is your responsibility to achieve) and that all the other harmonics are perfectly in tune to the harmonic sequence (which isn't true, but you get a decent approximation to it for the better brands of horn, at least if you have a good embouchure) then it is possible to calculate how far out the other harmonics are from equal temperament. So I've done that. Taking the various harmonics upwards from middle C, they are out from equal temperament as follows:

C = in tune
E = 13.7 cents flat
G = 2 cents sharp
Bb = 31.2 cents flat
C = in tune
D = 3.9 cents sharp
E = 13.7 cents flat
F = 51.3 cents sharp
G = 2 cents sharp
Ab = 40.5 cents sharp
Bb = 31.2 cents flat
B = 11.7 cents flat
C = in tune

Move all those pitches up a perfect 4th to get the tuning of the equivalent harmonics on the Bb side.

From this you can see easily why some harmonics were for the most part avoided by the classical composers. from middle C upwards, the E, G, C, D, E, F (with some bending by use of the hand to flatten it), G and top C harmonics are adequately in tune.

Although the E is 13.7 cents flat (100 cents make a semitone), when playing hand horn, you would generally be crooked in the key of the piece, and so that note would expect to be flat relative to equal temperament - in fact making it so will make it sound in tune for the key you are in.

So if you are playing a transposed part, if you see a written E, you know it is probably the third relative to the key of the piece, and so a bit of flatness on that note is OK.

But if you are playing a romantic or modern piece for valve horns with the part written in F irrespective of the key of the piece, then you can't make that assumption. That means that you have to think about the key and listen out for the rest of the orchestra for your tuning.

Just because you have your horn in tune to the oboe's A doesn't mean that you don't have to adjust note by note during a session. String players of my acquaintance say that when they are playing in a key with sharps, they position their fingers to play slightly sharper for C# and G# than they do when playing Db and Ab, in other words they are using just temperament rather then equal temperament. You will have to match them - whatever key the piece is in.

I also recall a story of a pianist who was the rehearsal pianist for a big choir. When he played the rehearsal piano by itself (tuned of course using equal temperament) it sounded perfectly well in tune, but when he accompanied the choir it always seemed a bit off. The singers would have (without realising it) been singing to just intonation in order to get their chords perfectly in tune, and so the piano would have sounded a bit odd.

Tuning is a complex business. Having a double horn makes it easier to play in tune, but don't assume that simply because you have a good instrument and you have tuned it, that you need do nothing more. When playing in an ensemble, you need to listen to every note, and make instantaneous adjustments where necessary.

Playing chamber music

2009-07-29T18:20:00.000+01:00

Playing chamber music is great fun. There's a far more intimate feel to it as compared to playing in an orchestra, and much more opportunity for you to express your individuality.

But there are certain other skills and talents that you need to hone if you are going to be a successful chamber player. They are somewhat different from those necessary to play well in an orchestra.

The first thing is that you play more in chamber music than in an orchestra, so your endurance needs to be better. A 2 hour rehearsal will tire you out far more than an equivalent orchestral session. So make sure you are up to scratch for your endurance.

There are a number of chamber groups which commonly include horns, some aspects of playing are common to all of them, and some are unique to each.

Wind quintet
This is one of the most common groupings. One thing to remember here is that if you play at full volume, you can easily drown a mere four woodwind players. So your playing needs to be gentle and toned down in terms of volume. Also, many woodwind quintet pieces (especially those by French composers) have textures that are gossamer-light, and your playing style needs to reflect this.

Brass quintet
This is the other most common combination. Your problem here is the precise opposite of your position in the woodwind quintet - your bell is the only one which faces away from the audience, so your sound will tend to appear muffled compared to the the other players, especially the trumpets. So you need to go in for sharper attacks and a solid bright tone.

One or two horns and strings
I'm thinking here of pieces like the Mozart Horn Quintet and the Beethoven Sextet. In essence the horns are solo instruments, though in a smaller context than that of an orchestral concerto. You have to think soloistically when playing such pieces.

Mixed wind and string ensembles
Pieces such as the Beethoven Septet and the Schubert Octet are what I think of for this ensemble. They have a bit more of an orchestral style to them - you are frequently providing notes in the middle of the harmony, but you have to keep the style nice and light to compensate for the fact that you have only a single string player to each part instead of the serried ranks of players in an orchestra.

Larger wind ensembles
Anything from a wind octet for pieces such as the Mozart C Minor Serenade, through the Gounod Petite Symphonie (9 players), the Mozart "Gran Partita" Serenade for 13 wind, to even the Richard Strauss "Happy Workshop" Sonatina for 16 wind instruments. The more players you add, the closer you become to working as a small orchestra, especially if (above 10 players or so) you have a conductor. With more players, you can afford to produce a slightly more solid tone than for a wind quintet.

But there are some things which you need to do in all of these ensembles.

First is the one single most important thing about playing chamber music. You cannot bury yourself in your part and plough on with playing the notes. Just as in an orchestra you always need to keep one eye on the conductor, so in chamber music it is vital that you exchange regular eye contact with the other players as you play. You rely on each other to stay together and to coordinate the beat. By means of gestures and eye contact as you play, you can achieve far more flexibility with regard to changes in tempo than can be managed in an orchestra.

In a wind quintet, the upper instruments - flute or oboe, sometimes the clarinet - will have the tune more of the time, and so have more of the responsibility to set the style and tempo. Mark in your part where necessary who you need to look at for leadership as regards the beat. You will as a group need to decide at the start of each movement who is going to give the upbeat.

Because you don't have a conductor, the responsibility for maintaining the beat and the responsibility for deciding on phrasing an interpretation is shared among the players. It has to be done by agreement and consensus, with grace and good humour. Each player is playing his or her own unique instrument, and so everyone brings their own unique contribution to the group. There almost always is some kind of "pecking order" but hopefully is isn't too restrictive, and ideas can come from anywhere.

If you make a suggestion in rehearsal, the aim should always be to improve the performance as a whole. Try to phrase it as such. Saying "could we try at bar x again, I don't think we were quite together" is much better than turning to a specific player and saying "you were late at bar x". If you want the group (and your participation in it) to last, you have to be diplomatic.

If there is a weak player in the group, your performance is only going to be as good as that player can be cajoled into producing. So you need to provide encouragement and confidence to the weakest members of the group in order to get them to play better than they realised was possible for them.

Horns in small wind groups, particularly for classical pieces, often find themselves playing repeated quavers, while the tune goes on above. Here is a wonderful opportunity to be of service to the group as a whole. Don't play all the quavers the same strength, even if they are all marked with a common dynamic. Stress the first one of each bar, and possibly the one halfway through the bar as well. The aim is to offer an emphasis to the beat and enhance the rhythm. If you do things like this, the other players will find themselves surprised at how easy and enjoyable it is to play with you.

In brass quintets, the leader is almost inevitably the first trumpet. The same principles apply in terms of looking at each other to coordinate phrasing and speed. The first trumpet will most often be the person gesturing the upbeats at the start of a piece, and will also usually be the person coordinating rubatos in the piece itself.

When you play something like the Mozart Horn Quintet, the primary responsibility for how it goes is shared between you and the first violin (yes, I know that the Mozart has only one violin and two violas. You know what I mean.)

For wind and string pieces such as the Beethoven Septet, the first violin is the de facto leader, and for small groups with piano, such as the Brahms Horn Trio, you are three entirely equal participants.

Even though groups of different types have a natural leader, that doesn't mean that you only look at the leader. For any particular passage, you look at whoever has the need at that specific moment.

In orchestras, you can get away with not knowing all that much about what is going on around you. So long as you are with the conductor things can't go too badly. But in chamber music, you have to have a far greater awareness of what your fellow players are doing. In fact, having this awareness is a thoroughly good idea for orchestral playing as well, and so you will find that playing in a chamber group will greatly improve your orchestral playing and your enjoyment of it, as you learn to listen better.

When to use the F side and when to use the Bb side?

2009-07-28T01:09:00.000+01:00

Previously, I said that you should get familiar with both sides of the horn, so that you can choose which side to use on any occasion.

But how do you choose which side to use when playing in a performance?

There are a number of things to consider

Tuning
Security
Tone
Fingering

Start with tuning. As a general rule, you want to avoid using a 5th harmonic or octaves thereof since these are flat relative to equal temperament, and you want to avoid 13 and 123 valve combinations, as these will tend to be sharp.

So, on the Bb side, that means you avoid playing an open A, or playing Ab, G or F# with 2, 1 or 12 respectively. The A can be played 12 and the Ab 23 with no difficulty, but G will be flat if played 1, and sharp if played 13. So you play the G open on the F side if possible. The same consideration puts F# on to the F side using 2. Of course, in the octave above, G can be played open on the Bb side and F# with 2. Those fingerings are fine.

In the octave below, G and F# should also be on the F side.

First space F can be played either open on Bb side, or 1 on F side. Both should be fine from a tuning point of view. E played open on the F side will be a bit flat, but will be in tune played 2 on the Bb side. The same consideration applies to Eb, D and C#.

Security - avoiding cracks and clams - will tend to cause you to want to play predominantly on the Bb side particularly in the upper register, since the harmonics are further apart on the Bb side than on the F side.

There are those who suggest that you ought to play predominantly on the F side from 2nd-line G down, and predominantly on the Bb side from Ab upwards. Personally, I don't see the need for such a hard-and-fast rule, especially as just below that transition, you come to the range E to C# which will be flat if played on the F side. Also, if you make that a general principle, then you will find yourself with quite a few awkward fingerings and poor-sounding slurs if you have a passage which takes you over the break a lot.

Tone is a bit harder to decide on. In principle, you ought to be able to produce a tone on both sides of the horn such that the audience can't tell which side you are using. If you have achieved that, then for the most part tone colour doesn't need to be a consideration. In practice, the F side does tend to produce a slightly more veiled or velvety sort of tone, a bit less brash than the Bb side. If the piece you are playing requires that, then using the F side might be a good idea, if only to put you in to the right state of mind for the piece.

As for fingering, take a look at the following excerpt from the Scherzo of Mahler 6. (You can click on the graphic to see it larger.)

Look first at Horns 1 & 2 on the top line. Under normal circumstances, you would think that this is upper register, straightforward Bb side territory, especially as the notes are D# and E which would tend to be flat on the F side. But with the grace notes like this, going from 1 on the D# to 2 on the E won't give you the quickest or cleanest possible slur. Much easier is to go from 2 to 0 on the F side. But what about the tuning? Well this is a rather brash passage, we don't want all that much in terms of subtlety here, so you can open your right hand a bit, which will have the dual effect of raising the pitch and giving you a brighter and more raucous tone, which is precisely the effect required!

Horns 7 & 8 an octave lower should use the same fingering, for pretty much the same reason.

The middle two parts are more interesting - you have more different notes to consider. But almost all the note pairs are a semitone slur up from the grace note. The same consideration applies, you want if possible to avoid having two valves going in opposite directions in the slur. C#-D is OK 23-3 Bb side, or 2-0 on the F side. Either will work perfectly well. B#-C# can also be on either side, as can B-C. For A#-B you can take advantage of the slightly flat open Bb harmonic and play this note pair 0-2 on the F side. The A# is only a grace note, it will pass so fast that nobody will have time to notice that it is a trifle on the flat side. G#-A can be played 23-3 on either side, and so on. So in fact, the great majority of these slurs are either as easy on both sides, or significantly easier on the F side, albeit occasionally with an unconventional fingering. So this part should probably also be played on the F side, even though it is in a range more normally played on the Bb side.

I'll leave it to you to work out the rest of the horn 3-4 stave and the horn 5-6 stave to see what fingerings are appropriate and which side you should play.

The key point is that even if you make a decision predominantly to use one side, you have to know both sides sufficiently well so that when a passage comes up such as the one I have described, you can switch in order to make the passage easier to play effectively.

Right Brain, Left Brain and Making Music

2009-07-25T15:30:00.000+01:00

Lyle Sanford, on his Music Therapy blog was kind enough to reference my post on practicing. He had been musing on right-brain and left-brain approaches to music. That seems to be a good topic to explore a bit.

The left side of the brain is associated with concentration and rational thinking. The right side of the brain is connected more with openness to experience and more intuitive ways of doing things. As Lyle correctly pointed out, the kind of practice technique I described in Practicing a difficult passage effectively is entirely left-brain in its approach. You have a task you have set yourself and you use your analytic skills to achieve it.

But there is a distinction to be made between playing your instrument and playing music. Unless and until you have sufficient control over the instrument that you can stop devoting all your effort and concentration to it, you can't play music - all you can play are the notes. It is instantly obvious to the listener when somebody is so consumed by the the technical issues of controlling the instrument that they have no thoughts for phrasing and musicality. Even somebody wholly uneducated in music will sense that there is "something missing" in such a performance even though they can't express what that something is. In contrast, even in a beginner, if they are playing a sufficiently easy piece, it is easy to tell whether they have "got it" and are thinking musically.

This isn't limited to classical music. I enjoyed watching X Factor last autumn on ITV. Both I (with an extensive musical education) and my partner (with no formal education in music beyond class music lessons at school) both picked out Alexandra Burke and JLS as the two front runners from early on in the series. They both had sufficient mastery of themselves that they could just get on with singing the music. This is something distinct from mere talent. Almost all the singers had lots of talent, but none of the others quite managed to achieve that presence that comes from being able to leave all your troubles behind and put everything into the performance. We wondered as the series went on whether anybody else would be able to make that step up, but nobody else did.

In my articles on playing the Eroica, I described some left-brain sorts of things that you do, to decide beforehand how you will approach a passage, in terms of dynamics, fingering or phrasing. But that is merely scratching the surface. Once you have sufficient control over the instrument, you can stop thinking in a left-brain sort of way and just leave yourself open to what is going on around you. So you instinctively know that a particular phrase has to be played just so, and that it is obvious for reasons you don't quite understand that the top of a crescendo must be exactly there.

So, how do you get into right-brain mode? Unfortunately, that is a very left-brain way of expressing the problem, which is a bit self-defeating!

First of all, you have to stop worrying. That means you need to know what you are doing well enough that you don't have cause to worry.

Then you have to listen. You need to do that anyway, so that you make sure you play together with the other players. But I am talking here of a deeper immersion in the music. You stop thinking about the particular way the first oboe has phrased something and you let the music wash around you. You become part of the music intimately attuned to everything else going on. Your left brain is still active - after all you do still have to blow down the instrument and make the necessary noises, but it is no longer in sole control. You have stopped merely playing the instrument and have started playing the music.

On a lesser level, this sort of thing is routine among most professional and the better amateur musicians. The most intense experiences however are rare, and give rise to a kind of euphoria which can leave you walking on air for days afterwards. In my own experience, a particular combination of circumstances is necessary. First of all the group I'm part of is of a quality such that I'm not distracted by other people's technical shortcomings. Second, the group as a whole needs to be sufficiently on top of the music that uncertainty doesn't get transmitted around. A top-notch and inspiring conductor is a big help, though not an absolute necessity. And finally everything just has to gell on the night, in a way which means that everyone gets a boost from everyone else's confidence, so that the whole group ends up playing a bit better than they realised they could. When this happens, there is nothing quite like being in the middle of an orchestra playing some thoroughly romantic piece of music and being completely surrounded by this great wash of sound, knowing you are contributing your own bit to it!

If you know your instrument sufficiently well, to some degree you can get on with playing the music in just about any concert, and the heightened concentration and awareness that comes from having to perform rather than merely rehearse brings enjoyment to music making. It is an act of sharing - with the audience and with your fellow players.

I've played hundreds of concerts in my time, at all levels of music below the professional, and I've had this kind of intense experience probably less than a dozen times. I hope that the audience shared it to some extent. Almost every concert brings a faint echo of the intense experience - enough for me to want to play the next concert and see if it will come next time!

Concerts on the Edinburgh Fringe

2009-07-24T20:27:00.000+01:00

Anybody in Edinburgh on 12-14 August? I'm taking part in 4 concerts on the Fringe as part of St Clements Wind Ensemble, as follows:

Tickets £8, concessions £6, except for the lunchtime concert in Canongate Kirk, which is free.

12August 2009, 8pm
St Marks Unitarian Church (Venue 125)
7 Castle Terrace Edinburgh, EH1 2DP
www.edinburgh-unitarians.org.uk

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006) Bagatelles (1953)
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) La Cheminee Du Roi Rene (The Chimney Of King Rene), suite for wind quintet, Op. 205, (1939)
Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), Trois pièces brèves (3), for wind quintet 1930

-Short Interval-

Sir Malcolm Arnold (1921 – 2006), Three Shanties, opus 4
W A Mozart, Fantasy in f minor for a mechanical organ, KV 594, arr. for wind quintet by W S Meyer
G Bizet, 'Jeux d'enfants', op.22, arr. for wind quintet by Gordon Davies
and some other pieces to be announced in the concert. Duration ca. 70 min

13 August 2009, 8pm
St Marks Unitarian Church (Venue 125)
7 Castle Terrace Edinburgh, EH1 2DP
www.edinburgh-unitarians.org.uk

W.A. Mozart: Fantasy in f minor for a mechanical organ, KV608. arr. for wind nonet by K H Pillney
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) La Cheminee Du Roi Rene (The Chimney Of King Rene), suite for wind quintet, Op. 205, (1939)/Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), Trois pièces brèves (3), for wind quintet 1930/Sir Malcolm Arnold (1921 – 2006), Three Shanties, opus 4
Christopher Irvin: Sea Breeze, for 10 wind players, first performance

-Short Interval-

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006) Six Bagatelles (1953)
W.A. Mozart: Serenade No. 12 in C minor, K. 388.

Concert Duration: ca.80 min

FREE LUNCHTIME CONCERT 14 August 2009, 1pm at Canongate Kirk

Canongate Kirk (Venue 60)
153 Canongate, Royal Mile EH8 8BN
www.canongatekirk.org.uk

Nicholas Sackman: 'Folio III' for flute and piano (M Heidemann)
G F Handel: Sonata for Oboe and piano (R Kozam)
Nino Rota: Sonata for Clarinet and piano (J Peacock)
Tbc: Music for bassoon and piano (S Rennard)
Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakoff: Quintet for wind quartet and piano (with J West, Horn)Michael Round, Piano

14 August 2009, 5pm Canongate Kirk (Venue 60)
153 Canongate, Royal Mile EH8 8BN
www.canongatekirk.org.uk

The programme will include elements from both of the St Marks programmes.

If you come to any of the concerts, do please come over and say hello afterwards.

It's a good group, you would enjoy hearing them. Last year we played the Brahms Serenade in D in an arrangement I made for 13 winds. BBC Radio 3 broadcast two movements of it in their Play to the Nation series on October 2nd last year.

Random thought

2009-07-23T11:08:00.000+01:00

You don't ever master the french horn. The best you can achieve is to come to an arrangement with it.

Blending as a horn section

2009-07-21T19:47:00.000+01:00

When you are playing in an orchestra, a significant part of your job is to fit in - with your tuning, your tone colour, your style and articulation and your phrasing. As you will realise from my posts on the Eroica symphony, the horns spend most of their time accompanying, providing harmonic background to tunes going on elsewhere.

Let's start with tuning. A section that is not in tune with itself will sound horrible no matter what else it is doing. This means that it is the first duty of the other players to match their tuning with the principal horn - even if they think the principal is playing out of tune! This doesn't just mean tuning to the A at the start of the rehearsal or concert, but listening out for the tuning of every chord and making minute instantaneous adjustments as necessary. The first horn should be listening out and adjusting to the woodwind or strings, and the others have to adjust to the first horn. if both the principal and the rest of the section are doing their jobs in this respect, the tuning will be wonderful. The fact that you are listening out for each other helps enormously for other aspects of blending as well.

The second most important thing is to match playing style. In this respect, the first horn has a bit more freedom than the rest of the section, since there will be occasions when he/she can set the playing style not merely for the section but for the orchestra as a whole, when choosing how to articulate and phrase a solo passage. Whatever the first horn is doing with regard to articulation and phrasing - e.g. dynamics, length of staccato notes, extent of crescendos and diminuendos etc, must be matched by the rest of the section - even if they think they would do it differently if they were first horn! They probably would do it differently, but some one person has to make the decision about how the section will play an ensemble passage, and that one person is almost invariably the principal. If you want to be a good second, third or fourth horn, you must accept that adapting to the principal's playing style is part of the job.

Once you have a section playing in tune and in a common style, I find that differences in tone colour between different players matter relatively little. I'm sure that if the players go the extra mile to try and match tone colour to the principal as well, then the sonority of the sound can further improve. Some professional sections go even further in this direction and expect the regular players all to play the same make & model of horn. In an amateur orchestra, this is obviously impractical, and even in a professional setup I have my doubts as to whether it is actually all that helpful. How you blow into the instrument matters more than which instrument you blow into.

If you want to find out whether you are blending well into your horn section as heard by the audience, then the simplest way to find out is to have a knowledgeable musical friend or a teacher sit in on a rehearsal and listen to you, and offer their opinion. Alternatively, if your concerts are recorded, get hold of a copy of the recording and have a listen to how the section sounds.

By the way, if you think that there is unfairly little opportunity as a non-principal in a section to engage in your own musical creativity and interpretation, spare a thought for the violins - 16 or so players all playing the same part. They have even less opportunity for individuality than you do!

So, you've decided you want to be a professional horn player

2009-07-20T23:20:00.000+01:00

You're a high school student, and have been inspired by the sound of Denis Brain or Philip Farkas or Dale Clevenger, you are practicing hard and you want to go to college and then on to play in the profession. Wonderful! The chances (I'm sad to have to say) are that you won't get to make a career out of playing, even if you graduate college as a performance major.

Remember that there are hundreds of kids across the country who have a level of achievement comparable to or greater than yours. If you make it to music school, be aware that there is only space in the profession for about the top 10-20% of those who graduate. Competition for places really is that fierce.

That means it is not enough merely to be an outstanding player. You will need from an early age to be a thoroughgoing professional in all aspects, including:

Always make sure you are on time, tuned and ready in your seat with instrument, pencil and the correct music well before the conductor starts. Traffic and bad weather are inadequate excuses for being late or missing a rehearsal. Serious illness or injury, death of a close relative and the end of the world are about the only excuses that will be acceptable, and even the end of the world will require musical accompaniment.
You need to be an outstanding sightreader, not only in F but also in all transpositions. If you are going to force your way into the profession, you will need to compete for work with people who have performed Brahms 2 (with passages for horn in H) on 20 or more previous occasions, and play it as well as they do.
Contacts, contacts. Maintain an address book with the names & contact details of everyone in the music business you come across. You never know who you will need to phone in a hurry. Keep a backup copy in case you lose it.
Networking. Always take the trouble to be nice to people. Don't gossip behind their backs. Music is a small world, and you can be sure that any nasty remark you make about anybody will make its way back them - and that means the end of work sent your way by him or her. On an engagement with a new orchestra, always introduce yourself to the principal horn and to the person who booked you. Take whichever part you are given, and if asked if that is OK with you, say "yes" decisively and positively. You aren't old enough to get away with being a prima donna in any context - including your school band. Get into good habits early.
Know your orchestral parts. In all probability this is the meat of what you will actually be playing in your career if you make it. Make sure you practice the lower parts as well as the principal's part. There is only one principal horn and usually three others. Initially, and perhaps for your whole career, you will mostly be playing those lower parts.
The principal is always right, even if he is out of tune. Tune to the principal, so that the horn section is always in tune with itself. If you are principal, listen out for whoever nearby is playing with you - eg principal clarinet or bassoon. Tuning doesn't consist merely of checking that you are right with the A at the start of the rehearsal, it means listening to and adjusting if necessary every note you play. Even minor tuning adjustments to eliminate "beats" can make a decisive difference in how good the horn section sounds. Get used to listening and making those adjustments as a matter of habit.
Rehearsal etiquette. Unless you are principal horn, only in the most exceptional circumstances should you say a word during rehearsal unless a question is directed to you. You don't call out a question to the conductor for anything except in dire emergency. If you think there is a misprint in the part, don't waste rehearsal time by calling it out, take your part and compare it with the score during a break. Don't swap jokes or gossip with the person sitting next to you during rehearsal. If you have any kind of lesser query, quietly ask the first horn or the player next to you. Unless you are principal, you don't tell any other player what they should be doing under any circumstances. Even if you are principal, don't tell anyone what to do unless you are confident that you have the trust of the other player first, and always speak encouragingly and in terms of how to make a phrase even better, rather than saying somebody is playing wrong. Save chat and minor issues for the coffee break.

Also, be aware that injury, tiredness, family circumstances, illness or disillusion may cause you to cut short your playing career even if you succeed in making that top 10%. Therefore, you must think about what you want to do either if you don't make it as a player or decide to give it up
for whatever reason. Plan your education accordingly.

Transposing

2009-07-20T22:19:00.000+01:00

If you want to become a professional horn player, or even an amateur who plays regularly in a community orchestra, you must be able to transpose at sight. A lot of the standard orchestral repertoire that involves transposition, and you will be lost immediately if you can't put a transposed part on the stand in front of you and play it with almost as much facility as if it were in F.

I've just taken a look through all the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Mendelssohn and Schumann. This is all very much standard early romantic orchestral repertoire. Both professional and community orchestras play this stuff all the time. I counted up all the transpositions, according to how many movements in each part were in each key. These are the totals I came up with.

Horn in A: 8 movements
Horn in G: 2 movements
Horn in F: 72 movements
Horn in E: 27 movements
Horn in Eb: 40 movements
Horn in D: 52 movements
Horn in C: 34 movements
Horn in B natural: 4 movements
Horn in Bb: 32 movements

If you hope to go to music college as a performance major, your transposition capabilities should be pretty secure before you finish high school.

And no, nobody is going to write out horn parts for you in F. And no, you won't have time to do that yourself if you ever become a professional - you might only get one rehearsal on the day of a concert and then have to perform. You just have to be able to put the music on the stand and play it.

So, how to learn how to transpose? There are a number of techniques. I work out what the new key signature should be, and then think into a different scale (and therefore a different set of fingerings). Others imagine the piece in an odd clef and then add or subtract an octave.

Many of the Kopprasch studies are indicated to be practiced transposed in addition to being played in F. Do that. Slowly at first, and then faster so that eventually you can play them as fast transposed as you can in F.

Practice transposed sight-reading. I explained how to improve your sight-reading in a previous article. Now you have to do it all over again in different keys. Complain all you like about it, then get on with it. The audience at a concert neither knows nor cares about transposition, and will make no allowance for it when deciding if the horns have fluffed too many notes.

Bb or F side? What should you practice?

2009-07-16T22:23:00.000+01:00

In my opinion students should practice scales & most etudes in three ways.

Everything on the F side
Everything on the Bb side except for notes that can't be reached on the Bb side
Whatever sensible mixed fingering is convenient and produces a good tone.

For the mixed fingering, G and F# should of course more or less always be on the F side unless it result in awkward fingerings. As for F downwards, it depends very much on the player and the instrument. Personally I tend to use the Bb side in the whole F to C# range, as I find the notes blow more freely on the Bb side on my horn. But if I want a particular velvety tone for a soft
entry, then I may switch to the F side for the purpose.

But it is necessary to know your scales on both sides and be thoroughly familiar with both sets of fingerings in order to be able to switch easily for whatever purpose you might need.

For instance if you work on the principle that everything from 2nd-line G downwards should be played on the F side, and everything above on the Bb side (a fairly common recommendation, but which I do not endorse), then you may have some difficulty achieving a clean slur up a 4th from G to C. But that slur is fairly easy if it is done with both notes played open on the F side. Once you have learned not to hit the intermediate Bb harmonic on the way up, you can get a beautifully clean slur, much cleaner than you can get when moving the thumb valve, which inevitably results in the air having to start resonating in a long new length of tubing. Even more difficult would be a slur from F to Bb, which would be cleaner either as a lip slur on the F side, or a 0-1 slur on the Bb side.

But these alternatives aren't available unless you have sufficient facility on both sides of the instrument to take advantage of them. Therefore, you have to achieve more or less equal familiarity with the fingerings of both sides of the horn.

Practicing a difficult passage effectively

2009-07-08T22:21:00.000+01:00

The essence of effective practice is that you practice getting things right. If you get something wrong, it is almost certainly because you have played it too fast to get it right. Most people, when they even notice they have got it wrong, repeat awhole piece or long passage again, and almost certainly make the same mistake next time the reach the same point. What they are doing is practicing getting it wrong. And the more they practice getting it wrong, the better they become at getting it wrong.

If you recognise yourself in the description above, this is how you should practice a difficult passage or etude.

First of all, you have to decide that perfection is your aim, and you are not going to be satisfied with less. Saying to yourself "it was nearly right, and I'm sure it will be OK next time" is the greatest enemy of progress.

Second, when you notice a mistake, STOP, immediately, before you have a chance to forget what the mistake was or where. It might be a piece of awkward fingering, it might be a short passage with a high note that you mispitched, it might even be a slur that wasn't sufficiently clean. Go back a bar or two, and practice just the fragment that contained the error. If you still get it wrong, go about 30% slower and do it again. Keep slowing down until you find a speed at which the error goes away.

Then, having found a speed that is OK, repeat several times at that speed. If you find yourself still making regular errors, slow down even further, until you find a speed at which you can play the fragment at least 3 times in a row (and preferably 6 times) with no error at all.

Resist the temptation to go any faster in the later repetitions. What you are doing is practicing getting it right, and the only way you can practice getting it right is to practice at a speed at which you know you actually can get it right!

Once you have managed 6 error-free repetitions, try the fragment just a little faster, 10% or so. If all is well, repeat 3 times at that speed, and then go a bit faster still. If you make a mistake, immediately drop the speed by 30% and do the 6 repetitions at the slower speed.

Gradually, you can get the speed back up to concert speed. Having done that, go back a few bars and put the fragment back into context. Hopefully it should now be fine. Carry on until you come to the next difficult bit, and repeat the process.

This practice technique is very hard work if done properly, and is very tiring, but there is no more efficient use of practice time. This is because of two things.

You spend most of your time practicing the difficult bits, which after all, are the bits that need the practice!
You spend most of your time practicing playing those difficult bits right (albeit slowly to start with).

Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent, and you want to cause your practice to get you to permanently play passages correctly. Repeatedly playing correctly instills those habits and memories.

You might notice that the techniques described here bear a remarkable resemblance to those I described in The art of sight reading a few weeks ago. That's because they essentially are the same. Whatever you are practicing, you learn faster if you practice getting it right, and you practice getting it right by practicing slowly.

In fact, getting good at sight reading is a very efficient use of practice time, because it means that you start from much further on when you have to learn a new piece.