Different kinds of tone

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.

Growing up musical - 2

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

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.

"8 Simple Rules" for playing in an orchestra

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

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.

Musicality

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

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.

How flat is that open E on the F side?

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.

Blending as a horn section

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!

Transposing

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?

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

1. Everything on the F side
2. Everything on the Bb side except for notes that can't be reached on the Bb side
3. 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

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.

Your throat and playing the horn

In my experience, more high-register problems happen as a result of throat contraction than any other cause. I remember on an orchestral course I attended some years ago, another of the horn players, an amateur who had been playing in community orchestras for a great many years, made a very strangled sound for any note above about E or F.

Once I had gained his confidence, it was but a few minutes work to explain the problem and suggest a new way of thinking about upper register notes and a few exercises to establish a new habit. He was bright and quickly understood what he had been doing wrong.

He came back the following year with a vastly improved upper register, a better overall tone, and an offer to buy me a drink to say thank you!

His problem was that he was tensing up almost everything in order to get high notes, and as a result his throat constricted so much it was a miracle any air got through at all! Because there was so little air getting through, he found himself having to tighten his embouchure even more to try and get the note high enough.

The solution was a bit of relaxation and improved posture. If you have this kind of problem, I suggest you proceed as follows:

• Sit straight in the chair, upright but relaxed. Have your head nicely balanced at the top of your spine so you only minimally use your neck muscles to keep your head still.
• Practice taking a couple of deep breaths in that position, "filling up from the bottom". In other words, let your abdominal muscles expand before your ribcage as you fill up with air.
• Keeping your head and torso in position, bring the horn up to your lips. Adjust the position of the horn (NOT your head) until the mouthpiece is in a comfortable embouchure position.
• Keeping the angle of the leadpipe to your head constant, rotate the horn until the bell is touching your torso, with the edge of the bell probably just above your right hip. Most of the weight of the horn should now be being supported by your right hand, while the left hand is mainly being used to keep the mouthpiece in place.
• Take another of those deep breaths, and hold it by closing your mouth with your tongue.
• Place the horn to your lips, and tense your abdominal muscles as if you are providing air support to play a note - but don't play it just yet! Keep the air dammed up behind your tongue.
• Get used to that feeling, then let go the tongue and play a nice long mid-register note. Think of blowing all the way through the instrument, and not merely getting the air past your lips. Don't try to force the sound, just let it sing. All the time, make sure you keep that relaxed and balanced posture.

If you find that this gives you a sound quite radically different from what you were achieving before, then it is quite likely that you have the kind of tension problems I described. If this is the case, then I would recommend cutting down on practice on difficult technical stuff for a while. Instead, spend your time on playing long notes and simple studies which allow you to concentrate on posture and relaxation. You can't build good habits at this if you are concentrating on sorting fiendishly difficult passages. The temptation will be too great to slip into old bad habits just to get you through the passage. Once you start getting used to playing relaxed like this, you can progress to harder stuff with a wider range.

The trick is to avoid increasing the general tension as you move up the register. When you play a high note, there should be only two changes in you compared to playing mid-range. Your abdominal muscles must provide more air support, and your lips tighten a bit to increase the frequency they oscillate. Nothing else should tighten up at all. Easy to say, not so easy to do if you have got into bad habits.

I came across a similar issue with another orchestral colleague recently. In this case the throat tightening was particularly pronounced when doing ascending slurs - an ascending fourth from C to high F for instance. The underlying cause this time was probably lack of confidence rather than faulty technique, but the effect was much the same, the high note came out cracked and extremely tentative. Once I explained what was happening and how to provide air support with the abdominal muscles to rise to the higher notes, the slurring instantly improved.

If you're an amateur horn player, and you feel that you aren't getting all you should out of the instrument, it may be that just one or two consultation lessons will help tremendously. There's nothing like having an experienced player & teacher take a quick look and point out any bad habits that you have got into. It may well be that you were told in lessons you had at school the practice techniques needed to overcome the problem, and you just need reminding about them.

The art of sight reading

Sight-reading is a skill that can be mastered at any age. I've taught it to people of all ages who previously thought that is was a black art only to be mastered by extremely fine musicians and not to be understood by mere mortals.

The key to successful sight reading is learning not to panic. If you start to panic over the notes, so much of your brain is taken up with the panic that there is nothing left for actually doing the reading and playing. Therefore sight reading exercises and techniques should be directed towards avoiding and eliminating panic.

The techniques are fairly simple.

1. For the early stages of sight-reading practice, choose exercises substantially easier than the ones you are using to develop technique & endurance.
2. When doing a sight reading exercise, choose a speed slow enough that you can be confident that you won't panic over the most difficult part. That means that the easier parts go more slowly than the fastest you can manage.
3. Before you start, check out time signatures, key signatures, and have a special look at any awkward notes, intervals or rhythms. The idea is to avoid being surprised by difficult bits when they arrive.
4. Count a bar's rest before you start to set the speed, and keep counting so you can stick to that speed throughout the exercise. On no account speed up in the easy bits, it will simply mean you either panic (and stop) at the difficult bits, or you slow down. In an orchestra or ensemble, you won't be given the option to slow down!
5. Look a bar or so ahead of the note that you are playing. You don't need to look at the note you are playing now - it is already either right or wrong, and if it is wrong there is nothing more you can do for it. You need to be looking at notes you will be playing soon, so that when they finally arrive, you aren't surprised by them. Remembering to do this is the hardest part of sight-reading (until you get the trick of it, when it is natural!). It may help if you can get a friend to hold a pencil pointed to the bar ahead of where you are playing, in order to draw your eyes forward. If you do this, take extra special care to keep counting at a steady speed, so you don't try to catch up with where the pencil is.
6. If despite these techniques, you get an attack of panic when doing a sight-reading exercise, repeat the exercise at least 30% slower. The whole idea is to practice not panicking, and to get used to the idea that sight-reading without panic is achievable. If you still break down 30% slower, go 30% slower still and keep getting slower until you find a speed at which you don't panic.

Once you find a speed at which you are able regularly to sight-read successfully, keep practising at that speed to get used to the thought-patterns involved, and to gain confidence that you really can do it! Then, gradually, notch the speed up a bit - 5% or 10% at a time, and see if you can still manage it.

Sight-reading in an orchestra or ensemble is a different matter. Different techniques are required simply because you don't get to choose the speed at which the piece is rehearsed. The same general anti-panic principle applies, but now, instead of dropping the speed to get the notes, you drop notes in order to maintain the speed.

The key thing is that you must not fall behind and you must not get lost. If that means in the early rehearsals before you have had a chance to practice the part, all you manage to do is count the bars and play the first note of each bar of difficult passages, then so be it. Better that than getting lost and causing the conductor to stop the rehearsal and tell you where he has got to.

Once you have mastered the basic techniques in the easy exercises, then you use the same technique reading through every piece of music you can lay your hands on, in order to keep and extend the skill.

Eroica third movement

(Different prints of the score have differing opinions as to how the bars should be numbered, particularly in this movement. I'm going by the Eulenberg edition miniature score, which you can view online here.)

When performing this symphony the horns will be judged by how they play this movement, particularly the Trio section.

Apart from a few quiet notes, the horns' first entry is at bar 93. Although it is a sudden ff entry (after a steep 1-bar crescendo by the rest of the orchestra) you are part of the texture. A solid sound, but you don't need to try and drown everyone. The same goes for the other loud passages at 123 and at 159.

Now for the Trio. The choice of dynamic for the opening is very confusing, because you have just finished the Scherzo section with accented notes within an ff dynamic. And the start of the Trio doesn't include a dynamic marking for the horns, except for the sf on the second note, and yet there is a gradual crescendo only to f at the end of the passage. That implies that the start ought to be relatively soft - something which is reinforced by the fact that the rest of the orchestra is marked p at 173 and similar places.

Essentially there are two common approaches to this. One is to start at about the dynamic as you finished the Scherzo and crescendo from there. The other is to decide that Beethoven intended the Trio to start softly and crescendo only to f. I prefer this second approach, for what I think are a number of good reasons.

1. The orchestra's intervention at 173 and similar places isn't drowned
2. The first horn doesn't have to scream up to the top C, but can play it at a more comfortable dynamic
3. The 2nd horn's low notes at the end of the crescendo have a chance of actually being heard.
4. The sf held notes at 240, 248 & 256 can be permitted to just sing once the accent has been completed, and can have a beautiful tone without being forced.
5. A forte climax will be quite loud enough and give a contrast the orchestra's piano entry at 181.
   

I suggest you start at a solo p, and have the sf within that context, crescendo to f (really mf) and drop back down to the same p level when the theme is repeated at 182, so that you can crescendo all over again. If you decide to play this way, get everyone to mark in p at all the appropriate places in their parts, otherwise somebody is absolutely bound to forget on the night, because of confusing parts and the "tradition" of playing it all pretty loud.

Use the same dynamics when the theme returns at 228. The audience is expecting the passage to be exactly the same before, but Beethoven puts in a surprise at bar 236. Instead of the first horn going on up to the top C as previously, all three horns hold the chord for a 2-bar diminuendo. The sf here doesn't need to be a particularly sharp one, just a bit of extra oomph to the front end of the note so you have plenty of space in which to diminuendo. When you repeat the chord 244, give it the same dynamic, and possibly a slightly softer stress as you slur onto the held note at 252.

The other thing that you have to decide on and work out is how you are going to set the balance between the three horns. Is this a solo for first horn with the others accompanying, or is it a joint solo for all three, or something a little bit in between?

My view is that this really is a trio solo for three horns, and 2nd and 3rd need to match the volume of the first. In some ways, the 2nd horn has the most interesting part, with the rapid downward arpeggio at the end of the first two passages. We want to hear that! But as it is low, the 2nd horn will need to push it out and the others not press too hard so that a balance is achieved. The first horn going up to the top C will be heard more or less whatever happens. third horn should slot in so that he is heard but so that the two higher parts don't drown the second. You have to listen to each other carefully in order to work out how to get the effect right.

For the variation on the theme and the held chord at 236, first horn can sing out a little bit more for that held note and the descending passage immediately after.

But the main thing is to enjoy it! If you play it even half-decently, the conductor will give the horns a bow at the end of the performance. Enjoy that as well!

Producing a "projected" sound

In my articles on the Eroica, I've mentioned more than once that you should play solo passages with a "projected" sound.

What on earth does that mean?

I know how to make a projected sound, one that will carry over an orchestra for a solo passage, but I've done it for so long that it's been a while since I thought about how, and even what the characteristics of a projected tone are. I just do it. So I've given a fair bit of thought to it before attempting to write it down.

Generally speaking, when we play louder, two quite separate things happen. One is that we produce more volume, and the other is that there is an increasing preponderance of overtones in the sound, as the sound gets more "brassy".

Projecting your tone is getting more volume without the increased brassiness. In other words, getting increased volume so you carry over the top of the orchestra, while the tone colour remains as if you are playing quietly within the texture of the piece. Because there isn't the extra brassiness that the listener associates with a horn or other brass instrument playing loud, the ear is in a way fooled into thinking that it isn't actually loud, but that instead the sound is being sort of pumped straight into the listener's ear without having travelled across the intervening space. I have no idea who first called it "projecting" but it is a very apt word for describing the effect on the listener.

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to play 1st horn at a special Rehearsal Orchestra course. Instead of one of their usual conductors, we had Sir Simon Rattle for a day, coming to work with us on his day off from conducting Parsifal every night at Covent Garden. Even though Sir Simon is a former member of the orchestra (he played percussion at one of its residential courses in Edinburgh under Harry Legge, when he was about 14 or 15) I think it quite amazing that he was prepared to spend 6 hours rehearsing Bruckner 9 with a bunch of amateurs in the middle of such a strenuous series of engagements.

Now, Bruckner uses the brass. Bruckner 9 uses a lot of brass; 8 horns (4 doubling Wagner Tuba), three trumpets, three trombones and a tuba. And in the first session, immediately after the first forte entry of the heavy brass, he stopped the 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!"

So, you now understand hopefully the sort of sound you should be aiming for. How do you train yourself to get it?

Actually, the practice technique is remarkably simple. You can even incorporate it into your warmup. It is simply practicing long notes - with a crescendo and decrescendo.

Start on a nice mid-range note. Take a deep breath and start the note playing piano. Do a slow gradual crescendo, listening carefully to your tone. Try really hard to avoid tightening the lips - this is what causes the brassiness. If anything, the embouchure should relax slightly as you push air through at a faster rate. See how loud you can get without adding a brassy edge. When you have reached your limit, do an equally gradual decrescendo back to piano. Don't try to play louder than the maximum you can achieve without a brassy edge.

Repeat this for each note of a one-octave ascending scale. As you practice, you should try each day to get the top end of the crescendo just a little bit louder than you could manage before. Over different days you should arrange for this kind of long note practice to be carried out over the full range of the instrument.

Doing this will help you not only gain a projected sound, but practicing a piano crescendo entry in the upper register will prepare you for if you ever have to perform the Britten Serenade, which includes a pianissimo crescendo entry on a top C in the Elegy movement.

Now in addition, there are occasions when you do want a brassy edge to the sound, while not overwhelming people with volume. So you can do a variation on this exercise. Long note practice again, but this time you do only a modest crescendo to about a single forte, but with a deliberate brassy edge to your tone.

There is a limit to what I can do in words to explain the differences in your embouchure that will achieve the two different effects. All I can suggest is that you try it, and listen carefully to the result.

The idea is that if you deliberately practice both of these, then you have a much wider range of tone colour and expressiveness available to you. You can control the volume and tone colour more or less independently of each other. It is then up to you to decide what combination to use on any specific occasion. That is where musicality comes in.

Eroica second movement

We come to the second movement of the Eroica, the Marcia Funebre. The movement is in C minor, horns 1 and 2 are in C, with Horn 3 in Eb, partly to be able to play the third of the C minor tonic chord, partly to be able to play when the piece briefly modulates into the relative major key.

At bar 9, the horns are part of the texture while the oboe has the tune. Except for bar 41 where the fp is briefly exposed, the horns remain in the background as part of the tutti texture until the third horn's ff passage at bar 135.

Most people think this is a solo. It isn't. You are doubled by both clarinets. In fact, the clarinets take over the tune with the violas in the second half of bar 139 when the tune goes into a new key where hand horns cannot easily follow.

In many recordings, this passage is blasted out with all the force the player can muster, and is sometimes doubled for added weight. This is a case of playing Beethoven as if he were Tchaikovsky. There is no need for it. If Beethoven had wanted this to be primarily a horn sound, there are other ways in which he could have orchestrated it to put more horns onto the passage. The intention is for the horn to be a significant part of the sound, but not to drown the rest of the orchestra. Therefore, in my opinion, it should sing out, so you play as loud as you can manage without adding a brassy edge to your sound.

At bar 173 the horns for several bars have a dotted rhythm on repeated notes make sure you accurately position the demisemiquaver. It isn't as short a note as you might initially think. the passage is piano and part of the texture, but you can make it a bit more noticeable without detracting from the tune in the oboe and clarinet by slightly detaching the notes. That will help the orchestra as a whole keep in tempo.

At bar 184, the 2nd horn has a pedal C for horn in C that is held for two and a half bars. It doesn't matter too much if the note is a bit slow to sound, the entry is covered by the strings playing a forte chord, but you want to me sure that the note and tuning is secure by the end of the bar when the chord ends and the oboes take over the tune with the rest of the woodwind in support.

The next exposed moment is for second horn at bar 230, there is more or less nothing else happening along with the held C slurred to a B.

After that, it is all within the texture to the end of the movement.

THAT solo in the first movement of the Eroica

I've had some discussions with people on the Yahoo Horn mailing list concerning the solo at bar 412 of the first movement, and researching the matter I've discovered a few new things.

First of all there is a discrepancy between different editions. Some editions mark the final Ab piano, and others do not. Some editions include a crescendo marking 2 bars before the end of the passage, and some do not.

The first edition, which is available online at the digital archives of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, has the Ab piano and no crescendo before it. But Beethoven was a notoriously poor proofreader, the original manuscript is no longer in existence, and Beethoven's first editions are not known for being particularly accurate. So I wouldn't want to take the first edition as being necessarily authoritative.

Therefore, you are probably going to have to work out for yourself and in co-operation with the conductor how you will approach the end of the solo. Personally, I would not drop the dynamic for the final note. The Ab is the same note as the starting note of the flute's version of the phrase, and so holding the note for a crotchet and then stopping allows for a change in tone colour of the note as the reverberation of the horn note dies and the flute takes over (with the violins doubling an octave lower for the first couple of bars). The flute is also marked dolce at the start of its solo, just as the horn was at the start of its solo 8 bars earlier.

Also, as a purely practical issue, you significantly increase the risk of of cracking the Ab if you suddenly drop the volume when slurring to it.

In discussing this passage with others, it has been suggested (by Kerry Thomson and Richard Chenoweth) that to get a piano Ab the note could be played handstopped, as it would have been in Beethoven's day. I can see where they are coming from, but I disagree for two reasons.

First, I doubt very much whether a subito piano is actually intended, though if it is requested by the conductor, you do it whatever Beethoven's intention was. Second, (as John Dutton has pointed out) hand-horn technique and hand-horn design in Beethoven's day would have allowed the handstopped note to be played with a tone that is quite close to that of an open note. It is far harder on modern wide-bore valve horns to bend the pitch using hand-horn technique without affecting the tone to a much greater extent than Beethoven would have expected to hear. But you don't need to do that, because you have valves! Therefore, when using modern instruments, I think you should use modern techniques and play the note using the valves.

The debate should of course remind you that there no single authoritatively right way to play the piece. What I've provided is how I play it and the reasons behind my choices. But you may disagree and have an alternative approach that works just as well or even better for you. If so, go for it!

Interpreting the Eroica Symphony

Playing Beethoven is a bit strange. Traditionally, we don’t think of Beethoven as requiring the delicacy of touch demanded by Mozart, and Beethoven’s music is often treated by horn players as if he were Tchaikovsky. It is all those sudden forte chords and accents. But in fact Beethoven is far closer to Mozart than to the classics of the late Romantic repertoire, and our playing of Beethoven horn parts needs to be conceived accordingly.

We now realise that the Eroica symphony was a revolutionary work, that launched Beethoven as a truly unique and different talent and provided a decisive break from the classicism of Mozart and Haydn. But Beethoven’s first two symphonies stuck very close to the general layout of the late Mozart symphonies, both in instrumentation and structure, the main innovation being the inclusion of a Scherzo in place of the conventional Minuet & Trio for the third movement of the Second Symphony. That isn’t to suggest that the first two symphonies are in any way unworthy, but they are clearly Beethoven growing into the distinctive sound that would come later. The Eroica is Beethoven’s first serious attempt at moving to something beyond Mozartian classicism in his orchestral writing.

But Beethoven has been so popular for so long that a great deal of tradition has accumulated as to how he should be played, and much of this tradition is quite frankly both historically dubious and musically awful.

So you have to approach this in context. This piece is late Classical, not late Romantic. The orchestra lacks the heavy brass and additional woodwind of later composers. The instrumentation is double woodwind, two trumpets, three horns, timpani and strings, i.e. your standard classical symphony orchestra with one extra horn. The role of the horns is still much the same as it is in other classical symphonies - mainly blending into the middle of the harmonies, and the occasional solo passage sailing out over the top.

The choice of three horns rather than the normal two is interesting. Of course, it is by far from being the first orchestral work to employ more than a single pair of horns, Haydn’s Symphony No. 31 (Hornsignal) and Mozart’s Divertimento No. 2 (K. 131) both use 4 horns, and both in fact have passages for the horns operating as a solo section that bear a significant resemblance to the famous passage in the Trio of the Scherzo of the Eroica. (I strongly recommend you get hold of a recording of both works and have a listen. It will be both enjoyable and instructive.) Adding the extra horn enabled Beethoven to overcome some of the limitations of the hand horn by occasionally crooking the third horn in a different key from the other two. The Marcia Funebre has first and second horns in C while the third remains in Eb.

One other thing needs to be noticed about Beethoven’s habits of notation. Beethoven almost never writes mf as a dynamic. I don't think I have ever seen an mf in any Beethoven orchestral work, in any part except where it was inserted by an ignorant editor. Therefore you should (broadly speaking) treat f as mf and ff as f, and treat repeated f markings on individual notes within the piece as accents within the current dynamic. Therefore ff dynamics do not need to be blasted out as if you were announcing The Last Trump. Generally, they should be played at what in romantic works you would think of as a good solid single forte, without any brassy edge to the tone.

This all sets the context as to how you should approach the work. You need to think about this sort of thing for any work you play - the composer’s intentions, the musical style in which he was working at the time, and the musical forces he used and the capabilities of the instruments of the day. If you leave all this sort of thing to the conductor and just play the notes, something significant will be lost from the performance. The conductor produces no sound in the concert (at least, one devoutly hopes he doesn’t) and so you have responsibility of producing a sound that the audience will enjoy. It isn’t reasonable to expect the conductor to spoonfeed you as to how to produce it.

So with this, let’s look over the detail of the parts, and how you play them. I’ll look just at the first movement in this post and tackle the other movements later. If you want to understand fully what I am on about you need to have a copy of the full score (and not just the horn parts) handy.

The entry for horns 1 & 2 at bar 13 is part of the tutti texture, but the continuation for first horn at bar 15 is exposed (though not solo, you are doubled by the flute and clarinet). But it is still p, we are looking for a nice clear but not overwhelming tone that blends with the instruments you are doubling with. Listen out for them and make sure that you match with them in tuning and style.

The sf notes in the passage from bars 22 to 45 are within the context of a passage that is piano. The horns are not the most significant thing happening here. So the notes should be fairly sharp accents within a piano context, and immediately brought back to piano. There is a sharp 2 bar crescendo at 35 to an ff passage. Again, you aren’t solo here, you are doubled by the trumpets. They provide the edge, you don’t need to blast this.

From bar 57 to 80, the horns should be blending, you are part of the texture and have nothing that the audience should particularly notice.

At 92, the horns have a crescendo passage (horn three joins a bar later). This is part of an overall orchestral crescendo that Beethoven achieves by progressively adding new instruments over a few bars. The sf at the climax of the phrase is a light one, within a piano context. Just an extra bit of weight of the front end of the note, and then pull back immediately before continuing the decrescendo to the end of the bar.

The entry at 107 is part of another classic Beethoven crescendo, this time reaching a more substantial sort of sound. But even though you have a forte general dynamic with sf on individual notes, you don’t blast. Remember, in Beethoven, f means mf, so you play the sf notes as accents within an mf context, immediately dropping back to the background dynamic. The horns are still just part of the texture, even when the dymanic advances to ff at 143.

The entry of horns 1 & 2 at 170 is very much in the background - you are providing harmonic continuity and with the repeated crotchets, just a bit of background rhythm. Watch the conductor carefully and make sure you don’t succumb to the temptation to get ahead of the beat. To add a bit of definition to the crotchets without getting louder, separate them ever so slightly.

The ff entry at 190 is still not solo, you are part of the harmony and so don’t try to overwhelm the tune. The same applies to the entry at 218 (1st horn entering a bar later).

In the passage starting at G (bar 224) the third horn has the first of his independent moments. While 1 & 2 are doing the same held-note and crotchet combination as at 170, the third horn enters two bars later with a countermelody in the form of an ascending arpeggio. Notice that I said countermelody, not solo. Though it does need to be heard, it isn’t the tune, and should be perceived by the audience as an interesting additional thing going on within the music.

At bar 236, the first horn has its first truly solo moment with the ascending quaver passage for one bar. Almost all the orchestra stops to listen to it, so you don’t need to be loud, just clear, since there is almost nothing else going on that you have to compete with. The staccato doesn’t need to be too pronounced, just enough to ensure that the individual notes have definition. How much you need to separate them will depend on the acoustic you are playing in and will have to be judged on the night. You should aim to match the style of the first flute in the previous two bars. The sf at the top of the passage should still be played within a piano context.

The next 80 bars or so contain essentially similar material. The next new thing starts with the bassoon entry at 342. Horns 1 & 2 join in with a similar passage at 347, but you must listen very carefully not just to the bassoons but to all the woodwind, Variations of the tune are weaving in and out in canon, and the horns are in fact one bar behind the main tune, initially still held by the bassoons but later passed on to other instruments as the volume rises. You are part of the texture and still not playing the tune.

At 378 2nd & 3rd horns have held chords in a decrescendo to pianissimo. While this is pp, this needs to be clear as there is little else happening. You have to make sure that you get balance and articulation matched. If anything 2nd horn, being lower, needs to put very slightly more weight on the note in order to make it sound equal with 3rd.

Then we have a true solo moment - for second horn! At 398 you have two bars where there is nothing else moving at all. It is in a register where the horn doesn’t carry all that well, so as it is both solo and relatively low, I suggest that you put it out at a fairly solid mf, even though there is very little else happening that you need to carry over.

At 412, the first horn has its first substantial solo. This is trickier than it looks. It is in F rather than Eb, and that extra tone higher catches people. Also difficult is the slurred Ab at the end after the held G. I’ve heard that Ab cracked many times! So you have to plan how you are going to cope with it. The first decision is whether you are going to breathe at the start of 416, after the first held G. If you can take a big breath at the start of the solo and manage without a breath in the middle, it will sound better musically, but if you can’t, better to take some more air on board to make sure you can manage the crescendo to the Ab. The instruction is dolce, and there isn’t much else happening, so we need projection rather than simple volume. (I’ll write about how to produce a projected sound on another occasion.) As for fingerings, there are a variety of possible approaches. Most players use the Bb side in this sort of range, but the problem is the second-space G in bar 413. If played 1 on the Bb side, this is usually noticeably flat, but if you play just this note on the F side, there is likely to be a noticeable “blip” in the transition between the G and the Cs above before and after.

However, if you incorporate arpeggios in your warmup, cleanly slurring between a G and a C without hitting the intervening Bb harmonic is one of the things you do more often than almost anything else. Therefore you can play the first part of the solo on the F side. I suggest that you play the first 2 bars wholly open on the F side, and then switch to the Bb side. Alternatively, you can play the whole passage on the F side if there is too much difference in tone colour between the two sides of your horn. Do whatever works for you to get the slurs nice and clean. To ensure that you get the slurred Ab cleanly, make sure that you either breathe at 413 or have taken on ample supplies of air at the start of the passage. The crescendo doesn’t need to be huge, and the Ab should be achieved not by tightening the lips but mainly by providing a bit more support to the air column from your diaphragm. Don’t snatch at it, and don’t cut it off too quickly. It is a full crotchet with no staccato and is therefore a moderately long note. Let it sound.

At 520, the horns are playing the tune - not solo, half the orchestra is playing the same notes, but you can enjoy yourselves for four bars. The horns have a bar solo at 539 and again at 541, play piano but projected.

At 593, the 6-bar phrase in 3rd horn is part of the texture. It is doubled by first bassoon and has the same rhythm as all the other woodwind playing in harmony.

At 619, the horns play alternating bars. This is fairly exposed, and you should work to try and match tone volume and articulation between the different players as you each take your own bar. I suggest that the notes are very slightly detached for better definition.

The last exposed passage starts at bar 634. The first horn is solo for 8 bars with 2nd horn joining in with a countermelody. A projected piano is called for here. After 8 bars, other instruments join in, and the horns (with 3rd now joining in) are again part of the texture a bar behind the tune, just as at 347.

The remainder of the movement is contributing to tutti passages.

For the great majority of the movement, the horns are in the background. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to take care over what you play. You should take care over the tuning, style, articulation and dynamic of every note, so that the blend is as near perfect as possible. This means that you don’t just follow the conductor and play your part, you have to listen to what is going on around you so that you match what you play to what else is happening. (Of course, all the other players should be doing the same, but you have no control over that. Just do it right yourself.)

The audience will enjoy the performance better as a result, even though most of them will have little or no idea what has gone into achieving it.