Musicality and musical content

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

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.

A bit more on musicality

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

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.

Chamber music and watching each other

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.