Archived under: Teaching | Descants & Triples, Fingerings, Single horns
It is not “Cheating”
Many of us learned horn in a very standard way for the United States, double horns with “standard” fingerings (F horn from G in the staff down) and larger mouthpieces by Giardinelli and Holton. This was very much my background, one in which it would have been seen as “cheating” to use B-flat horn alternate fingerings or a descant horn. The theory was to work for the big sound. Nobody said horn playing was easy! If you were strong enough you should be able to play anything with standard fingerings. And if you could not get attacks to work, well, you just needed to knuckle down and learn how to do it with your Kopprasch book.
While there is a place for the standard ways of doing things, the message I would bring today is that it is in fact not cheating to use alternate fingerings or horns with high F sides. These are tools available to you, make use of them. Personally this past year I have put a lot of effort into developing more fluency in alternate fingerings. It is practice that does pay off.
A final thought would be this; professional second horn players make more use of the B-flat horn than the average horn student probably would ever guess. They are not cheating; they are professionals doing a job as well as they can.
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