Yancich, Discipline, and Recent Wind Music Publications

This past weekend at the 2008 Southeast Horn Workshop I enjoyed meeting one of the sons of the late Milan Yancich, Mark Yancich, who is the current owner of Wind Music. He is the timpanist of the Atlanta Symphony; his brother Paul is timpanist of the Cleveland Orchestra. How did they do it? The tribute to Milan Yancich that was published in the February 2008 issue of The Horn Call gives a big clue to something that might have contributed to their success, the discipline of their father. Paul Yancich recalled:

“There are four children and we woke up every morning to the sound of a French horn warming up for forty-five minutes. Those of you who studied with him know the routines and he did practice what he preached every morning, Monday through Sunday, every holiday, never missing, to my memory. He was the most disciplined musician I have ever known. His routine in the morning was the same, played in the same order at the same tempos and dynamics. I can’t remember him missing a note or sounding anything other than rock solid as he worked his way through the scales, arpeggios, single note blasts, and articulations. By 8:00 am he was on his way down to Eastman, many times dropping me off at Monroe High School on his way.

Read the whole article. And check out A Practical Guide to French Horn Playing by Milan Yancich, it is a classic, the book and the CDs. I like in particular how he has a unique approach to several technical aspects of horn playing and includes double and triple tonguing exercises.

In general I love new publications and want to also mention that I purchased several from Wind Music at the workshop. I thought I owned almost everything in their catalog but found a couple I had missed. One is a version of volume one of the Schantl horn method, Etudes for the Natural Horn, which focus on exercises on the open harmonics, and another is the Sonata for Horn and Piano by Fritz Spindler. Schantl was a big name Viennese teacher around 1900 and I had the rest of his method but the Spindler I had not heard of; it is dedicated to Oscar Franz so it must date from roughly 1875 and looks to be worth reading further.