Epstein on Vowels, Elevators, and Dairy Products

This post is from the original Horn Notes Blog, first posted on 10/23/05.

While I have had other horn guest artists in, yesterday marked the first time I have hosted a real horn event. ASU Horn Day 2005 has now passed and was all I hoped it would be. Guest artist Eli Epstein gave us a very clear view of his pedagogy during the events of the day, with over 50 horn participants at ASU during the day benefiting from his teaching. I studied with Eli the year after I left Eastman which was also the year before he won the 2nd horn position he held for 17 seasons in Cleveland (prior to that he was 2nd horn in Rochester). I learned a great deal from Eli that year, some of which comes out fairly directly in my playing and teaching (I took many auditions that year) and many other concepts that come in more indirectly

For me a most interesting aspect was seeing how his pedagogy has grown over the years. We began the day with his “power warm-up” where he very clearly laid out three major aspects of his pedagogy, vowels, elevators, and dairy products, which were expanded upon in his two later master classes as well.

Vowels. This is a concept that I believe many many horn players employ but it is little talked about in any horn text. Back in the late 80s the concept in his teaching was high range to low the tongue position was different, very high being “tee” and working down to the bottom of the range from there “ta,” “toe,” and “though.” This he has expanded out even further and fine tuned.

Elevators. This relates in a sense to the above concept except that it focuses in on the jaw position side of the equation. The jaw has many positions; watching him play you can see that the floors are to a point pretty subtle but they are there! A related observation is that many students need more floors; there has to be change high to low (Eli for example has four basement floors in the “elevator” of his low range), and this concept is a great visualization.

Dairy Products. While he did not talk about dairy products in the late 80s he did talk about air in my lessons. I made it through a Masters degree at Eastman with very little talk about air in lessons–I gather my teachers to then thought I was doing fairly well on the air side of the equation. I don’t remember the specifics of the concepts but I do remember a day that Eli brought up some concepts in a lesson on air that struck me at the time as being so important that I asked if I could have another lesson the next day. Which I took! His concepts now have been refined to use dairy products as a visualization as to the flow of air through the aperture. The differing thicknesses of say skim milk and heavy cream are much more tangible than thinking about air (which is invisible) moving through the lip aperture (which you also can’t see).

Of course there was much more to it all. He had a lot of different ideas that were presented really well!! Eli is working on a book and really should be featured at more horn events. He recently left the Cleveland Orchestra, is currently on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, and is also working to develop his “Music from the Inside Out” presentations further (his performance of the Brahms Trio at our horn day was an example of this presentation).

Also I should thank again all who came in for the day (including groups from the UA and NAU horn studios), the performers (6 ASU students plus horn ensembles from UA and ASU [great job!]), ASU [!], vendors who displayed horns and accessories (Tom Greer [Moosewood], Loren Mayhew [Finke/Thompson Edition], and Chuck Kerrigan [Milanos--Hoyer and Conn horns], Conn-Selmer for partial funding of the event, and especially horn TAs Gustavo Camacho and Rose French who helped me a great deal toward making the event come off smoothly.

I don’t know what next year will bring in terms of guest artists and funding but I am sure that this event will leave a great “afterglow” in the studio for some years; I really look forward to getting back to lessons next week.