Striving for Tone

Another post from the archive, this dates to 7/2/2004 and is a favorite of mine.

As I type these words I am at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina for my fifth summer, teaching half of the 16 student horn studio (9 college students and 7 advanced high school students–there are two divisions of students at Brevard–Jean Martin-Williams from the University of Georgia is the other half of the horn faculty) and performing principal horn in the top (of three) orchestras, the faculty/student Brevard Music Center Festival Orchestra. Works on the schedule for me this summer include Tchaik 4, Symphonic Metamorphisis, Scherazade, Dvorak 9, Gershwin and Pops concerts, two operas, several major Wagner excerpts, and Mahler 5. Not so long ago, I was on the other side of things at a summer music festival–a student at a summer music festival–and as one of my students this summer is working on an embouchure change my mind has been brought back to my first summer festival experience.

In the summer of 1982 I was between my sophomore and junior years of college and had the previous semester changed my major to horn performance from music business. I was accepted that summer to study at the Aspen Music Festival and went to Colorado for the first of three summers of intense study. After seating auditions I was somewhat surprised but the horn faculty felt as a group that I needed to change my embouchure. My teacher at Aspen, David Wakefield, knowing already that my teacher at Emporia State (my undergraduate school, a small college in Kansas) was a friend of his parents in Oklahoma and a trombonist, felt that this was something that needed to be attempted now. Up to that point I had played the horn 1/3 upper lip and 2/3 lower lip. It was a long but focused summer of study; I worked a lot on Mozart 1 and Kopprasch in low transpositions, went to lots of great concerts, played in the horn choir, a brass quintet, and all my assigned ensemble seatings (only performed one orchestral concert–fourth horn on Lt. Kije), and watched a lot of Cubs games. I learned a great deal that summer. As I was about to leave my last lesson Dr. Wakefield said he wanted to leave me with a deep thought, something that would propel me through the next year of study. Striking a somewhat Wagnerian pose, his final words to me that summer were “strive for tone.”

I know that he would have no special reason to remember this moment in a life but I have had it firmly in a corner of my mind for years. Not only was the whole summer very pivotal for me as a hornist, the longer I teach the more I understand the truth of his comment: if you have a full, round tone in all registers and dynamics this is a sure sign that many aspects of your playing are fundamentally correct. So, if you “strive for tone,” you will probably keep on track pretty well as a student of the horn. He also probably didn’t mean for me to take the comment so deeply, of course, but this reminds me yet again that the small and large things we do and say impact others in a variety of ways.

So this summer especially, “strive for tone.”