110% Accuracy

The horn is, among standard orchestral instruments, perhaps the easiest to miss notes on. I recall Verne Reynolds requesting in lessons at Eastman 110% accuracy. Reynolds ranks among the most accurate players I have ever heard. But we are human beings playing a difficult instrument.

In the August 12, 2008 issue of The New York Times Allan Kozinn noted in his article “The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra,”

When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems.

After some discussion of period instrument groups Kozinn continues,

… surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.

The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.

The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.

OUCH!

But, really, that is the deal. You want to play beautifully, with a great tone, lyric phrases, etc., but for the average listener really all that matters is do the horns stick out? Are they on the notes? 110% accuracy is the goal. An impossible goal, but one we have to constantly shoot for and if that means constantly reevaluating our practice habits, our equipment choices, etc. then that is what we have to do.