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A topic in a number of lessons this week has been right hand position. Something I referenced in these lessons was the quote in the following post, which originally appeared on 1/19/06 in the old version of this blog.
There are already articles in my main site on buzzing and on right hand position, but this past weekend at A.I.R Horns (a regional horn event here in Arizona) the featured guest artist, Gail Williams, brought up two points that in particular stuck with me.
One involved thinking of free buzzing as being an exercise designed to build “trunk strength.” My son has had physical therapy for years and part of what they are trying to build up is his trunk strength, the middle of his body in other words. With free buzzing you are not building up this area, of course, but you are building up the general “trunk strength” of the area around your chops, something that can be of real benefit.
The other point involved right hand position and the harmonic series. She brought up a demonstration she had seen by Richard Merewether, the long time (now deceased) horn designer at Paxman. His point was that if you play over the high harmonics of the horn with a poor hand position, the harmonics are not as stable as they are when you have your hand in the bell in the best position, well in the bell, fingernails touching. Give it a try, it is quite interesting. In his book The Horn, The Horn he wrote
Consider the horn played with a careless hand-placement (or none whatever) which will nonetheless give reasonably-centered notes at least as far up as the twelfth harmonic …. the addition of further harmonics up as far as the 24th, through a studied and exact right-hand position, must add greatly to the stability all over the range, besides enhancing the horn’s timbre by bringing in all its high-frequency potential as available and evocable overtones. (p.37)
I find that players often have an element of “hand position drift” when they play which will impact accuracy. A hand position very close to that which would be the best on natural horn really is the best on the valved horn not only for sound but also for upper range accuracy and stability.
