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After joining the ASU faculty as horn professor in the fall of 2001 I was honored to get to know and work with one of my predecessors, Ralph Lockwood. From him over a period of years I inherited a number of studio materials from when he was horn professor, the period between John Barrows and Thomas Bacon. Among all the materials, this photo is one of the most precious.
It is the great horn teacher and player Philip Farkas (1914-1992). The photo was taken at the 1989 Southwest Regional Horn Workshop, hosted by Lockwood, where Farkas was a featured guest. Found in one of several files of materials saved from the event, I love this photo; it is so striking to see Farkas in this most interesting and warmly funny pose.
In preparation for this post I contacted Professor Lockwood, now retired and living in Columbus, Ohio. He did not take the photo; it seems to have been either taken by an ASU student or by a participant at the workshop, who gave it to Professor Lockwood along with a file of other photos of events at the workshop. On seeing the photo again I love how Lockwood worded it, this photo captures “a moment of whimsy that humanizes yet even more a very great and generous soul.”
UPDATE: The photographer was Karen Teplik. She was one of the artists for the 1989 workshop and may be seen on the right, standing between Ralph Lockwood and William Lane at the event (photo described further here). She had double prints made of her photos and gave a set to Lockwood which remained with the archive from the event. As she explains in her Pinterest note on the photo,
I took this picture of Philip Farkas at the Southwest Regional Horn Workshop at Arizona State University in 1989. I was sitting in the auditorium and turned around to see people, and lo and behold, Philip Farkas was sitting right behind me! As I brought my camera up to take his picture he did this pose.
And even more amazingly, she did not know this photo was a viral sensation of sorts until I ran into her at a horn recital here in the Phoenix area in March of 2014! The image has made several trips through Facebook that I know of and is among the first images you get if you do a Google image search for Philp Farkas. And it remains a fun image by which to remember Farkas, who would have been 100 years old March 5, 2014.
