Review: A Complete Guide to Brass?

As I will soon become brass department chair at Arizona State I recently obtained a copy of the Scott Whitener book A Complete Guide to Brass. I will oversee the brass methods courses at ASU next year and this is used as a text. I did not use it when taught this course at the Crane School of Music or at IU as a graduate assistant, instead developing my own materials which became the basis of my publication Introducing the Horn, but I believe perhaps most schools that offer music education degrees in the United States use the Whitener book. It is the standard text used for brass methods.

The coverage in the book of the horn is fairly good overall but a couple things caught my attention looking over the publication.

First, a strength of the book is that it covers a wide range of middle brass instruments including descant horns, Vienna horns, ascending third valve horns, and a nice section on the E-flat alto or tenor horn. British tenor horn soloist Gordon Higgenbottom demonstrates how to hold the instrument, mouthpieces are recommended (Dennis Wick), the coverage is pretty impressive actually for an instrument that is at least to us in the USA somewhat obscure, being only used in brass bands. The average music educator will never encounter one. Whitener even includes a section on the 1943 Sonata für Althorn by Hindemith, describing how the instrument Hindemith was writing for was a German E-flat alto horn in oval form with rotary valves (it looks like a small Wagner tuba). I would agree with his assessment that this is the instrument Hindemith had in mind, but, as Whitener notes, we normally perform this work on French horn today.

On the other hand the section on mellophone is sad. Well, at least it is mentioned at all, but the section is less than two pages long and woefully inadequate. In marching season many thousands of mellophones and marching horns are in use every day, many makers produce them, they have significant issues that need to be understood by music educators including mouthpiece choices and much more, but Whitener in fact comes across in the end as being a bit confused about it all. No wonder so many music educators are confused about the mellophone! And no wonder so many horn players have bad experiences with it.

In Episode 84 of The Mellocast, titled “A Complete Guide to Brass … Almost,” we talk about these two sections of the Whitener book in some depth. Check it out!

Talking to other horn teachers recently I know hardly any have ever listened to any episode of The Mellocast. It is semi-weekly podcast on all things middle brass (think of it being sort of an Internet radio broadcast) on which I have been a guest a number of times now in the two years it has existed. This particular episode was a lot of fun to record and I really would welcome regular blog readers, challenge you in fact, to listen to this particular episode. Surf over to www.mellocast.com and either listen there or download Episode 84 to your ipod. We cover a lot of good ground in this episode especially. Check over the back episodes at the site as well, there is a brief outline online of every one. There is a whole lot of good information in these podcasts that relates to us as horn players and teachers pretty directly.