Notes from IHS 41

I am in Macomb, Illinois at the 41st International Horn Symposium. I will be very busy at the event but will try to post daily updates to this post during the week, to give a bit of an online insight into the event. If you are not here, try to get to a future symposium and also join the IHS! It will be a great event, lots of variety, and great playing by hornists from all over the world.

I arrived Sunday and that night was part of a horn ensemble that greeted the Amtrak train carrying IHS officers Jeff Snedeker and Heidi Vogel from Chicago. Monday we had Advisory Council meetings all day and I also set up my booth for Horn Notes Edition. The event officially starts later this morning, Tuesday with things really kicking into gear this afternoon.

UPDATE 1. On Tuesday afternoon business was a bit slow so I was able to attend the natural horn presentation by Richard Seraphinoff and to also hear the performance by Laurence Lowe of his Sonata No. 2, a wonderful work that he played great! (Quiz: how many other composers have written two or more horn sonatas?). I enjoyed hearing the evening concert as well, Gregory Hustis and Jennifer Kummer. The latter name is one not as familiar in the horn world, she is the top studio player in Nashville and performed wonderfully. Much more today!

UPDATE 2: Wednesday my presentation on “Instruments Your Horn Teacher Never Told You About” went well. Things were busier at the booth so the only concert I heard was most of the 1:30 recital, in particular a premiere of a new work by Walter Mays performed well by Nicholas Smith. I had a meeting after dinner and a late rehearsal so I only heard a portion of the evening recital which included a number of horn ensemble works. Tomorrow will be a blur, as I perform twice and have two rehearsals, the booth, and another meeting! Looking forward to Friday.

UPDATE 2.5: To paint a bit more of a picture of the event, this year it is being held on the campus of a smaller university (currently on break) in a small town, so the activities center very much on the horn. Many of the sessions and concerts occur in their student union building, which also has a hotel level which is were I am staying. Many participants are in a dorm. There are several large and small rooms of vendors with horns and music open much of the day and more sessions and concerts than any one person could possibly attend, as there are often multiple sessions at the same time. A great event! Many congratulations to host Randall Faust for his tireless work to organize this great event.

UPDATE 3: A busy day and I did not get to anywhere near all that was going on. I played on two concerts, performed the Telemann Concerto (which went well) and also played horn and Wagner tuba on the jazz concert this evening (which also went well). Tonight was the night that featured jazz horn and there was some very hot horn playing heard!

Also, to better give readers a mental picture of the event, there are about 600 hornists here from all over the world. For example, my Telemann was right after a performance by the Japan Horn Society, and in the evening I was in the group backing up Jim Rattingan, the British jazz hornist; among others in the group backing him up on Caseoso were William VerMeulen, Jennifer Kummer, Andrew Pelletier, and W. Marshall Sealy. A most interesting day for me.

UPDATE 4: OK, lets start out today with a bit of “Internet Horn 101.” There is a video of the Long Call performed beautifully by Annamia Larsson, Co-Principal Horn of the Royal Opera in Stockholm. She was a featured artist on the evening concert and I found it interesting, I believe a large portion of the audience has never seen this video. So, first, if you have not seen it, here it is!

At the end of the concert she told the story of the video, it was made for the website of the Royal Opera because their performances of The Ringwere sold out. Later it was put on YouTube and became a hit among hornists. The bit at the beginning, the part where she is standing in a mall with her horn, was the idea of the violist that put the video together. In the video she is credited by her maiden name Annamia Eriksson, which may also have been a part of why some in the audience didn’t seem to make the connection.

There was more to the concert of course. It opened with The Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse performing very nicely and featured works of Canadian and Scandanavian composers performed by Larsson and Jeff Nelson. They also teamed up for three works for two horns and piano, including one of the two Michael Haydn double concertos. They discovered in fact a week ago that Annamia was working on one of them and Jeff a different one, and he graciously agreed to perform the one she was working on! All in all a great concert, beautifully performed and crowd pleasing.

I look forward to Saturday, as after I close the Horn Notes Edition booth I will have time to attend more sessions and performances.

UPDATE 5: Over the final weekend of the symposium the hotel Internet died, and the first night out I did not have Internet access, so this will be the final, somewhat late update.

Saturday I had two rehearsals and a panel discussion but after closing the Horn Notes Edition sales table I felt like I finally had some time! I enjoyed very much the concert that afternoon of works that were either winners of the IHS Composition Contest or of a Meir Rimon commissioning assistance grant and also enjoyed hearing the jazz horn competition. And I went to bed early!

Sunday morning we were greeted by rain. It was mostly cool and rained occasionally at the workshop. I went to the group warm-up led by Lydia Van Dreel that was an interesting combination of ideas from Caruso and others, and then went to “IHS church,” the general meeting.

For me though a major event was the banquet, where I performed as one of a number of surprises. My act was Misty in a version of the classic Stan Kenton chart but for Mellophonium and piano. I will not soon forget the audience reaction bringing that instrument out, I wondered if I would need some chicken wire between me and the audience! It will be a banquet that goes down in the books as one to try to top, the acts by the horn ensembles from TAMUK and West Virginia led by Jennifer Sholtis and Virginia Thompson respectively were great, Mirror Image brought some class to the event (with music from their new CD), and it closed with stand up comedy by Jonathan Stoneman, including a performance of Mozart on a tea pot (a real “devil to play” I should say).

After that I went to the master class by Japanese hornist Hiroshi Matsuzaki, where he focused very much on the musical elements of the Adagio and Allegro with an excellent student performer. By then I was really needing a power nap so I skipped the last session, went to dinner, and prepared for the final, closing concert where I played Wagner tuba on three different “London Horn Sound” arrangements, most especially enjoying the arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody by Richard Bissil. Jonathan Stoneman and I held down the bottom of the section on a pair of Wagner tubas I “imported” from Arizona (they belong to Arizona State–I am still waiting for my check with the extra fees for cartage and doubling [just kidding], they did add to the sound of the group).

That closing concert was quite the concert! Coming in at just under four hours in length, based on audience reaction there were three clear “winners” on the program as there were three standing ovations, although for sure all the rest got at least honorable mentions and it was of course not a contest. On the first half William VerMeulen received a well-deserved standing ovation for his great performance of Steamboat Stomp. On the second half the audience loved Bohemian Rhapsody and also the last of the participant horn ensembles, not just because they were last on the program but because they played their Music from the Royal Fireworks very well, nailing many more high C’s than are normally heard at nearly 11:00 PM.

And so I close the books on the 41st International Horn Symposium, a most memorable event. Now I am on the road and tonight am in Denver, where I was able to visit the Colorado Railroad Museum before dinner. I will have some follow up posts soon on what I purchased and other topics of potential interest to readers, be watching for those, and I am enjoying a relaxed drive home with the nine instruments I brought with me.

UPDATE 6: Newhornist’s Blog has a good rundown of the entire event well worth reading as well.

UPDATE 7: Catherine Roche-Wallace has a lot of photos from the event in her blog as does Leigh’s Mental Lint.