A Wrap-up of the 1989 SWRHW

The last session that I have a video of in the archive of the 1989 Southwest Regional Horn Workshop is the master class with William Lane, Principal Horn of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His class focused on orchestral excerpts. Lane over the course of the class told a number of stories, offered advice on orchestral playing, and worked on musical concepts.

Of the students that played the only one I recognized was Karl Kemm, who had also played on the Sellers master class on Saturday. This time he played Beethoven 9. On this excerpt a comment from Mr. Lane was that conductors were afraid that you would mess it up, so they tend to follow you and may actually let your tempo get too slow. Thus he advised to keep the tempo moving along, take the lead.

One thing that Mr. Lane handled well but might have been a little awkward at the time was Philip Farkas was there at the session and actually spoke up and interjected comments and stories several times. He may well have been told to feel free to speak up, I have no way to know, but watching the video all these years later it does honestly feel a little awkward having done sessions at workshops myself.

I don’t have recordings or videos of any of the performances and there were multiple sessions during some of these time slots. The other sessions were so far as I know not recorded.

I do have a few still photos however. The full roster of artists posed for a photo on the Sunday of the event. In this photo you will see left to right Philip Farkas, Kristin Thelander, Jacquelyn Sellers, Gordon Campbell, Earl Saxton, Paul Chambers, Ralph Lockwood, Karen Teplik, and William Lane.

Also we have this photo of the 1989 ASU Horn Studio in their SWRHW T-shirts, with Professor Lockwood.

Finally, earlier this year I also posted a short article on another still photo from the archive associated with this workshop. It is a priceless photo of Philip Farkas in a relaxed mood; be sure to check it out here.

And so we close the book on the archive videos of sessions at this 1989 workshop.

One final footnote for those out there that are caretakers of similar archive material, consider transferring these to DVD. I have a parallel project of converting a large personal archive of cassette tapes to MP3 format as well, something it is important to do before they become beyond use.