Before Farkas: Birchard Coar

I recently updated my list of horn pedagogy resources in my studio site. It is not a comprehensive list but reflects what I think are among the best resources out there. Several are, unfortunately, out of print.

Looking at the list, there is only one book from before 1956, The French Horn by Dr. Birchard Coar. Dating to 1947, it was the first comprehensive book of its type. It is an especially interesting publication in this context. On the whole his thrust is horn history but he does cover a number of performing issues (such as suggestions how to manage the chords in the Weber Concertino cadenza) and has a lengthy section on the double horn that covers topics such as stopping the horn, multiple tonguing (something Farkas did not cover in The Art of French Horn Playing), etc. Some of the topics are quite dated but then again some are so dated that they may be on the cutting edge again, for example his discussion of the topic of some teachers starting beginners on the horn in F alto (i.e., mellophone). He suggests transitioning to a horn as soon as is possible, guided by the judgment of the teachers involved. He was writing about the “classic” mellophone back then, but I know that there are directors who do the same thing with marching mellophones today.

Visually it is really old school; it was typed on a typewriter! But a lot of copies made it out there as it was the first of its kind. If your library has a copy of the Coar book it really is worth looking over, a lot of the content is timeless even if from the era before Farkas.