The FARKAS MODEL Mouthpiece

Among all the various classic horn mouthpieces made in the United States one that has had the most lasting interest and impact is the original FARKAS MODEL. This mouthpiece was produced by Schilke before Farkas became associated with Holton and is not to be confused with later imitations.

Farkas first met Renold Schilke when he was a high school student in the Chicago Civic Orchestra and, according to Nancy Jordan Fako in Philip Farkas and His Horn, with Schilke shared an “extreme interest in how various factors of mouthpiece and instrument design affected performance outcome.”

When Farkas returned to Chicago in 1947 he found that Schilke was making trumpet mouthpieces with extreme precision in a workshop in his basement. According to Fako,

…Phil regularly made the long trip to the Schilke home to work with him…. It was not long before they determined that they wanted to go into business and produce mouthpieces for other than their own use. Now they needed a name, and they decided to call their company Music Products, Inc.

The first horn mouthpiece produced and marketed by Music Products, Inc., was a copy of the one that Phil most often used. He was constantly experimenting, as he would do his entire life. Consequently, at any one time he had a number of different mouthpieces that he was using. There were always five or six mouthpieces on his music stand…. However, there was a certain one which was always his favorite and to which he always returned when he found himself in a particularly difficult performance situation, and it was this mouthpiece that he decided to produce as the “Farkas Model.”

Farkas, with his experience in advertising, produced a brochure to market this new product. In it he shared

I have, with my own hands, made over two hundred mouthpieces, each different in some respect…. in 1949 I made a mouthpiece which just seemed to have “everything.” Day after day I tried it and compared it to other good mouthpieces and every time it triumphed. Therefore I feel justified in saying that this is one of the best mouthpieces that has ever been made….

The mouthpiece in the photo is an example of this mouthpiece. My understanding is they produced 1,000 of these before Farkas became associated with Holton. The block letter stamping FARKAS MODEL is hard to see in photo but is the one way to tell it if is an original.

Holton for many years made and still makes a similar mouthpiece, the MC cup. If the original FARKAS MODEL was the inspiration, the Holton MC has suffered in comparison over the years due to quality control issues. Later in the Fako book she reports of Farkas in 1992 reacting to

…a letter from a horn player who had bought two Farkas mouthpieces which were supposedly the same model he had used for twenty-six years, but were actually “a far departure” from his original. Phil immediately wrote to Larry Ramirez [at Holton]:

…where there is much smoke perhaps there is a fire.

…this seems like an opportune time to make a new cutter for the MC mouthpiece. I will be happy to furnish a Schilke-Farkas for the occasion….

Back to the mouthpiece in the photo, I actually won my job in Nashville playing on this very mouthpiece. I was given it as a Doctoral student, and really liked it for a good while, to the extent that I even made a backbore reamer that matched the backbore and could be used to modify other mouthpieces to this same backbore.

This gets at what the differences are between the classic Schilke FARKAS MODEL and their later Holton cousins. Start with any dimension you wish, the Holton version varied considerably over the years due to reasons hinted at by Farkas himself above.

One other note would be I recall when I was a Doctoral student at Indiana University that Farkas was playing on that original mouthpiece again, which he had Rick Seraphinoff do some restoration work on so that it was still usable.

There are a number of mouthpieces made today that are similar but probably the magic Farkas found with his original prototype is not to be found. If you run across one of these classic mouthpieces give it a try, it may have a bit of magic left in it.