Hornmasters: Schuller on Mouthpieces

Gunther Schuller was certainly aware of The Art of French Horn Playing and also chose to start his 1962 publication Horn Technique with the topic of instruments and mouthpieces. On mouthpieces Farkas took the general stand that you needed to start with something middle of the road and learn to play on the equipment you had. Schuller gets to some of the same ideas as Farkas (avoiding extremes, and eventually offering the advice to “pick a good one and stay with it”) but takes a quite different track in his discussion, especially with respect to younger students.

The choice of a mouthpiece is a … difficult and vital matter, and the young student is strongly urged to seek the advice at the earliest possible stage of the most competent professional available. In many years of teaching, I have often had to witness the frustrations of young players who originally started on a poor mouthpiece and whose embouchure developed certain unnatural aspects because of an unsuitable mouthpiece….

The ‘ideal’ mouthpiece is something so closely connected with personal tastes and personal physical needs, that it is practically impossible to generalize. What may be ideal for one player may be impossible for another…. If anything can be said at all in a general way, it is that a mouthpiece should be a compromise, if it is to enable the player to render with authenticity the many styles required of the modern player, form the lightest Mozart to the heaviest Mahler and Strauss.

While many players and teachers approach the choice of a mouthpiece from a purely physical point of view, I would suggest that this is not enough if we are to consider the playing of the horn as a fine art, not merely as a means of making a living. Since we are dealing with music, the physical requirements of a mouthpiece must be balanced against certain musical requirements.

… I think it is basically unmusical and a fallacy to pursue a specific tone per se, without considering the musical requirements to which end the tone should be only a means. In certain quarters in America and in certain countries in Europe, there are definite ideas on this subject which, while they may satisfy certain personal short-range viewpoints, in my opinion violate the fundamentals of artistic music-making. A large or fat tone that remains inexorably the same is of very little musical value in a performance of a Debussy or Mozart piece, when that tone relentlessly penetrates the light-textured orchestral fabric….

While these are artistic issues, I feel they must be mentioned early in the discussion, since very often the choice of mouthpiece (and horn) is so extreme that, after a short while, a more moderate middle course is no longer physically and psychologically possible. Early habits and training are notoriously tenacious.