- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
This is part of what was originally a report on the 2011 International Horn Symposium in San Francisco, focusing on one of the significant sessions.
Day two for me started out with practice and then attending the session by natural hornist Richard Seraphinoff. I had studied with Rick at IU and had heard that he had a new horn out, the missing link as it were. His session started though by noting four answers to the question of why study the natural horn.
- To learn how it really was, to gain historical insights
- To build the ear, as on the double horn much is done by feel
- It makes us much more precise as to what we do on the modern horn, especially in articulations
- Professional opportunities
At the end of the session he described his newest model of horn. What he had noted over the years was that when people think natural horn they are either thinking baroque horn (pre 1750) or a natural horn from a 19th century maker. Note: the era that Mozart and Haydn and Rosetti and others wrote in is the era between 1750 and 1800. Rick has now copied a horn dated 1760 by Anton Kerner that fits that gap and as he puts it the instrument explains a lot in terms of the high horn writing seen in Haydn and others — with a smaller bell it is a much better instrument than later models in that range. We hope to have more soon on Horn Matters. This photo is of me trying his new model of horn.
