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With this topic we get to one that we all care about a lot, accuracy. Who does not want to play more accurately? And who does not want to have tips to offer their students about how to play more accurately? Virtually every book on the horn has some thoughts in it that relate to accuracy. I have personally worked some on a book draft related to accuracy, as there are at least 1,000 ways to miss notes on the horn.
Why do we miss notes?
The question I would ask as we start into this part of the Hornmasters series is that of why do we miss notes?
Conductors it seems to me often think the reason you miss notes is you are either not that good or you are nervous or not focused enough. But I can assure any conductor reading this, I can be completely relaxed and focused and still miss notes.
As to why we miss notes, as players and teachers we tend to gravitate toward certain reasons. On a high level, we are not missing notes because we can’t hear them. I tend to think in my own case that I am mostly missing because my chops are not set quite right. Other fine players I have known have focused on the tonguing being just right, or on the air as being the culprit that sends notes flying in the wrong directions if not managed just right.
As a related aside, I was cleaning and came across a print out of a 2001 article on CNN.com, “Philip Myers, French hornist: ‘Practice attacks.'” From the article:
I practice attacks — the beginnings of notes — every day. See, the casualty rate among brass players is extremely high: You have a lot of people who are able to play for ten years, and then they “lose their lip,” as it’s sometimes called — they lose their ability to play. I’d say 90 percent of that would be tied to problems making attacks: players get afraid to make them. I can’t tell you how many horn players I’ve talked to over the years who have said, “If I can just get that first note out, then I’m alright after that” — and they’re not talking about hitting the right note, they’re talking about beginning it successfully, cleanly. It’s very audible when that effort is a failure.
In this quote Myers speaks clearly on the topic of accuracy. It is essential!
How to teach accuracy to a student
Turning to the pedagogical side of this topic, there are different ways of managing this as a teacher. Some seem to take it as their personal mission to point out every mistake clearly, as though you did not notice them. Other teachers take a much more hands off and encouraging approach to accuracy, as they know the average, perfectionist horn player already has the inner critic going pretty well and knows what they missed.
It is a tough topic. As we read in this series try to read inside the texts a bit to see where the author is coming from, if they have specific technical things that they feel impact accuracy the most for students and also, if you can, try to guess why they think they miss notes. As certainly every horn player does miss notes.
The “penalty method” and first note accuracy
To kick things off, first up is Philip Farkas. For Farkas as presented in The Art of French Horn Playing the embouchure was a major key to accuracy. He also presents other tactics toward developing accuracy.
One of these tactics is the “penalty method.” He used it to avoid becoming careless, and it involved striving for perfect repetitions of a piece that was in progress. The penalty for a miss was “to go back and do it again, after continuing to the end!” Practice and will-power was the answer.
The other tactic has to do with developing first note accuracy. He wrote that
There is nothing more disheartening than to break the first note of a passage, as one then feels that he has “ruined” the passage before he has fairly started. And yet this first note seems to be the one most often missed. There is good reason for this, as it is usually the most difficult note of the passage, psychologically speaking. Once under way, a certain momentum seems to carry us along; but that first note, coming in “cold,” seems to be the difficult one much too often. Frequently, in the classics, there is just one isolated solo note to hit, high and pianissimo, and this can cause about as much mental anguish to the anxious horn player as an elaborate solo.
Farkas presents a classic exercise of fairly random pitches to work on first note accuracy. One goal he states is to attempt to “hear the notes and intervals before each attack.” This is a major key to accuracy, to which Farkas adds
…but particularly for the purpose of this exercise, try to “taste” each note. Every note has a distinct muscular setting, almost a “flavor” of its own. It is this distinction in taste and feel, almost instinctive, that we wish to develop for each note on the horn.
[And see this article for a few more thoughts on this quotation.]
He also suggests combining the two tactics, that each note missed in the accuracy exercise be repeated three times as a penalty for missing.
Mouthpiece buzzing
As a practical aid to develop accuracy Farkas also suggested mouthpiece buzzing in The Art of Brass Playing.
Another simple test of one’s accuracy of pitch production is made by buzzing on the mouthpiece alone. After missing an attack on the horn, take the mouthpiece off the instrument and try to buzz the note just missed. It is usually a shock to hear how far off pitch you actually were, and yet the instrument had been expected to cooperate somehow with this out-of-tune attack…. When this lip buzzing accuracy-of-pitch is developed to a high degree, several improvements will take place in one’s playing. In the first place, the hoped for clean attack now becomes a reality. But there are additional benefits—better intonation, better accuracy and better tone quality. …concerning accuracy, a broken note is just a note that is too far out of tune….
In fact, if you can’t play it on the mouthpiece, you can’t play it on the instrument.
While buzzing has applications toward accuracy, it is also a topic in and of itself with many applications in horn teaching and playing.
When we return to the topic of accuracy a number of other approaches and tactics will be examined.
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