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This free, online course presents a great deal of information on teaching (and playing) the horn, gleaned from a variety of sources, with commentary to encourage critical thinking skills. The full course of study may be seen here.
Prelude: Don’t stop thinking for yourself
As a prelude to the course, I would offer this quote from former University of Iowa horn professor Jeffrey Agrell, originally left as a comment on the Horn Notes Blog but soon expanded into a short article.
As I once wrote in a Horn Call article, “Beware of Philip Farkas”, to me the principal danger of the Great Horn Players (teachers, players, book authors) is that people stop thinking for themselves, stop analyzing, observing what’s really happening, stop making their own decisions, stop looking for new ways to do things better and more efficiently. If the Great One said it, it must be true for everyone, all the time, amen, no further thought required. In fact, not everything works for everyone all the time. There are a lot of variables in people and what works for people. The Great Ones are a good place to start, but don’t let them keep you from making your own considered decisions and especially don’t let them kill your own spirit of inquiry and inspiration. The zen koan “if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him” means to me that you should not let any expert make all your decisions for you. Learn from the great ones, but don’t accept everything uncritically. Think about everything you do and see if there is a way to do it better, more efficiently, rather than just blindly follow a prescription. It’s easier and simpler just to “follow orders” than to wrestle with problems and work out your own solutions from what you know and observe. But it can pay big dividends.
About the course
The University of Horn Matters horn pedagogy course was originally posted in the fall of 2012 and has been further revised every year, with major revisions in 2022. The majority of the readings are from the Hornmasters series in Horn Matters; the course references 8-12 articles a week, which flow fairly quickly and give readers a lot to think about as they develop their own view of the bigger picture. But hopefully not too much, so as to tie you up in knots as a player!
The online course functions as a version of the same course offered in the horn studio at Arizona State University. In addition to the readings and discussion of the readings, students taking the live class will among other things write a book report on The Inner Game of Tennis and keep a concise journal to reflect on the weekly readings.
While a number of the resources cited are long out of print, readers following this course are also highly encouraged to purchase any of the texts cited or quoted that are in print, as there is much more to be found in each book than just the short quotations given in the readings.
While it is hoped that this course will be of interest to horn players of a wide variety of interests and levels, this course would also serve well as an excellent review for graduate horn students anywhere who have upcoming comprehensive exams.
An elephant in the room: Older, published horn resources have some “issues” that you might begin to notice
Besides some of the sources of the readings included with the course being dated, you might begin to notice other issues.
For example, some older sources use gendered language that assumes that readers are male. Thankfully, the horn world has long been more friendly than the other brass instruments to female players (we must overall be very close to 50/50 in the USA), and the language used does not significantly impact the information presented.
More critically, there was a conventional wisdom that band directors were taught for many years, which I believe impacts how the embouchure is approached in some sources. The conventional wisdom was to steer students with thin lips to the horn and trumpet, and those with heavier lips were pointed toward to the low brass. It also shows up in the area of equipment; the smaller, traditional inner diameter of mouthpieces does not suit a player with heavier lips. This is something to have in mind if you work with beginners, you want to set people up with equipment that suits their physiology and sets them up for success.
Which is all to say that readers need to keep in mind there are hidden biases that have become engrained inside conventional wisdom on many levels. Some elements will always need adjustment to fit individual players — there is more than one way to play a horn. As a person with heavier than average lips I’m glad my own band directors did not subscribe to that conventional wisdom and initially steer me to the lower brass! Anyone of any race or gender can play the horn well, there are no limitations.
What about horn repertoire?
There is an entire companion repertoire class as well, presented in the live ASU classes in our spring semester. But, first, on to pedagogy!
Go to Week I: Choosing the Mouthpiece and the Horn
