Home > Articles by: John Ericson

Articles by John Ericson

Indexed in reverse chronological order.

Twitter, #Horn #FrenchHorn #JustHitTheNotes

PUBLISHED: August 11, 2011, John Ericson

One of my projects this summer has been to get more familiar with Twitter. HM has a good number of fans on Twitter (over 300, at present) and having started using Twitter more I can see also that it is a great way to get a concise, custom news feed, especially on something like a [...]

Summer Music in the Park: The Tradition Lives On

PUBLISHED: August 4, 2011, John Ericson

Imagine a bandstand in a park with a forty piece band playing a summer concert. Something of the past or something you can see now? As noted on Tuesday, this summer, after teaching at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, I was able to take a two week trip with my family to visit my [...]

Categories: Sub-categories:
Emporia Municipal Band

Brief Review: LA Phil and Vienna Horns — The Death Hunt

PUBLISHED: August 2, 2011, John Ericson

This past two weeks I was on vacation and I discovered that I only had one horn CD in the car for the trip, Vienna Horns Director’s Cut. It got a very good hearing on the road! There are several great cuts on this CD, including in particular a very nice arrangement of a portion [...]

Categories: Sub-categories:
Horn ensemble

Three Quotes on the Horn in the Nineteenth Century

PUBLISHED: July 28, 2011, John Ericson

One of the things I enjoy is quotations from older sources; they give a window into horn playing and our past from a first person perspective. These three quotations look back at the horn in the nineteenth century from a much closer perspective than we have today. Our first quote today is from 1925 but [...]

Categories: Sub-categories:
Quotations

Hornmasters Interlude: Repertoire to Practice

PUBLISHED: July 26, 2011, John Ericson

While Farkas in The Art of French Horn Playing does address the topic of etude study in the section on practice, he did not address the topics of what solo and orchestral works are the most important to study. This is a story that is repeated in most of the classic horn methods written since [...]

Categories: Sub-categories:
Excerpts

Will a Different Mouthpiece make much of a Difference?

PUBLISHED: July 21, 2011, John Ericson

This article was written and posted in the original HTML Horn Notes Blog at the end of one of my summers teaching at the Brevard Music Center. Dated 7/30/2005, it is one of those topics that comes up very often in horn teaching. Recently I have found myself talking with several students about mouthpieces. Mouthpiece [...]

Hornmasters on How Much to Practice

PUBLISHED: July 19, 2011, John Ericson

There are a variety of approaches to the question of how much to practice on a French horn. Farkas in The Art of French Horn Playing was a strong advocate of three hours of practice a day. He does allow that rehearsals and concerts are a portion of what playing can be done in one [...]

John Ericson & Bruce Hembd
on the French horn, brass related topics, and the field of classical music.