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Articles by John Ericson

Indexed in reverse chronological order.

Webcast: Marching Band Competition

PUBLISHED: October 22, 2011, John Ericson

One of the annual events I like to get to is the ASU Marching Competition. I was there last year for example and reported on the visceral experience of a line of 35 strong mellophone players. This year I was looking forward to hearing an even more visceral line of 42 mellophones, but due to [...]

Hornmasters on Average Tonguing, part II: Schuller and Yancich

PUBLISHED: October 20, 2011, John Ericson

Gunther Schuller in Horn Technique has a rather different take on the tongue and tonguing than Farkas. He certainly does not agree with the up and down idea of a tongue stroke and offers an alternate approach to tonguing. The tongue during a note, i.e. after the attack, pulls back into a relatively relaxed suspended [...]

Then: Double Horn and Descant at the Audition. Now?

PUBLISHED: October 18, 2011, John Ericson

Before (and after) winning Third Horn in Nashville in 1991 I took a lot of auditions. Early on, I owned just one horn, and in a fairly early audition I advanced and had to play a very high excerpt from Haydn 31 on a big double horn. I did not win and decided then and [...]

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Descants & Triples

Hornmasters on Average Tonguing, part I: Horner and Farkas

PUBLISHED: October 16, 2011, John Ericson

Virtually every method book on the horn has something to say on the topic of tonguing, much of it contradictory. And it is a really important topic. As such, this part of the Hornmasters series will be broken up into six parts, moving chronologically through Classic horn publications that address the topic. To begin I [...]

9 Ways We can Tell that a Composer or Arranger Does Not Know how to Write for the Horn

PUBLISHED: October 15, 2011, John Ericson

Periodically we at Horn matters have touched on the topic of bad horn writing. Horn players reading this already have a good idea, intuitively, what is characteristic for the horn (especially heroic lines) but it is something that is not necessarily intuitively understood by composers and arrangers. In this article I brought up these topics: [...]

What is a “Dual Bore” Horn?

PUBLISHED: October 13, 2011, John Ericson

While I am not using it at present, for some years I played a Paxman 25A horn. It is a big horn and it is “dual bore.” What they did with this model is make the F side bigger than normal. The photos with this article tell the tale. The slide on the left is [...]

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Hornmasters: Attacks, a Prelude to Tonguing

PUBLISHED: October 11, 2011, John Ericson

Tonguing would seem on the surface to be a fairly uncontroversial topic. We have touched on this topic in this series of quotations from Classic horn methods but now it is time to turn more directly to the topic. Tonguing is a topic that every teacher has tips to offer. Looking at the big picture [...]

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