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Horn & Music History

French horn and general music history.

Who Wrote the Haydn Double Concerto?

This week I had the opportunity to perform the double concerto commonly attributed to Haydn. My performance was with Rose French (with piano), as...

The Kopprasch Op. 5 Etudes and a New Free “Low Horn”...

Way back in 1997 The Horn Call published an article that I wrote on the history of the Kopprasch etudes, a version of which...

Three Quotes on the Horn in the Nineteenth Century

One of the things I enjoy is quotations from older sources; they give a window into horn playing and our past from a first...

Understanding Wagner and the Horn (my best article)

Most every semester people working on research projects contact me about various topics related to the horn in the 19th century. This spring in...

Nationalism and the traditional French style, II

Continued from Part I In most textbooks I encounter, Nationalism - as a movement in Western music history -  has a beginning and an end....

Nationalism and the traditional French style, I

Lucien Thévet (1914 - 2007) was one of the last practitioners of a unique style of horn playing and recently, some samples of his...

Long Before Farkas: Horn Mutes and Other Advice for Brass Players...

Way back in 1813 a comprehensive method book with sections on all the instruments was published, the Vollständige Theoretisch-pracktische Musikschule of Joseph Fröhlich....

Gottlob Benedikt Bierey: Excited about Valves

Bruce sent me a link to a very interesting post yesterday from the site Wired.com. The title of the post was “May 3, 1815:...

The Natural Horn and the Beethoven 9 “Controversy”

In our horn repertoire class at ASU we arrived recently at the topic of Beethoven 9. The fourth horn solo has been the subject...

Why was the Valve Invented?

A question that comes up periodically is that of why was the valve invented. There is a myth that is repeated often that they...