Advanced, Online Courses on Horn Repertoire & Pedagogy
The University of Horn Matters horn pedagogy and repertoire courses are presented free as an Open Educational Resource (OER) to the horn playing community by Horn Matters. As some weeks will be of more interest than other weeks to individual readers of Horn Matters, the complete course is outlined below.
Click on a link to arrive at the topic area of interest.
Horn Pedagogy Course
- Introducing The University of Horn Matters Horn Pedagogy Course
- Week 1: Choosing the Mouthpiece and Horn
- Week 2: Descant and Triple horns, Mellophones, Care and Maintenance of the Horn, and Left Hand Position
- Week 3: Right Hand Position, Fingerings, and Intonation
- Week 4: Embouchure Overview
- Week 5: Breathing, and a bit on Dystonia
- Week 6: Practice and Warm-Up
- Week 7: Slurs, Legato, and Average Tonguing
- Week 8: Rapid Tonguing, Staccato, Multiple Tonguing
- Week 9: Tone Quality, Chords, and Musical Phrasing
- Week 10: Range Development
- Week 11: Endurance, Use of an Assistant Horn, Dynamic Range, and Mouthpiece Pressure
- Week 12: Accuracy and Transposition
- Week 13: Lip Trills, and Muting and Stopping the Horn
- Week 14: Performance Anxiety and Care of the Lip
- Week 15: A Missing Topic, and Final Review
- BONUS: Four Types of Students, Two Types of Teachers
Horn Repertoire Course
- Introducing The University of Horn Matters Horn Repertoire Course
- Week 1: The Resume, What to Prepare for Professional Auditions, and Your Audience
- Week 2: Orchestral Auditions and Orchestral Life
- Week 3: Introducing the Natural Horn
- Week 4: Review of literature for horn in the Baroque period
- Week 5: The Descant Horn and Approaches to Baroque Literature today
- Week 6: Who Invented Hand-Horn Technique, and the Early Classical Horn
- Week 7: The Classical Natural Horn
- Week 8: Approaches to Classical Literature Today
- Week 9: The Natural Horn in the Romantic Period
- Week 10: The Early Valved Horn
- Week 11: The Valved Horn in the Later 19th Century
- Bonus Week: Stuck in the 19th Century
- Week 12: The Wagner Tuba
- Week 13: The Modern Horn
- Week 14: A Course of Study
- Week 15: Final
Comprehensive, hybrid courses that you can study on your own!
These OER courses are actually, believe it or not, an adaptation of a book project that I abandoned. It just made more sense to break up the content (which was full of quotes) and post it for the horn community on Horn Matters.
Depending on the year I have made use of these materials as a text or supplemental material for the same courses at Arizona State University, where I serve as horn professor. The first year I used them was the 2012-13 school year. The articles have all been updated a number of times since they were originally posted.
That having been said, honestly, the content presented here is too much to cover well in an actual, sit down course for horn performance majors at the college level. If you are reading this just as an interested hornist, do feel free to skim and skip around a bit as an enhancement to your playing, don’t make it into too hard a project.
Writing this update in the summer of 2026, I have to admit there have been several recent years when I only lightly referenced these materials, taking a totally different tactic to the ASU courses. This coming year I actually won’t be making extensive use of these materials.
Each week the course typically references readings from as many as 12 articles. These can be read deeply or skimmed quickly, depending on interests, and will give readers a lot to think about as they develop their own view of the bigger picture of horn pedagogy and horn repertoire.
Before you start…
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- We attempt to keep everything working properly, but be aware that some outside links will go bad over time.
- The topic areas for the pedagogy course in general follow in the order found in the Farkas book. It’s a somewhat quirky order of topics when you think about it, but is so familiar to horn players that it was adopted for this online course.
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