Random Monday: Placebo Domingo, Horns on Fire and Killer Queen

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 [...]

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: [...]

The mind of the horn player can be a complicated place, and one psychological principal in particular that has always held a fascination for me personally has been the placebo effect - both in teaching and in my personal learning. According to the American Cancer Society: A placebo (pluh-see-bow) is a substance or other kind of treatment that [...]

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 [...]

Kiss and make up Sometimes life just gets random and I was not able to post an article on Monday. This was due to a rather intense discussion at my workplace revolving around the academic claim to “fair use” when it comes to using the music from the popular Harry Potter movie series without permission. [...]

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 [...]