Horn Player Quits TV News Show

One classic publication I have come back to recently is Preparatory Melodies to Solo Work for French Horn edited by Max P. Pottag. This is a great publication for the moderately advanced student–melodic, short, with some challenges–and I have recently come back to it in my personal practice. It was a book my first major [...]

Reflections from the past week. Gunther Schuller From a regional section of the New York Times, I discovered that Gunther Schuller actually did some conducting on Miles Davis’ landmark album Birth of the Cool, in addition to playing horn. Schuller recently adopted some of that recording’s material for a new jazz nonet. What is a [...]

Every dog has its day. Generating both laughter and scandal in its day, Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) was unusual not only for its non-allegorical use of a nude, but also for its stark, unrefined contrasts. The gradations of light, shadow and perspective typical of the era are abandoned in favor of images [...]

Is heavier better, or is it a gimmick? Over the years I have experimented with a variety of equipment, including instruments, mouthpieces, leadpipes and bells. One facet in this experimentation has been with equipment and parts that are intentionally made “heavier” — either with extra metal, with alloys, or with manufacturing methods to make the [...]

As I will soon become brass department chair at Arizona State I recently obtained a copy of the Scott Whitener book A Complete Guide to Brass. I will oversee the brass methods courses at ASU next year and this is used as a text. I did not use it when taught this course at the [...]

Following up on my post from yesterday, there are a number of things that combined will help keep your embouchure healthy. One thing I learned to do was warm-down. The summer I learned to do this was the summer I was in the Colorado Philharmonic Orchestra, now known as the National Repertory Orchestra. I was [...]