Horn Matters is the leading online resource on the French horn, co-founded by John Ericson and Bruce Hembd. The mission of Horn Matters is: to encourage, inspire, inform, and challenge horn players, and; to promote the best musical instrument ever, the French horn. (More.)

Most Recent Articles

Ultrasonic Cleaning and your Horn

You know that you need to keep your horn clean. If you are proactive about maintenance you will hardly ever need to have your...

Geyer Update: Engravings, Serial Numbers, and More

I could also have titled this article “Things I got wrong” in the Geyer Dreaming series (which starts here), or the related article published...

Revisiting the Art of French Horn on LP Records

The past year the vast majority of my actual classical music listening has been to LP records. With the recent passing of Hermann Baumann...

Brief Review: The Horn. The Book You Need

To open this brief review, I’ll start with a money quote: The Horn by Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti is the most significant book on...
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Featured Articles

Horn Etudes by Female Composers

Many Horn Matters readers will be familiar with the Works with Horn by Female Composers website by Dr. Lin Foulk. If not, this is...

Julius Watkins, jazz French horn pioneer

Talking with colleagues recently, a topic that came up was how some great players of the recent past are unjustly neglected today. In terms...

Overview of Trusted Brands in French Horns

A survey titled "What Brand Names Do You Trust?" collected the opinions of 392 participants. The results are in and while it may take...

Choosing a French Horn Mouthpiece (I): The Basic Parts

Part I: The Rim and Preliminary Thoughts Part II: Cup, Throat and Bore Part III: Weight, Plating and Shopping Tips For the past decade...

French Horn Transposition Chart

A complete reference. Transposition Chart (PDF) (updated 2012) Over the past few months, I have been posting various transposition tricks, including how to transpose: A and...

Farkas on Stagefright (and more)

In the world of horn there have been few that made as much impact as Philip Farkas (1914-1992). The Art of French Horn Playing...

Random Articles

Bad Conventional Wisdom, part 1: Background, and a breathing story

As I shared in a workshop presentation back in 2010, I became a better teacher in 2008. I generated an article for Horn Matters...

John Clark, Song of Light–Memories of Horn Calls Past: My First...

One feature of The Horn Call for many years has been reviews of new books and recordings. My first issue had a special, guest...

2016 Update: Advertising at Horn Matters

With the 2016 New Year we are offering a new format and pricing structure for our banner ads. We have had banner ads at Horn Matters...

Topic: “Clicks” and valve changes

I have been working on final editing of a series of new Bordogni publications (more soon!) and have been playing as a result a...

Transforming negative into positive

This comic strip from Odd Quartet hits on a note of truth and is also great advice.

From the Mailbag: My Water Key is Worthless

QUESTION: I must be a total idiot, but I cannot get my spit valves to work on any horn I have tried. It seems that...
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