The more recent of the two posts is from the blog of Michael Gilliand, who is Adjunct Professor of Horn at Missouri Southern State University and Principal Horn with the Fort Smith Symphony in Fort Smith, Arkansas. His recent post “So You Want to be a Professional Hornist?” is one I found on the shared RSS reading from Bruce Hembd on Horn Matters, and includes the following on the section on the typical daily regime.

Typical Daily Regime for the serious student which was garnered from Kendall Betts, former principal horn of the Minnesota Orchestra during a master class:

• 20-45 minutes F horn warm up such as Farkas.
• 30-60 minutes etudes, some or all on F horn, such as Kopprasch, Kling, Gallay, Belloli, Reynolds, and others.
• 20-45 minutes technical routines such as scales, arpeggios, broken arpeggios, chordal arpeggios, Clarke, Arban, Singer, or other technical materials.
• 20-45 minutes long tones: pppp; ff>pp
• 30-60 minutes repertoire: solos, excerpts, orchestral parts, etc.

Gilliand in particular is a strong believer in F horn practice to improve accuracy. He comments in his post further that

For young students work on the F horn is extremely important. Work on this side of the horn truly aids endurance, more natural slurs, better intonation, smoother piano not attacks, and more tonal color due to the sounding overtones. Truly, work on the F horn will provide one with some difficult practice. After one has work through the first four or five Kopprasch Etudes the results will be clearly evident.

He included as an example this graphic from the original edition of the Kopprasch etudes; for more see my Horn Articles Online article on the Original Kopprasch Etudes.

[This year I hope to bring out several new publications that relate to the type of music you could use in a daily workout such as the one described from Kendall Betts; more on those as they near publication.]

The second post is from Julia Rose, Associate Principal Horn of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, a great article on her recent re-evaluation of her warm-up and mid-range. As a brief personal preface, I find that I have to warm up a good while in the mid-range before I can work out from the center. The Farkas warm-up mentioned above for example starts too fast for me. Julia has some great thoughts along these same lines.

Ever since college, I have been doing Doug Hill’s maintenance session. Doug was my teacher in college at the University of Wisconsin, and like Doug, I believe the maintenance session can be a major factor for improving and maintaining on the horn. Sometimes the term “warmup” is used interchangeable with “maintenance session.” If one merely wants to warm up, one can do that in 10 minutes. If one wants to work on range, breathing, scales, arpeggios, attacks, etc. during the warmup, then it should more correctly be called a maintenance session. It is usually done at the beginning of the day, but it can be done anytime.

Anyway, Doug’s maintenance session is, shall we say, rather ambitious…it starts out slowly with an attack/release study in whole notes at various pitches, and then launches full-force into a whole series of arpeggios of every dynamic and speed all over the horn, really testing the outer ranges. It has suited me well for many years, but ever since I’ve turned 30, it’s felt like my middle register has become the most problematic range of my horn playing. But I figured it was just a high horn thing, and I’ve never attributed it directly to my maintenance session.

Julia had a recent embouchure injury she had to come back from. With this in mind and jumping ahead a bit in her post she continues

So, once things were healed up, I went with the idea. I took a good look at my maintenance session and decided that I needed to make it more suitable to my needs. You see, Doug’s maintenance session is a really good one, and it suits many people very well, but I have always accepted it blindly because it created such improvement in my playing at the time I really needed it (in college). I needed help with my high range and fluency back then. Now my needs are different. My high range is always there, my low range is there, I know my scales and arpeggios. What feels like is NOT always there is my middle register. It felt stiff and unresponsive much of the time. So, doesn’t it make sense to focus on fluency and flexibility in the middle range?

So, borrowing some exercises from Wendell Rider’s excellent book “Real World Horn Playing,” I’ve started to play most of my maintenance session in the middle register, using open natural harmonics, saving a couple Doug Hill arpeggios for the very end. I’ve been doing this for about a month now, and like I figured, my high and low ranges are there, but now my middle range is becoming much more comfortable. Not only that, but I have more chops left over for subsequent hours of practice. Before I was just burning my chops up and stiffening them during my first practice session. What strengthened my chops back in college is stiffening them for me now.

In short, maintenance sessions are all well and good, but every few years, one needs to step back and evaluate one’s strengths and weaknesses, because they will change over time.

Between these two posts there is a lot to think over in relation to the warm-up and the routine and the New Year. Be sure to check out their full posts and give the whole topic some thought, it will pay off.

Where the horns are on the stage is an important issue and, unfortunately, we often end up being the pawns in larger orchestral games of personalities and turf. Personally I would rather sit in a row behind the woodwinds even if it means sitting in front of the timpani. I would much rather be there, close to the woodwinds, than in front of the trumpets and/or trombones.

A few months ago there was a post related to this in the Julia Rose blog. Julia after noting various seating arrangements and issues experienced in her orchestra explains

I see 2 problems that have caused this musical chairs fiasco. The 1st is (obviously) our poor concert hall. The 2nd is a lack of leadership in the matter from the podium. I can speak freely about this now that we are going on our 2nd year without a music director. Our past music directors have not made the sound of the orchestra a priority with regard to seating, but instead have been swayed by factions of musicians complaining. The horn section has been a pawn in the whole game, and we get shoved into locations no other musician wants to be placed, just because we don’t complain as much.

Read her post for more on her specific situation. It is a big topic. I may be biased but the horns do get pushed around probably because we are in fact nicer people overall. Ideally you will have a conductor with a good ear who manages the situation so that the best sound is the goal, but that is not always the case due to the various squeaky wheels and self-appointed brass section leaders in the orchestra. And some conductors don’t have a good ear, but that is a topic for another post.

Speaking of natural horn, I had a funny thought during … Dvorak’s Symphony #8. The 3rd movement (begins in D horn, then the 3rd horn has 4 fast measures (in 3/4, conducted in one!) to switch crooks to C horn for about 8 bars, and then has 17 bars to switch back to D horn. I had a vision of a frantic Bohemian horn player dropping his D crook during the 4 bar rest and making a total racket and embarassment of himself. 3rd horn players are usually the klutzy ones…I can say this because I am one! What was Dvorak thinking?

This work is a great example of one that runs up against the question of what the composer seems to think players will do as notated in the part versus what the horn players must have actually done. First, a major point: this is not natural horn writing, it is valved horn writing. Dvorak seems to be thinking that his horn players will be changing crooks on valved horn, such as on the one in the illustration with this post with a crook just like a natural horn, playing in a variety of keys to suit the key of the music better. It could be done! But reality is horn players pretty quickly quit bothering and transposed everything to F no matter if they were playing on a single F horn, a single Bb horn, or by the early 20th century a double horn. Dvorak seems to have thought some players were changing crooks, and so long as he heard the right notes coming out of the horn section all was good.

For more on the nineteenth century valved horn I have a lot of information over in Horn Articles Online, and I plan at some point in the future to publish a book on the topic.

This is a great event to check into. I was a second prize winner in the university division way back in 1989. At that time it was known as the American Horn Competition.

So what is does this photo have to do with the event? It is an image on the IHCA website in the section of 2001 photos. They caption it “Three of the judges after the competition!!!” Is that Steven Gross on the left?

Also, be sure to check out Julia’s site, it is full of great info even if she is a Steelers fan, with photos in her site to prove it!

The post I have been thinking about for several days is “My Crazy Embouchure,” which I highly recommend reading in full. In it Julia relates the story of her embouchure,

I have had my share of embouchure struggles throughout my career, including a major embouchure change in college. I played with a very einsetzen embouchure (almost all upper lip) until I was a sophomore in college. …

Somehow I did very well using that embouchure in high school. I had a very good tone for a high school student, a good low range, but I pretty much pressured the high range into existence. I was able to get around the limitations of my embouchure through sheer hard work and practice, as I really wanted to play the horn for a living eventually. But in my sophomore year of college I hit the proverbial wall, especially in the high range, and realized I needed to make a change. When I was in middle/high school, various people (who were in positions to know better) told me that I should never change my embouchure, as it resembled Dennis Brain’s and how could that be wrong, and that they had gone through embouchure changes themselves and that it “ruined” them.

So I was quite afraid of the change, but luckily I was studying with “Mr. Embouchure” in college, Douglas Hill. He is quite an amazing teacher- in my opinion his knowledge of embouchure is second to none in the teaching profession, and he has had an amazing success rate among many his students who are now playing and teaching professionally. He has turned many students who appeared at first hearing to have limited talent into fine players. He has changed many students’ embouchures successfully, which gave me confidence that it would all end up well for me. So I attempted the change.

Myself, I can relate to her story very well as I changed my embouchure not once but twice, in the middle of my undergraduate program and also at the beginning of my Doctoral studies. My original embouchure coming out of high school was 2/3 lower lip! I made all-state as a senior in high school but my low range was terrible and I was no super hot prospect for a performance program. I started college in fact as a music business major. But I got serious about playing and, in short, made a lot of progress working with good teachers. But I hit a bit of a wall after my MM studies and made another fairly big adjustment. It was needed and frankly got me where I am today.

My first embouchure change especially was not at all easy. I can really relate to Julia where she shares,

Little did I know that I was in for 6 months of sheer agony! He gave me the information I needed to make the change- what constitutes a good embouchure, his philosophies on embouchure, and told me to study the photos in Farkas’ 40 Virtuoso Horn Players’ Embouchures. So I began; I couldn’t play a C major scale for a week. I struggled in front of a mirror in a little practice room with a window on it, embarrassed by the pathetic sounds coming out of my horn. I’m sure more than a couple horn students strolled down that hallway, heard those awful sounds and wondered, “Who in the #&*$ is that?!” and peeked in the window. But eventually something clicked over Winter Break for me involving something with my lower lip, I was able to move the mouthpiece down, and my playing took off very quickly from there.

The mistake I see students make out of high school especially is that they are trying too hard to study with the wrong kind of teacher, one that is actually not capable of working with a student to work out their playing problems. Typically these are very natural players that may even have limited interest in teaching, they are “players” and their teaching is more along the lines of coaching. Their teaching success is based on teaching students who are also very natural players with few problems out of high school.

But plenty of other hornists have potential for success given hard work and good teachers. Really, in auditions at ASU, we are trying above all to estimate potential, we don’t expect finished products but players who we feel are capable of making progress. Julia certainly found in Doug Hill a teacher that took the time to work things out with a student that he felt had potential.

No teacher relishes embouchure work with students. It takes a lot of effort from both teacher and student. But the practical fact is virtually every horn student needs some embouchure adjustment to get the extreme ranges sorted out to a very high level, which may include an embouchure change. Be aware of that as you consider teachers and programs and your horn playing.