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As I shared in a workshop presentation back in 2010, I became a better teacher in 2008. I generated an article for Horn Matters related to that, Beyond Farkas: A Workshop Presentation, but that article only went so far, and did not get as directly as I should have at the topic of the dangers of conventional wisdom. I gave the topic another try on June 24 this summer, with a presentation to the Horns-United camp on the topic “Is ‘Conventional Wisdom’ holding back your horn playing?,” which got closer, but in this series this week my hope is to dig even deeper into the issues.
In the big picture, some of the issues are the result of lack of knowledge and repeating things told you by teachers or read in books. Where this is especially bad today in our world of horn teaching is that conventional wisdom comes from horn teaching that grew from a time when most horn players were mostly of one gender and ethnicity.
I studied with a number of good teachers. After finishing my Masters at Eastman with Verne Reynolds, I was playing well, but was helped greatly while taking professional auditions by private lessons with Becky Root, Peter Kurau, Milan Yancich, and especially Eli Epstein, all of the Rochester Philharmonic at the time. He was still developing his pedagogy (in comparison to that seen in his method, Horn Playing from the Inside Out), but his overall pedagogy was a big influence at the time in my audition preparation.
However, backing up a step, there was a group of very memorable lessons with Becky Root, Principal Horn of the Rochester Philharmonic at the time, where she talked to me about breathing. None of my teachers to that point that I can recall had ever taken time to work directly with me on the mechanics of breathing, and it was extremely helpful at the time. I later came to realize that 6’ tall male horn players can sound fine breathing OK only, and I sounded fine breathing OK only. For Root, almost a foot shorter than me, she needed to breathe very well all the time, and she had more awareness of the issue. I have taken this to heart in my playing and teaching over years, and this is just one of many issues that the modern horn teacher needs to be aware of in relation to gender and ethnicity and playing the horn at the highest level.
When I went back to school to work on my Doctorate, I chose the Doctor of Music in Brass Pedagogy program at Indiana University, working with Michael Hatfield, as I was especially interested in pedagogy. Part of any effective pedagogy is an understanding of the actual mechanics of brass playing. In that period, it became more and more clear to me that people were very hesitant to be critical of the Farkas book. Let me state clearly, I have no personal axe to grind against Prof. Farkas, I treasure the memory of several lessons with him and being part of the horn quintet that played at his 50th Wedding Anniversary reception. Not to mention that the Farkas book was a revolution to my horn playing when I first read it in High School. However, in that period I began to really question elements of his published pedagogy.
After IU, I won the position of Third Horn in the Nashville Symphony. Over time with that full time playing experience and then teaching at the college level (since 2001 at Arizona State), what became more and more clear to me was there is a spectrum of ways to play the horn. Stated more clearly, I began to see how Farkas in 1957 in The Art of French Horn Playing was toward one end of the spectrum, and the approach presented by Gunther Schuller in his 1962 publication Horn Technique was toward the other end. They are interesting publications to compare directly, as you get the sense that Schuller probably thought everything in the Farkas book was wrong, but he never says the approach is wrong, he just presents a completely different approach in his own book.
What has happened in the horn world over time is that even today (!), some 60 years after the book was published (!!), teachers and students are hesitant to be critical of the Farkas book. The result is the continuation of a conventional wisdom approach that is in some ways on one end of a spectrum, and other ways very dated or applicable only to a subset of players. It is really time to move on from dated sources, bad conventional wisdom approaches do not lead to the best results for a horn world full of diversity.
When the series continues we will start with the topic of tonguing.
