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When I was a Doctoral student, I was able to create a special minor for my degree at IU, the minor being in brass instrument design and construction. For that project, I wrote a lengthy paper and built a natural horn working with Rick Seraphinoff. As I have said before, effectively I was his first apprentice, although we did not think of it in those terms at the time.
While readers might not guess this, and I don’t mention this to students that often either, my original college major was music business with a strong interest in going into instrument repair. While my direction obviously changed toward performance and teaching, I had developed some basic repair skills before I got to IU from taking art and shop metals classes and an instrument repair seminar. At IU, our idea was to start first with some repair on an inexpensive compensating double, then take on the bigger project that built the horn you see below.
What I did was take a Cousenon concert mellophone from the early 20th century and use the bell and first branch to make a natural horn patterned on an English instrument from the late 18th century. It can be crooked with the system of crooks and couplers into every key from C alto to Bb basso, and has a main slide for low pitch as well.
The second photo shows the horn build in progress in 1989, on a bench at the shop at IU. I bent all the tubing, and made all the tapered parts using mandrels Rick had developed. The horn turned out very well, too well almost, as to this day it is the natural horn I am the most likely to play among the several I have access to. It is a very comfortable and responsive horn.
After graduation, I had an idea to build an early valved horn that took crooks. For this I followed the pattern of a Gumpert model Kruspe from around 1880. The design allows the horn to be crooked as high as Bb alto. Again under the guidance of Rick Seraphinoff I made F and E crooks for it, and I could borrow crooks from the other horn and put it in any key (using the valve slides from yet another horn for Bb alto). This first photo is fairly early in the build, and the second is a bit further on.
The body of the horn was a Cleveland (a King subsidiary brand) single F, a cheap student horn with frankly a quirky valve section. Over the years, I have tweaked this horn a few times, most notably cutting the bell when I was in Potsdam. It plays very responsively, I think the basic Gumpert design is a very good one and I do play this horn often, especially warming up on it a home, but the horn itself still has issues to address. That will be part of my sabbatical project, as I want to put a different valve section on the horn and I hate the tinted lacquer, it has to go if I can get it off! It will be a major rebuild.
I would also like to work out another single F based on the Schmidt design seen in part 1 of this series. I have several project horns on hand to use for parts, including especially one with a wonderful hand hammered bell but an incomplete valve section. After that, if I have enough time, I have even more projects in mind, gradually refreshing and growing skills in horn repair and construction.
If you are curious to see these projects unfold in real time, I will be posting to my personal Instagram regularly as to how the project is going, and periodically here as well. If you are an Instagram user, look for me at ericsonhorn, where I recently also posted a number of performance videos.
