- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
With The University of Horn Matters being online for ten years, this summer was a great one to update it extensively. I believe Horn Matters readers will find the improvements to be significant.
What exactly is “The University of Horn Matters?”
The University of Horn Matters is what I named our free horn pedagogy and repertoire courses. These were launched over the 2012-13 school year, and are still used as the primary course materials for our horn pedagogy and repertoire courses at Arizona State. As presented online, it is a resource that any horn player can make use of for performance insights and to increase their knowledge of horn repertoire and pedagogy.
Why a major update?
I have done small updates to the course most every year, but this year I decided was the one where it was time to really rework some things. Content was cut, content was added, it was a major update. I worked over every page of the course at least once, and most of it several times.
Headers to improve organization
While it was not my initial goal, as I worked on it one of my goals quickly became improving the readability of the course. Much of the quoted text in the readings is dense, and I took several angles as I went along to improve this.
A person looking casually at the before and after would probably most notice the headers dividing sections of content better, and sprinkling more memes and illustrations around here and there to break up the content visually, but there really are a lot of changes.
Being less “diplomatic”
When I put the course together, I know I took some pains to be diplomatic with my commentary, especially as published online. I’m still pretty diplomatic, but this time around I do take more direct aim at flaws in the conventional wisdoms of the horn world.
Credit this to my being a more experienced teacher. I have seen too many problems that were caused or made worse by following conventional wisdom approaches, especially some of them laid out in the venerable Farkas book. The default ideas presented there float around in the ether of horn teaching. The danger is that conventional wisdom sounds right and gets repeated endlessly — but it can be the source of the problems, rather than a solution. I encourage readers to think critically about the words, to question if they accurately reflect physiological reality, and recognize that some approaches presented only work for a subset of players.
Lots of quotes from lots of books
As you read into the articles in the course there are numerous quotes from books. There is a bit of a story to that.
Basically, one summer about 15 years ago I was going to try to put together a book of a similar scope to Trumpet Pedagogy by David Hickman. I started by typing out quotes from classic horn methods, organized in the order seen in the Farkas book. For several reasons I eventually dropped that book idea and instead used that text as the basis of the University of Horn Matters content, in combination with some other unpublished materials that were incorporated into the repertoire course.
As to the sources I quote, there is good in every one, but if I had a suggestion of a book to track down it would be the Harry Berv book. He has some great insights, and it is a shame this book is not often referenced today.
The goal: better horn playing and teaching
While you can only cover so much in a free online course on the horn, I hope that within the course as presented I can significantly impact the following elements for those that take the time to study it on your own:
- Knowledge
- Improvement in your own playing
- Development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills
- More “tools in your toolbox” that you can use with your students
Intrigued? Check it out here
Periodically I am in communication with horn teachers that use The University of Horn Matters with their students — and also in communication with teachers that are unaware of the resource! Spread the word.
Below is the link to the main page of the course, which will lead you to hundreds of articles related to all aspects of horn playing. And if you are a horn teacher, consider it as a resource for your students, there is nothing like The University of Horn Matters online for any instrument.
UPDATE: Episode 56 of the Horn Notes Podcast looks in more depth at the updates to the University of Horn Matters
