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This series has covered a lot of ground! So much so that it has been a challenge to write the conclusion – but it is, of course, a story with no conclusion yet, the Geyer dream will continue well beyond 2023, the 100 year mark of his iconic horn design.
Sadly, the original horns are in fact getting old. There is a conventional wisdom that you might not want to use a horn over about 40 years old as your main, daily driver horn. But some are still in daily use, and to conclude our series we have a few random stores.
Clyde Wedgewood and an influencer today
If you are active on Instagram or TikTok you have seen a major horn influencer post regularly on her original Geyer, Alana Yee. There is a great TikTok post about her horn, which you will have to really dig to view (but well worth the trek). The post was on 2-22-2022. When she had the horn out on trial the seller told her it had belonged Clyde Wedgewood. She then googled him (he was second horn in the Chicago Symphony with Farkas; there are photos of his embouchure and with the horn in The Art of Brass Playing) and got the newspaper article on his murder! Was the horn cursed? But she thought it wasn’t, after using the horn for four years.
Murder?!? Filling in a few more details (and feel free to do the search on Wedgewood), rumor was he was into guns and prostitutes and other shady stuff, and yes he was murdered. But being of short stature, I can imagine that Geyer made the horn specifically to fit him, and it is great that it also fits Alana Yee well today.
Hatfield and the high Bb
Famously, Geyer style horns can have a bad high Bb. During my Doctoral studies my major professor, Mike Hatfield told me a story. When he started his career, he was playing an original Geyer horn, but he had questions — was it him or the horn? He had Chris Leuba and Philip Farkas try the horn. I forget which one said which, but one said the Bb was fine and the other said the horn was unusable and to get another. Eventually he sold it, he just did not have sufficient trust in the high Bb.
Which gets to a standard thing I tell people. When trying a Geyer style horn, test the high Bb. If it is not good, walk away. You play high Bb a lot! You need to have faith in the note. Why they can be bad is a quirk of the design that makers have to work out carefully.
A Geyer dissertation?
If you want to read more, there is a recent dissertation to check out. “Kruspe versus Geyer: An Examination of Horns Used in Several Texas Symphony Orchestras” is a 2016 dissertation from Texas Tech by Andrea Christine Denis. Happy to see some of my writing show up in the footnotes! The full dissertation may be accessed here.
Pondering my Geyer single F
Finally, back during my sabbatical I worked on rebuilding several single F horns to classic designs (series starts here), and one of the key designs in my mind was the Schmidt single F (seen at that same link). I rebuilt a Mirafone horn to a similar design, then was able to buy the remains of an original Geyer single F and rebuild that. The finished versions are seen below.
The key things to note are the Geyer (on the left) actually follows the Schmidt design more closely than my altered Mirafone, and also the Mirafone has several rather bad notes and on the Geyer they are a lot better. I’m probably going to go back and modify the Mirafone bell horn to more closely match the Geyer design. Even with the single F being probably part of a school order, he was just hard wired to make as good a horn as he could, to a solid design. A good final thought in a series dedicated to the craftsmanship of Carl Geyer and the 100th anniversary of the Geyer horn.
Return to the beginning of Geyer Dreaming series
