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In terms of fundamentals and the advancing player, the thing you will need to explore is the world of alternate fingerings.
Alternate fingerings and me, and a fingering chart
Backing up a few steps, I was initially presented (by the horn playing high school band director who helped me switch to horn from trumpet) with a handwritten fingering chart of fingerings for the double horn. The first step is to just know one set of fingerings well! The fingering chart from my Introducing the Horn book will serve well.
In my own case, Verne Reynolds especially (my MM teacher) was not a fan of alternate fingerings. He said something like “a bassoonist would be overjoyed to play all the notes of their instrument with just 4 fingers on the left hand.” And he had a point, you do need to get good at standard fingerings. Confidence and consistency in your fingerings certainly helps accuracy.
But at some point, you want to learn some of the alternates and maybe change your “standard” fingerings as well. Which leads to a story.
Unethical teaching methods and the Bb horn
From multiple sources I have heard stories regarding the late Professor Louis Stout, who was some years ago the horn professor at the University of Michigan. He was a strong advocate of using Bb horn fingerings, and if a student came to his studio that did not know the Bb horn fingerings well, he would take their F horn slides (!) and put them in his desk drawer! They only got them back when they knew the Bb horn fingerings well enough. I don’t think any college teacher would do that today.
Still, that is typically the thing to learn (Bb horn into the typical F horn range), but I have found the opposite happens too – a percentage of students come in very fluent in Bb horn but don’t know F horn. In either case, you really should know both sets of fingerings, and that is a fundamental to master.
When the series continues the topic will be tuning.
Continue reading the Fundamentals series
