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The proverbial elephant in the room in horn playing is accuracy. In the prompt from Douglas Hill (this series is based on a list of fundamentals found in his book) wisely focuses on two aspects of a huge topic: initial attacks and also hearing intervals.
48 Ways to Miss Lots of Notes
Actually, there are many more than 48** ways to miss notes (**the reference is of course to the 48 Etudes of Verne Reynolds, which contain many accuracy challenges – his seemingly favorite phrase to say in my lessons was “one more time for accuracy.”).
Not long ago I was working on a series of articles on accuracy – it starts here – and I’ll get back to that series sometime, after this fundamentals series is done. But a premise of that series was that there are hundreds of things that impact accuracy to varying degrees. So many things that you can’t (and should not) focus on all of them – reality being you have to pick a couple things as your personal points of focus, and attacks and hearing intervals are very good choices for focus.
Initial attacks
There is a lot to be said for having a consistent way of setting up your attacks. Having a method of breathing/setting/playing that happens all in one motion is essential.
One of the most recently completed articles in the accuracy series was “Accuracy Encyclopedia: F is for First Note Accuracy.” In it I lay out several important points, but the main one is to have a smooth and continuous motion that goes from your inhale to when you start the note. There can’t be a hitch in this cycle, as illustrated below (from the Gunther Schuller book).
Hearing entrance notes and intervals
Mentally hearing what you want to play is also extremely important, although you can hear exactly what you want to play and still miss it. Still, it sets you up better if you can hear it, and I touched on that in another of my articles from the accuracy series, “Accuracy Encyclopedia: Audiation and Autopilot.”
What about teaching accuracy?
To close this installment, if you have a copy of the Hill book of Collected Thoughts, turn to chapter 9, “High Expectations.” For me this is a fascinating (but short) chapter that gets at the challenges of teaching accuracy.
It is a topic complicated by the expectations of composers and conductors, which can be both low and high. A consequence of all this is the development, for the player, of “a mindset of fear,” one that “turns on itself and becomes a greater problem than the inherent idiosyncrasies of the horn.”
Where the horn teacher comes in is that we have a lot of power to create accuracy problems if we don’t teach the topic wisely. Hill states it this way: “Do not pass on your prejudices or your own problems to your students.” Reynolds hammered away on accuracy in my lessons back in the day, but I don’t think it a very effective teaching technique. Horn students typically have a harsh inner critic anyway — and, as teacher you can, as Hill says, “block out the joy of making music” by how you approach this topic. Teaching accuracy has no one correct approach, but it is one of the very most important ones to address, worthy of careful thought.
When the series continues the topic is Endurance.
Continue reading the Fundamentals series
