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Horn teachers have always wanted their students to practice. Sometimes, the methods used are not healthy ones.
The traditional take
Farkas in The Art of French Horn Playing divided practice for purposes of improvement on the horn into three categories; what to practice, how to practice, and how much to practice. The overall point being that
The foundation of a performer’s musicianship and technical proficiency is practice. Upon the quality and quantity of this practice depends his entire success. Of course, talent and natural ability play an important part in musical development, but even the highly gifted player must devote tremendous amounts of time to careful, arduous work on a chosen instrument.
Farkas mainly has the angle that we do have to practice to get better, and progress to the highest levels our our art requires quite a bit of quality practice.
A darker take on the topic
Gunther Schuller had, on the surface, a similar thought — but clearly has a darker take when he advised in Horn Technique,
While on the subject of practising, I should like to utter a word of warning to those who propose to take the horn seriously and make it a career. If you wish to achieve a position prominent enough to assure you the kind of livelihood you think you deserve, there must be some time in your student years during which you put in the six to twelve months of brutal hard work without which an enduring successful career is not possible. This ‘basic training’ period is necessary not only in order to refine your playing to the highest professional level, but to build up the easily underestimated amount of resistance, both physical and mental, that the nervous tension of everyday professional playing demands. Any short cuts in this respect will sooner or later lead to trouble.
Advice that sounds like good advice, but is bad advice
Of these two quotes I think the worst advice is this from Schuller: “If you wish to achieve a position prominent enough to assure you the kind of livelihood you think you deserve, there must be some time in your student years during which you put in the six to twelve months of brutal hard work without which an enduring successful career is not possible.” (Italics original to the quote).
He probably thought of it a straight talk, but it is certainly not good advice. Don’t go into a dark place of brutal study, and don’t seek out that highly critical teacher as a mentor. It may seem like correct advice, but it is bad, unhealthy advice of the type that you could eventually need therapy to get over.
On top of that, you could easily beat up your chops so much that you never really recover! I will talk about this more later in this series, but you are best to think of your day having three, solid playing sessions a day maximum. A playing session being a rehearsal, a concert, or an hour of individual practice. You start pushing it further and you will not have the results you desire. But again,
Avoid the dark practice space and the Highly Critical Teacher
Those familiar with my story know that I lived a version of that brutal study theory during my Master’s degree study with a CT — I never worked harder and it did lay a foundation going forward. If you are curious for more on that, this article is a reflection on the things I learned in that time frame. But still, the Schuller advice, while it sounds like good advice, is bad advice.
What gets us going, what motivates our practice, is a love of the art and craft of horn playing, and of making great music with others. To be able to do it as a career is an ideal outcome, but in the end you should still love music whatever direction your studies and life overall take you.
Continue in Hornmasters series
