Just Duet

Musicians lead the lives of lighthouse keepers for much of the time, putting in the hours working out thorny technical problems so that performing looks (and maybe is, with enough work) easy. As Malcolm Gladwell and other authors say, it takes 10,000 hours of deep (or deliberate) practice to develop very high levels of skill on anything. That’s a long time in the lighthouse, and it ain’t for sissies, as the saying goes. Musicians need the grit and gumption of a Navy SEAL to spend hour after hour grinding away at problems, spending most of their time on things they can’t do very well or possibly at all. The very length and difficulty of the practice gauntlet is a great weeder-outer of wanna-be’s; otherwise everyone could be a virtuoso without ado.

But still… Aren’t there ways to get the same technical vitamins and make the hours a little shorter and even more enjoyable? Well, there’s no way around some of it, but I submit that there are many skills that could be studied exactly in this way by simply doing them with a partner. It’s easier to do physical exercise with a friend or in an exercise class with others. And it’s also both expeditious and enjoyable to attack certain problems à due. Let’s list and look:

Sight reading/Style. We should all be doing some sight reading every day. It should be easy and even fun to do this on our own, but somehow it’s hard to get to it as much as we should. The antidote to this inertia is to arrange some regular (or even irregular) times with other horn players to play duets, even if it’s only a short time. Duets invariably come in books/collections, and it’s a good idea to start amassing a collection of duets early on (a mentor of mine always said: “If you have [sheet] music, you can play”). There are all kinds of duets available, in many styles and levels of difficulty. Examples:

•Jazzy/swing: Bipperies (L.E. Shaw) – 2 vol.

•Baroque: Six Canonic Sonatas – Telemann (Shaw)

•Classical: Mozart – 12 Duets; Nicolai – Duets (6 Vol.); Duvernoy – 20 Duets

•Modern: Barboteu – 4 Duos; Heiden: 5 Canons

•Quirky: Wilder: 22 Duets

•Odd Meter: Gates – Odd Meter Duets, Del Borgo – Contemporary Rhythm & Meter Duets

•Technique: Amsden – Celebrated Practice Duets

•Folk: Agrell – Fiddle Tunes for 2 Horns [with optional parts for guitar and bass]

There are many, many more books of duets available. Start collecting – and using – them now!

Transposition. Let’s face it 1) it’s not much fun to work on your transposition alone and 2) we all need to be able to transpose fluently from every other “horn” [key]. Duets are the answer. Start with some early C major natural horn looking material (I like the Kling 30 Duets for this). The Duvernoy duets are a notch harder, but are also very good material. If you spend an hour or two on, say, the B natural transposition, you will be amazed at how far you get in a relatively short time. The feared tritone transposition will not seem so bad any more .

Bass Clef. It’s hard to get enough bass clef playing time in on a regular basis, but duet it and you’ll maintain and develop your low range. The best source material for this may be duet books originally written for bass clef instruments: trombone, bassoon (watch out for tenor clef…), tuba, etc. If you really want a challenge, try the Amsden collection in the bass clef version. My favorite is a decades-old book of Orlando di Lasso duets (“for voices or instruments”) where the lower part is in bass clef (later: both parts) and for lagniappe, there are no bar lines. Great stuff, very fun.

Duets keep you going when you might quit otherwise. As Stephen Nachmanovitch says:

One advantage of collaboration is that it’s much easier to learn from someone else than from yourself. And inertia, which is often a major block in solitary work, hardly exists at all here: you release each other’s energy. Learning becomes many-sided, a refreshing and vitalizing force.

What if you want to play with another instrument that is not a horn?

A.: There is less choice, but you might be able to come up with some compositions for your particular combination of interest. Or not.

If you can’t find much (or even if you can), there is the other option: make up your own, either composed or improvised.

If you improvise, you can play as long as you want with any other instrument. It’s easier than you might think. In general, all you need to do is for one person to play some kind of melody line (simple is good), while the other personal plays some kind of accompaniment. It might, but doesn’t have to be, chord (or chord progression) based. Easier: pick a technical problem, such as a melodic minor scale and jump in. Steal melodic and rhythmic ideas from each a lot. Rest now and then. Move to foreground and background and back. Vary register, articulation, dynamics, rhythms, timbre. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s a great learning tool.

What are you waiting for?

Just duet!

[and keep an eye out for my new book, due out later this year: Improv Duets for Classical Musicians, GIA Publications - lots of ideas there. It's been done for a couple of months; it's just awaiting the editor's touch...]

Go, team!

“Everyone can learn from everybody,” Wegher said. “Everybody feeds off each other, everybody pushes each other. No matter who comes out on top, you know they’re going to be the best because they’ve been pushed.”

Brandon Wegher is a running back for the University of Iowa football team, but his words made me wonder: how can musicians use this kind of healthy collaboration to make them (and the “team”) better. And: in what ways is their situation different from ours, and what ways could we find to emulate their interaction so as to harvest more of this kind of positive team collaboration.

Although we spend a lot of time alone in a practice room developing instrumental skills, we all are part of ensembles as well: band, orchestra, chamber music, horn choir, brass choir. There is always opportunity there to use that “team” situation to listen, adjust, make note of deficiencies and work on them later. In that respect, low horns have more possibilities, because, as the saying goes, the first horn has to be a soloist; second horn has to be a musician. There are some dangers in the usual large ensemble situation. If the conductor doesn’t know how to rehearse effectively, players get bored and unless they are very disciplined, this lack of focus/attention translates into sloppy section playing. If one or more players in a section has a bad attitude (doesn’t like the conductor, the music, the player he’s sitting next to, had a bad day, etc.) and lets this affect a professional attitude, the whole section can be dragged down. Another difficult situation is when players are not matched to their roles. Each part in a horn section has a distinct role – 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, assistant, and if the player from arrogance or ignorance doesn’t or won’t fulfill that role, it can be ugly and uncomfortable (this is aside from being able to play the part). There’s not much worse situation for a first horn who has a second horn who lets it be known that he thinks he should really be playing first and who refuses to “be a musician” and match the first in rhythm, dynamics, intonation, etc. I am blessed with currently playing in an orchestra with a dream team – where any one of them could play any of the parts, but who all fully accept and carry out their individual roles. It makes the job easy, fun, and something to look forward to. But I have also spent too much time (any time at all is too much) in the other situation where players did not accept and carry out their roles, and believe me, it’s the stuff of ulcers, therapy, and visions of joining the Foreign Legion. I suspect that this happens less in professional situations than at the college level. It’s hearsay, but I have heard stories about the deadly competition that reigns at some very prestigious music institutions that will remain unnamed here. One grad of one of these (now in her thirties) told me of some direct sabotage by other players and that she is still recovering from the effects of this kind of unhealthy competition.

The football team has a little different situation: they have several players for each position, and at any point in a game or season, the best player gets to play. Orchestras or bands theoretically pick the best player, but only once – at the audition. Once in, players just have to keep doing a good job to keep the position. So it will remain speculation what it would be like to be in an ensemble where whether you played a concert depended on which four of, say, the eight of you were the top players.

What else could we do to have more healthy collaboration? That’s topic that is worthy of investigation by all of us; there are many answers, and different solutions for different people. There are a couple of ideas that come to mind, however:

•When someone in the section plays an outstanding solo, give them some subtle positive feedback – foot shuffle or extension, that sort of thing. Don’t overdo it, however, or you will devalue the compliment.

•Play duets – often. It’s collaboration of the best kind. You are alternately both soloist and musician, and spur each other on. It’s a great way to tackle technique that might get too little attention otherwise: transposition, sight-reading, low/high range playing, different styles. Think up new ways to challenge each other. Play a classical style duet on natural horns (or hold down first valve on your double and play it all in Eb horn using hand horn technique). Play a bass line or ostinato and have the other player improvise in a key that needs attention (F#, Db, etc.), then switch. Play the Amsden duets at maximum tempo, no stopping for the wounded. Always have a duet book or two in your case, play whenever you can. If you don’t have any/many yet, borrow some from your teacher or a colleague. And put in an order for some from King or Hickey’s.

•Player/Coach. Get a partner and play solos, etudes, orchestral excerpts for each other. Be an extra ear for the other player and 1) help them isolate areas that need improving and 2) help them come up with solutions (plural) to make those improvements.

Working with people can make significant positive difference in all of our musical lives and development. It pays to look for collaborative opportunities whenever and wherever we can.

Facts of Life

Death. Taxes. Transposition. Current high school band practices to the contrary, there are some things that a horn player can’t – and shouldn’t – avoid. It’s just a simple fact of horn life. Many (if not most) high school bands (and worse, high school orchestras) don’t use music that requires horn players to transpose, so players very often come to transposition late. But until that fine (?) day when every last piece of horn sheet music on the planet is in F, horn players with any pretension to ability beyond school band have to be able to transpose. Well-meaning teachers of horn with pre-college students add to the problem by allowing students to play, say, Mozart concertos from F horn parts. But they really are not doing the students any favors. Transposition is like learning foreign languages – the earlier you begin, the easier it is. Not learning to transpose imposes limits on what the students can play. Not being able to transpose is like only learning the alphabet up to the letter m. Not being able to transpose closes the door on playing many solos, orchestra works, chamber music pieces, opera (especially!), and even some older horn ensemble works. So start now. Start early and repeat often. But start easy – transpose simple tunes, beginner’s methods, music without accidentals. To amass the quantity needed to become fluent in one of these new “languages,” it’s a good idea to play duets – transposed.

Trill. Another essential technique is trilling, i.e. whole step lip trilling (usually from overtone 8 to 9). I’ve seen many high school players who consider the Mozart concertos too easy for them, but it’s very hard to come up with even one of them who can do a satisfactory lip trill, and – let’s face it – if you can’t trill, you’re not ready to perform Mozart. Trilling is another early-and-often technique, but you can work on the same motion between any two adjacent overtones, such as between overtones 5 & 6 (E-G).

Bass Clef. A lot of the band music, methods, etudes and solos that a high school player encounters has little or no bass clef, leaving the deceptive impression that a horn player is just fine without being able to read or play in the bass clef. Many don’t even know the fingerings in the low register or have ever experimented to see how low they can play. They may have learned to read bass clef in piano lessons, but haven’t had to play in bass clef on the horn. Fast forward to college and the student quickly discovers another deficiency that he will have to remedy. Horns are responsible for playing over a huge range, and we need to speak fluent bass clef for access to a good bit of it.

Stopped horn. Another essential technique (that also requires transposition) that many come to too late.

Multiple tonguing. Trumpet players are practically born into the world double tonguing, yet many horn players arrive at the ivy-covered walls of their alma mater innocent of the experience of double or triple tonguing. Another essential earlier-the-better technique for teachers to take note of. You don’t need to spring for a copy of Arban for DT material; it’s easy to construct your own multiple tonguing exercises. Just play your regular scales and arpeggios multiple tongued, or take a familiar tune (Mary had a little lamb, et al.) and turn it into a string of double-tongued notes.

There are other techniques that horn players have to face. Best is simply to get started. Better late than never. The obstacle is the path. Identify the deficiency and go after it!

Jumping on the Blog Wagon

Every semester our horn studio has some special project. Last semester we read and discussed two books, Talent is Overrated and The Talent Code. This semester everyone will keep a horn blog. Following is part of the instructions for this assignment (revised):

If you’ve never kept a blog before, you may be in for a treat. Blogging is as fun and infectious as it is enriching and informative. You get to learn, be expressive/educational, and perhaps have the most fun you’ve ever had writing. Everyone is required to keep a horn blog this semester. The minimum number of entries is 20 entries over the 14 weeks of the semester, less than two a week.

Your content should be concerned primarily with one or both of two things:

1) Discussing what you personally are doing, working on, thinking about concerning the horn (practice, performance, problem solving, playing in orchestra, etc.)

and/or

2) Discussing some horn topic, with the idea of passing on information to other horn players that you have collected, thought about, and written about.

3) Freshmen (and others, if they wish) should have at least 4 entries based on chapters from Philip Farkas’s The Art of Horn Playing so that you become more familiar with that standard work.

Where/How do you start a blog? There are a number of free blog hosts that make it very easy to get started. Try:

http://www.blogger.com (You.tube video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU4gXHkejMo)

http://wordpress.com/ (host of J.A.’s blog)

You can set up a blog in minutes. Choose a theme and a title and you’re off. You can set it up yourself or we can set it up together in a lesson or arrange for another time. Ask me questions any time about anything to do with writing your blog.

Tips on blogging:

•Starting a Blog (www.startingablog.com/)

•How to Start a Blog (www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Blog)

What do you call your blog? Anything you like, but it’s a good idea to make it obvious in the title what your blog is about, i.e. (something) Horn, or Horn (something). Decide on a title first thing; you will need a title to set up the blog online.

Length? A paragraph or more per entry. Entries don’t have to be lengthy (although they may be if you’re on a roll), but they’re not tweets, either. There needs to be some substance there.

Where do you get ideas?

For #1, you simply write about what you’re currently doing. The act of writing organizes your thoughts and often solves problems while you write. Horn seminars may supply more ideas/content, especially since we are having a number of guest artists this semester. Talk about your reactions to the new ideas they bring, or the new way they talk about common problems, for instance.

For #2, the best place to start is to read other horn blogs. Take their ideas and give them a new spin, or take them a bit farther. Or combine two ideas. You might start with my blog Horn Insights and first read some of my entries, then sample of the blogs (not all just on horn) in the Blogroll list on the right hand side. Probably the biggest/best horn blog is Horn Matters, which takes the combined efforts of two ace hornists/bloggers (and both are savvy webmasters as well) Bruce Hembd and John Ericson. Their site is very slick in appearance and vast in content. You should have no trouble coming up with content after looking through a few of these. I owe the start of my blog to blogmeister John Ericson, who (at the IHS Symposium in Macomb last summer) peptalked me into getting started. Thanks, John!

Who will read my blog? It’s hard to know who reads it unless they leave comments, which some thoughtful readers sometimes do. You will know how many people visit your blog, since the blog hosts thoughtfully provide visit counters – you can see how many hits your site had each day/week/month. One thing is for sure: you know that the rest of the horn studio and me will be reading your blog every week (and we may even leave comments!). Read Bruce Hembd on the benefits of blogging, reflective learning, and student blogs.

When Should I Start? Start now. Today. Set your blog. Pick a topic. Write a bit. Read it over, correcting spelling, grammar, expression. And the release it into the wild (i.e. press Publish). Read it again online, make further corrections that you missed the first time. Enjoy for a few moments the satisfaction that comes with 1) thinking about something and 2) publishing your considered thoughts and, in general, being a producer now instead of just a consumer. Read through a few blogs by other people and record plans or a list of future possible topics. Once you get started, you’ll find that it doesn’t take as much time as you feared (ok, you may be able to check your email only 41 times a minute instead of the usual 47), but that the satisfaction of small but continued writing is something you can’t buy or get any other way. Freedom of the Press belongs to the person who owns a press. In this day and age of effortless internet publishing, that means everyone with the gumption to do it. Write now!

All the World’s a Stage…

I find it very enlightening and useful to compare the various aspects of horn playing with other disciplines, some similar, some (on the surface) not similar at all. I’ve done this mostly with sports/athletics and some with business, but more recently I was thinking about the parallels of what we do as classical musicians and what actors in a play do. In short, we recite. We recite texts that others have created for us to perform for audiences. It’s up to us to infuse the bare text with life so that the audience is captivated by our performance (and, hopefully, clamors for more, and wants to shower us with praise [applause] for a job well done).

We don’t think about it much, but  if we were to read plays or screenplays, we might be a bit amazed to note that the texts that actors read are very bare bones. It’s a huge help for the actor to start with excellent writing, but a great actor can take very few and very (seemingly) ordinary words and make them rock our souls and emotions. Sometimes their work seems so effortless that we might not even give them credit for their craft. Actors can seem like “normal” people reciting their lines, but to appreciate what they do, think of the times when you have see “real” people on TV speaking. They move us not at all and their words come across as stiff, wooden, unmusical, lacking in art or appeal.

How do actors do it? What tools do they have in their toolbox to inflect the bare text and bring it to life so that it moves and captivates us?

A quick list: tone of voice (register, rises and falls, phrasing of tone), pacing/rhythm of delivery, volume, timbre, facial expression, movement/gesture, lighting, make-up, costume, timing (in relation to other actor’s lines). The more experienced the actor, the quicker they arrive at the most appropriate and effective combination of these “tools” for each line. Unless it’s a one-person show (and often even then), the actor has help from a Director, who has a unifying vision of how the text show be delivered and fit together. The combination of a great actor and great direction (plus all the help from everyone else involved in the production, such as make-up, lighting, and costumes) can create magical performances that move and/or delight us deeply and that we may savor in memory for a long time.

Let’s see what happens when we translate the actor’s toolbox to musical performance in general and playing the horn in particular.

Our text is the printed page. The composer is both playwright and director (unless we’re working with a teacher who is to some degree the director). The bare bones are the notes. We get some help from the composer/director in the dynamics and other expressive markings. Is that enough? Many players stop there, and it usually shows. A whole region may be marked p, piano; but if we play it all at that one dynamic, it likely sounds dull and lifeless. Fine detail often brings life and interest to works of art; the nuances and fine shades of color, texture, and other such features can make all the difference.

What else would help besides the composer’s ink? A modicum of research is a good place to start. What do we know about the composer: his life, era, influences, style? When was the piece written? Was it written for a particular individual or for a particular occasion? Knowing these things can help us be true to the general style of the piece.

It’s easy to see that composers almost never leave us enough detail, and if they did, the “text” would be nearly indecipherable. We need to a general feeling for the music and its style to be internalized. Then we can recite our text so that it is the most effective, just as learning to speak a foreign language to some degree and then speaking freely is a better way to communicate than just memorizing phrases. And just as we listen to foreign language recordings of native speakers to learn all the micro-detail of language pronunciation that can’t be recorded in any useful way with ink alone, we need to listen to recordings of our solos whenever possible and absorb the richness of the phrasing and texture aurally, even though we possess the printed notes.

Once we have heard enough (different!) performances of our particular work (or works in this style), we can begin to work out each phrase of our solo. Where is the high point? Where do we increase and decrease volume and how much? Is there any rubato? Where? How much? Can we locate where our line assumes a “background” role so that we can adjust our dynamics accordingly? For this part of the process of working out and mastering the musical phrasing of our solo, it is usually a good idea to begin with exaggerated dynamics, i.e. starting much louder than will done in the end. Start with a big block of “marble”, then gradually sculpt it down to where the differences are clear and not too much or too little.

The last stage might be to listen to a recording of your playing. Is the phrasing that you feel you are be obvious about coming through in the cheap seats? Will every phrase have a clear (i.e. audible) goal to someone who has never heard the piece before? Are there still passages that suffer from what sounds like “drive-by phrasing”?

Take notes. Make changes. Record again. Repeat until your finished product is full of detail, nuance, and texture that are audible to all in the hall.

Then take a well-earned break. Put your horn away and go see a stage play. Don’t let it spoil the enjoyment of watching the play, but do ask yourself: how do the actors invest their lines with meaning and emotion? Are there further ways I can learn from their performance and bring their process back to the horn?

Spicing Up the Routine

My new book, Improv Games for 1 Player was just released by GIA Publications. About half of the content is taken from the big book (354 p.), Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (also GIA) and half is new material that I have collected or invented since the publication of the big book two years ago. The great thing about the big book is its vast content. The problem with the big book is its vast content – it’s not very portable. This volume is much slimmer (56 p.) and should fit easily in any instrumental case.

The main purpose for this book is to enliven the instrumentalist’s daily routine, both musical and technical. The good thing about routines is that it gets things done: a warm-up routine is a set content that is meant to be played the same way every day. The dangerous thing about a routine is that it can become boring; the mind can go to sleep. Also, the way we’ve all been trained, we’re not accustomed to adjusting the routine – we play the set sequence no matter how our chops are today, no matter what our needs are. Life is not really like that. Things change. Times change. Chops change. We are a little different every day, every time we play the horn. Flexibility is a great musical virtue that is not normally built into a classical player’s approach to technique. This book is meant to do something about that by offering a variety of ways to do the same stuff we always do, i.e. scales,  arpeggios, and other elements of basic technique. What this book (and the big book, as well as the two other books in this series that will be coming out next year) does is to add the rather scary addition of thought to routine. Instead of mindless repetition (which is always accompanied by hope or belief that sheer repetition is sufficient) of the same old stuff, these games challenge you in a friendly way to “think in music”. A good analogy would be the difference between memorizing a bunch of Berlitz phrases of a foreign language and hoping to have an opportunity to parrot them and being able to speak (even at a very basic level) a language, i.e. being able to improvise in it to be able to express something and communicate with it.

So the book, rather than being a written-out list of octave scales that you play as is, ad infinitum (or ad nauseum), has in fact no music notation in it at all, but rather challenges you get off the page and use the technical material in a musical context. For instance, instead of just playing arpeggio notes up-and-back, you will be challenge to recast the material (e.g. major, minor, augmented, diminished, etc. arpeggios) as a fanfare. Or to play a familiar tune by ear, and then use it to train your ear and extend your instrumental knowledge of keys & chords, melodies and bass lines. It’s great fun, and hard to stop once you get going (get past the reaction inculcated by classical training of “Oh dear I’ve never done anything like this I’m afraid, I might make a mistake!”).

Thinking is so much fun and so terrifically beneficial that it’s a wonder that it’s not part of our classical training. But the classical training paradigm rigidly keeps performance, theory, history, and composition all separate (with the possible exception of piano/pianists). This book puts them all together and adds another dimension normally forbidden to classical musicians: fun.

Music isn’t supposed to be fun, is it? Music is serious!

When we think about it, it becomes clear that we don’t know how to “play” our instruments. We only serious them.

But that’s a topic for another post.

I just wanted to let you know what’s out there, in case you’re one of the few who is interested in peeking outside the box at the wonders that await the curious and the broad-minded…

Tabata: Pain!? = Gain! Horn?

Reader Jesse called my attention to another training program called Tabata. Let me quote from the first thing that a Google search turned up – an “Ezines @rticle” entitled “Tabata Anything – Four Minutes of Pain to Gain” by John Harker:

“The Tabata protocol is a high-intensity training regimen that produces remarkable results. A Tabata workout (also called a Tabata sequence) is an interval training cycle of 20 seconds of maximum intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated without pause 8 times for a total of four minutes. In a group context, you can keep score by counting how many lifts/jumps/whatever you do in each of the 20 second rounds. The round with the smallest number is your score.”

I have been wondering what form this might take on the horn since Jesse’s comment, but an answer came to me last weekend: I played Shostakovich Sym. No. 5, and there it was: that blastissimo unison section on p. 2 ought to serve nicely as the 20-second high-intensity part of a Tabata training. 4 minutes of this 20 seconds on/10 seconds off routine should be a good way to build up strength, power, and muscle tone without overdoing it or causing injury. It might take some experimentation to decide if the 20/10 time allotments are optimal for horn players; it’s also possible that these numbers can and should vary from one person to the next. But they’re a good place to start.

This Shostakovich excerpt is also not the only one that could be used for this, either alone or in alternation with other excerpts. Tchaikovsky (e.g. Tchaik 4) is full of such spots, as is Strauss, Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, and others. We would be pleased to hear from players experimenting with Tabata and various excerpts.

The Alchemy of Synergy, Part II

Part I talked about the fun and benefits of working together with another player, as coaches, mentors, and playing partners, especially in playing duets with the great benefits of sight-reading and transposition, among others.

There is another kind of duet and another kind of benefit to be had if you make up the duets yourselves. That is: improvising them.

Improvising means “thinking in music,” something that is nearly never done is traditional pedagogy of horn or any other instrument. More’s the pity. Now, why would you want to do something like that?

One great thing about improvisation of any kind is that brings together all elements of music: performance, theory, history, composition, ear training – you need it all to invent music on the spot.

What, me, improvise? [you say] I can’t do that! I can’t play 16th notes at MM=220!

Neither can I. But what I can do is revise my definition of what improvisation is so that I can do it.

First of all, improvisation does not have to be jazz. I’m not a jazz player. I’m a classical player. So I’ll play something that is like the stuff I play all the time. You don’t have to be able to play Donna Lee to make up your own music. A sarabande will do just fine. Start with some long tones. Start with one long tone. Listen to it. See where it wants to go next. As a duet, perhaps start with a common scale and listen to the interval between the two voices. Consonant or dissonant? If it’s dissonant, hold it a moment, then resolve it up or down. If it’s consonant, hold it until you take a breath. Then pick a new note and start again.

You very quickly find out two things when you do this: 1) It’s easy. 2) It’s fun.

And perhaps 3): why didn’t I do this years ago?

You discover that improvising duets is like having a conversation, except in music. You use what you know to discuss subjects that interest you in ways that are familiar and comfortable. Conversing doesn’t have anything particular to do with playing fast; if it did, auctioneers would be the most sought-after conversation partners. It just matters that it’s interesting and that it makes sense. If you recite something, you just need to know how to pronounce the words. If you converse about something, you also need to know what the words mean, both individually and in context, and you can use everything you know – vocabulary, grammar, history, jokes, expressive speaking ability, etc – to make your content and delivery more interesting. In a conversation you must also listen, and spontaneously react to and develop what your partner comes up with in the moment. It’s really fun, and improvising music is just like having a conversation except that at no time in our music training did anyone every give us training or encouragement to have a musical conversation.

But you don’t have to wait for someone to give you either permission or training.

Just do it. And get in on the fun and musical and technical benefits of making up your own stuff.

Making up your own duets is a perfect complement to a session of reading duets, both musically and technically. Here are a few more ideas to get you started:

•Player 1 (P1) plays some kind of I-V repeated bass (like an oom pah tuba) and P2 makes up a march. Here and forever more, always switch parts and do it again.

•P1 plays one low long tone – a drone. P2 experiments with making melodies using one scale above it. Start with the drone being the tonic, then see what’s like for the drone to be other scale degrees.

•Pulse the drone: give it a rhythm. Put some pep in your step!

•P1 plays a simple bass line, e.g. C-B-A-G, or in minor: C Bb Ab G. P2 solos over it.

•Players make up a piece based on the rhythm of their names.

•Players choose a familiar (and simple!) tune and figure out the melody via ear & error. After you can play it in C, play it in all other keys. Then repeat in minor. Then repeat, with P1 on the melody and P2 on 1) harmony 2) chord roots 3) countermelody.

•Just start playing: there are always rules, but here you have to figure out the rules as you go. Hint: arrive at a common pulse and key as quickly as possible. Hint #2: Recycle material. Find one simple, strong idea and develop it in all kinds of ways.

If you need more ideas, check out my book, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (GIA).

Have fun!

The Alchemy of Synergy, Part I

The title of this post is taken from a book by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson entitled: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. I’m about half way through and am enjoying his insights very much. I’m in Chapter Five, “Finding Your Tribe,” which is about finding the group of people to hang out with who are passionate about the same things you are, which will enable you to go much farther than if you were in isolation. This rang something of a bell with me since at a critical junction in college, I decided that I was really much more at home with musicians than chemists. Although I had and still have an interest in science (Discover magazine is usually my choice of airport magazines), at that time I choose to go after this music thing and see what might come of it. To cut to the chase, with a lot of work and even more luck, it all worked out.

But this post isn’t about seeking the tribe or the vocation. It’s about the idea of working with another like-minded person so that you each make each other better, challenge each other, mentor each other. As musicians we are accustomed to a lighthouse keeper style existence for much of the time working long and hard alone in a practice room. There is no way around a whole lot of that, but at the same time we should not overlook the great capacity for increasing both learning and fun when we work á deux.

First of all, it simply feels good to be with someone else who is as passionate about horn playing as you are. That Significant Other might be supportive and sympathetic, but unless they’re one too, it’s not the same. It helps your attitude to have someone else be there and understand your obsession. You can hang out with this person (or persons – it could be a Tribe, too), and have great conversations about all the details and minutiae of the domain (the Realm of Horn Playing) – players, equipment, history, recordings, literature, teaching, on and on. You can listen to recordings together and trade oohs and aahs over great solo playing and orchestral excerpts. You can play Trivial Horn Pursuit and see if you can stump each other.

A great help in achieving mastery is getting feedback. You get this from your teacher, but you only see your teacher an hour a week. Not much! Not enough! You can and should get your own feedback from recording practice and analyzing the results. But nothing is better than a live coach right there, who listens and suggests. So enlist your playing partner to do regular weekly sessions of coaching/mentoring. You will learn much more quickly than by yourself.

Another way for the two of you to enjoy the synergy of collaborative effort is duets. Make a point of buying duet books regularly, and have your playing partner buy them too; if possible, coordinate efforts so that they buy different duet books than you buy. You can both hone your sight-reading abilities playing duet after duet in many different styles. Transposition is a sine qua non for horn players, but – let’s face it – is not the most exciting thing to practice on your own. But with your playing partner it becomes fun. One afternoon of concentrated effort and you both will be among the 1% of hornist in the country who are comfortable sight-reading horn in B natural!

Two players working together can advance their knowledge and know-how much farther than either could alone. As Stephen Nachmanovitch in his landmark book on improvisation Free Play says:

One advantage of collaboration is that it’s much easier to learn from someone else than from yourself. And inertia, which is often a major block in solitary work, hardly exists at all here: you release each other’s energy. Learning becomes many-sided, a refreshing and vitalizing force.

There are a ton of duet books out there. To mention a few:

Bipperies (Shaw) – 2 Vol.

Odd Meter Duets (Gates)

Otto Nicolai duets

Barboteu “4 Duos”

Contemporary Rhythm & Meter Duets (Del Borgo)

12 Duets (Mozart)

20 Duets (Duvernoy)

30 Duets (Kling)

Five Canons (Bernard Heiden)

60 Selected Duets (L.A. Horn Club – publ. Southern)

Six Sonatas for 2 horns (Schenk – transcr. Reynolds)

Amsden’s Celebrated Practice Duets

Fiddle Tunes for 2 horns (arr. Agrell)

Selected Duets for French Horn Vol. 1 (Voxman)

Selected Duets for French Horn Vol. II (Voxman)

Six Canonic Sonatas – (Telemann, arr. Shaw)

Ten Pieces for Two Horns (Hill)

22 Duets (Wilder)

Don’t forget that although there are many collections of horn duets on the market, you can also profit by stealing duets from other instruments: give your bass clef a workout by getting books of duets for bassoons, trombones, tubas (old bass clef!). Or work on your high range with trumpet duets. Vocal duets can also be a great source of material. Get books of duets in many different styles.

You also don’t have to be limited to just horn/horn duets. There are fewer choices, but there are also books for horn plus one other instrument out there. Go for it!

In any case, find a playing partner and dive into the great enjoyment and deep pool of benefits from working regularly with another horn player (or other instrument).

Horn Fartlek

Sports training provides fertile ground for concepts that we can transfer to horn playing; an earlier Horn Call article of mine was entitled “Lessons from the Gym” that listed a number of such lessons. My wife (a musician, but not a horn player) has serious interests in sports training. She’s become an expert the past couple years in Cross Fit training and recently has done a number of “300″ training courses. 300 training comes from the intense training program that the actors in the movie “The 300″ had to endure to acquire the sensational bodies of Spartan warriors. Her class included a Big Ten football player, a bouncer, a policeman, and various athletes in their 20s. She’s in her mid-fifties. The trainers call her “mom.” This is the kind of training that gives Navy SEALS pause, complete with trainers who scream “more weight!” if they see actually able to lift what they give you. It’s an hour or so of very heavy training (often involving moving either yourself around quickly or very heavy objects not quite as quickly) 3 times a week. You get to run 3 miles on off days. I couldn’t do this kind of thing at gunpoint, but my wife found that she thrives on it. It takes some serious motivation to get through it; the class started with 20 and finished with 6. Wife not only completed it (they take a brutal test at the end for lagniappe), but signed up for it two more times. Recently they discontinued offering the 300 training, so wife has been looking to put together a new training program for herself that is suitably demanding.

She was musing about this, and I piped up, “Have you considered Fartlek?”

She gave me about the same look you’re giving me right now, but allowed me to continue and define my terms.

Fartlek is a Swedish word that refers to a type of conditioning training that alternates the intensity of exercise, e.g. alternating walking with sprinting. Its opposite is continuous training, such as jogging at a steady pace. Fartlek sessions can be custom-designed for both the athlete and the particular sport. According to Wikipedia, a typical session would include:

•5-10 min. warm-up (jogging)

•Steady, hard training (e.g. running for a mile or two)

•Recovery (walk for 5 min.)

•Alternate sprints (50-60 meters) with jogging; repeat until a little tired

•Easy running with 3 or 4 “quick steps” (sudden acceleration)

•Full speed uphill (200 m.)

•1 min. fast run

•Repeat whole routine until total prescribed time is achieved.

One big advantage of Fartlek training is that it can be adapted for each sport. “Athletes can make the most of the flexibility of fartlek training by mimicking the activities which would take place during the chosen sport.”  Most fartlek session are kept frequent and short. Longer training becomes interval training. The opposite of both of these is continuous training.

There is plenty of information on the internet for those interested. What interests me is brainstorming ways that fartlek training might be applied to horn playing. I invite readers to brainstorm along with me. Let’s see…

•Depending on what a player’s current goals and playing demands are, the player could select from the three types of training: fartlek, interval, and continuous.

•Fartlek is comprised of a mix of jogging, “cruising” (medium speed), and all-out sprints. What are the horn playing equivalents?

jogging: soft-medium dynamics, middle/low range

cruising: mf-f dynamics, range to top of the staff

sprint: ff dynamics, upper register

•Horn practice session corresponding to fartlek session might be something like:

-Warm-up 5-10 min. Easy on the embouchure – middle and low range, not too loud – overtone series. Intersperse rests.

-Technical review and development 20-30 min. Scales, arpeggios, patterns

-5 min. rest.

- Work on technical problems in etudes or solos; upper register work; intersperse short rests. Continue until a little tired.

-Alternate high/loud excerpt and solo problem solving with low range practice and/or rest.

-Speed drills with scales, arpeggios, or patterns; or: sight-reading

-Repeat

Just a start. Feel free to add your own thoughts on how we could apply the training benefits of fartlek to horn playing.