Improv Part II: Technique

Improvising also puts you at the edge of your abilities in scales, arpeggios, intervals, and overall technique on your instrument. When creating or even copying a melody in a certain key, you are forced to think of the scale as a horizontal palette of available pitches, not just an up-and-down sequence. This use of scale can sharpen your sense of interval, especially when imitating another player or playing a melody that you have in your head. This kind of practice will make run-of-the-mill scales a walk in the park.

The Franz Strauss Fantasie (Op. 2): a review

This is an absolutely wonderful piece, one of my favorites from the Romantic era for horn. It features four main movements (the second of which is a theme/variations, sort of 3 mvts. in one), each with its own character.

The 1st and 3rd movements are slow, very legato, and provide an excellent opportunity for very expressive and Romantic (over-the-top emotional!) playing. The 2nd movement is a theme and variations. The Thema is only in quarter notes, but the two successive variations take from the style of The Carnival of Venice (don't worry, it's not as difficult!). Plently of Kopprash-like passages in here! The fourth movement is a Russian dance, and has a delightful, bouncy dance melody that'll get stuck in your head.

Overall the Franz Strauss Fantasie is an excellent piece, chock full of delightful Romantic idiosyncrasies, and with plenty of opportunities for technical and lyrical playing.

TED video: Music and Passion (Benjamin Zander)

This is a video I absolutely MUST share with anyone who likes (or even dislikes) classical music. A well-known educator, Benjamin Zander, talks at a TED conference about classical music, its essence, and how it is so important still today and how it awakens passion within us. He is charismatic, enthusiastic, and engaging, and I guarantee you won't want to stop this video after you start it. Enjoy!

Here is the link.

Improv as a Practical Tool

Can improvisation, which involves no written music, be practically helpful to an instrumentalist? Let’s answer this question with another: is there a link between artistic expression and written music, or are we just following the directions? Do we just play that crescendo, or do we sometimes feel ourselves energized by it? If a marking on a score says to play a passage “joyously,” how do we know what that means?

Improvisation teaches you to synthesize these styles and emotions, and learning to do this can help a great deal to develop your stylistic and expressive playing as an instrumentalist. If you know how to make a piece that sounds like Mozart, doesn’t that mean that you understand the style? Improvisation exercises that involve expressing an emotion, feeling, or adjective also transfer directly to performance practice. If you can make a piece or a melody that expresses anxiousness, gracefulness, sorrow, fury, or alarm, that would indicate understanding of how to express those emotions through music, and you would use those tools come time to play.

The Arutunian Horn Concerto: a review

As many of you know, I played the Arutunian concerto for our studio recital. I picked the piece because I wanted something off the beaten path, and its scales and weird passages interested me.

The piece is in two movements - one insanely slow (quarter = 40) and one insanely fast (5/8 measure = 70). The first mvt. is technically easy. The only hurdle is that the horn is on your face a lot, and the slow tempo increases that. But even for someone like me with endurance problems, it was simply a matter of forcing myself to play through everything at least twice a day during the time leading up to the recital.

The 2nd movement is a beast. Given that the first couple pages really only contain scalar material, they should fly by pretty quick, as long as you can get into a grove with the 5/8 time (but that's the real trick isn't it?). The scales take a lot from Russian and eastern European folk music, and use a lot of augmented 2nds. The last page contains a monster of an arpeggio lick, which can only be conquered through repetition.

But at the end, the solo wasn't very intimidating once I got it in my head and under my fingers. Just a matter of repetition. I would recommend it!

The Indispensable Bach Cello Suites

Bach's Cello Suites, transcribed for horn, were a stepping stone for me in developing smooth large-interval slurs and a controlled lower register. Besides some Classical and Romantic 2nd horn parts (and some difficult solo passages), there are not many demands for this type of flexible, controlled playing. The Cello Suites ask you to play leaps greater than octaves as part of a musical phrase, not just as separate notes.

The music is also of very high quality, and they aren't very hard on your face. Coming from one of the greatest composers of all time, the pieces have counterpoint, complex harmonies, beautiful melodies, and a wonderful flow, all with just one line of music. A must have for any horn player.

Atonal Etudes

If there is one thing that has helped me with my sense of pitch and interval with horn, it has been atonal etudes. The etude books of Gunther Schuller, Charles Decker, Falk, and Cheynes (the last two are part of that whole French scene of etude books). Even some solos, like those of Alec Wilder, are exploratory enough to through your ear for a loop.

The Decker book is devoted to 12-tone work and is technically the easiest. Each etude is based on a row which is display at the top. The Schuller etudes are more pattern-and-variation based (my personal favorite). They are somwhat Kopprasch-like in this respect, but much more interesting and fun! The Falk and Cheynes are quite tough and require a lot of work.

If you ever want to explore new and interesting ground in your non-solo work, give these books a shot!