by Richard Seraphinoff
The horn world was saddened to hear of the passing of Lowell Greer on January 5th of this year. Lowell had a stellar career as a performer on both modern horn and natural horn, and he was known as a pioneer in natural horn performance, horn making, and scholarship. This tribute for Horn and More will focus on Lowell the mentor and teacher whom many of us in Detroit got to know in the 1970s. For a longer tribute in the May issue of The Horn Call, I’ll write about Lowell as those of us who worked with him in later years knew him and enjoyed both his artistry and personality.
I first met Lowell when I was in high school and needed to find a private horn teacher. At that time, in the mid-1970s, Lowell was assistant principal horn of the Detroit symphony, and he taught a small number of students, a few of whom went on to become professional horn players, including Rob Danforth, R.J. Kelley, and myself. The three of us were members of the Detroit Youth Symphony horn section, and Lowell was our coach. Studying with Lowell was much more than just having a horn lesson each week. It often involved recitals of Lowell and his students and the parties afterwards, for which Lowell would cook elaborate meals—with plenty of Dr. Pepper. It was like an extended family, with Christmas parties at which we exchanged presents, and sessions playing quartets and chamber music throughout the year. I still have, and use, a few horn making tools that Lowell gave me for Christmas as far back as 1974.
It was at this point that Lowell started to learn about the natural horn, and of course, he had to share his exploration with his students. At lessons, after playing a Kopprasch etude, Lowell would say “Fine! Now play it again on this horn.” Then he would hand you a natural horn made from a single F horn with its valves removed. The result was that we became proficient on both instruments early on in our studies with him. We didn’t think of the valved horn as the ‘normal horn’ and the natural horn as some exotic and difficult way to play the same music. They were two different but equally legitimate ways of playing the horn, and that’s how Lowell thought of them. I played second horn to Lowell for two seasons in the Toledo Symphony, and when playing his Alexander 107 B flat/high F horn (his regular instrument), I heard totally high-tech, clean, precise modern horn playing of the highest level; and when playing with him on natural horn, it was the same remarkable musicianship and the same distinctive musical personality, but done on an authentic low-tech horn in an authentic, well-researched way.
As we, his students, became more excited about learning the natural horn, the logical result, and the very “Lowell” thing to do, was to organize an ensemble of natural horns known as the Detroit Waldhorn Society (I still have one or two of the T-shirts). This group, which included his students and a couple of Detroit professional horn players, presented concerts around the Detroit area, and we even went as far as the Interlochen Arts Academy, where Lowell was the horn teacher, to introduce audiences to the natural horn. As Lowell searched out method books and 18th and 19th century sources and studied them, we all learned more and more about how the natural horn was actually played. This became the basis for much period instrument playing over the next nearly fifty years. Though there were other people playing natural horn in the USA at that time (and even earlier), what Lowell developed and taught became the basis of what might be called the ‘American school’ of natural horn playing. This became clear to me at the Naturhorn Festival which took place in Essen, Germany in 1993. Also in attendance were representatives of the German school of natural horn players, led by Hermann Baumann, and the English school, of which Tony Halstead was one of the founding players and teachers. French-speaking players such as Francis Orval and Michel Garcin-Marrou represented a French school, and Lowell was the mentor and master of our American school. Hearing the players from different countries at this festival impressed upon me that, already at this relatively early date, distinct national schools of natural horn playing had developed. Lowell’s clean, singing way of playing the instrument—as can be heard on his Mozart concerto recording with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and on his superb Brahms trio recording with violinist Stephanie Chase and pianist Steven Lubin—set the stage for how we all approached the natural horn in the United States. (Listen also to his assertive, noble playing in Va tacito from Handel’s Julius Caesar.)
My own introduction to horn making took place one evening in about 1974 when I brought an old flea-market horn to my lesson. At around 8 p.m., after my lesson, we descended into Lowell’s basement; at about 3:30 a.m., we came up the stairs again with my first natural horn—which I got to try out in a concert soon after in which Lowell and I played Handel’s Water Music with the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra in Ann Arbor Michigan, one of the earliest period instrument orchestras in North America. We eventually played Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 and many other works with this group as I followed along learning natural horn technique, performance practice, and horn making from Lowell.
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| (L-R: Lowell Greer, Rick Seraphinoff, and Uwe Bartels) |
I often wondered what drew Lowell to the natural horn. Was it the challenge of making nice music on an instrument that was more difficult to play? Was it the curiosity to understand how the music sounded to the composers and audiences of the time? Or was it an academic exercise of detective work to go back to the sources and figure out the horn technique of the distant past?
I was in Toledo this past week helping to catalog Lowell’s many instruments (and pieces of instruments), as well as his books and music, and his widow Patricia asked me, “What was it that made Lowell’s playing so distinctive and special?” It occurred to me, as I tried to give her an answer, that what made Lowell’s playing so special was a wide variety of colors that struck the ear like a human voice. I should preface this next statement by saying that I, like Lowell, am a total fan of the modern horn and think it’s one of the greatest instruments ever invented; but I believe that one of the qualities that intrigued Lowell about the natural horn is the subtle unevenness of colors and the vulnerability of its voice. The natural horn can be played with overly-closed stopped notes that can give it an ugly character, or it can be played, as the old treatises tell us, with only the most subtle differences between open and stopped notes, putting more musical tension on the closed notes, which are typically the non-harmonic tones in a melody. To instill emotion in the listener, those uneven colors, when skillfully managed, emulate the vowels and consonants as well as the emotional content that a singer or speaker can convey. This, I believe is the key to the magic of the wide palette of colors and emotions Lowell achieved in his playing—as one can hear in the third movement of the Brahms trio recording. This very organic way of expressing music on the horn, with its risks and with the imperfections we humans show when expressing ourselves, is what drew Lowell to the natural horn and made his playing draw us into the stories that he had to tell.
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| (at Kendall Betts Horn Camp) |
