by Inman Hebert
Students can be guilty of relegating music history to the classroom. In a grade-incentivized academic system, cramming for exams and exiling material not being tested in the near future to the back of our minds becomes very easy. Regardless of outcomes (grades), cramming may cause us to dismiss the relevance of musicological concepts to careers in music. College professors, at this point, would ask students to fully embrace—integrate and apply—their curricula. So why and how do we apply music history to our playing?
We can look to period-instrument specialists and their studies for inspiration. Horn players from around the globe study and perform solos, chamber music, and symphonic music on natural horn. While we can never replicate any musical era with complete accuracy, experts in this practice strive for a high degree of authenticity in both the unique timbres of the original instruments and in their historically-informed styles of performance.
Given the natural horn’s limitations, not every horn player desires to study the instrument. For the longest time, I falsely categorized natural horn playing as completely separate from the modern valved traditions. As such, I dismissed its potential to influence my musical ideas. Learning how the two are inextricably linked, particularly with relation to the performance of repertoire originally written for those instruments, opened up new possibilities. (The Paris Conservatory tradition of the nineteenth century required that students practice both natural and valved horn techniques…but this is information for another article.)
Taking inspiration from the natural horn by performing its repertoire can aid our growth into more mature musicians. Using a Mozart horn concerto as an example, we can examine which notes would have been open, covered, stopped, etc. on the natural horn and gain insights into Mozart’s intentions for phrase structures, color and nuance, and even humor. Moreover, we can look at generalized musical trends in the Classical period, such as beats one and three almost always serving as strong metrical points, to further guide us in phrasing.
Professors share their expertise so that students may have epiphanies to internalize and which, sometimes, revolutionize one’s approach to performing music. Originally, I chased one identity, one sound concept, and one way of performance, but I later realized that a defining trait of musical development is adaptability. The study of each piece relative to its musicological context provides us with the knowledge to better understand the composer and performance practices of an era, and, thereby, to create a more nuanced and relevant performance.
If we decide to break from historical trends, the decision should be a conscious one based on context and steeped in knowledge. As developing musicians, we have an obligation to study the history of our instruments and its repertoire, not for the purposes of replicating the past but rather to allow the past to inform our present.
