The IHS is looking for our next Paper Archivist! Our archives are housed at the Eastman School of Music, but you don't need to be geographically located near there to hold this position. We are grateful to Peggy Moran for her years of service in this role, and her gracious offer to help with the transition to answer questions and guide our new archivist through the process. 

The official description of this role states:

1. (The Archivist is) responsible for maintenance-level processing of all archival materials and for administering the Records Management Policy.
2. (The Archivist is) appointed by the Advisory Council (AC) according to IHS Hiring Policies, to solicit, receive, weed, process, and transport materials according to the current IHS Records Management Policy. The Archivist may also, at his or her discretion, recommend changes to this Policy, which must be approved by the IHS AC, and which, after approval, will be communicated to the Archive location Head of Special Collections. The Archivist will report annually to the IHS AC, with a copy of same to the Head of Special Collections.
3. Once materials have been weeded and transported to the Archive location, the Head of Special Collections (or designee) will assume full responsibility for oversight of the IHS Archive, including any additional maintenance-level processing of all archival materials, administering the IHS Records Management Policy, and ensuring compliance with all provisions of the current agreement as enacted, together with any revisions that may be effected at any time.

If you have any questions, please ask! Interested? Send inquiries and/or a resume and cover letter to exec-director@hornsociety.org by June 15, 2023.

by Kerry Turner

I began horn when I was 10 years old. One of my very first gigs was playing 3rd horn on Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the San Antonio Choral Society. I was only in sixth grade. After rehearsing for a month, I started writing my own music in a similar style. I sat down at our piano and began composing oratorio-type pieces. My mother, who was a concert pianist, became aware of this talent and decided to teach me how to actually notate music. She gave me a few music theory tips as well. Throughout my junior high and high school years, I composed a lot of tone poem-style pieces. My parents encouraged me to concentrate on composition and not so much on horn. I won a large composition department scholarship to Baylor University, but I decided to double major in horn as well. When I transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, I was encouraged to specialize, so I chose the horn. It was only when I began my activities with the American Horn Quartet that I took up composing again. 

At the beginning of my composition career, I was writing specifically for the members of the American Horn Quartet, whose playing abilities I knew intimately. Shortly after that, when I began composing for other people, I sometimes considered their playing abilities, and sometimes I didn’t. For example, I have been commissioned by a few amateur ensembles, and of course I had to take that into consideration. When I am in the process of composing, I allow the creative muse to dictate what I am writing. But I really tried to keep my eye on the level of difficulty. As a performer, I am very much aware of the need to leave enough time for rests during the course of the piece. But for some of the commissions I get for professional symphony orchestras, I’m well aware of the proficiency for which I am writing. 

For many years, when I agreed to a commission, I included a phrase in the contract that stated that the commissioner is aware of the compositional style of the composer. There were people who commissioned me and were expecting an avant-garde piece or postmodern work. I always live by the philosophy that composers should be true to their own voices. Although my musical language is predominantly tonal, I have studied, experimented in, and incorporated other styles of composition, which composers today have inherited—for example, twelve-tone, minimalism, extended techniques, and neo-medievalism. I have never changed my musical language to suit a commissioner’s personal taste. The times I have tried to experiment with more dissonant, “modern” composing, it has not been a success. 

Did composing change me as a horn player? The large answer to that is “no.” The recent answer to that is “yes.” Certain friends of mine have encouraged me to write somewhat easier pieces. When I say easier, I mean not as extreme in the demands of the range, and maybe not so technically difficult. Also, as an older player, I’m hesitant to write extremely difficult pieces for myself. But in the end, the muse dictates what I do. A classic example of this is my new work for IHS 55 for four horns and string orchestra. I kept the horn parts fairly reasonable, but there is a complex fugue in the last movement with about 16 devilishly difficult bars for the soloists. 

After you’ve composed a lot of music and studied a lot of compositions from many different periods, especially new music, you learn to understand music much more quickly and at a deeper level. I’ve also learned how to spot the passages in a composition that were probably difficult for the composer to write. Very often in my orchestra during rehearsals, I became clearly aware of the composer’s mammoth accomplishment in a certain passage. And I have often wanted just to stand up and ask everybody if they were also aware of what an unbelievable miracle that passage is! This happens especially often with Richard Strauss and J.S. Bach. 

Composing is a special gift. I’m not so certain that it can be taught and learned if you don’t already have an aptitude for it. I know this is not a popular thing to write. However, I would advise those who want to follow this path to study the compositions of the great masters. When you are in the zone, 90% of what you are writing is inspiration. But you really must hone your technical skills to get you through the remaining 10%. I think that might be a quote from Brahms, actually. 

When you are presenting your music to your colleagues in the hope that they will play it, try to present them with short pieces, pieces that properly represent your ability. Musicians are much more likely to try your piece if it is short. If they want more, someone will ask for it. 

Years ago, a friend of mine once told me to be very careful about which pieces I release to the world. People will form an opinion about your ability as a composer from that single hearing. So make it good! 

Meet the People—Horn and More Student Liaison

by Inman Hebert

My name is Inman Hebert. My first introduction to the horn came with our junior high band program. Six years later, I am graduating from Prattville High School in Central Alabama, and in the fall, I will attend the University of Alabama to pursue a music performance degree while studying with Charles “Skip” Snead.

In my private lessons with Dr. Brenda Luchsinger, horn professor at Alabama State University and the Alabama state coordinator for the International Horn Society, she encouraged me to join the IHS. I have been a proud member for the past four years, and I currently have the privilege of serving on the Student Advisory Board.

I plan to integrate more student-oriented content into the Horn and More newsletter, and I am always open to your ideas. Particularly, I would like to feature young winners of prominent solo competitions, accentuating the diverse stories behind the young stars of our community. Additionally, I want to highlight the various opportunities available for young horn players, from camps to competitions and symposiums.

The horn community’s generosity during the pandemic with its online offerings opened my eyes to the experiences available to horn players. By contributing content in an online format, I hope to increase the participation of the younger generation in the IHS and encourage them to explore. You are welcome to contact me at studentliaison@hornsociety.org.

by Johannes Dengler

I recently had the great pleasure of presenting the instrument of my famous predecessor, Franz Strauss, with my colleague Milena Viotti. The Bavarian State Orchestra is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year, and for this occasion a number of short videos relating to the history of our orchestra have been produced. For 30 years now, I have been able to play as a solo horn player in the same chair in the Bavarian State Opera, and so for me, my first encounter with this original instrument triggered a memorable and impressive journey into the past, and I want to tell you about it.

Much has been handed down, researched, and published about the personality of Franz Strauss and his position and importance in music history; I can't contribute anything new in terms of content. But if you approach the instrument purely phenomenologically in the present, there is still a lot to say.

On the one hand, the craftsmanship is striking. Every screw, every small part does not come from perfect industrial mass production, as it does today, but from small editions that were mostly made by hand and which had a much greater spread in quality. I can only imagine that the raw materials market, e.g. for brass, was completely different in 1867 than it is today. The special form of the instrument, with a long cylindrical portion and a very conical bell, can also be ascribed with high probability to a collaboration between the master builder Ottensteiner and Franz Strauss. The underlying artistry of everyone involved, to achieve the best result on all levels with few attempts and little experience, seems remarkable to me. Certainly it was not possible to simply provide many identically constructed horns in tried-and-tested versions from which to choose, as is the case today.

In many respects, this horn is a starting point, and the repertoire premiered with it (e.g. Rheingold in 1869, Walküre in 1870, and Meistersinger in 1868), was not even known at the time it was made. Personally, I would even go so far and not rule out that the experience with the premiere of Tristan in 1865, two years before the Ottensteiner Horn was made, could have persuaded Franz Strauss to move from the basic tuning in F to a B-flat horn. Tristan on the 3-valve Bb horn seems almost impossible to me, as there are many muted single tones in legato passages that can‘t be played well. In doing so, he consciously violated the general convention of playing an F horn and chose his individual path, as we know from reports, against considerable resistance and hostility from his colleagues and some conductors.

From the anecdotes about Franz Strauss at that time, one can understand on the one hand his great artistic sensibility and on the other a high pressure to perfection. When I only played a few notes on the razor-sharp mouthpiece and saw in the service lists that Franz Strauss played these Wagnerian works alone, without the possibility of changing or assistants, with countless rehearsals in the authoritarian times of the era, I suddenly recalled my own early days in our orchestra. I remember the associated normal initial overstrain with this repertoire vividly. However, I was able to fall back on all the experiences of my colleagues and a systematic training. Franz Strauss had to fight for all this with an unimaginable talent.

From these circumstances, the inner rejection that Franz Strauss is said to have had towards Wagner is revealed to me personally as immediately and physically plausible. I'm really thinking in terms of my own experiences with world premieres today.

The shape of the instrument and the nature of the mouthpiece (very large bore, narrow inner width and sharp edge) seem to correlate with Franz Strauss' efforts at the time to find the tonal "sweet spot" of the National Theater in Munich. The Munich theater, with its more than 2000 seats, was gigantic in that era when the city had about 150,000 inhabitants. As one can gather from the admiring testimonies of his contemporaries up to and including Richard Wagner, he seems to have succeeded with this horn, producing an open, vocal phrasing style of playing of natural beauty, which was able to project into the entire theater. In order to achieve this goal, he went his own way by choosing the basic tuning in B flat. This was partly due to his strong personality, which did not shy away from conflict, but also partly to a scrupulous and sensitive reaction to the excessive demands of the new repertoire.

Franz Strauss' individual style as a horn player has become a living and formative history in the work and horn parts of his son Richard where we find the spiritual ideal of the horn sound with which Richard Strauss himself grew up. This style was shaped by the architectural and acoustic conditions of the Munich National Theater as well as by the examination and the necessary adaptation to the challenges of the new repertoire.

Finally, I would like to mention one more point: had it not been for such a capable, gifted, and ultimately courageous personality as Franz Strauss on the first horn of the Royal Court Opera in Munich, Richard Wagner's way of writing for the horn would probably have not been the same, namely from Tristan where Wagner worked together with Franz to write the horn part. From that point, Wagner began writing differently for horn. Before that, it would have been unthinkable to make the horn a full, even central element of his opera compositions. The history of our instrument and the subsequent horn parts depend directly on this one unique personality.

Today, for horn players, all of this can still be taken as an inspiring example. The "right" sound and the right dynamics in a certain hall and our own individual way of playing should determine our choice of instrument and mouthpiece and drive our will to choose the best setup without too much consideration for the general conventions of our time. Moreover, this can inspire us to work together with instrument makers on the further development of our horns. It is time now to carry the fire further into the future, and to convince future composers and the listening public of the versatility and expressiveness of our instrument.