by Matthew Haislip, DMA
Hello, everyone! I am Dr. Matthew C. Haislip, Associate Professor of Horn at Mississippi State University. I currently serve the International Horn Society as Media Reviews Editor for The Horn Call and as Mississippi Area Representative. I am a founding member of Quintasonic Brass and am a contracted member of the Starkville Symphony, North Mississippi Symphony, Meridian Symphony, and Missouri Symphony. Additionally, I serve on the faculty of Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan during the summer months and have performed with ensembles across the nation, including the Cincinnati Opera, Opera Naples, Omaha Symphony, West Texas Symphony, and Billings Symphony, among others.
The International Horn Society has filled me with a strong sense of community ever since Shawn Hagen, retired hornist of The United States Army Band “Pershing’s Own,” bought me a three-year membership to the IHS when I was in junior high school. His influence on me as a family friend who inspired me to take up the horn and who supported me in my studies demonstrates the generous camaraderie of horn players that countless others have also experienced from members worldwide.
As a composer, I feel that new music is vital for our future as hornists. My book, Dueling Fundamentals for Two Horns, published in 2019 by Mountain Peak Music, has been endorsed by several international hornists. I was ecstatic to learn that players of all levels found it to be a helpful and enjoyable pedagogical tool. I am also proud to have had the opportunity to lead the successful commissioning consortium for Anthony Plog’s Horn Sonata and to have performed the world premiere of this riveting new work in 2023. The IHS offers members help with commissioning new music through the Meir Rimon Commissioning Assistance Grant Project. Consider the relationships hornists have cultivated with composers that brought us masterworks such as Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, or Krzysztof Penderecki’s Winterreise Horn Concerto. Perhaps we could see a new horn concerto by a thrilling contemporary composer such as Caroline Shaw someday! With each endeavor, we hope that future generations will look back on this era in the international horn community and see our work as having been meaningful and enduring…and I believe that they will.
Our horn world has never been richer, and the IHS is leading the way with profound artistic performances, groundbreaking commissions with prizes awarded to repertoire by composers of diverse backgrounds, excellent regional and international symposia, a regular podcast, celebrations of stylistic freedom for maximal artistic expression and exploration, and decades of educationally enriching publications available at the click of a button—including The Horn Call and Horn and More. How will you make your own unique mark on the horn world? We can’t wait to see!
