auf Deutsch

by Austris Apenis

1. How did music first come into your life, and what is the earliest musical memory you still carry with you? What drew you to the horn in particular—was it love at first sound, or a slower discovery? Many musicians take a winding road into the profession. What did yours look like, and did any of the detours turn out to be valuable later?

My mother played the lute and often sang in the evenings with me and my brothers. Today the instrument lies on my grand piano. Song is my way into music. I grew up in modest circumstances in a small village, where there was little opportunity for musical development. My parents sang in the church choir, and there was a piano in the house. So I began playing the piano at the age of 7, and it remained my main instrument until I was 19. Besides the church choir, the village also had a brass choir in which I played trumpet. That is how it came about that after my school qualifying exams, I began studying school music in Mainz with piano as my principal subject and trumpet as my second.

I did not particularly like the trumpet's bright tone color, so right at the beginning of my studies I changed my second subject to the horn. The high register went well, but the low register was something I still had to discover. After two years, the low register was there but the high register was gone. I moved to the Hochschule in Cologne, still on the school music course, but now for two years with horn as my principal subject and piano as my second. Prof. Erich Penzel trained my high register, and my range was fundamentally in order.

While I was still completing my school music examinations, I auditioned at the Frankfurt Opera and won the position of second horn. Only then did I begin studying the horn more thoroughly…a somewhat unusual order of things. The school music course covers many subjects, and so I had a broad musical education and a good knowledge of the repertoire. The intensive piano study was helpful for my musical understanding as well.

2. Which teachers or mentors shaped you most, and what are the most important things from them that you still pass on today?

In technical terms, my training with Erich Penzel was formative, and I have assumed a great deal of it in my own teaching and developed it further.

In a course, Frøydes Ree Wekre recommended practicing certain technical matters—double tonguing or lip trills, for example—for 5 minutes every day; I have applied this constant repetition in what one might call homeopathic doses both for myself and in my teaching.

Musically there are a great many musicians from whom I have learned simply by listening, Fritz Wunderlich for example.

3. What did you learn from Fritz Wunderlich?

I adore his open, emotional and authentic way of singing.

4. When did you know that the horn was going to be your life?

As a school music student at the Hochschule in Cologne, I was taken seriously by the horn players studying horn as their principal subject only because I had a small car. So now and then I was allowed to play along in concerts because I could drive my colleagues there. That is how we came to travel to a concert at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart. It became clear to me in a flash that I wanted to be a horn player.

I was actually in the middle of my school music finals, but after I told Prof. Penzel of my decision, he sent me, just two weeks later, to the audition at the Frankfurt Opera, and so the decision was made.

5. What do you remember…

 in English

por Francisco A. Rodríguez

Del 14 al 18 de septiembre de 2026 se celebró en Ciudad de Panamá la cuarta edición del Festival de Cornos de Panamá, organizado por Hampel Horn. El festival continúa consolidándose como un espacio de formación, intercambio artístico y desarrollo del corno francés en Panamá, con especial atención a los jóvenes estudiantes y músicos en formación.

Esta edición contó con la participación del cornista estadounidense Michael Thornton, quien ofreció clases magistrales, conferencias y actividades de formación, así como de Natalia Stets, directora de orquesta de Ucrania, quien dirigió el ensamble de cornos durante el festival. La programación incluyó además conferencias, ensayos, clases y conciertos, generando espacios de aprendizaje y encuentro entre estudiantes, docentes y músicos profesionales.

Uno de los momentos centrales fue el II Concurso de Cornos de Panamá, realizado el 14 de septiembre en la Escuela Juvenil de Música de Ciudad de las Artes. Los participantes compitieron en las categorías Intermedia y Avanzada, interpretando repertorio correspondiente a su nivel.

Como parte de esta segunda edición, el concurso incorporó una propuesta que amplió la experiencia de los participantes: los ganadores tuvieron la oportunidad de interpretar junto a una orquesta las mismas obras que habían preparado para el concurso. Esta iniciativa permitió que el concurso trascendiera la competencia y se convirtiera también en una experiencia artística y formativa.

Para Hampel Horn, brindar esta oportunidad significa reconocer no solamente el talento de los jóvenes cornistas, sino también el tiempo, la disciplina y el esfuerzo que invierten diariamente en su formación. Llevar al escenario el repertorio trabajado durante meses y compartirlo junto a una orquesta representa una experiencia significativa dentro de su desarrollo musical.

La IV edición del Festival de Cornos de Panamá concluyó con actividades académicas, presentaciones y un concierto de clausura, reafirmando el compromiso de Hampel Horn con la formación de nuevas generaciones de cornistas y con el desarrollo del corno francés en Panamá.

Details

Prizes: $1250.00 for each division
Deadline: entries must be received by December 1, 2026
Questions: email Matthew C. Haislip, Coordinator

by Katy Carnaggio

As a researcher, I hunt for underlying structures that protect performance under pressure. “Play with more feeling” is a real thing to ask for. (See Part 1) And also, that request does almost no work to communicate what to do. So what structure allows musicians to create the perception of blue without feeling blue?

Research on emotion spans several competing theories, but three parts recur across nearly all of them:

• Story: the context, the details of the memory or situation
• Subjective Feeling: the personally felt quality
• Bodily State: concrete physical sensations like heart rate, breath, posture, timing, and muscular tone

You can enter an emotion through any of the three. Tell the story of a loss without feeling sad. Feel sadness without revisiting the details. Or put on the physical posture of sadness, leaving the story and feeling untouched.

But only bodily state directly shapes the sound.

Racing heart, shaky legs, dry mouth. Anyone who has felt performance anxiety knows that viscerally. While performance anxiety feels like the enemy, it reveals how powerfully a bodily state can shape expression.

That capacity is not limited to involuntary processes. The musculoskeletal system gives performers a deliberate entrance point: trainable configurations of posture, timing, breath, and muscular tone. A furrowed brow. Rounded shoulders. The underlying architecture of blue.

That architecture leaves acoustic traces. Change the body and you change the signal.

…which is why this bird now has me doing math before breakfast.

The move we've been making all morning has a name: Fourier analysis. It's the mathematics that reveals the rainbow inside the beam and the harmonic series inside the tone. And it's what my phone has been quietly running on the porch all along. The bird app unfolds the Blue Jay's call into a spectrogram and reads the shape like a fingerprint. It never sees the feathers. It names him from the sound alone.

If emotion reaches the ear, it's in the signal…which means it leaves traces on the spectrogram.

So let's look.

Open the spectrogram from Chrome Music Lab and press the microphone icon so it can hear you. We'll compare two emotional colors: cheer and grief.

Start with cheer. Close your eyes and picture saying “bye” to a coworker on Friday afternoon. Before you speak, trace the contour of cheer through your body.

You might feel your face unfold into a quick smile, perhaps with a slight lift of the eyebrows. The word sits toward the front of your mouth. Your weight is already shifting forward; you're half-turned toward the door before the word is out. Your breath stays shallow and high in your chest because nothing is asking it to go deeper. Your body has already left the room.

Reset. Trade cheer for grief. This time, you're saying “bye” to your childhood bedroom on moving day.

Your feet may not want to move. There's a heaviness in the center of your chest, slightly left, like something pooling there. Your breath drops into the belly and slows, catching at the top of the inhale before turning around. Your throat narrows. The word, when it comes, comes from further back in your mouth. It's softer—not because you decided to be quiet, but because there's less air behind it. Your shoulders may round slightly forward, like the body is curling around that heavy thing in your chest. Afterward, you pause. The body wants to stay.

There it is: the architecture of blue.

Now say it both ways and watch the screen, swapping your cheer jacket for your blue jacket and back again. Same word, different signal.

The effect is even more dramatic on your instrument. Recall the bodily configuration and it can organize your playing in dozens of ways at once—one pull instead of twenty tiny knobs. The body coordinates details you'd never think to manage: micro-timing, breath pacing, the weight of an attack. You don't play each one. They come with the posture.

There's no universal dictionary for this. No entry that says grief means shoulders forward, jaw soft, breath low. Your grief may live somewhere mine doesn’t. But that's not bad news. It means the configurations you need aren't in a book; they're already in you, built from every goodbye you've ever said. They've been shaping your sound all along, unsupervised. The work is to catch them at it: find the sets that reliably color your sound, and practice recalling them until they hold under pressure.

Which is what “play with more feeling” was asking for all along. Not more emotion—more clarity. Bodily state is a concrete shape you can trace, train, and tap into on demand, in the audition, in the hall, under the lights.

Practicing them means paying attention to your own life—how cheer moves through you in a doorway, where grief pools when you say goodbye—and carrying what you find back to the instrument. Grief is overwhelming when it’s yours. As a physical architecture, it becomes a landscape you can explore without repeatedly reopening the loss. You can play grief eighty times a season without grieving eighty times.

It's a kind of protection: feeling made wearable…made removable.

The Blue Jay figured this out long before we did. Not only with his feathers, but with his voice. He imitates hawk calls. No hawk story. No hawk feeling. Just a physical configuration that sends the signal into the air, and other birds respond to what they hear.

But when a real hawk appears, he drops the disguise and answers in his own voice. That graceless squawk becomes an alarm. The dawn chorus takes cover. Other jays gather. The predator’s cover is blown.

The voice that did not match his outfit had been protecting the morning all along.

My eyes soften, and my hand sinks into the sun-warmed fluff of Lucy's tummy. “Oh,” I exhale.

He was never the fairy-tale prince.

He was the knight all along.

Declining Attention Spans and Their Impact on the Classical Music Community

by Inman Hébert

The cell phone pervades our existence. Our society has become so accustomed to rampant screen addiction that the sight of students with noses buried in devices while strolling on campus or attending classes seems ordinary. This phenomenon extends to classical music concerts, where audience members pay for live performances of celebrated masterworks yet doomscroll during concerts. While anecdotal, these firsthand observations represent a broader trend of declining attention spans with potentially worrisome implications for our future as classical musicians.

In a 2020 Nature article, “Memory failure predicted by attention lapsing and media multitasking,” researchers found a significant correlation between media multitasking and attention lapses. Moreover, this distractibility predicts working memory failure and negatively affects long-term memory. These declines in cognitive function inhibit our ability to focus on one task, problem-solve, read, and communicate, essential tasks for daily functionality. This research fits into a broader literature linking media use to cognitive decline.

For our classical music community, can orchestras attract audiences to listen to hour-long traditional symphonies and two-hour concerts when habituated to seek new stimuli after 45 seconds? The traditional classical repertoire runs counter to the short-form content that dominates the modern media landscape because it requires time, sustained focus, and commitment to enjoy. As demographics shift to consumers with embedded media-usage habits, will orchestras continue to adapt to a changing landscape and remain viable without losing their core mission? Can orchestras continue to unite, enrich, educate, inspire, and engage?

While conductors, marketing directors, and development staff seek solutions to captivate audiences, as students, we must look inward. How will the broader societal trend impact our development as musicians? From the back of a musicology classroom, students scroll social media on their laptops as the professor analyzes Tchaikovsky. We have access to more information but endless distractions.

We must reframe how our media habits shape our musical journeys. While we cannot control external factors, we do have agency in our decisions. What if more of us made daily, conscious choices about screen time and chose to be present in our environment? Subtle changes can help us maximize our study and rate of improvement. What if we took more time to be silent with our thoughts? We can easily forget that boredom sparks innovation and creativity. The intentionality to eliminate distractions can help us aspire to understand how and why we play. We must first connect with ourselves and the music before we can hope to play in a manner that resonates with our audience.

South Asia—Restraint as Radicalism, Part I

by Vidhurinda Samaraweera

I am convinced that a horn player who has lived inside all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies would name his Eighth (Op. 93) the most quietly rewarding to play; choosing it without batting an eye over the Eroica, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh, or even the Ninth. It offers the horns no heroic fanfares, no funeral march, and no choral apotheosis to crown. What it has instead is something much rarer: horn writing built almost entirely from wit, restraint, and an intimate knowledge of exactly what two natural horns could and could not do. That makes the horn writing in Op. 93 special, and its craft becomes fully visible once you set it beside what Beethoven asked of the instrument everywhere else in his output, and what his contemporaries were asking of it during the same period.

To see why, we have to start with a fact that students sometimes forget (and professionals almost never do). In 1812, the horn had no valves. Beethoven was writing for the natural horn (and specifically the Inventionshorn tradition), an instrument whose crooks (interchangeable lengths of tubing) let a player retune the whole instrument to a new fundamental, but which otherwise offered only the open harmonic series plus whatever notes the right hand, inserted into the bell, could bend into tune. Dresden virtuoso Anton Joseph Hampel’s own pupil, the itinerant virtuoso Giovanni Punto, carried this hand-stopping technique across Europe and, in April 1800, premiered a piece Beethoven wrote specifically for him, i.e., the Horn Sonata, Op. 17. It displayed a direct, personal apprenticeship in the instrument’s possibilities in the exact month Beethoven premiered his First Symphony, predating the eight symphonies that followed. Moreover, alongside the hand-stopping culture solidified a real division of labour: the cor alto (high horn) specialist, playing on a shallower, narrow-diameter mouthpiece built for agility and singing tone in the upper partials, and the cor basso (low horn) specialist, whose deeper, wider mouthpiece was built for resonance, register leaps, and a darker, more veiled color in the bottom range. Nearly everything distinctive about the Eighth Symphony’s horn writing comes from Beethoven deploying that old distinction with impeccable precision and taste.

…

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by Layne Anspach

Hello musicians! János Tamás’ Trio for clarinet, horn, and piano (1992) is this month’s CMC focus. János Tamás (1936-1995) was a Swiss-Hungarian composer, pianist, and conductor.  Tamás was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. The Nazi occupation during World War II forced him to go into hiding, but it was the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 that caused him to flee to Switzerland. After studying at the Bern Conservatory, Tamás began his career as conductor and piano teacher at the Old Cantonal School in Aarau from 1971-1995. His compositional career developed later but yielded a portfolio of 120 works.

Tamás’ composition style started in the Hungarian tradition (ala Béla Bartók), but he grew to develop his own individual style. The Trio for clarinet, horn, and piano comes from the later style. The trio is a single movement with distinct sections. The opening section, Schwungvoll, presents an active piano part alongside calls and motifs from both wind players. Piano activity decreases significantly at Molto agitato, but the clarinet and horn continue their interplay.

The section changes most noticeably at Calmo where the clarinet and horn play longer melodic lines, unhurried but cautious. As the section continues, the winds shed transparent melodies for motivic interjections while the piano builds in complexity and activity. Ruhig marks the beginning of several clarinet solo presentations, with and without accompaniment. The final section, Sanft wiegend, continuously increases in intensity, both rhythmically and dynamically, until the “wild” conclusion.

Hornist for the reference recording is Mischa Greull.

Ein Waldhorn Lustig

by Caiti Beth McKinney

Hello everyone! In a sharp departure from the Romanticism of Emilie Mayer, this month I want to introduce you to a composer from the 20th Century—Claire Polin (1926-1995). Polin was a pianist, flutist, and musicologist in addition to being a composer. She didn’t begin playing flute until she was seventeen when her doctor recommended she take up the instrument to help her lungs recover after a bout of double pneumonia. Polin studied composition with some of the biggest names of her day, including Vincent Persichetti (hornists know his Parables) and Roger Sessions, and her music reflects the avant-garde sensibilities of 1970s and ’80s.

Although much of her music, naturally, was written for flute and winds, Polin also composed several pieces that highlighted the horn. Of note are her two brass quintets, hefty, “serious” works that will challenge any performer. Cader Idris: Landscape for Brass Quintet (1971), named for the Welsh mountain, utilizes extended techniques and dense writing to create a sense of urgency and scale. The other quintet, Makimono II, remains unrecorded—challenge issued!

In addition to the brass quintets, Polin also composed works with slightly more unusual instrumentations, including A klockwork diurnal (1977) for horn, alto saxophone, and bassoon, and Telemannicon II (1980) for horn and two trumpets. Woodwind quintets are also part of Polin’s legacy, including works with evocative titles like Res naturae: The Carmarthan dove in a mialiseet dance (1980), and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1989).

Polin’s works are uniquely her own; every piece she composed was in her distinct voice. While their complexity and styles are not for the faint of heart, Polin’s music is more than ready for a revival. 

by Mike Harcrow

In the fall of my first year as a university music major, four of my horn studio mates and I piled into a car and drove six hours to see Barry Tuckwell perform a Mozart concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. We snuck into the wings at intermission and found him alone in his dressing room, and to our delight, he was happy to shake our hands and spend time chatting with us! This was formative in my musical life, and now I want to provide such opportunities for my students—or at least encourage them to plan their own adventures.

Just this past weekend, I took some horn students from south-central Pennsylvania to Chardon, Ohio, to spend an afternoon with Chuck Ward. They watched and listened as he did minor repairs on each of their horns. In turn, they bombarded him with well thought-out questions and entertained his very fluffy German shepherd. And this afternoon? These same students are enjoying a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 by the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra. (And yes, they are getting their homework done too!)

I am fortunate to live three hours or less from most of the major metropolitan areas in the northeastern United States, so events and great venues are plentiful. Opportunities I have provided for students over the decades include concert trips, master classes, ensemble coaching sessions, private lessons with renowned teachers and performers, visits to horn and mouthpiece makers or to a repair shop for a “spa day,” equipment and accessory shopping trips, performance opportunities (from IHS Symposia and regional workshops to state conventions by audition)…even coffee shop Q&A sessions with “names” in the horn world. As a student, be curious, and ask for good things. As a teacher, be creative, and give more to your students than the hour a week.

Being a facilitator is easy. Look up concert information. Ask for complimentary or discounted tickets. Use your connections. Write emails or make phone calls. Come up with simple travel plans and budgets. People in the horn world are kind and generous and nearly always willing to help students learn and grow. And the time spent together builds the kind of community that will continue to aid and encourage others.

Plan Now for IHS 59,
June 2-6, 2027 in Miami, Florida, USA

Richard Todd, Host