Pedagogy Column—Tipping the Scales
…to get the most out of your practice time
by Sarah Schouten
Before I ever even mention the word scales in a lesson—or even hint at it—I can feel the eye rolls, groans, and general disdain heading my way. Perhaps instead of taking the view that scales are something we “have to do,” we can reframe our thinking and understand them as a vehicle to make our practicing and performing more efficient. We can use scales to help us strengthen multiple fundamental skills, thus maximizing our precious practice time.
Here are a few ideas to help you get started.
- Intonation
We often fall into the trap of tuning with our eyes or only tuning certain notes or intervals. Put on a drone and start playing your scales. The possibilities are almost endless. You can tune all the intervals, use a cello or other instrument drones to work on matching intonation and timbre, experiment with tuning apps, etc.
- Dynamics
Need to work on dynamics? Why not use your scales? This way you can get practice doing both. You can also tailor this type of fundamental work to your specific needs, high/soft or low/loud, etc., to get the most out of your practice time. Need to work on a dynamic level with sustained pitches? Play your scale slowly. Need to work on changing dynamics (crescendo/diminuendo) or subito dynamic changes? Figure out a scale pattern that mimics your music and then repeat that practice in all the keys.
- Articulation
Yes, this one seems obvious, but think outside the box a little here and manipulate your scale pattern to suit your needs. Do you need to work on light, staccato tonguing? Then perhaps create a pattern from your scale that includes repetition of notes. Do you have an accented note in the middle of a phrase? Add an accent to specific scale tones. Need to work on a slur-two-tongue-two pattern? Include that articulation in your scales.
- Speed
Having trouble internalizing a tempo? Put on your metronome and play your scales at that speed; after a few days, see if you can find that beat on your own. Need to work on a steady internal subdivision? Play scales and subdivide while using a metronome to keep you honest. Have a tricky polyrhythm between your part and another? If you have duplets, put your metronome on triplets, etc.
- Combinations
If you are now having fun and looking for more possibilities, combine any of the above ideas to meet your needs!
When practice seems daunting or you just don’t want to look at “that” etude anymore, identify a skill you need to address, put it into a scale pattern, and get to work. Be adventurous and create your own scale patterns and exercises. Let go of preconceived notions, get creative with the basics, and be amazed by your progress.
Happy practicing!
Chamber Music Corner—Dubois Trio Cantabile
Chamber Music Corner—Dubois Trio Cantabile
by Layne Anspach
This month’s focus will be on Théodore Dubois’ Trio Cantabile for violin, horn, and piano. Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) was a French composer and organist. He studied organ and piano at the Paris Conservatoire where he later taught harmony and composition (1871-1896), eventually became the school director (1896-1905). Highlighting his compositional ability, he was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1861. An active church organist, he performed at Sainte-Clotilde and the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, having succeeded both Franck and Saint-Saëns. Dubois is best known for his sacred works, but he also wrote many secular works such as this month’s offering. His output includes over 200 chamber works, ballets, operas, masses, and orchestral works.
Trio Cantabile is a short but very lovely piece. The primary instrumentation is violin, horn, and piano, but the horn part can be performed by a cello, and the score indicates piano or organ. In the score, the horn is marked as “Cor chromatique en Fa.” The work is simple in its form with two themes repeated twice each. The first theme is presented by the horn with chordal keyboard accompaniment. The violin later takes up the melody while the horn continues in a supportive role.
After the violin concludes the first melody, the horn takes up the second melody. The second melody dances between duple and triple subdivisions since the whole work is in 9|8. The subdivision shifts easily because the constant keyboard accompaniment is made almost exclusively of dotted half and dotted quarter notes. The violin takes over the second melody with the horn in a supportive role, like in the first half of the piece. The work ends with a short coda which slows into a peaceful ascending resolution.
The reference recording is from the album Horn Trios by Brahms, Kahn, Koechlin Dubois (Affetto). The hornist is Howard Wall.
Composer Spotlight—Aliyah Danielle
by Caiti Beth McKinney
Happy Spring to the Horn Community!
I want to start the season with a bang by featuring one of my favorite living composers (who also just happens to be a rockstar horn player), Aliyah Danielle.
Aliyah is one of those rare artists who can shine in any genre and any style, and this is further evidenced by her groundbreaking compositions. You can see the depth of her unique perspective even in the degrees she holds: Aliyah has her grounding in music education with a B.M. from Arizona State and then continued to earn a Master of Music in Contemporary Performance from the Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. Beyond formal education, Aliyah’s musical origins come from her family; her mother is a pianist, and Aliyah grew up surrounded by singers and church music. Like many horn players, Aliyah fell in love with the sound of the instrument before she had ever even held the instrument.
When it comes to composing, Aliyah has a bold and individual style that plays with genre and expectations. One of my favorite of Aliyah’s works, a brass quintet titled In Spite Of…, takes the listener on a full emotional journey. The piece begins with a contemplative chorale that blends elements of gospel music with a quiet fanfare, then moves into a soaring section with quick, articulated trumpet and floating horn lines. Out of seemingly nowhere, the tuba takes over with a funk/jazz bass line until the trombone enters with the melody. The music constantly surprises me, never quite leading where I anticipate (in the best way). This quintet is a guaranteed crowd pleaser, so be sure to give it a listen!
Aliyah has also composed a variety of other outstanding pieces, including several chamber pieces for horn, tuba, or some combination of them. Even more incredibly, in 2023 Aliyah released her debut album, Genesis, a triumph of both her horn playing and compositional abilities. Genesis engages with themes, according to the composer, of “…mental health, breaking free from societal expectations, personal growth, and healing.” Like much of Aliyah’s music, the album is highly narrative, genre-bending, and experimental. Listeners can hear infusions of styles like rock and R&B, all imbued with Aliyah’s classical training and background. (I should mention that I have listened to the album in its entirety over a dozen times, and I am continuously surprised with each listen).
If her musical performances and writing weren’t enough, Aliyah is also a founding member of the Chromatic Brass Collective, an outstanding organization dedicated to providing mentorship and resources for “racially and ethnically underrepresented women and gender non-conforming people throughout the brass world.” If your eyes and ears aren’t on Aliyah Danielle, you’re missing out.
Student Column—The Art of Programming a Recital
by Inman Hebert
With the warm winds of spring, we find ourselves squarely in the midst of recital season, where undergraduate and graduate college students perform masterworks for horn. In the recent quest to program and prepare for my first collegiate recital, I found myself with a myriad of questions and perspectives thinking about this milestone event.
Logistically, reserving the performance hall, identifying a pianist, and, in my case, collaborating with a fellow student can be challenging in pinpointing the appropriate steps and effectively communicating with all involved. More importantly, I found myself pondering what to choose for the recital and why. What are the goals of this recital, and how do I design a program accordingly?
Initially, I felt internalized pressure to program “the standards” of horn playing. After all, a tenet of music performance education lies in mastering horn repertoire most frequently requested for auditions and competitions, from the Paris Conservatory graduation pieces to Strauss and Mozart. Programming these works seemed logical as certain solo repertoire appears on every list.
As I thought about how recitals tell a story through music, infinite pathways opened. Even the etymology from the Latin recitāre and the old French récital suggests a more narrative-based experience. Recitals portray a version of who we are as musicians and our artistic choices.
As students, we attend the performances of our fellow students. In archives, researchers can find numerous examples of recital programs from the past. On the Internet Archive, viewers can read through programs for institute recitals at the Curtis Institute of Music dating back to 1926. While some programs may certainly be more thematic than others, all recitals ultimately tell the story of the performing artist.
We all must answer what that tale will be for our next recital. While our institutions and mentors will guide us, these decisions are individualized. Our tale may be as simple as one of self-improvement or of deeper emotional meaning. By structuring a recital in the manner that speaks to us, we will be able to deliver a compelling performance that speaks musically to our audience.
Research to Resonance—Even Your Silence is in the Right Key
by Katy Carnaggio
The wind-swept autumn leaves from trees, twirling flashes of ember across a bright blue ballroom sky…. Every year, the wind came to offer flight…devoted, delighted. And every year, it didn’t understand why so many clung to the branches instead.
Even when everyone knew this was just for a season, that leaves falling were a part of life. For the leaf, immersed in volatility, there was no autumn; all it could see was the fall.
As a musician, it’s natural to cling to the branch that keeps you healthy and green, too: practice. When the tolerance for error feels like zero, microscopic changes can lead to massive consequences. The volatile dance between fall and flight is unrelenting. Your aperture shifts as blood rushes to your lips and muscles fatigue; the temperature drops degree by degree during an outdoor concert at sundown. Audience reactions, unexpected sounds, adrenaline, rubato, the humanity of interpretation, the democracy of pitch… everything is in motion at once.
And practice works, for the parts of playing that hold still. In a stable environment, what you learned yesterday is true today. The fingering for a written C on the F side of the horn is open. You can trust this knowledge forever.
However, in volatile environments, the “truth” expires quickly. You walk onstage tired, the hall is drier than the rehearsal space, your lips are already a little swollen, and the conductor takes the opening faster than planned. The “rule” for how to breathe, support, and land that same C changes from what you rehearsed.
- Stable conditions reward optimization. You practice a movement until it's efficient and precise, and what works today will work tomorrow.
- Volatile conditions reward adaptation. Optimization is actually dangerous here; if you “optimize” your approach for one exact body state, one exact room, or one exact tempo and any of those changes, you miss.
Optimization is trained by deliberate practice. Adaptation is trained by transfer. That’s why one embodied soft landing can beat a hundred “try harder” reps. When you invoke a schema like a gently falling leaf in performance, you swap a volatile skill for a stable one. Instead of trying to control sound at the embouchure, you scan your body; you find where your tension, posture, or breath don’t match the template of “soft landing,” and your system quietly reorganizes to solve for it. The mismatch between your current state and the schema drives the correction, the same way a wrong note drives a correction. Except, this correction happens before you make a sound.
“Falling leaf” lives in your body the same way the fingering for C does: as a stable, deployable, full-body coordination pattern. It’s the same regardless of which pitch, which hall, which measure, or what your face is doing today. You can run it on a G, in your room at 10 p.m., a high entrance in orchestra, an audition final round or just exhaling on a walk. The performance conditions are volatile; the pattern is not.
Without transfer, you only have one tool: the rehearsed answer. With transfer, you have a whole toolkit: everything you've ever taken time to learn, feel, map, and experience.
A musician grinding out greens—bound to routine, heavy with repetition—is one bright leaf in a canopy of thousands, held in place by the illusion that consistency means executing the same answer every time.
Volatility strips back the green and exposes true expertise: the ability to solve for the same outcome with whatever conditions you get today. It reveals a multidimensional palette of deeply transferable skills you’ve built from living a whole life…the books, the dancing, the relationships, the episodes. Even your silence is in the right key.
Volatility is not the enemy. It's not even the challenge. It's just what's true. And it never asked for your perfection. It wants your presence. It wants the specific, unrepeatable pattern of everything you've ever learned, felt, solved, and survived.
When you stop clinging to the branch of the rehearsed answer and let volatility meet all of who you are, it doesn't drop you. It twirls you into flight far past “in tune and on time,” into the thing committees and colleagues actually remember: the sound only you make. You’re no longer just consistent; you’re irreplaceable.
The word itself always knew. Volatility comes from the Latin volare, “to fly.” Before it meant crashing markets or explosive tempers, it meant birds. Butterflies. Wings. Volatility contains within it the possibility for flight.
Meet the People—Kyle Hayes
Kyle Hayes is a versatile performer and educator whose work bridges the traditions of classical French horn and Highland bagpipes. Currently, he is based in Mexico City where he teaches English as a foreign language.
He graduated from the University of Memphis where he studied with Dan Phillips before completing his graduate studies at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, studying under David Johnson. After returning to the United States, he was a freelance musician in Nashville, Tennessee, where he performed with several area orchestras, chamber ensembles, and musical theatre productions. Additionally, his horn playing can be heard on film, television, and video game soundtracks.
While in Nashville, Kyle taught privately in the metro Nashville area with students consistently placing in top chairs in regional and all-state honor bands and orchestras. He was also the horn specialist for Music Makes Us, an initiative of Metro Nashville Public Schools and the greater community, aiming to provide equitable access to high-quality music education for K-12 school students.
In 2019, he relocated to Mexico City after being hired as an English teacher but has maintained his musical career. Along with teaching English, Kyle has continued teaching horn online and plays bagpipes with Saint Patrick’s Battalion Bagpipe Band.
Kyle serves as the editor of The Horn Zone for the International Horn Society, items of interest by and for young horn players.
He is also in the process of developing The Virtual Horn Studio to provide free video resources for music educators and horn students without access to private lessons.
Meet the People—Charlotte Ulmer, IHS Marketing Director
by Charlotte Ulmer
Charlotte Ulmer is the Professor of Horn at Purdue University–Fort Wayne and second horn in the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic and Central Ohio Symphony. She was also former principal horn for the North American tour of Disney’s Frozen.
Charlotte received her Master of Music from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music and her Bachelor of Music from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Additionally, she studied abroad in Vienna, where she worked with Wolfgang Vladar, third horn of the Vienna Philharmonic. She also completed a graduate certificate in Arts Marketing and Management through the University of Denver.
In addition to Frozen, Charlotte toured with Les Misérables as a substitute Second Horn and regularly appears with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, West Virginia Symphony, and is a former associate member of the Civic Orchestra in Chicago.
Charlotte’s primary teachers include Haley Hoops, Randy Gardner, Tom Sherwood, Jeff Nelsen, and Rick Seraphinoff.
Notable accomplishments in her career include founding the 501(c)3 nonprofit, Artist Unleashed, for which she produced its inaugural event; she won an Emmy® for her role as Associate Producer in addition to her team’s seven wins for their work on a multi-genre concert and fundraiser.
She was a Jacobs Scholar and Indiana University Founders Scholar for the entirety of her undergraduate career. She won the state title for outstanding chamber music group from the Ohio Music Teachers Association in 2016 and is a Brand Endorser for Robinson’s Remedies.
As an artist administrator, she has worked for the Classical Tahoe music festival and is a part of the artistic team for Opera Theatre St. Louis. She served as the Business Development Manager for a regional orchestra in Cincinnati, where she wrote and received over $80,000 in grants for the orchestra.
Research to Resonance—Your Whole Life is a Practice
by Katy Carnaggio
Textures. Rhythms. Tiny emotional blueprints. Your brain has been collecting them and filing them under “music,” whether you asked it to or not. But you can help. Most mechanisms of transfer can be leveraged by noticing a moment, naming the quality it holds, and linking it to something you already know on the horn.
If you love music, you can't help it. You learn timing from the neighbor's car alarm, phrasing from your cat's mid-morning yowl, and articulation (if you're truly desperate) from the pop and splatter of breakfast sausages. Not everything translates directly (don't try to build your embouchure away from the horn, for example). But the instinct to listen and connect your favorite parts of your life to your music? That's what makes transfer so powerful.
Both practice and transfer build skill—one through focused repetition, and the other through lived experience. And the deepest musicianship relies on both. Here are eight ways this may already be happening for you:
(Adapted from: Ormrod, Jeanne Ellis. Human Learning. Eighth edition. Pearson, 2020.)
Next time something catches your ear (or your eye, or your gut), name what it's doing. That's where Part IV picks up.
