Composer Spotlight—Margaret Bonds
by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hi everyone!
This month, I’ll be sharing about another orchestral composer, Chicago-born Margaret Bonds. Born in 1913, Bonds was an integral part of the African American arts and cultural movement known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. You may recognize the name of one of Bonds’ dear friends and musical companions, composer Florence Price (1887-1953). In fact, Bonds was such a skilled pianist that she performed Price’s Piano Concerto in 1933 with the Chicago Symphony at the World’s Fair, making her the first African American woman to be featured as a soloist with a major American symphony orchestra.
Lately, Bonds is becoming a household name for vocalists and choral directors thanks to her extensive compositional output for voice, but she also composed several substantial pieces for orchestra, musical theater, and piano. Many of her works were written in collaboration with noted poet, author, and fellow member of the Chicago Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901-1967), by setting his words to music.
When it comes to the horn, orchestral music doesn’t get more brass-heavy than the opening of Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations (1964). Trumpets, horns, and trombones perform the unbroken and unapologetic melody based on the Negro spiritual I Want Jesus to Walk with Me, while the strings punctuate with accented bursts of sound. For a piece about the Civil Rights movement and the bravery of Black Americans who fought for their rights and equality, Bonds’ emphatic use of the brass is incredibly appropriate for the first movement, which she titled Decision, named after Black Americans’ decision to defy the infamous Jim Crow laws of the South. The piece is named after the Montgomery bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and was written in the immediate aftermath of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Very recently, Bonds’ work has been garnering recordings and performances by orchestras like the Boston Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra, but it is still, unfortunately, relatively unknown in the broader orchestral world.
Horn on Record
by Ian Zook
Volume 13—Christopher Leuba
Horn on Record is all about preserving the intersection of influential hornists and long-lost recordings and repertoire. It is thrilling then to present Christopher Leuba’s 1974 recording of Bernhard Heiden’s Quintet for Horn and String Quartet performed with the Philadelphia String Quartet.
Christopher Leuba (1929-2019) was born in Pittsburgh USA and studied at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the Pittsburgh Symphony as 4th Horn at age seventeen, and soon after served in the US Army Band with stations at West Point and the English Midlands. While in England, Leuba studied with Aubrey Brain, and upon returning to the United States moved to Chicago and studied with Philip Farkas. Leuba was appointed principal horn of the Minneapolis Symphony from 1954-1960, and again from 1963-1967. During the 1960-1962 seasons, he succeeded his mentor Farkas as principal horn of the Chicago Symphony.
Leuba taught at the University of Washington from 1968-1979 and spent many summers on the faculties of the Aspen and Chautauqua Music Festivals. His performance career continued with positions in the Seattle and Portland Operas, and the Philharmonica Hungarica conducted by Antal Doráti. His pedagogical legacy is reflected in his many publications, including Rules of the Game, A Study of Musical Intonation, Phrasing Concepts, and Dexterity Drills. A compendium of many of these materials is available through Faust Music, and you can also listen to extensive interviews with Christopher Leuba, recorded in 2011 by Howard Sanner, about his professional career and musical experiences.
Christopher Leuba’s 1974 recording of Bernhard Heiden’s Quintet is the first commercial recording, predating another interpretation from hornist Mason Jones and the Philarte Quartet produced in 1980. While many hornists are familiar with Bernhard Heiden’s Horn Sonata (1939), his Quintet for Horn and Strings is much neglected in current performance. Heiden, a pupil of Paul Hindemith at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, spent nearly thirty years on the composition faculty of Indiana University. Much like Hindemith, Bernhard Heiden’s music is highly structed and polyphonic, with rigorous manipulation of thematic and motivic material.
Composed in 1952, Heiden’s Quintet for Horn and Strings is dedicated to John Barrows and has four movements with a total duration under twenty minutes.
The first movement has a lilting compound-meter melody, propelled at times by churning sixteenth-note ostinato patterns. In this example, notice how Leuba energetically articulates the ostinato rhythm before weaving the melodic motive through the string texture:
Heiden, mvt. 1:
The vivace second movement pairs muted strings with stopped horn, creating a wispy dervish of sound. When the instruments un-mute, a marching bassline in the cello is cleverly brightened with syncopated interjections which displace the overall sense of cadential arrival:
Heiden, mvt. 2:
The gorgeous Andantino allows the impassioned musicality of the performers to draw upon their rich palette of colors. Leuba’s very subtle use of vibrato accentuates the dolce connection of the horn’s melodic phrase:
Heiden, mvt. 3:
The Quintet closes with a folk-tune inspired melody reminiscent of Bartók. Leuba’s quite firm and powerful sound is present here, efficiently channeled into the precise and nimble double-tongued articulations:
Heiden, mvt. 4:
I hope that this marvelous recording and the featured musical contributions of Christopher Leuba will prompt more performances of Heiden’s Quintet for Horn and String Quartet to be programmed.
The Ambitious Amateur
by Marty Schlenker
Dear Fellow Amateurs,
It’s been several months since I devoted a column to my journey in resuming lessons in middle age. So…how’s it been going?
In previous columns, I’ve shared the advice that helped me the most the fastest, including repositioning my tongue farther back and reshaping my air column to be narrower and rounder, as if it were a straw that I was holding between my lips. Making these changes has enabled the fronts of my notes to be less percussive with the tongue, and they have made it easier for notes to speak.
I alluded to but didn’t really describe other guidance which I know will be good in the long run but which was really challenging at first. It was said in several different ways, but the common concept is that I was exerting too much of my whole body in the attempt to get notes, especially in passages containing large interval changes. This manifested in small ways (eyebrows) and large (clenched shoulders), but fundamentally, it was a substitute for work that should have been done by facial muscles within the mouthpiece ring.
The advice, “keep still outside the mouthpiece ring, no matter what the register or interval” has proven quite difficult, especially right after travel-induced practice breaks. The “hefting” I was doing was only delaying the development of a broadly capable embouchure. Quelling this movement made sense, but it took a while to find any kind of substitute.
Practice breaks…. My business travel slowed down significantly in March and April. The circumstances of my employer weren’t great, so this wasn’t planned; but the silver lining was the longest continuous stretch of practice days since I resumed lessons. With daily conditioning rather than a couple sessions a week, it became easier to summon air from my lower torso, and I could start to make melodic jumps while maintaining a more relaxed upper body.
That’s not to say that this is a resolved issue. Far from it. I would estimate I’m not even a quarter of the way to the embouchure strengthening that I think I need. But it’s a start. Here are some of the “case-in-point” passages newly attained (most of the time, anyway):
Mueller (ed. Chambers) Vol. 2 #23:
Kling #4, in the style of Rossini:
There’s lots more to report that will have to wait until future columns: I acquired another horn and have some things to say about it. I was invited to conduct a trombone ensemble and overcame some self-doubt. I attended the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff’s oratorio Saul and made a playing adjustment inspired by the horns of the Harrisburg Symphony.
Fellow amateurs, have you resumed lessons? Are they helping? How? Please write and share your stories; this column will be better for it. marty.schlenker@cavaliers.org
Your servant and kindred spirit,
Marty Schlenker, Amateur Hornist
Composer Spotlight—Annette LeSiege
by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hello everyone!
Sometimes finding biographical information about the composers I research is easy; in such cases, they will have Grove Dictionary entries, fleshed-out Wikipedia articles, or websites dedicated to their work. More often, data and historical records are scarce and near impossible to find beyond surface-level detail. Such is the case with this month’s featured composer, Annette LeSiege (1947-2012). In remembrances after the composer’s passing, colleagues and students from her positions at Wake Forest University and New Jersey City University alike described her as a warm and caring educator with a passion for pedagogy and composition. Her catalog of over 70 pieces encompasses a variety of genres, ranging from works for full orchestra to solo and chamber works, several of which feature the horn.
Much of LeSiege’s music, luckily, is fully published and available for purchase—which is not always the case with underrepresented composers. Among her works is a fantastic piece for solo horn entitled Shadow Dancer, a short but profound work featuring extensive muted and stopped passages. The piece feels like a conversation between the muted and open horn, growing increasingly emphatic without any sense of aggression. It ends with a held concert E-flat with instructions to fade “to nothing….” Perhaps the referenced dancer is returning to the shadows?
LeSiege also composed a piece for horn and piano called Airs and Dances, Burgundian Suite for horn and vibraphone, Hoops and Angles for horn and percussion, and other chamber pieces for slightly larger forces including brass quintet, woodwind quintet, and other mixed ensembles. At the time of this writing, none of these works has been recorded, despite the ready availability of sheet music. If Shadow Dancer is any indication, any player who takes the time to learn LeSiege’s unrecorded pieces will be well rewarded!
Recording Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jku10CZTt34 (Shadow Dancer starts at about 26:10 in this recording; the hornist is Horn on Record columnist Ian Zook.)
Student Column—The Career Hunt: Music Professor
by Inman Hebert
So You Think You Want to be A Music Professor….
As students, many of us work with college professors who mentor us through our development as horn players. As we progress on our journeys, we look at potential careers to pursue after graduation. One excellent option is following in the footsteps of our mentors and becoming teachers ourselves. In this exploration, what should horn students consider before choosing to pursue the collegiate career path?
If interested in becoming a music professor, searching for and analyzing job announcements can help inform one’s decision process. The search will yield results from conservatories to private and public institutions, both liberal arts colleges and universities, that are not always close to a metropolis or existing family connections, and distance can be crucial in the decision-making process for some.
Often, the types of jobs available do not match our ideals. Non-tenure track lecturer and instructor positions with contracts that typically span one to three years far outnumber tenure-track positions with ascending ranks of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. While some positions may be less than full-time in conjunction with performing, adjunct instructors, by definition, are part-time positions hired to fulfill a particular and limited role. Though success in a performance career may supersede some requirements, most announcements list a minimum requirement of a master’s degree while many dictate a terminal degree such as a DMA.
If these initial job searches do not dampen one’s interest, then what must a horn student understand about becoming a professor? By reading biographies of music professors online and talking with those in the field, students will discover that the path to becoming a music professor is a unique journey filled with many twists and turns. The path is rarely a straight line but one that is often a pursuit of passion with dedication. In addition to being extremely competitive, it may involve multiple steps, often beyond our initial expectations, and will often take more time than we may currently imagine. While no single path exists, our adaptability and receptiveness to any and all opportunities start now while we are students.
A professorship encompasses a broad range of duties far beyond the requisite education and the proficiency to play the horn at a high level of accomplishment. Students must ask themselves if they desire to teach and mentor others. Those who respond in the affirmative must invest the time to develop their communication skills. Not all students learn in the same manner, and professors with empathy and understanding will meet students where they are in their role as mentors to communicate in a way that is helpful to the students in their development. The ability to communicate well manifests not only in lessons but also in lecturing, advising, recruiting prospective students, and interacting with colleagues. Early in their education, students should seek opportunities to observe and internalize what succeeds in master classes, private lessons, and studios, while more experienced students should be provided opportunities to start working with others.
For many musicians, writing is an undervalued form of communication that students can work to improve. Whether promoting yourself in a curriculum vitae and cover letter for a position, writing about your research, or advertising on your own or on a college website, writing can be an asset that provides a first impression as a candidate and shows that you are knowledgeable, credible, professional, and organized.
While college professors must maintain a commitment to teaching, skills needed may extend to finding and recruiting students, administrating a studio, teaching private lessons, conducting ensembles, developing music history or pedagogy or other courses, mentoring students beyond lessons, maintaining an active research profile, and performing. More and more, professors are also required to serve institutions in governance (like committee work, particularly at smaller liberal arts colleges), assessment, state and national accreditation processes, department-oriented administrative work (such as budgeting, planning and scheduling, etc.) and/or administrative roles (department chairs, deans, etc.), implementing DEI initiatives, creating new degrees or altering existing ones, and so on. Much of this comes as on-the-job training for which students pursuing a professorship must be aware but also agreeable to learn. These unexpected aspects of a teaching career are challenging but also educational and enriching.
Those seeking to become a music professor should excel on the horn and enjoy all aspects of music. The diversity of the students and the roles performed will be as varied as the mission of the position. Applicants can never know what will get a search committee’s attention, so they should take advantage of any opportunity which can broaden their skill sets. Search committees are looking for a peer who can perform service and contribute to the success of their music program. As students, we must decide if we have the interest, adaptability, and dedication to pursue this career path.
Second International Horn Festival in Mexico
Second International Horn Festival in Mexico
by Mauricio Soto
The Second International Horn Festival was held at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico from March 24-28, 2024. With the participation of more than 100 students and teachers from 18 Mexican states, the Festival featured recitals, lectures, group warm-ups, and more. We welcomed the participation of Ernie Tovar (Philadelphia Orchestra) and 13 distinguished teachers who live in Mexico. Compositions by Mexican composers Carlos Chávez, Rodrigo Lomán, Alexis Aranda, José Luis Guzman Wolffer, and others were performed. Performances of music from other parts of the world included works by Jane Vignery (Belgium), Ida Gotkovsky (France), and the world premiere of Marigold Fields for 8 horns by composer Aaron Bartos (USA).
Horn on Record
by Ian Zook
Volume 15—Adriaan van Woudenberg
This issue of Horn on Record will explore an often overlooked and vitally important piece of chamber music, the Wind Quintet, Op. 26 by Arnold Schoenberg, recorded by Dutch hornist Adriaan van Woudenberg and the Danzi Quintet. Schoenberg composed his Quintet in August 1924, and it was premiered the following month. This recording of van Woudenberg was released by Philips in 1961.
Adriaan van Woudenberg (b. 1925) was the solo horn of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam from 1944-1985. His studies were all with Richard Sell, then solo horn of Concertgebouw, and van Woudenberg was appointed as second horn in the orchestra before his final exams were completed at the Conservatory. Once he moved to the solo horn role after Sell, van Woudenberg played under Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, and Bernard Haitink during their tenures as chief conductors. Across his career he taught at the Sweelinck, Tilburg, and Maastricht Conservatories, and also the Musikhochshule in Trossigen, Germany.
Van Woudenberg was also a longtime member of the Danzi Wind Quintet, founded in 1956 by flutist Frans Vester. This quintet was formed specifically to perform the Dutch premiere of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet in 1958 at the Holland Festival–the culmination of 107 rehearsals since the quintet’s inception! Known for their expertise in contemporary music, van Woundenberg’s Danzi Quintet subsequently toured Italy, Germany, Russia, and America, and performed at the World Exhibition in Montréal, Canada, and had works written for them by Rob de Bois, Ton de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, Peter Schat, Josef Tal, and Jan van Vlijmen.
The International Horn Society recognized Adriaan van Woudenberg’s influence at the Symposuim in London in 2014, making him an Honorary Member.
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was a dynamic figure in 20th century music history. He transitioned from an early compositional career saturated in the post-Romantic harmonic style with works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Guerrelieder (1913) to his methods aimed at the democratizing of the tonal system through atonalism. In the early 1920s, Schoenberg introduced his “twelve-tone row” system, where a set of the twelve discreet pitches of the chromatic scale serve as the “key” of the work and can be written successively as a melody or motif and simultaneously organized harmonically. This tone row can be further manipulated from its original form by means of transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion.
After introducing this tonal landscape in his Piano Suite, Op. 25 in 1925, Schoenberg launched into the first large scale work using the dodecaphonic method with his Wind Quintet, Op. 26. This is a groundbreaking work for both woodwind quintet and chamber ensemble writing, and it is extremely difficult in every possible respect for all performers. Schoenberg not only uses a unique tonal language, he also compositionally structures “developing variation” throughout: these brief motivic cells transform through intermixing degrees of rhythmic, melodic, or pitch contour and can do so in rapid succession and across an expanded scale. This can be challenging to listeners as there are few concrete “tunes” to grasp on initial hearings; however, repeated study and score review are illuminating exercises. Thankfully, performers benefit from Schoenberg’s use of notating primary and secondary voices with indications of Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme in the score!
With the amount of rehearsal the Danzi Quintet clearly invested in their pursuit of this quintet, we are the beneficiaries of a recording that not only pulls attention to the needed prevailing voices, but offers nuance of phrase, impeccable intonation, and masterful interplay of instrumental timbre. Van Woudenberg’s performance in this recording is truly inspiring—he deftly covers the entire range of the horn, dances through wicked chromatic figurations, and can bury his tone within the woodwind texture or proclaim his presence authoritatively, often in consequent musical moments.
Our listening begins with the closing moments of the first movement, where van Woudenberg zips through fiendish passagework, cycling through the tone row (E♭, G, A, B, C♯, C, B♭, D, E, F♯, A♭, F) with practiced ease and efficiency. The flute recapitulates the movement’s opening motive, and van Woudenberg’s gentle melodic tone and pin-point threading of large interval leaps bring the movement to a close:
The second movement, labelled scherzando, demonstrates the Danzi Quintet’s wonderful interplay of sound and texture, weaving their lines and articulations to create a dance-like feel, even if the tonal language doesn’t easily cooperate. Van Woudenberg binds everything together, carrying an almost Mahlerian scherzo tune, with a few added high-octane outbursts:
The etwas fliessender section of the third movement intertwines a supple triplet figure through the winds, with the horn taking some beautiful lines. The music then dissolves into a quirky waltz:
Our last excerpt is the ending of the fourth movement, rondo, in which van Woudenberg unleashes his mighty orchestral sound, honed for the Concertgebouw, and the ensemble bursts with energy to the final cadence:
If you are curious to discover this fascinating chamber work by Arnold Schoenberg, then I urge you to go to Discogs and put your own copy on the turntable! The dedication of the Danzi Quintet to bring this piece to life is remarkable and a grand testament to their desire to invest in the musical creativity of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony. Thank you for reading Horn on Record!
Meet the People—Andrew Pelletier, IHS Past President
by Andrew Pelletier
I was very honored and a little amused that Mike Harcrow and the Horn and More team wanted to do a “Meet the People” feature with me—I'm always stunned when anyone shows interest in what I've done and try to do with the horn, believing that there are several thousand horn players more deserving or interesting than myself, but I'll try my best....
I was born and raised in Maine, in the Northeast of the USA, and started playing the horn in sixth grade. I quit through junior high school (I could not afford a horn and the school didn't have one for me to borrow) but picked it back up in senior high and have been trying to perfect it ever since. I attended the University of Southern Maine (GO HUSKIES!) for my undergraduate studies and found myself, at 18, playing in the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Maine's only professional orchestra. I played with the PSO for 5 seasons (undergrad plus one gap year), before heading to Los Angeles for graduate study with James Decker at the University of Southern California, earning my master’s degree in 1998 and the Doctor of Musical Arts in 2001. While in L.A. I was super lucky to freelance quite frequently, including for television and feature film studio recording sessions. I also played principal horn for the Santa Barbara Symphony and taught at a few community colleges. In 2004, I moved to Bowling Green, Ohio, to become the horn professor at Bowling Green State University. In my time at BGSU so far, I have played principal horn in Ann Arbor, Michigan (for 11 seasons), and principal horn for the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit (for 16 seasons), and I have been a frequent substitute player with the Toledo Symphony, Detroit Symphony, and the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, in Columbus, Ohio. BGSU named me a Professor of Creative Arts Excellence in 2020, and I was elected the Chair of the Department of Music Performance Studies in 2023.
Now, my deep love and care of the IHS goes all the way to the very beginning, leafing through my former teacher's collection of old issues of The Horn Call. I was (and am) so excited by the history, the traditions, the personalities, and the music of our great instrument. I attended my first IHS Symposium in 1997 at the Eastman School of Music (bravo, Peter Kurau!), thanks to the Jon Hawkins Memorial Scholarship, and I was hooked. The IHS kindly gave me a platform to experiment as a solo artist, usually bringing new pieces I'd commissioned, and I've been lucky to perform at 12 Symposia (thus far—see you in July!) and have commissioned and premiered over 60 works for our instrument. I've made lifelong friends through the IHS, and I always come away from IHS events charged up to learn more, to try new things, to experiment. One of the greatest honors of my life was when I was elected President of the IHS, starting in 2018. It was a challenge to keep the Society healthy and moving forward during covid, but thanks to the extraordinary staff, volunteers, and the hard work of the Advisory Council, I feel like we escaped the pandemic in a good position for growth. I've been involved with the IHS for almost 30 years, now, and although I am currently enjoying a bit of a break in official duties for the Society, I know that this won't last forever, and I look forward to any opportunity I may have to help it grow and prosper, and help to inspire and develop horn players and teachers the world over. I am immensely proud to be an IHS Life Member, and I am always thankful for what the IHS has done for me.
