by Roseann Sachs

I have been a musician since I began studying the piano in kindergarten. It was in fourth grade that I began playing the French horn as part of a very strong school music program in Minnesota. I still remember the sense of awe when I first played in a band; and while each instrument had its own part, together we made something much better. It was in middle school that my parents bought me a fine used Mirafone double horn, the horn I still play today. I realize now what a sacrifice that was for them to make that purchase.

As I headed off to Bethel University, in St. Paul, MN, my interests were focused on science and its application to medicine. However, I continued to study piano privately, and I made first chair horn in my college band as a freshman.  At the end of my first year, I declared chemistry as my major; but midway through my second year, I also added in a music major, with an emphasis on piano performance. College was very busy for me: a life of long labs, problem sets, lots of practice room time, ensemble rehearsals, recitals and concerts. I have never regretted studying both chemistry and music in college! But what would I do with those two degrees? Along the way I had decided that I wanted to be a college professor, and the intricacies and problem-solving that were a part of organic chemistry were what I most wanted to teach. Therefore I pursued a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. 

Admittedly, during the years of developing my chemistry courses, starting up my undergraduate research lab, earning tenure, and having and raising children, I did not play my horn. When I started to play again here at Messiah College, the horn certainly required some maintenance!  Since then, I have played in Messiah College’s horn choir, pit orchestras for our college theatre program and at several high schools, several church gigs, and with the Greater Harrisburg Concert Band. Each time, I’m reminded that there is nothing that compares to performing live music. Chemistry is truly beautiful, trust me on that! However, it’s not the same as how music touches and restores my soul when performing, with either my horn or from the piano, with others.

Roseann K. Sachs is Professor of Chemistry at Messiah College, Mechanicsburg, PA

by Yasuhiko Isobe

As a principal hornist for Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, I am also a baseball umpire on the weekends.

Before playing French horn in my high school years, I was a member of a baseball team.

After joining the orchestra, I gathered friends to form a team to play baseball games. However, we stopped playing baseball after some of the team members stopped coming to the games due to life changing events such as job changes and marriages.

While giving some thoughts about how to enjoy baseball alone, I got to know someone who was aspiring to become a baseball umpire for Major League Baseball (MLB). During the conversation about becoming an umpire, he asked me if I would like to participate in a seminar presented by someone from the Major League Baseball umpire school who was coming to Japan.

I decided to go to the seminar, and to my surprise, I was able to get coached by Jim Evans who is the Principal of Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring (approved by MLB). I also became a member of MBUA (Metropolitan area Baseball Umpire Association) after someone from the seminar recommended that I should join the association.

Ever since then, I umpire amateur baseball games a few times a month whenever there are no concerts or lessons. 

Judging a pitcher throwing an outstanding curve ball, watching the ball be hit by the batter, a swift-footed runner running over the base and making a call... 

Strike! He’s out! That’s a catch!

Being able to stand behind the catcher is the greatest position to enjoy the baseball game. 

It may sound strange, but I feel I can perform as a hornist better after umpiring a baseball game the day before.

I umpire roughly 50 games a year. As long as my health allows, I would like to continue umpiring baseball games.

Translation: Mami Abe

By Bruce Richards

Nearly 15 years ago, I came across an album by the Southern Cross Soloists from Australia. (Peter Luff, horn)  The album, Song for the Shadowland, featured music by Paul Stanhope. The title piece is a four movement work for soprano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano. This includes four settings of aboriginal poems by Oodgeroo Noonuccal.  The first, second and fourth movements are sung, but the third is a solo for horn entitled Interlude.  This solo horn piece was so successful that Paul Stanhope published it separately under the title Dawn Interlude.

Here is an excerpt of the description that Stanhope gives to the solo: 

“This piece is in some ways a commentary on Oodgeroo's poem Dawn Wail for the Dead but also, in its own way, a personal gesture of sorrow for past wrongs perpetrated against Indigenous Australians.” 

A video interview with Australian composer Paul Stanhope by Bruce Richards (with French subtitles):

Used with kind permission by the Liège Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Belgium

by Ann Ellsworth

Premiering Sheila Silver's “Being in LIfe,” for Horn, Alpenhorn, Tibetan Singing Bowls and String Orchestra

Sheila Silver’s new piece, “Being in Life,” for Horn, Alpenhorn, Tibetan Singing Bowls and String Orchestra, was premiered in Seattle by the Philharmonia Northwest, Julia Tai conducting. I have never premiered a piece of this scale and magnitude or worked in such close collaboration with a composer. Sheila is an amazing creative force - watching her process different textures and phrases within her rhythmic sound world gave me a glimpse into her deeper relationship with music and sound. I was also fascinated to see firsthand how Sheila, as a composer, took this idea of a piece and grew it into a premiere. The love and commitment she gave to this piece had the same energy with which she gardens, teaches and cares for those around her. Her passion for life and music is inspiring and life-changing. I had met Sheila very briefly as a colleague when, as a junior faculty in crisis, I reached out to her for advice. Sheila reached back as a mentor and friend, played music with me, encouraged me, listened to me and talked with me about Being in Life. 

Sheila’s partner, John Feldman, is a filmmaker and needed a soundtrack for his film about biologist  Lynn Margulis called, “Symbiotic Earth.”  Sheila invited me up to their home in the Hudson Valley near Great Barrington to “improvise the soundtrack,” an offer I feared but could not possibly resist. I had been to her home once before with Rachel Drehmann - we were in Great Barrington playing with Ken Cooper’s Berkshire Bach Festival - and after dinner (amazing!), Sheila took us up to her studio and proceeded to beat, ring, clang and sing her impressive collection of Tibetan singing bowls for about an hour. She wanted to know what would happen when the horn and bowls played together, and it was with this vision in mind that she asked me to come and stay for three days and make a soundtrack. 

I am no wilting violet here but I have to admit, trying to keep up with Sheila’s work pace is exhausting. We’re about 20 years apart but her energy level is so high, I often forgot that I was the chronologically younger one. She’s a morning person; rehearsal would start at 6:00AM, which I pushed back to 6:30 because I had to “warm-up,” a concession she made graciously. We’d play for a few hours then go for a brisk 45-minute walk in the hills near her home. Breathless might be an appropriate word to describe our pace, and yet somehow we were able to converse. I loved her stories about studying abroad with Karkoschka and Ligeti. Sheila filled me in on her new opera, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which is slated for premiere with the Seattle Opera. She told me about asking Khaled Hosseini for the rights, getting her Guggenheim Fellowship and traveling to India to study Hindustani music. She was immersed in this sound world and spoke at length about instrumentation, how to be true to the spirit of this music, and when to abandon the form and be true to her Western setting of the piece. At times she would tear up talking about the Hosseini story and the hardships faced by the women in Afghanistan. I was working on a book about my adoptive family. (It’s been released this month - see the link at the end of this article. -Ed.)