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.

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.

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.

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.