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 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

New York Freelance hornist and actor/writer/director, Kyra Sims, tells us about her life as a horn player and theater artist.

Before we learn about all the non-horn playing interesting things about you, tell us about your life as a horn player. Where did you grow up?

Germantown, TN, right outside of Memphis

When did you start playing horn/where did you study

I started playing horn at age 11, when I joined the 6th grade band at my middle school. I had already been taking piano lessons for several years so I could read music in both clefs, which gave me a leg up on learning horn. I didn’t start private lessons until I was in 9th grade though, so the first year or so of study was my teacher (Jill Wilson) helping me get rid of all my bad habits!

Who are some of your heroes as horn players? As artists? As people?

When I was studying with Jill, she had this beautiful dog, a malamute, whom she’d named Frøydis, after the Norwegian horn player Frøydis Ree Wekre. She told me a little about who Frøydis was, and soon after I found an album of hers at a band clinic. She is still to this day one of my favorite horn players to listen to. Other artistic heroes of mine include the actress Viola Davis, and Lizzo!

You have trained with the Upright Citizens Brigade, you do stand-up comedy, right? Do you also do theater? Other acting?

I did stand up for about a year or so, and I did pretty well I think- I made it into a comedy festival in Chicago, and had a good set there. But after that was over I realized how time intensive it is to become a really good stand up comic, and I didn’t have that time in my life, and I didn’t want to be just an okay comic, so I decided to stop. My main theatre-making these days is with a theatre company I joined in 2015, The New York Neo-Futurists. With them I write, direct, and perform tiny plays- about 2 minutes or less- in a show called The Infinite Wrench. In the show, we try to perform 30 of these plays in 60 minutes, and the audience decides the order. It’s chaotic and experimental, but with moments of truly real, grounded art. I love having a theatre family that keeps me on my toes and lets me be completely myself.