by Katerina Javurkovà, IHS 55 Featured Artist
I grew up in a small town outside of Prague, in the Czech Republic. I started horn at age nine, and I worked hard at mastering the instrument. My father was an amateur trumpet player, and he really wanted to see me succeed on the horn. By the time I was fifteen, I was practicing many hours a day, but something happened. I’m not even sure what it was, but my lips felt wrong, my embouchure felt wrong, and I couldn’t play.
I took a lot of time away from the horn. Then I began to play again, very slowly. I rebuilt my playing from the ground up, starting with Lesson One. I was young, and I wasn’t panicked; if I decided to do something different with my life, I could. I worked methodically, and finally recovered my playing, eventually realizing that many of the problems I had experienced were probably more mental than physical. The point here, though, is that you can overcome a traumatic thing like this.
I went on to study with Bedřich Tylšar—he and his brother Zdeněk were very famous Czech horn players—at the conservatory in Prague (the Pražská Konzervatoř). Mr. Tylšar was a strict teacher who insisted on perfect rhythm, perfect intonation, and absolutely consistent sound. He passed the Czech horn playing tradition down to me. Toward the end of my studies at the conservatory, I was able to spend six months at the conservatory in Paris, studying with the great French player André Cazalet. Mr. Cazalet taught me to be free, to trust my musical heart, to play with soul.
Mr. Cazalet also taught me the French system of warming up. It involves lots of scales and lots of precision. I found that if I do this routine daily, it takes me about forty minutes, and it makes me ready to face any playing challenge. But I have to do the warmup correctly: it must be in time, in tune, and accurate.
When I got back to Prague and continued with Mr. Tylšar, we occasionally had arguments about interpretation. Sometimes he would want more strictness while I would want more freedom. But he was able to see that the things I had learned from Mr. Cazalet made my playing more beautiful.
Through these two streams of pedagogy, one focusing on perfection of detail and the other on beauty and art (after warming up on perfection of detail), I became the horn player I am today. I now play third horn (and sometimes principal) in the Czech Philharmonic, and I love my job. I am a little sad that the old Czech style of horn playing is slowly being lost, but it is, at least, still demonstrated to this day in the great playing of Radek Baborák.
