Chamber Music Corner—Tamás Trio
by Layne Anspach
Hello musicians! János Tamás’ Trio for clarinet, horn, and piano (1992) is this month’s CMC focus. János Tamás (1936-1995) was a Swiss-Hungarian composer, pianist, and conductor. Tamás was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. The Nazi occupation during World War II forced him to go into hiding, but it was the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 that caused him to flee to Switzerland. After studying at the Bern Conservatory, Tamás began his career as conductor and piano teacher at the Old Cantonal School in Aarau from 1971-1995. His compositional career developed later but yielded a portfolio of 120 works.
Tamás’ composition style started in the Hungarian tradition (ala Béla Bartók), but he grew to develop his own individual style. The Trio for clarinet, horn, and piano comes from the later style. The trio is a single movement with distinct sections. The opening section, Schwungvoll, presents an active piano part alongside calls and motifs from both wind players. Piano activity decreases significantly at Molto agitato, but the clarinet and horn continue their interplay.
The section changes most noticeably at Calmo where the clarinet and horn play longer melodic lines, unhurried but cautious. As the section continues, the winds shed transparent melodies for motivic interjections while the piano builds in complexity and activity. Ruhig marks the beginning of several clarinet solo presentations, with and without accompaniment. The final section, Sanft wiegend, continuously increases in intensity, both rhythmically and dynamically, until the “wild” conclusion.
Hornist for the reference recording is Mischa Greull.
Composer Spotlight—Emilie Mayer
by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hello all!
I was going through my lists of composers I have already featured in this Horn and More column and was completely baffled to discover that I have not yet written about one of my all-time favorite composers, Emilie Mayer (1812-1883). I am convinced that Mayer is the missing orchestral link between Beethoven and Brahms (in a time where the symphony as a genre was supposedly extinct), and her eight symphonies, multiple overtures, and extensive collections of lieder are not to be missed. In a somewhat common story for women composers of this period, Mayer was well-known and respected during her lifetime, especially throughout Germany, but her legacy was almost lost after she died.
If you check the programs of major symphony orchestras in the USA this season, you’ll actually see Mayer’s Faust Overture, Op. 46 appearing more and more frequently (it’s always a win). The piece starts with a menacing line in the low strings and bassoons which is quickly picked up by the higher strings. The work demonstrates Mayer’s mastery of both orchestration and counterpoint throughout, culminating in my favorite moment of the piece: a soaring brass chorale resounding over a running ostinato in the basses and strings, creating a feeling of grandeur and lushness that one looks for in a Romantic Era composition.
However, I would encourage all of you not to stop your listening at this short, albeit excellent, overture. Mayer’s remaining six symphonies (two are believed to be lost) have now been professionally recorded and together they tell a story of a rapidly developing and progressing composer. All eight were written in an eleven-year span between 1845 and 1856 and show in real-time the development of Germanic Romanticism. I particularly enjoy Mayer’s Symphony No. 7 in F Major, but you really can’t go wrong with a single one.
Happy listening!
Call for Scores—2026 IHS Composition Contest
Prizes: $1250.00 for each division
Deadline: entries must be received by December 1, 2026
Questions: email Matthew C. Haislip, Coordinator
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Research to Resonance—Playing With Feeling, Without the Feelings (Part 2)
by Katy Carnaggio
As a researcher, I hunt for underlying structures that protect performance under pressure. “Play with more feeling” is a real thing to ask for. (See Part 1) And also, that request does almost no work to communicate what to do. So what structure allows musicians to create the perception of blue without feeling blue?
Research on emotion spans several competing theories, but three parts recur across nearly all of them:
- Story: the context, the details of the memory or situation
- Subjective Feeling: the personally felt quality
- Bodily State: concrete physical sensations like heart rate, breath, posture, timing, and muscular tone
You can enter an emotion through any of the three. Tell the story of a loss without feeling sad. Feel sadness without revisiting the details. Or put on the physical posture of sadness, leaving the story and feeling untouched.
But only bodily state directly shapes the sound.
Racing heart, shaky legs, dry mouth. Anyone who has felt performance anxiety knows that viscerally. While performance anxiety feels like the enemy, it reveals how powerfully a bodily state can shape expression.
That capacity is not limited to involuntary processes. The musculoskeletal system gives performers a deliberate entrance point: trainable configurations of posture, timing, breath, and muscular tone. A furrowed brow. Rounded shoulders. The underlying architecture of blue.
That architecture leaves acoustic traces. Change the body and you change the signal.
…which is why this bird now has me doing math before breakfast.
The move we've been making all morning has a name: Fourier analysis. It's the mathematics that reveals the rainbow inside the beam and the harmonic series inside the tone. And it's what my phone has been quietly running on the porch all along. The bird app unfolds the Blue Jay's call into a spectrogram and reads the shape like a fingerprint. It never sees the feathers. It names him from the sound alone.
If emotion reaches the ear, it's in the signal…which means it leaves traces on the spectrogram.
So let's look.
Open the spectrogram from Chrome Music Lab and press the microphone icon so it can hear you. We'll compare two emotional colors: cheer and grief.
Start with cheer. Close your eyes and picture saying “bye” to a coworker on Friday afternoon. Before you speak, trace the contour of cheer through your body.
You might feel your face unfold into a quick smile, perhaps with a slight lift of the eyebrows. The word sits toward the front of your mouth. Your weight is already shifting forward; you're half-turned toward the door before the word is out. Your breath stays shallow and high in your chest because nothing is asking it to go deeper. Your body has already left the room.
Reset. Trade cheer for grief. This time, you're saying “bye” to your childhood bedroom on moving day.
Your feet may not want to move. There's a heaviness in the center of your chest, slightly left, like something pooling there. Your breath drops into the belly and slows, catching at the top of the inhale before turning around. Your throat narrows. The word, when it comes, comes from further back in your mouth. It's softer—not because you decided to be quiet, but because there's less air behind it. Your shoulders may round slightly forward, like the body is curling around that heavy thing in your chest. Afterward, you pause. The body wants to stay.
There it is: the architecture of blue.
Now say it both ways and watch the screen, swapping your cheer jacket for your blue jacket and back again. Same word, different signal.
The effect is even more dramatic on your instrument. Recall the bodily configuration and it can organize your playing in dozens of ways at once—one pull instead of twenty tiny knobs. The body coordinates details you'd never think to manage: micro-timing, breath pacing, the weight of an attack. You don't play each one. They come with the posture.
There's no universal dictionary for this. No entry that says grief means shoulders forward, jaw soft, breath low. Your grief may live somewhere mine doesn’t. But that's not bad news. It means the configurations you need aren't in a book; they're already in you, built from every goodbye you've ever said. They've been shaping your sound all along, unsupervised. The work is to catch them at it: find the sets that reliably color your sound, and practice recalling them until they hold under pressure.
Which is what “play with more feeling” was asking for all along. Not more emotion—more clarity. Bodily state is a concrete shape you can trace, train, and tap into on demand, in the audition, in the hall, under the lights.
Practicing them means paying attention to your own life—how cheer moves through you in a doorway, where grief pools when you say goodbye—and carrying what you find back to the instrument. Grief is overwhelming when it’s yours. As a physical architecture, it becomes a landscape you can explore without repeatedly reopening the loss. You can play grief eighty times a season without grieving eighty times.
It's a kind of protection: feeling made wearable…made removable.
The Blue Jay figured this out long before we did. Not only with his feathers, but with his voice. He imitates hawk calls. No hawk story. No hawk feeling. Just a physical configuration that sends the signal into the air, and other birds respond to what they hear.
But when a real hawk appears, he drops the disguise and answers in his own voice. That graceless squawk becomes an alarm. The dawn chorus takes cover. Other jays gather. The predator’s cover is blown.
The voice that did not match his outfit had been protecting the morning all along.
My eyes soften, and my hand sinks into the sun-warmed fluff of Lucy's tummy. “Oh,” I exhale.
He was never the fairy-tale prince.
He was the knight all along.
El Enfoque de Arnold Jacobs en la Vida de un Trompista
por Christian Morabito (traductor del libro Song and Wind al español)
Así como todo artista de metal, en mis comienzos con la trompa, lo he pasado bastante mal debido a que la incomodidad era cotidianamente parte de mí. Todo eso cambiaría al encontrar a mi mentor en Argentina, Jorge Ramírez Álvarez (ex trombón bajo de la OFBA) quien de una manera inconsciente, me introdujera en este maravilloso enfoque de “Canción y Viento” y de repente, todo sería como magia. Comenzaba a interpretar mi instrumento no solamente con un sonido mucho mejor y más amplio, sino que también de una manera mucho más cómoda y simple. ¡No era magia, era lógica!
Luego de escuchar y ver videos en YouTube del gran Charles G. Vernon (trombón bajo de la OSC), descubrí, luego de una llamada telefónica, que lo que me había enseñado Jorge en Argentina era 100% Jacobs, ya que élhabía estudiado en los años 70´s en Boston y en esa época, “todos estudiaban con Jacobs.”
Desde ese momento y gracias al destino, me introduje en este enfoque, siguiéndolo a raja tabla,100x100%, estudiando, investigando, traduciendo subtitulando entrevistas a ex alumnos del Maestro del canal TPTV (TubaPeopleTV) de Michael Grose, profesor de tuba y eufonio de la Universidad de Oregon y ex alumno de Jacobs por 17 años, colega y amigo personal.
Arnold Jacobs (tubista de la OSC por 44 años y pedagogo de excelencia), desmitificó muchos temas relacionados a nuestras mentes y a nuestros cuerpos al interpretar los instrumentos de viento metal y viento madera ayudando también a cantantes y hasta algún que otro instrumentista de madera, desde haber estudiado casi toda su vida medicina (estructura y función del cuerpo humano), psicología y filosofía.
Jacobs hablaba de la neuro-plasticidad en los años 70´s cuando ni siquiera se había inventado el término, diciendo que el cerebro cambiaba de forma de acuerdo a nuestros pensamientos.
“La narración de la historia con sonido para alguien más”, ha sido el leitmotiv de sus enseñanzas, enfocándose en el producto final deseado y no en la metodología de cómo lograrlo.
Es un enfoque individualizado, ya que las personas somos todas y cada una, seres humanos diferentes.
Puedes encontrar más información en mi canal de YouTube MorabitoBrass y en mi Podcast de todos los martes a las 12.30 pm.
Conceptos de Arnold Jacobs que desmitifican:
Diafragma: Es un músculo involuntario con forma de cúpula que no podemos controlar, no podemos sentir y que es inhalador por naturaleza. Al inhalar solo le da lugar a los pulmones para su llenado y al exhalar solo vuelve a su lugar, no empuja hacia arriba.
Labios: Deben actuar como nuestras cuerdas vocales, “cuerdas labiales”. Son órganos muy complejos que cuentan con fibras musculares, membrana y demás. No podemos tratarlos como músculos completos y antagónicos como los son los bíceps o tríceps. No hay que desarrollarlos, eso ya ha sucedido. No podemos fortalecerlos como si fueran los cuádriceps ya que no aumentan de tamaños con el trabajo duro.
Mentalización: En este enfoque es indispensable que el intérprete del instrumentos de metal tenga constantemente la música sonando en la mente para que los labios, desde recibir señales eléctricas a través del 7mo. Nervio craneal (nervio motor a cargo de la embocadura) respondan a los estímulos musicales.
Respiración: En los pulmones es el único lugar donde entra el aire al ser inhalado para luego ser exhalado hacia el exterior de nuestros cuerpos. Debemos utilizar vocales abiertas al hacerlo como una OH o una AH. Respiraciones siempre profundas y relajadas sin llegar a los extremos de llenado ni de vaciado. Debemos pensar en un pecho levantado como el de “Súperman”, permitiendo que nuestras cajas torácicas se ensanchen y eleven solo un poco de manera natural nuestros cuerpos, así como cuando bostezamos.
El señor Jacobs ha sido la persona que ha introducido los dispositivos incentivadores como por ejemplo el “Constructor de Respiraciones”, “la Bolsa de Anestesia”, el “Espirómetro”, “una simple hoja de papel” y tantos otros, con los que medía y trabajaba la capacidad vital o pulmonar de la mayoría de sus alumnos/as en búsqueda del fluido/flujo del aire libre.
Música: Al hablar de Canción, el Maestro Jacobs le da una importancia del 85% y al hablar de Viento solo el 15%. Canción significa entre otras muchas cosas actividad motora, impartir información, enviar, decir, cantar, vibrar, mostrarnos al mundo tal cual somos y Viento significa actividad sensorial, aire en movimiento, recibir información, evaluar, criticar, etc.
Todo lo que hacemos debe estar basado siempreprimero en “el arte de la música” y lo técnico o mecánico de manera secundaria.
El legado del señor Jacobs sigue y seguirá vivo, pasando de generación en generación, ayudando a miles de personas todo el tiempo. ¡Muchas gracias, señor Jacobs!
