John EricsonI reported this over in Horn Matters as well (here), but, in short, my original Horn Articles Online website is now dead. Well, not completely dead, as it can be accessed if you are logged into “myASU.” But if you are not a current student or faculty member you can’t go to it any more.
Horn Articles Online was live from the fall of 1998 until the spring of 2025, which is quite a run when you get down to it. The image above is from the Pree method book and was used as the logo for the site.
The site was still stable and complete, but it was also OLD and ASU closed down so far as I know every old faculty site from that era. Exactly why is still not clear to me, but I’m sure there were many accessibility issues among all the various old websites pulled down at the same time.
Back in 2008, when the site was 10 years old, I posted an article looking back, set up similarly to an article I saw in the Douglas Yeo website. His was in a question and answer format, and I think readers now might still find the first two of my questions/answers to be of interest.
1. Whose idea was it for you to have a website?
In early 1998 I first acquired a PC powerful enough to run a browser on it. Prior to that I had only had E-mail access (and that only for a bit more than two years). At the time I was Third Horn in the Nashville Symphony and was enthusiastic about horn history, having recently completed a very substantial dissertation about the valved horn in early 19th century Germany and also several related articles for The Horn Call. The idea came to me that these materials could be worked into a website.
So while in part I made the site because I had an idea and materials to post, that still really does not say why I first built the site. The answer to that question gets into my motivations for doing things. It was a topic which I had thought over a lot the previous few years, after the birth of my son who has Down Syndrome. I could have reacted to that major life event several ways, but for me it reinforced a belief that God puts all of us in unique places and gives us unique opportunities. I knew that I had distinctive materials and experiences and was in a position to create a web site of this type, one that could make a positive impact. Exactly how distinctive has become clear over the years, as I know of no other site like Horn Articles Online.
Initially I was thinking about a website before I was hired at SUNY Potsdam, and after I was hired I decided to set it up as a studio website.
2. How, then, did your site get set up?
I started working out the layout in WordPerfect actually, the same program I had used for my dissertation, making charts and dividing up materials from my published articles and my dissertation to flow better on the Internet as sort of an “online book.” The hardest thing is always organization of content.
That spring I also interviewed and won the position of Assistant Professor of Horn at the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam. I contacted the person who did their website and he told me that SUNY Potsdam was well set up to host a faculty website such as I envisioned and that he used a Claris product to build theirs. So I purchased the same software and figured out how to use it to set up the first version of the site.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
In my answer to the first question I mentioned my son. James is now 31, and one of the things he loves is to come to my office and listen to music while I work on things, especially when few students are on campus (as crowds stress him out). Which is what he is doing right now as I type these words, chilling in the background listening to music.
This summer James will get plenty of these afternoons in the office, as I have a lot of editing to do on Horn Matters. A lot! But I enjoy working over the site like this periodically, I know the site has a lot of impact on our horn world.
I’ll be posting regularly about these site updates over on the Horn Matters Facebook page, give us a follow and check out all the updates as they come in.