John EricsonA group of questions recently came in related to my Rescued! CD, released last year. The first answer has to do with the horn I used, and the rest I think you can figure out the questions from the answers. For best audio quality check out the actual CD, but if you want to get the flavor of it the whole CD is on YouTube as well.
- So what Rick Seraphinoff did was essentially use his best practices as a natural horn maker to build a horn for me with a somewhat larger bell than he would use normally, building the horn to be convertible as a natural horn or a valved horn. It is patterned in layout after the horn illustrated as a natural horn and as a valve horn in the Kling Method. It is inspired by mid to late 19th century practices and built using the practices of that time, but not specifically copied from a particular instrument. He actually built this for me when I was in Nashville, I have been planning a project of this type for quite a long while.
- One key to the recording was I spent about four months working on upper range articulations on that horn, playing other instruments as little as possible. Mouthpiece and crook choices were really important, along with carefully refining my articulation point.
- Pitch is A=440
- The original musical sources are all on IMSLP. Only three works recorded are available in a modern edition so far as I know. This actually gets to the process of making the CD as well. I found about 20 unknown or hardly performed works on IMSLP that had had some potential, to my knowledge only one having been previously recorded. I worked on all of them with the pianist and we narrowed it down to the works we felt were the best. The only one that I know of another recording of is the Oscar Franz work.
- The piano is a smaller modern piano. The recording was made in a studio using the piano available there. I wish I could tell you how many feet long but it was in any case not a large concert grand piano like we have in concert halls at ASU.
Below is one of my favorite tracks.