(This article updated 2021, combining elements of four Horn Matters posts)

For those in the area, I should note first I am giving this recital twice. The second performance is at Arizona State in Katzin Concert Hall on Sunday, October 3, and a version of this recital will also be presented on a series at the Musical Instrument Museum on September 29.

On my recital this year I wanted to play on a variety of horns and work through the story of the horn in Classical music. Pretty hard to do that without playing some natural horn!

I had three natural horns available to me to try to use this year. There is nothing like a concert coming up to put rubber to the road and help you make some decisions. The three horns were a custom, large natural horn which is convertible to an early valved horn, a McCracken owned by ASU, and this horn. I made it as a project during my Doctoral studies with the help of natural horn maker Richard Seraphinoff.

In terms of this concert the bottom line is this instrument I made has the best high G of the three choices I had, and if you are planning to play the Beethoven Sonata that is a note you really need to feel pretty comfortable about. The photo is one taken some years ago when it was first constructed. The horn is based on an early 20th century French mellophone bell (!) but with crooks made to match a crook and coupler system as seen in this article. Instead of that crook/coupler system however I will be using the E crook that I made for the early valved horn which will be featured in the next part of this series on this recital. E crook? It puts that horn in E but this horn in F due to the different size of the corpus of each instrument. As mentioned on this horn I will play the Beethoven Sonata and also the Saint-Seans Romance.

After the natural horn the next phase of the story of the horn to feature on the recital this year is the early valved horn. For this phase I also had several options as to horns, and I came around to this single F horn with crooks as the best option.

This horn is a mutt; the body is from an old King single horn I purchased used, the bell flare is adapted from my old (now long sold) Holton descant, and the crook was made from very authentic tapers with the help of Richard Seraphinoff. I made two crooks for this horn, the F crook is on the horn and the E crook is also in the photo. The pattern of the body is a Gumpert model single horn, based on a photo I found in a book and made again with the help of Seraphinoff. It is certainly the best playing of the three options and for a public recital and again that is the bottom line. On this horn, crooked in F, I will play one of the Gounod Melodies.

After that I move on to single B-flat. For this the choice was easy, this Alexander single B-flat, discussed more in this article. Before the invention of the double horn there was actually a raging controversy about which was better, single F or single B-flat. I can tell you with certainty that the single B-flat plays a lot more easily and will be a pleasure to play the Reinecke Notturno upon.

I also wanted to explore the possibility of using a piston valve horn. This next horn is a “modern” double horn but it is of a type that pros quit using by roughly the 1970s; this is a Selmer piston valve compensating double that is owned by Arizona State.

This instrument is to put it nicely ergonomically challenged and I frankly have trouble working the valves quickly (the direction of the action is hard to manage and there is a lot of “mass” to the valves also) but the high range on this instrument is nice, it plays fairly easily and in tune, it is visually striking, and I thought it would be an interesting color for the Dukas Villanelle. It does sound noticeably different with its very small bore in general and small bell throat.

Playing this horn allows a comparison, what do piston valves feel like compared to rotary valves? It was not a topic I had spent much time thinking about previously. Really, do we have options on horn? It is pretty hard to make a double horn with piston valves. I can say this now with some certainty though; piston valves do as I had been told by tuba players allow an easier legato. It is too bad that piston valves are not overall a viable option on horn because if they were a double horn that was laid out with better ergonomics and piston valves would have potential to be a killer instrument.

Some knowledgeable reader out there at this point are thinking “wait a minute, shouldn’t Ericson be playing the opening of the Villanelle on natural horn as requested by Dukas?” Well, let’s just say I could play it on natural horn but I have chosen not to. Maybe, if I had a great single horn with pistons (an ascending third valve would be nice) that really matched up with the natural horn, and maybe if it were actually a lecture-recital just on the topic of the Villanelle, but at this point in the flow of the recital I will be ready to play some double horn again and the legato I spoke of in the previous paragraph with the piston valves will be enjoyed. I have a bit more of my thinking on this topic here.

The final horn on the recital for those who have seen me play in recent years will be a surprise. For years I have played pretty large horns and my main go-to horn for about ten years has been a big Paxman 25AND. I made both of my CDs on this horn, etc. It is comfortable to me like an old shoe but at the same time I am trying to gear up for the period instruments on this program and when I switch over to the Paxman after playing those it just feels huge. ASU owns an older production Hoyer (60’s-70’s, made in East Germany during the cold war–“Meister” model, was their top line instrument) that will be the final instrument I use playing Basler (Songs of Praise) and a Schumann song transcription. A fairly low mileage instrument for its age, it seems to match up better to the other horns in terms of how it blows and honestly it is fun to play something different for a change when you feel that it is fundamentally a good horn. I had to make a couple minor changes to the horn to improve ergonomics, and it takes a European shank mouthpiece (a standard shank mouthpiece does not work well on this vintage of Hoyer, but will work fine on their recent production instruments).

So in short I plan to play on five different horns on this recital. It will be a wild ride for me and I hope an enjoyable view into the story of the horn for the audience.