Shiny!

I appear to have purchased, on eBay, an old piston horn.

I had been wanting to do this in order to play the Dukas Villanelle in my final recital next year, but couldn't quite justify buying an instrument for one piece of music. I had a chat with my teacher about this at my lesson on Thursday, and as it happens, I don't have to buy the piston horn and only use it for piston horn pieces... I don't have to do that at all.

The plan is to have it altered so that the pistons can be removed entirely, making it a sort of convertible horn that can be a piston horn or a natural horn. Once it is a natural horn I will then have the wild goose chase of finding crooks for it, but there is a strong possibility I can get these made.

Also in that horn lesson we discussed what I'm doing over the summer and made up a sensible plan for getting some of it done. It's a while since I had a lesson where I didn't actually play a note, but this was definitely one of the better ones in that category. It will be quite a lot of work but I'm very much looking forward to it and have made good progress so far.