It's been a busy week and it isn't even done yet.

Monday I was teaching, then wandered around a bit and found a silk sari for £5 in a charity shop. That prompted me to come home and do some simple sewing, so I now have two new sarongs (hey, I said it was simple), lovely and cool for the hot weather. I was absolutely shattered, unsurprising after my late night on Sunday.

Yesterday was a day of much rehearsing and some minor slaying of paperwork. I was still very tired and found it a struggle to concentrate well, but managed to have a reasonable day anyway.

The first two rehearsals were for the Trinity Symphony Orchestra, preparing for the final of the soloists competition. I'm playing 2nd horn in the Brahms violin concerto and the Ravel piano concerto, both gorgeous works. The rehearsals were productive but very poorly attended by some sections. The weather was glorious and I accidentally caught a slight sunburn eating my lunch on Blackheath. I was still feeling chilly when inside the Great Hall though. Maybe there's a passage to some sort of frozen netherworld under the stage.

The third rehearsal was Brahms horn trio. We finally got through the whole last movement... slowly. I would have liked to go faster but slow practise does pay off better in the end, and as my part is probably the easiest of the three I don't feel I get much say in when we get to play faster. B, the pianist, is definitely interested in trying to organise some recitals. It's looking like we'll try to play in some lunchtime concerts in August. Meantime we've got a couple of rehearsals booked for next week.

Today was good as well. I've just about recovered from my sleep deprivation exercise on Sunday night, in that I found it much easier to wake this morning, but was still flagging quite a bit mid-afternoon. But I practised, and got an assignment handed in, and went to improv class but hardly anyone turned up (probably because of aforementioned assignment as well as the truly beautiful weather), had some lunch and did some banking, and went to horn class.

Horn class today was excellent. We had Johannes HinterHolzer visiting from Austria; we'd all been instructed to learn Mozart's 4th horn concerto (K495) and be prepared to play it. For the first half we talked about horn stuff in general, as well as the first movement of Mozart 4. Then we took some tea and sunshine and returned to actually do some playing.

A bit of context: when I was busking on the London Underground I played all of Mozart 4 two or three times a day, four or five days a week, for a year and a half. After a certain point it doesn't really get any easier. I know the piece pretty well by now, and to be honest I didn't prepare as much as I might have for today's class. I learned an incredible amount despite both of these factors. Johannes is very precise in his ideas about what makes a line musical and what general phrasing techniques will give the desired effect; the result is that instead of saying, "Do it like this" and then demonstrating, he will demonstrate and then explain exactly what he did to achieve that result. He's also very clear about the more nitty-gritty techniques for producing a good, accurate sound on the horn, and has an amazing ear for rhythm (or perhaps I just need to spend more time with the metronome). His manner is combination of encouraging and demanding that really inspires students to do their best. I'd very happily take a few lessons with him next time he's in London, and I'm sure others who were there would also jump at the chance.

The result of all this is that I'm now ready to actually work on Mozart 4 properly again, although I'll leave it until after my performance exam. I consider this a small miracle given just how much I've played it.

I do miss busking, both on and off the Tube, to a certain extent. There were good days and bad days, as with anything, but there's something very encouraging about standing up in public to play music and having people give you money of their own free will. I had to stop busking in 2006 after injuring myself rather badly when I took a tumble down the stairs in my home. I don't think I'm physically up to getting back to it just yet. I also don't think I want to do it for 4-6 hours per day for more than about a month at a time, because it is physically and mentally incredibly taxing, but it would be good to have the option of doing a month a year or perhaps three pitches a week after I've finished my degree.

Fearful Productivity

I have managed to slay many paperwork demons in the last two days. Hooray!

Yesterday's horn class with Roger Montgomery went well. It was a very standard sort of class, going through various extracts from the ballet and opera repertoire; the sort of thing that isn't in Probespiel.

Next week there will be a single F piston-valve horn and a Vienna horn, and we're going to go through various repertoire appropriate to those. I've said I'll work on the Dukas Villanelle and play it on the piston horn. This may have been foolish. I played through what I could remember of it this morning; the F fingerings did trip me up, but the fact that I haven't played the work for several years and don't always remember what key I'm in tripped me up more.

Brahms rehearsal on Tuesday went well, we got through the third movement and started on the final movement, and rehearsed the first two. It's several weeks since we had a chance to play together, so things were a little rusty in places, but overall I'm quite happy with how we're playing. We did a bit of jazz improv afterward, just for laughs. I'd like to do more of that, but it's another area where playing with people regularly is important, and it's hard enough trying to find rehearsal time already.

I'm still trying to find a pianist for the Reinecke trio. I'll be annoyed if we don't get to play it for lack of a willing pianist, but reality is like that. Perhaps I will have the chance to play it this summer at Charterhouse.

Oren Marshall breathing workshop

On Wednesday, Oren Marshall came to do a breathing workshop with the horns at Trinity.

I got a lot of good out of this session, from reminders of breathing exercises long-forgotten to a few new ones I hadn't done before. There was very little playing but what playing we did was methodical and vastly improved by some of the breathing techniques and mouthpiece-alone playing that we did.

The best thing, though, was leaving the session feeling envigorated and energetic after all that breathing; I'd been feeling quite lethargic and unenthusiastic earlier in the day. I will definitely be adding some of the exercises to my daily (*ahem*) practise routine, but I might also try to fit in a one or two hour breathing workout at some point each week.

Some of the exercises we did:

• Various stretches while breathing


• Running on the spot, with intervals of sprinting


• Breathing to a count while walking. This included holding the breath when the lungs are full and when they are empty.


• Breathing in for a count of one and out for a count of three, with the counts getting faster and faster. Most people would hyperventilate quite quickly after doing this but as horn players we managed reasonably well.


• Breathing in all the way, 'topping up' a few times, then letting all the air out, expelling a bit more a few times, then breathing normally for a few breaths before repeating


• Breathing through the mouthpiece, with the stem end in the mouth


• Breathing through the mouthpiece with an embouchure formed but no tone production


• Breathing through the horn without tone production, starting on the shortest length of tubing and increasing by a semitone each measure to increase the resistance.


• Standard 'practise it on the mouthpiece first' playing.

Horn Class with Pip Eastop

I've been busy again--but at least I've found somewhere to live, now.

On Wednesday afternoon, Pip Eastop came to do a horn class with us.

It was a bit of an unenthusiastic start, there was some orchestral music that had been set aside for working on but he didn't really want to do that and neither did any of us, so we worked on specific issues instead.

Fluttertonguing:

I've always had great difficulty with this because I cannot make the 'purr like a cat' noise with my tongue. I've been trying to make this noise since I was 4 (long before I started playing horn), to no avail. I can get about 2 or 3 flips of a rolled 'r' in but am unable to sustain this. As some people are congenitally unable to do this I have generally claimed it is impossible for me, despite occasionally spending a few weeks attempting to do it.

Pip thinks that being able to get 2 or 3 flips of the rolled 'r' in means that I can do this, I'll just have to practise it a lot more than most people would.

I'm not sure I'm convinced but I would very much like to crack this because then I can purr like a cat, so I'll give it a try (again). The method suggested is to keep doing those rolled 'r' sounds until I can sustain them longer and longer, and then work on doing them with the horn.

Lip trills:

These are difficult on the horn and the only real way around them is to practise some every day, but using the tongue to switch notes instead of trying to use the embouchure is a method I'd forgotten about, and will be focusing on again for a while. My lip trills are much better than last time I tried this method.

Low-range playing:

Farkas-style point-the-air-at-the-bottom-of-the-mouthpiece stuff. Useful, in that it worked for everyone, but everyone sounded a bit crap when they didn't _quite_ get it. My work is rather cut out for me in this department, though again my low range is much better than it once was; I think I'm most of the way there with this and will just have to do a lot of low playing for a month or two in order to make some small embouchure changes.

Hand-stopping:

I can already do this except for very low notes, so I didn't get a whole lot out of this part of the lesson, but others present did. We went into the "actually it's not raised a semitone, it's lowered to about a semitone from the previous harmonic, also when you get high enough it's just the same note" thing, and also into the thing about where if you get high enough you run out of proper harmonics and can just gliss around like on just a mouthpiece because you're playing too high for the horn (only on the mouthpiece it's because you're too low) but you get an extra third or so of clear notes if you stick your hand in the bell which is one of the reasons we stick our hands in the bell. Interestingly, with the hand out of the bell you run out of notes at about the same pitch on the F side and Bflat side despite the fact that if it were relative it should be a fourth higher on the Bflat side. He couldn't answer my question as to why this is; I suspect it has something to do with physics and the bore of the tube rather than the length of it. I also suspect it's the sort of thing most horn players aren't really that interested in. I should probably just learn more physics as it's unrealistic to expect most people to be able to answer that question.
In general Pip was very encouraging, if a bit daunting, and he made it clear that the best methods to use are the ones that produce the best sound, and other indicators of what is the 'right way' aren't really as valuable. This 'whatever works' attitude was quite refreshing.

There were also some comments about playing on mouthpiece alone and on mid-range playing that I don't entirely agree with. Pip figures there isn't money in making quacking noises on the mouthpiece so don't practise it, but this contradicts his previous urging us to do whatever works - personally I find that if I play something mouthpiece-only a few times through it will be far more secure when I get it back to the horn.

He also thinks that if the very high range and very low range are good and solid, the middle range will work itself out, and it doesn't matter so much because things are easier there anyway, so we should practise low stuff and high stuff a lot without really necessarily trying to work our way up to them. I'm not so sure about that. I can see the point he was trying to make - the middle ranges ARE easier - but I don't think it's a good idea to just focus on the high notes and low notes and work down from high and up from low to get the middle playable. All of my major improvements in tone in my high and low range have come from expanding it outward gradually, rather than from working really hard to get good tone in high or low range as an isolated exercise. I think that working on high and low range without doing this could work for some but it could also lead to weird embouchure habits developing due to trying to play things before the muscles have developed to deal with them.

An example of this even came up in class - another player who uses a lot of pressure in the high range and very often ends up with sore teeth. She's using pressure because she doesn't have the muscular strength in her embouchure to get the notes to sound that way without using the pressure. While a certain amount of pressure is a good thing, having sore teeth after playing is bad news (and eventually her teeth will MOVE which will not be nice for her playing!). I figure the way around this is a variety of strength-building exercises employed in such a way as to gradually improve tone and range. Pip didn't suggest anything of the sort and didn't really answer her question about how to get around using excess pressure, just went on about how not having any pressure at all isn't really a good thing.

Again, I can see his point - playing with absolutely no pressure at all tends not to work very well as even very small movements of the horn can completely disrupt the sound - but he did ask if we had any questions and then did not answer some of them, and this was a bit disappointing.

All in all I found this a very useful class despite some differences of opinion, and I enjoyed it thoroughly as well.