All the horn players I have played with up until a couple years ago had started on the Horn.
Of course, no one told me that the horn was too hard for me to play. I
guess that wasn't part of the pedagogical repertoire back in those days.
The practice of starting aspiring horn (and double reed) players on a different instrument has been around for decades (at least), and not just for pedagogical reasons. I don't agree with this as a blanket policy; I feel that every case should be treated on an individual basis, but in a mixed instrument beginner class, there are some pedagogical advantages to limiting the number of different instruments with which the teacher has to contend.
When I started playing in the '60s my (very good) school district had that policy. My sister played flute for one year before she switched to oboe, and I played cornet for 4 months before switching to horn. In both of these cases, the beginning band teacher was aware of our desire to play the other instruments and switched us as soon as he felt we would be able to keep up with the other students in the classes. In the case of the horn, remember that beginning band methods always use keys for unison exercises that benefit trumpet and clarinet players, so that horn parts typically may be either too high or too low to be played comfortably by a beginner. If a student has private lessons from the first day then this is not as much of an issue, but that is not the norm in my experience. I believe that in the U.S., the great majority of beginning wind and percussion players get almost all of their early instruction in heterogeneous instrument classes. If this has changed please let me know, but with shrinking teaching staffs and budgets, I think it likely to be more true now than it was 20 years ago.
Many dealers refuse to include more expensive instruments in their school rental programs, and if a school district does not own any of those, the students may not have much choice but to start on one of the so-called "basic" instruments: flute, clarinet, alto sax, trumpet or trombone. I certainly don't endorse this way of thinking; I simply present it as a reality in today's music education business.
Dan
================================ Dan Phillips Professor of Horn, University of Memphis webmaster: http://music.memphis.edu
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