Message text written by The Horn List >They arrive to auditions & have never seen Cosi fan tutte, Freischuetz, Falstaff, No.8 Symphony or the Nocturno. Enough "lamento" for today.<
Dear All I recently did a gig playing 2nd to a really brilliant young technician on the horn - wonderful articulation, beautiful sound, 100% accurate - a far better player than I ever was. The orchestra was a mixture of recently graduated professionals, semi professionals, amateurs and a couple of codgers like me at the very end of their professional careers. This young man totally ignored the two amateur players in the horn section but deigned to exchange a few words with me. He mentioned that he had just done his first date with a very famous British orchestra (the same one that gave me my first break in 1970) and that they had played, he thought, a Brahms Symphony. I asked which one. He replied that he was not sure but it started with the horns (so I assumed No 2). This took me back to my pre-student days, attending a music centre on Saturday mornings. At the morning break, we would stand around discussing the music which we had heard recently, the live concerts which we had attended and, yes, how many notes the horns had split in such and such a symphony. These days, I abhor 'split counting' as much as anybody else (but there are fewer splits to count) but, it does beg the question - what has gone wrong? No longer is it about playing music, it is about selling oneself. I remember one of the few times that, as an MU steward, I lost my temper with a colleague - a young violinist who wanted to take a performance of Der Rosenkavalier off to do a prestigious date elsewhere, and said that the fact that no deputies were available who knew this show and it meant either playing one short or having a dep sight reading as "not my problem!" Regards Paul A. Kampen (Grumpy old horn player - W. Yorks UK) _______________________________________________ post: horn@music.memphis.edu unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
