Hello Jeffrey, I agree with you, but I would even go further. Too many players today produce just an acoustical event, but no tone, no special tone, no personal tone, not a beautiful tone, just a colorless more or less intonated & dynamically controlled NOISE, nobody would care about.
What is a good horn tone ? A good horn tone is like a good "average" male human voice, a human higher baritonal voice. Imagine that, try to transfer this excperience to your horn playing & try to arrive with a similar result, no matter what horn (brand, bore, metal, technical type, mouthpiece, etc.) you use. Sing the horn or make it sing, but accept that there are millions of mini-variations possible. Stop playing the horn, if it sounds like a car-horn (sorry, this is not uncommon !) or a castrated alto-trombone. Be realistic & fair in your self-judgement. To achieve this goal, experiment in a multitude of ways: angle between leadpipe axis & front teeth axis, right hand function, mouth cavity, passive air support, impetus by the tongue, color imagination, MORE F-SIDE because of overtones, - equipment comes last: medium bore (average), larger bore mouthpiece, medium thick bell (average), etc. - and two things never cease: listening & practising (not mechanically & boring, but using the brain & oeconomically and allways but not everything & also tone studies & tone studies again !) ============================================================ ============================================ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Carter, Jeffrey Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 11:57 PM To: The Horn List Subject: RE: [Hornlist] RE: The preferred tone/sound these days? I think that as long as the tone does not take away from the musical message that there should 'ideally' be no preferred tone. Above all, I think that flexibility of tone color is probably much more important than devotion to any one color (ie. cleveland sound, ny sound, london sound etc). Jeff Carter -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Fri 4/27/2007 4:48 PM To: horn@music.memphis.edu Subject: [Hornlist] RE: The preferred tone/sound these days? Nobody cares about tone these days. The only thing that matters is to not miss notes. Actually, that's not such a bad thing in itself, I think it was Phil Farkas who said "after you miss a certain number of notes, it ceases to be espressivo". I do know of more than one top US orchestra which hired a player whose tone they didn't like, but that person played very accurately. Many of the "preferred" horns these days don't produce a very beautiful sound. - Steve Mumford _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ post: horn@music.memphis.edu unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
