Best posts made by SSmith1226

@bigdub said in Lawler C7 P s 119:

@kehaulani
Pretty sure there are horns with better intonation than others.
Otherwise we would all be playing Bundy's.
True?

No, Mendini by Cecilio!!!

@Vulgano-Brother said in A little humour:

Prequel
Imagine this: A knock on the door. The victim answers it. The President of the Condo Association says, “We have all taken a vote and want to offer you $150 for your Banjo.” The victim thinks about it and says, “No.”

Two months before the start of “The New Reality” this video was released. They must have been clairvoyant.

Any suggestions for a case for my new horn?
Youtube Video

@Vulgano-Brother said in A little humour:

What's the definition of perfect pitch? When you throw a banjo in the bin and it lands on an accordion.

Mahler No. 2- Resurrection Sympjony
The conductor, Karel Mark Chichon has put together a Mahler-2 highlights video with 79 home-bound musicians of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria and his wife, soprano Elina Garanca. This was all put together with 80 separate cellphone videos.

@Vulgano-Brother
I spent quite a bit of time with Barliman2001 in Vienna last summer and the summer before. This is some of the German that I learned.

@Dr-GO

Translation:

@ButchA said in Anyone like fishing? (when taking a break from Trumpet, that is...):

I know this is the Off Topic section, so I just wanted to ask a quick question after returning from a little hiatus... When not practicing trumpet, playing gigs with bands, does anyone like to go fishing in their free time?

Even more than fishing, I love catching, especially when my kids were growing up, taking them fishing / catching. My son now, nearly 37, takes his kids down to a lake to fish. The following are some of his catches when he was four and nine.

Some nice trumpet work and outstanding dancing:

@marty-hahn said in New to this board:t.

I’m not great but can get by and play in tune but I am happy to be back sort of. I’m hoping to get good enough to play with a community band. It’s going to take more work but I’m okay with that.
Looking forward to learning from everyone here.

Marty,
One way to get “good enough to play with a community band” is to play with one. Specifically, if there is a New Horizons Band near your community, join it. They accept individuals at all levels of experience from the very beginner, to the comeback players, to the more experienced players. I joined one of these bands after a 44 year layoff and worked my way from last seat third trumpet up to first trumpet. I have now been playing seven years and play in multiple community bands, big bands, and have played in orchestras as well. This process began with the New Horizons Band. Below is a link of the locations of the three active New Horizons Organizations in Washington.
Even if one of these is not convenient to your location, with your musical knowledge, you could
join a local community band, start at the bottom, and play what you can. With practice and experience, your skills will improve and you will advance.
The best of luck to you on your journey, and as promised, here is the link:

https://newhorizonsmusic.org/content.php?page=Find_a_Group

@ButchA
The fish was catch and release. Estimated 500 pounds. Had an estimated 900 pounder on for a short while and pulled the hooks. Had a 800-900 lb Blue Marlin on in Puerto Rico that looked considerably larger then the boat we were on. We released him, or I should say, he released us after about an hour of playing with us. Coincidentally at the time we were in Puerto Rico to attend the Heineken Jazz Festival with Arturo Sandoval as the headliner. See !!! I made it about Trumpets after all.
Here is s photo of a catch and release 150 lb Tarpon at the side of the boat at home in the Florida Keys.

@GeorgeB said in The New Reality:

@SSmith1226

Aw, man, I think I just fell in love with a dog ...

@Kehaulani said in The New Reality
I can't hear Bolero without thinking of Bo Derick.

Given the choice, I’ll vote for Bo Derek, but the dog in this video is a close second!

@Tobylou8 said in Anyone like fishing? (when taking a break from Trumpet, that is...):

Love fishing. Prefer wading mountain streams with ultra light gear. White Miller maybe the best lure I've ever used. It catches everything. Nothing like landing a 3 pound trout or large mouth bass in clear mountain water only 2-3 ft deep! I did catch a 5 pound Largemouth in a muddy pond whose eye was bigger than the spoon on the lure!! Will try to find the pic on my phone and post later.

I understand completely the thrill and challenge of ultra light gear, which uses 2-6 lb test line. Everything is relative though. The tarpon above weighing around 150 lbs was caught and landed on 20 lb test ( the heavy line in the photo is the leader). It dragged us over the flats (2-3 feet deep), into the channels ( 10-15) feet deep, tried to drag us under a bridge, and the fight lasted about an hour before we could get the fish to the side of the boat for a release. I’ve been in sailfish and marlin tournaments where we were given 17 lb test line that was required to be used, and released fish at the side of the boat. I’ve also caught pacific sailfish on fly rod with 16-20 lb tippets. Everything is relative. For example the tarpon above would be the equivalent of catching a 15 pound fish on 2 lb test given equal environmental issues.

@SSmith1226 said in The New Reality:

Wait until you get to your 70’s. It becomes a Travelogue of Mexican Beach Resort.

On the other hand, what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico.

Here is an article I found in the New York Times. Things could have been worse. I could have been a French Horn Player. Any comments from those of you who have played both? Are you better off being a Trumpet Player doubling on French Horn or a French Horn player doubling on Trumpet?

The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
By ALLAN KOZINN
August 12, 2008
Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.

At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the intractable early version of the horn has made its way into the Rose Theater as a series of period-instrument bands from Germany, England and Italy performed music ranging from Italian Baroque choral works to Mozart opera. When these groups were at their best, a listener whose fondness for period instruments dates to the 1960s could reflect on how far the performance standard has risen since.

In those days period ensembles that sounded vigorous on disc often proved anemic in concert, and the instruments’ antique technology was regularly blamed for mediocre performances. Nowadays, the performances are more typically extroverted and expressive, and although period instruments, by definition, have not been modernized to make them easier to play, listeners are no longer asked to consider their difficulty when a performance goes awry.

Except, that is, when the horn notes crack and slither. The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind.

It’s worth understanding the challenges hornists face. In its 17th- and 18th-century form, the horn is basically just a long, flared pipe wound into two or three coils, with a mouthpiece on the end. What it lacks, compared with today’s horn, is the valve mechanism: the complex tubing and finger keys at the center of a modern horn that let hornists play chromatically and in different keys.

Without recourse to valves, hornists are most at home in the relatively few notes in the overtone series that come naturally to a bit of coiled metal: mainly, the notes you hear in hunting and military calls. As the music grows more complex, the technical demands escalate. One resource hornists have is hand-stopping: by putting a hand inside the instrument’s bell, they can flatten the pitch to produce chromatic notes.

When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems. And a bit of condensation from a player’s breath adhering to the inside of a coil can lead to cracked notes, or “clams.”

As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!

Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:

“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”

I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.

For some reason — maybe it’s a little-documented, mouth-drying effect of global warming — the last season was particularly rough for hornists. In a concert of Brahms and Schumann works at the 92nd Street Y in December, the usually reliable David Jolley became ensnared in every tangle a hornist can encounter (or create), including serious balance issues in ensemble pieces. And visiting orchestras seemed more prone than usual to horn flaws.

But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.

The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.

The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.

Mentioning hornists’ failings in reviews invariably brings plenty of e-mail messages, often from people who did not hear the performances but feel moved to defend a player’s reputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these correspondents have variations on the word horn (“corno” or “horncall,” for example) in their e-mail addresses, and they usually identify themselves as hornists, as if their addresses didn’t make that clear.

In the case of the Haydn, some offered amazing conspiracy theories. The most interesting was that Mr. Gilbert had programmed the work knowing that it would be botched, so that he would later have reason to replace Mr. Myers. (Mr. Gilbert doesn’t seem that Machiavellian.) Another blamed the orchestra’s management for allowing Mr. Gilbert to program it.

Still others offered technical excuses: that the work requires a variety of horn that Mr. Myers doesn’t play, for instance. (That an orchestra’s programming is announced months in advance — ample time to deal with such technical problems or lobby to have the work replaced — seems not to have troubled anyone.)

Of about a dozen e-mail messages, all but one correspondent found someone other than the players to blame for the performance. A few blamed me: I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.

To the contrary. I played the horn briefly as a teenager, somewhere between the violin and the trombone (which had a nicer bite), and I gave up brass instruments only when I realized that continuing would mean spending weekends marching around at football games in a dopey band uniform. It was the late 1960s; that kind of thing just wasn’t done.

Nearly a decade later, as a composition student, I revisited the instrument and what it could (ideally) do when I wrote an unaccompanied horn piece and a quartet for horn, violin, bassoon and percussion (what was I thinking?) for a hornist friend.

I like the horn, honest. And I know how difficult it is to get a good, centered, well-tuned sound out of it.

But here’s the thing about musical performance: It’s all difficult. It’s meant to be. Composers write, and have always written, music that pushes the limits of technique. And if you’re onstage in a professional capacity, you’re expected to be able to negotiate it. That’s the least audiences expect, and it’s a precondition for what they buy tickets for: to be moved by an interpretation; to savor its nuances and to hear something revelatory, whether the work is new or familiar.

If, instead, they end up wincing at mistuned notes and reminding themselves how tough the instruments are, they’ve been pushed out of the zone. And at that point, no amount of rationalization will make the performance anything but a sow’s ear.

Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja performed by “United Trumpeters Peruvian”.

The type of Orchestra I would love to play in: