As if you needed another reason to join this wonderful organization – which is made up of horn players from around the world – the IHS has recently made available Two Surveys of European Horn Playing Styles, one completed in 1964/65 by Wendell (Pete) Exline, and the other in 2010 by Dan Phillips (IHS webmaster and Associate Professor at the University of Memphis).  I have only been looking at the material for the last hour or so, but already I can see that there is a wealth of information here that will take a long time for me to process.  Both surveys include recordings of standard orchestral excerpts performed by prominent European horn players, as well as photographs of their embouchures and other related information.  Dan Phillips deserves a huge “BRAVO” from the horn playing community for making this research available, and I am looking forward to reading his conclusions – presumably to be published in a future issue of The Horn Call. Some of the content is publicly available at the link above, but the real treasures (audio and video recordings) are only open to IHS members.  If you are a horn player and haven’t joined the IHS, now is a great time – the information in these surveys alone is well worth the small annual membership fee, not to mention that you will be supporting a very fine organization.