One project I’ve been working on recently is a horn playing lineage, modeled loosely on the concept of an academic genealogy.  Similar to a family tree, an academic genealogy (or lineage) attempts to trace the connections between students and their principal teachers.  Although most academic genealogies focus on dissertation advisers, I have attempted in mine to include my principal teachers for both undergraduate and graduate work.  Since the one-on-one relationship between applied teacher and student begins at the undergraduate level (and often before, as in the case of Philip Farkas and many others), I thought it was important to include both.  Initially I thought this project wouldn’t take long at all, but I quickly realized how much information a true genealogy would encompass.  One could conceivably go back hundreds of years, tracing teachers and students.  See the chart below for a brief outline of my horn playing lineage, based on the information I was able to easily access on the IHS site, as well as additional information available to me (click on the image for a larger view).   My principal teachers for both undergraduate and graduate degrees are included, along with information on their teachers, and their teachers’ teachers.  For those with multiple teachers (and degrees), follow the horizontal arrows to see their lineage.  The next step in this project would be to go into even more detail, going further back and attempting to pin down more exact information such as degrees, dates of matriculation, dissertation/thesis topics, etc.  I hope to continue this project further at a later time (probably this summer), but even at this cursory level one can see the many interconnected relationships in the horn world.   What would be really amazing is to create an interactive website similar to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, whose mission is  “to compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world.” Dissertation topic anyone?