After an extended hiatus, here is another installment in this series. No. 43 is deceptively tricky, especially when played at faster tempos. My edition suggests dotted-quarter = 104-132, and I topped out around dotted-quarter = 120. Try practicing this etude slurred or legato tongued to work on centering every pitch.
Here’s the next etude in the Kopprasch series. I’ve tweaked my video settings, which should hopefully remove the border that’s been appearing around recent uploads. This study really works flexibility and articulation in the middle register with a combination of repeated staccato and medium to wide skips. The tempo range provided in my edition is dotted-quarter=116-152, and for this recording the tempo is around dotted-quarter=132. Try not to over-tongue the staccatos, even in forte passages, at it just makes everything sound more labored. I like using T13 for the final repeated low Cs.
Here’s the latest installment in my Kopprasch video project. It’s been a while since the last video, but I am hoping to pick things up in the next few months and record more frequently. The Cornopub edition suggests a tempo range of quarter note=72-112, and my tempo settled around quarter=88. As always, consider using some B-flat horn fingerings below the staff for better clarity.
Hornetudes.com is an excellent new resource created by Ricardo Matosinhos, a professional horn player and teacher in Portugal. You can read his full bio for more details, but in short Dr. Matosinhos is an experienced player and teacher with a diverse musical background. Among his other horn-related projects are the Horn’s Pocket Guide, a handy reference for horn players of all levels, 12 Jazzy Etudes for Horn, and two more etude collections pending publication.
I’ve spent some time over the last few days perusing hornetudes.com, and I can already tell that it will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and professional players. According to the description on the home page, hornetudes.com is meant to accompany Ricardo’s dissertation, titled Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Horn Etudes Published Between 1950 and 2011. This site takes the form of an interactive database with numerous search options encompassing a substantial catalog of etudes for horn. I should also add that the site is being regularly updated with new additions, which Ricardo posts on the hornetudes.com Facebook page. Users can browse through the bibliography alphabetically, or display entries according to publisher, difficulty level, size, and/or country and date of publication. Here’s a screen shot showing one of the entries.
Title and author are listed at the top of the entry, in this case Sixteen Studies for French Horn by Verne Reynolds. This entry caught my eye because I was not aware of another set of etudes by Reynolds in addition to his “great 48,” or 48 Etudes for French Horn. Each entry contains a wealth of information, such as publication date – these studies were actually published after the 48 Etudes – publisher’s website, range, difficulty level, number of etudes, dynamic ranges, extended techniques required, and the average length of each etude. Helpful annotations can also be found at the end of the entry. For these studies, the following explanation for their being little known is provided.
Unlike its [sic] 48 studies, these are written in a tonal language. Having been published only three years after the 48 studies did not have the same acceptance, being now out of print and hard to find.
Though they are out of print, I plan to keep my eyes open for a set of these rare etudes, and I wouldn’t have known about them without the information contained on hornetudes.com. It’s a great website, and potentially a very powerful tool for research. Congratulations Ricardo, and thank you for providing this resource!
This Friday we’ll look at a great collection of etudes by the Dutch composer Jan Koetsier (1911-2006). Like most of his other works, the 13 Etudes Caractéristiques, Op. 117 are published in Switzerland by Editions Marc Reift (cover image linked from their website). I first became acquainted with Koetsier’s music in high school, when a friend of mine performed his Romanza, Op. 59/2 on a recital we shared at a local church. I went on to discover in college that Koetsier has a substantial number of solo and chamber works for horn. Many of them have never been recorded, and over the past several months I’ve been working on a CD project which will feature his horn and piano works, his Sonata for Horn and Harp, and a selection of these characteristic etudes. Recording is scheduled for August, 2012, and I’m very excited about it!
I haven’t decided for sure which of the thirteen etudes I want to include on the recording, but I’ve been practicing six or seven which seemed like they would work best. The collection is organized into three sets of four etudes, with one “bonus” etude at the end. Each set is designed to focus on a particular area of horn playing; the first set is melodic, the second set rhythmic, and the third set technical. The final etude, subtitled Drolatique or “Humorous,” is really an unaccompanied solo which combines challenges from all three of the previous sets. The etudes are somewhat progressive in difficulty, and I would rate their general difficulty somewhere around Maxime-Alphonse Book 4. The etudes tend to be shorter than those found in the later Maxime-Alphonse books, and for the most part are tonal with a good bit of chromaticism. They emphasize the middle and high range, with a few excursions into the low register. The overall range is G to c”’. Koetsier’s music can be quite challenging, and he does a good job of systematically challenging the player with these etudes. One of my favorites – which I plan to record – is based on rhythms from the “Sacrificial Dance” found in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Radek Baborák has recorded this one on the album Baborák Plays Etudes, but to my knowledge this is the only etude from the collection that’s been recorded thus far. The melodic etudes are quite beautiful, with long phrases and some large leaps. The rhythmic etudes include dotted rhythms, meter changes, and hemiolas, and the technical etudes have really pushed my technique to get them up to the indicated tempos. Overall this is a very fine collection of studies, well worth adding to your library.
While perusing the amazing resource that is the University of Iowa Horn Studio Site, I came across a recent dissertation by Brett Miller. Dr. Miller is a member of the U.S. Air Force Band, Ceremonial Brass, and also a composer of music for winds and brass. His D.M.A. dissertation from the University of Maryland is titled 45 Concert Etudes on the Themes of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Johannes Brahms, 2007 (follow the link to download the entire dissertation). The passage below, quoted from Dr. Miller’s abstract, provides an excellent summary of the goals and methods behind this substantial project.
The composition of these etudes was influenced by Franz Strauss’ pedagogical study, 17 Concert Studies for Valve-horn after themes from Beethoven. Strauss’ etudes were designed as pedagogical tools to enhance his students’ abilities on the horn as well as to enable greater ease in the performance of the works of Beethoven. Strauss borrows themes from Beethoven, each of which is woven into an etude designed around specific technical goals. Each etude is designed as a concert piece, rather than a repetitive technical etude…Following Franz Strauss’ example, this project involves the creation of 45 concert etudes that are based on themes from the works of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Johannes Brahms. Each etude focuses on particularly demanding technical or musical challenges that horn players encounter in preparing these works for performance or audition.
In the first part of the document, the author provides a brief biography of Franz Strauss, as well as an analysis of etudes 10, 11, and 13 from his 17 Concert Studies on the Themes of Beethoven. The rest of the dissertation presents Miller’s new compositions, picking up where Franz Strauss left off and going quite a bit further. Each etude is prefaced with a technical and musical analysis, and a detailed discussion of the excerpt on which it is based. As promised, Miller’s etudes go beyond the difficulty of the actual excerpts, with the goal being a more efficient, accurate, and musically convincing performance of the excerpts in an audition or performance. All of the major works by each composer are covered, and in fact this document serves very well as an introduction to several of the major orchestral excerpts by three of the greatest composers for the horn. Here are a few highlights from Miller’s collection. Many of the more challenging works include multiple etudes dealing with different excerpts from the same piece.
Richard Strauss
Gustav Mahler
Johannes Brahms
Though I haven’t spent much time with these etudes yet, I can certainly see their value for teachers, students, and professionals alike. They fill a gap in the horn’s pedagogical literature, and have the potential to become standard fare along with etudes by Kopprasch, Maxime-Alphonse, and others. Bravo to Brett Miller for a job well done! N.B. As of this post, I have not been able to find a publisher for the 45 Concert Etudes, but I do hope to see them in print in the future. [REVISED: The etudes are published and available at http://www.brettmillermusic.com/horn_dog_publishing.htm and http://hornsociety.org/marketplace/online-library#ecwid:category=0&mode=product&product=6996941 Thanks to Ricardo Matosinhos for sharing this link!]
Although Monday’s post was the last Kopprasch video upload for a while, I thought it might be nice to follow up with a few thoughts on the whole thing. Overall I’m very glad I did this project, and I think I achieved most of the goals I set at the beginning. Looking back at my very first “Kopprasch Project” post, here are the reasons I set out to do this.
1. Pretty much everyone who has played the horn for more than a few years has at least heard of the Kopprasch etudes, and they often (along with other standard etude collections) form a core repertory of materials for horn study.
2. Practicing Kopprasch can be beneficial for players of varying abilities. Whether it’s working on tone production and consistency, or perfecting transposition skills, I think Kopprasch holds an important place in the repertoire for students, amateurs, and professionals.
3. As a teacher, I wanted to provide a resource for my students and others so that they could at least hear one interpretation of these etudes, and use these recordings as a jumping off point for their own creative practicing.
4. Although there are several recordings online of Kopprasch etudes, to my knowledge no one has yet recorded all of Book 1 or Book 2 on video.
I stand by these reasons, and I do plan to return to the project at some point and record book 2. When I set out to record these studies, I had no idea how many people, if any, would view the videos or even care about them. One of the greatest strengths of the internet is also a major shortcoming – with the sheer amount of data floating around out there it’s easy for things to get buried or surface for a microsecond and then disappear. As the project continued I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was gaining a small but loyal following, and over time I started to receive comments (mostly positive) about the collection of videos. My favorite moment in the whole process was definitely finding out that I’d been awarded a Golden Clam award from HornMatters – this helped give me the inspiration to see the project through to the end of Book 1.
However, my summary of this project would not be complete without attempting to address some of the less positive comments directed toward it. By and large the horn playing community is very friendly, and I’m sure the majority of the “suggestions” I received were given in the spirit of constructive criticism. In any event, I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and proceed from there. One of the comments basically said I “missed too many notes.” Well, I will say that some of the recordings are better than others, though none of them are perfect. I tried to maintain as high a quality of playing as I possibly could for each recording, but as in life there were some good days and some less than good days. For me, it was important to try to keep recording each week (or every other week in some cases) even when I didn’t really feel like it, or when I knew that there were some issues that weren’t completely worked out yet. I’m a firm believer in learning as a cyclic process, so my response to that comment would simply be “I’ll do better next time.” I approach the Kopprasch etudes with my students as works in progress, which we can and should revisit often during our careers. Each time I play or teach Kopprasch I try to get something new out of it, so they never become boring to play or teach. I would also stress that these videos were not recorded in a professional audio studio, and were not spliced or edited (except to raise some of the sound levels and add intro credits). In many ways the collection is a video diary of 8 months in my horn playing life. For me it’s really fun to go back and look at some of the older videos when I was trying out some different horns – there are actually three different horns represented in the series – a Yamaha 667v, a Hoyer G10, and an Englebert Schmid ES1.
Another comment suggested that I take longer between each recording to better perfect the etude – say 2 to 3 weeks between etudes instead of 1 to 2 weeks. I think that is a fine suggestion, and perhaps for the second half of the project I’ll do that. One of my reasons for setting the somewhat arbitrary goal of an etude a week was to give myself a deadline or goal to work towards. For me, I could easily stretch that 2 or 3 weeks into a month or more, thus dragging out the project longer than I intended. The 1 week deadline really pushed me to become more efficient in my practicing, as with the other things I was working on I only had about 15-20 minutes each day to devote to Kopprasch.
All in all, I am satisfied with the project so far, and I think the ultimate goal of the endeavor – reacquainting myself with the Kopprasch etudes and becoming a better teacher and player – was achieved. In the end, if you don’t agree with the playing in the videos or find them less than inspiring, simply use them as an example of how not to play Kopprasch. At least they will have served some kind of purpose if used in this fashion.
To close out this post I want to say a big thank you to all of my subscribers on YouTube, and to encourage all the horn players out there to consider a project of this kind. It’s a great way to work through a series of etudes, not to mention a lot of fun! Perhaps one day we can have a horn etude channel on YouTube, complete with recordings of all the standards like Reynolds, Schuller, Barboteu, Mueller, etc.
After a week off, the Kopprasch project is back. Like the previous study, No. 18 forced me to deal with my sometimes nebulous mid-low range. I don’t know if you can tell from the video, but I used quite a bit of b-flat horn fingerings down there – the clarity and response were much better for me using some alternate fingerings. Suggested tempo is quarter note = 75-80. One other tip would be to not worry too much about playing ultra staccato. Even though it’s marked “sempre staccato,” I think trying to play too short really makes accuracy a challenge.
No. 15 is the first slow, lyrical etude in the collection, and is a great study for working on tone quality and phrasing. I like a tempo of around eighth-note=72. Take your time on the turns, and remember that the thirty-second notes aren’t nearly as fast as they look.
After a week off, here’s your next Kopprasch installment. This one can be quite challenging for a number of reasons, namely concentration, accuracy, and clarity of articulation. Suggested tempo is quarter note=108-112. Be careful on beat four in the first full measure after the repeat that you get low enough when slurring from the E at the top of the staff to the G below it. It is really easy to clip that interval and get a B-flat instead of a G. Keep the air moving, and relax.
James Boldin's Horn World 