Settlement in Louisville
The conflict in Louisville KY seems to have come to a resolution. After 20 months of very contentious negotiations the two sides have agreed to a one-year stop-gap agreement that will allow them time to get back to work while hammering out a longer-term deal.
Robert Birman (who has been the target of some humor here at Horn Matters) was conspicuously absent from the press conference that announced this one-year deal.
According to Robert Levine at Polyphonic.org:
This dispute had always seemed to me to be about Birman’s desire to make his bones by doing something that hadn’t been done before in the orchestra business. That “something” was originally the conversion of occupied full-time positions in the orchestra into part-time jobs, but then morphed into replacing musicians who were on strike (or locked out, depending on one’s point of view) with new non-union musicians.
The dispute was only going to end when his board took a fresh sniff of the Kool-aid they’d been served and decided they no longer trusted the mixologist.
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2012 European Brass Band Championships
The results are in and the Black Dyke band from the U.K is this year’s winner.
The cost of music lessons
At ParentingSquad.com a parent burns off some steam on what private music teachers make per hour. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that her highly misinformed opinion was a parody.
Horn Society of the Carolinas
The French horn “has the most amazing sound of any instrument in the orchestra,” says Judith White, 70, one of the group’s three cofounders. “I’ve been doing this all my life and I sit there sometimes with tears rolling down my cheeks thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful sound.’ … Just the shape of the instrument itself and the way it looks is beautiful. To see several horn players standing together holding these big, beautiful instruments is pretty amazing.”
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The practice makes perfect myth
This article at TIME emphasizes that when it comes to practice, quality trumps quantity.
Don’t expect applause
When working on a new project – whether it be a performance or a non-performance related horn item – this is good advice.
Accept applause, sure, please do.
But when you expect applause, when you do your work in order (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short. That’s because your work is depending on something out of your control. You have given away part of your art. If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work–the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.
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Talk less, play more
From David Zinman, we have this excellent quote:
‘The less a conductor explains in words the better. There’s nothing a musician hates more than a conductor telling him for five minutes what he wants. A horse wants to run. An orchestra wants to play.
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Cannibalism in Florida
According to an article in the Palm Beach Daily News, the Palm Beach Symphony is hoping to bring in students from Juilliard for concert events and school programs.
While on the one hand it seems like a great idea for students to get experience, on the other hand it ignores the rich pool of talented professional that live in the area. The comments in this article are especially interesting to read.
Random videos
Here is the fifth and final installment of an interview with Andrew Karr about his recent teaching excursion to Kabul, Afghanistan.
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A sampling model of a French horn, recorded with a BC3 breath controller in real time.
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Marc Papeghin collaborates with friends for a cover of music from the video game Starcraft.
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John Clark and friends play Mustang Sally.
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Arkady Shilkloper and the Horn Orchestra of Russia.
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If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
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