The Creative Hornist

Conventional horn wisdom has always been that one simply doesn't go exploring with the horn. It simply isn't done. You play the ink. Basta! Other instruments - say, instruments with a jazz tradition - are allowed off the leash, but horn? Uh-uh, no way, no how. It's too difficult. It's dumb. It's dangerous (you might make a mistake!). It's scary. It's not the norm. It's embarrassing. You're too young. You're too old. You haven't had the proper training. You don't have time. It's against the rules/tradition/laws of man and nature. Why bother? There's nothing out that there that the experts haven't already discovered. What are you going to play, anyway? If you try to make something up, it will sound mistake-ridden and bad. Who do you think you are? Remember what happened to Icarus and his winged experiments! Be sensible! Just. Don't. The arguments, brimming propriety and good sense, go on and on. They are, in fact, built in to our unconscious fundamental understanding of our definition of horn playing, so that the mere idea of 'exploring' with the horn almost never occurs to us, and any flicker of desire to do so is immediately rejected - if it ever surfaces at all. The Creative Hornist is a collection of countervailing and iconoclastic essays and information to persuade you to create your own music and discover your own musical voice. Don't wait any longer. Start now - today! - enjoying the other half of music and musicianship that has been missing.
About the Author: Jeffrey Agrell has earned his living playing and teaching horn since college: twenty-five years in the Lucerne (Switzerland) Symphony Orchestra, and, since 2000, as horn professor at the University of Iowa. He has performed and taught the full gamut of horn literature, including the repertoire for symphony orchestra, opera, musicals, ballet, operetta, and chamber music, while stretching personal artistic boundaries beyond the orchestra as a educator, composer, writer, clinician, recording artist, and solo performer. He is a former two-term member of the Advisory Council of the International Horn Society, has been a member of the faculty of the Asian Youth Orchestra in Hong Kong, and has taught at the prestigious Kendall Betts Horn Camp since 2005. Besides performing, he has won awards as both a writer and composer, with dozens of published compositions, and well over one hundred published articles, plus eight (now nine) books to his credit, including seven on classical improvisation and his recent landmark book Horn Technique (2017, 447 p.). Outside of horn and writing, he is an almost-jazz guitarist, and an enthusiastic, if not particularly skilled player of assorted percussion.