Harmony Kopprasch

The most popular all-time etude collection for horn (also used by low brasses) are the 60 Etudes (op. 6) by German hornist and composer Georg Kopprasch (c. 1800 - c. 1850). The Kopprasch etudes are more mechanical than musical in content and are useful to work on the basics of music: scales and arpeggios. There's just one problem with a diet of pure Kopprasch (as we familiarly refer to the whole collection): K etudes are great preparation for the early 19th century, but if we look around it should be apparent that the world is a different place than it was back then. Clothing, medicine, sports, communication - on and on - are all very different now from then. Shouldn't musical studies also reflect the demands of the current era? Enter the Millennium Kopprasch Series, of which Harmony Kopprasch Vol. I is the second, following Rhythm Kopprasch. This series takes the original etudes and dramatically extends them in various ways so that the musician of today can acquire the depth and breadth of skills they need to survive and thrive almost two hundred years after the original etudes were written. Harmony Kopprasch uses the original rhythms and meters, but applies them to a vastly more challenging array of scale and arpeggios types, chords, and keys. The player who knows the originals with their very limited scale types, chords, and keys can take their technique to the next level by revisiting the original pitches in HK in these contemporary harmonic contexts.
About the Author: Jeffrey Agrell has earned his living playing and teaching horn since college. After a first career as a symphony orchestra musician, he has been horn professor at the University of Iowa since 2000. 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 well over one hundred published articles and nine books to his credit, most recently, Rhythm Kopprasch, Horn Technique (447 p., 2017) and The Creative Hornist (228 p., 2017). He is an expert on classical improvisation, and has authored landmark books in this area, including Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians, Vol. I (2008) and Vol. II (2016). Outside of horn and writing, he is a used-to-be amateur jazz guitarist, and currently an enthusiastic, if not particularly skilled conga drum player. To contact Jeffrey Agrell with questions, comments, crazy ideas, get into interesting discussions about any of this, or engage him for concerts, workshops, keynote addresses, masterclasses, and all that, write to him at jeffrey.agrell@gmail.com