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How Low is Low?by Simon de Souza, Cornucopia, March 2000 |
How low should you be able to play? Even if one is exclusively a soloist, a look at the standard solo repertoire shows such works as Adagio and Allegro, Morceau de Concert, Glazunov's Reverie -- all have at least a pedal Bb and many of them an A, Ab, or even G. Most of the principal chamber works have pretty unavoidable pedals. And then there is the orchestral repertoire. A first horn who cannot play the opening phrase to Ein Heldenleben is not going far, while as third horn in Till Eulenspiegel you can scarcely ask conductors if they mind doing without the pedal A when you play the theme for horn in D.
But how low is necessary? I would suggest that an ability to play a controlled, quiet, sustained note down to at least a pedal G, and preferably an F, is something aspiring players should seek to have in their armoury. Lower than F, instances in the repertoire become rare. However, the most obvious example is probably Shostakovich's Fifth, where all four horns are required to play pedal E's. Realistically, what I suggest is to aim for a good solid pedal F, one which you can both produce and hold, cleanly and reliably at any dynamic and also (and this is critical) that you can slur down to and up from.
So how, assuming that you find playing low very difficult, can you improve matters? When working on players' low registers, I try to stick to a few fundamentals. The first of these is that of keeping the head up and not letting it drop as one descends. I encourage students to keep their heads up at all times, to consider the embouchure for the low register to be an extension of their normal middle register setup, to think of opening the aperture in the embouchure by lowering the jaw and to pay particular attention to the position of the tongue, preventing it emerging between the teeth where it blocks everything up and upsets the carefully arranged embouchure.
To help achieve this, I recommend the following exercise. Play in half notes, starting on the open Bb horn, on written F in the first space, slur down to C, then F, then rearticulate the F. Repeat on the 2nd valve, then the 1st, descending through the Bb combinations, continuing through the F horn combinations to the pedal F#. Resist any temptation to drop your head. As you descend, gently lower your jaw and slide down, letting the note blend until it eventually clicks onto the lower harmonic. It is better not to get the note than to "cheat"!
Keep your chin flat and firm and the corners of your embouchure braced. If you loosen the embouchure, control of the notes will be greatly diminished. The repeated low note should be tongued with the tip of the tongue still in contact with the lower edge of the upper teeth so that the tongue does not come through.
Finally, keep the air flow solid and constant. Part of the idea of the "slide" is that the sound and hence the air column should be absolutely constant.
This article is extracted from the Dec. 1999 issue of The Horn Magazine, a publication of the British Horn Society. Simon teaches at Wells Cathedral and Purcell schools and is a consultant at Trinity College. He is a freelance player and solo horn with the quintet Chaconne Brass. See a related article, The view of the low register from New York