I expected my one day at the International Horn Symposium in Los Angeles to yield the excitement and energy usually afforded by conferences of a grand scale, but I instead walked away feeling ambivalent about my lot as a horn player. Oops. Still, I appreciated the closing words of horn player J. Gregory Miller recounting his experiences touring with English rock band The Who: Oh, also, I bought a fancy-pants mute from Ion Balu, who is quite the gentlemanly dude....

The aforementioned performance of my hymn took place this last Saturday in Mountain View at the Community School of Music and Arts. Below is the one, very awful photo I have of the venue (Tateuchi Hall) from my seat in the back while I waited to go on stage myself. Tateuchi Hall, Community School of Music and Arts The performance went well, I thought, given that we were only able to rehearse it once....

For an upcoming recital, I have been trying to figure out how to perform (or arrange to have performed) my new choral work… without a chorus. Apart from my not having many connections in the choral community, a full chorus would probably outnumber the students and parents in attendance at the recital. As a fallback, I hastily mixed a synthesized rendition of the hymn for horn choir. I owe this exercise to GarageBand for having an impressive horn ensemble sample in its sound library, but I was happy enough with the results to take the time to “write out” (in Sibelius) the score for a 5-part horn choir....

My recent predilection for liturgical music has given rise to what ought to be my first choral work. It’s not finished, but with it, I have tried to produce a hymn in the style of Romantic-era musical settings of Russian orthodox worship services. I have given myself the rather daunting task of trying to capture the same spiritual flavor of these works, while omitting any religious program (that is, for some definition of “spiritual”)....

This past Saturday, I attended South Bay Horn Day at Mountain View High School. The festival lasted from nine in the morning to nine at night, with a mix of workshops, horn choir rehearsals, and performances filling the day. It is held annually, and I only attended once before in 2013. From my seat in the mass choir It was a joy to meet so many other horn players from the area and to hear the excitement in their voices as they recounted their experiences with the instrument....