This year the International Horn Society (yes, that’s a real thing!) is holding their International Horn Symposium at Ithica College in Ithica, New York from June 13-18.
Horn workshops happen around the world. There are at least four regional workshops that happen every year in the US: the Northeast, Southest, Mid-South and Mid-North horn workshops happen at different schools throughout their respective regions.There are also summer workshops that don’t migrate, but the International Horn Symposium is the big one – every it alternates between locations in the United States and abroad, and it always features soloists, teachers, and exhibits from around the world!
This year one of the featured masterclasses will be done by William VerMeulen, Professor of Horn at Rice University in Texas. Although a widely-acclaimed soloist and orchestral musician, perhaps VerMeulen’s greatest claim to fame is as a teacher, with former students performing in major orchestras across the country and world!
I’ve been to one masterclass by him many years ago, and he really does have some great pedagogical insights, as well as a wide range of metaphors and visualizations to help students more easily internalize important but hard-to-visualize concepts. Fortunately for those of us who can’t go to the Symposium in a couple of weeks, Mr. VerMeulen put together this short video of “Six Quick Fixes to Horn Playing”.
As a bonus, this video also includes a few snippets of VerMeulen’s Mozart horn concerto’s – recorded with the Houston Symphony and not an easy recording to find!
