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Volume 1, Issue 2 May, 1998 |
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Center Stage withPhilip Myers
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At Center Stage with us this issue is Philip Myers. Phil is one of the most intelligent, sensitive and generous people we have ever known and we are very proud to have him as a friend these many years now. As a player, he has been principal horn with the New York Philharmonic since 1980. Before that he was principal with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Atlantic Symphony in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Maybe it's the trumpet player in me, but what I like most about Phil' s playing is his attitude. Phil takes a back seat to no man! That's not to say you won't be dazzled by his introspection, woven through a spectrum of tone colors and phrasing, but (and this may be the trumpet player thing again) when it's time to roar...watch out! I thought Mahler wrote all those symphonies for the trumpets until Phil came to town. Strauss, Hindemith, Brahms, it doesn't matter, with Phil playing it's like hearing the work for the first time. Beautiful passages, obligato lines, "razz" playing, Phil can run the emotional gamut taking us along for the thrill of the ride. For this issue, we asked Phil to give us his thoughts on a subject that appears to have become quite a hot topic among horn layers. About two years ago, Phil switched from playing a Conn 8D to playing a Schmid triple horn. Some would consider this to be quite a turn about, others would call it downright sacrilegious! Not too surprisingly, Phil had a great deal to say on the subject. I don't know anyone as thoughtful as Phil is about music and playing the instrument. He has made his way, intellectually, there and back again, through any topic I've ever had the privilege to discuss with him. This situation was not any different. Even though Phil's response was far more detailed than the original scope of this newsletter had ever envisioned, we felt compelled to pass it on. The value of Phil's insights to horn players shouldn't require any touting. For the rest of us, when someone with "the big gig" talks about the equipment choices he has made and why they became an issue, well...let those with ears hear. So without further ado, we'll get out of Phil's way and allow him to elucidate. |
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SCM: Why did you choose to switch to the Schmid horn? PM: 1) I was no longer able to get the clarity I wanted on the Conn between written middle C and and written 3rd space C, a clarity I once felt I had been able to get. 2) I had never been able to produce a sound at a mezzo-forte dynamic level that I really liked, especially in the middle register. In short, I liked all the extremes of my horn (high, low, loud, soft) but not so much the middle ground (middle range, mezzo-forte volume). Now, I'm talking about myself, not anyone else, not anyone else especially because I felt it had changed for me. Maybe it's just me getting older and that aging having an effect on my playing. I'm 48 and maybe certain parts of my technique are changing for the worse as I get older. I don't know, but while I had always felt that I had to manipulate pretty heavily with my embouchure in the middle register to get the sound quality/ intensity mix I wanted (not age specific), I felt I had to go looking for something new to help my new found weakness because - I didn't seem to be able to beat the problem in the practice room. I tried. Now around 1979 I had switched from a Giardinelli B8 mouthpiece
to a Stork custom mouthpiece which John developed from a Ross Taylor mouthpiece
(former 4th horn player, New York Philharmonic, 1st in Cleveland, San
Francisco). The idea was not to copy the mouthpiece, but to start from it and
come up with something new. John made up six versions at a time, all
purposefully a little different, and I would take them down to the hall and play
them for the guys in the brass section. We hit with the nineteenth or twentieth
version, I don't remember which. The amazing thing was that when I played this
particular mouthpiece (the present M1) everyone just said "that's it" after
being rather qualified about all the others. This particular design really got
something different and it was instantly hearable to these guys. So I started
playing it and still do. But back to the Conn. Because I felt that this lack of clarity in the middle register was a recent development and therefore was probably me and not the horn, I tried going back to the B8 mouthpiece. But I felt that to get the balance of sound quality that I was looking for, I had to get all my tension from mouthpiece pressure, from jamming the thing into my mouth, and almost none from lip tension. So of course my flexibility and endurance went way down, my mouth hurt a lot and the middle register didn't get any better and about two months into the return to the B8 I crashed. I mean, I felt like I couldn't play at all. I was hiving trouble with everything and had to cancel a concerto outside of New York because I wouldn't have been able to get through it (Jacob Concerto). So I thought "This B8 thing isn't working out for me at this time" (1992) and I went back to the M1. I basically recovered immediately. Two weeks later I was doing Strauss 2nd in my home town (Elkhart, Indiana) and a week after that with the Philharmonic. I felt fine and I decided at that moment that from then on, the horn might change, but the mouthpiece would not ( I reached this decision with the help of one of my teachers, William Slocum, with whom I still consult because he has known my playing for twenty-seven years. But I still couldn't get clarity in the middle register in a lot of situations. So maybe it was totally my problem and not the horns, but I seemed to need some help to do something about it. So I guess from 1992 onward I was looking for a horn. Now, of course, over the years, I had played and owned a lot of horns, but I had never anything I liked better than the Conn. So at first I tried to go to the old pre-letter series Conn route. This just didn't pan out for me. I came to feel pretty quickly that I preferred the horns that Conn was making in Eastlake, so the last few years I played one of those, no modifications, and enjoyed myself very much, except for the above two problems. In the summer of 1996 Howard Wall (the fourth horn player of the Philharmonic) and I went to the Bordeaux Festival. It was a great time and Joseph Horowitz was just the greatest host, making everyone feel relaxed, special. etc. The hotel was crummy and the shoes I bought in Paris were too small, but that festival was one of the most pleasant times I;ve ever had. The French are tremendous. And here was Schmid. Now it was a little different then than now because he actually had maybe six or seven models to play that he hadn't already sold, from doubles, descants, triples, gold brass, yellow brass, etc. Well, Howard and I went into his showroom by ourselves about our second day there and I started playing all these models and it was clarity, clarity, clarity with rich, rich, rich to me. Man, I was so happy. Howard told me that I sounded best on the yellow brass triple so I thought, okay I'll buy that. So Schmid comes back and I say I want this one and he says sorry, just sold that a couple of hours ago. I couldn't believe it. "Who?" "A guy here in Bordeaux." "Is he married?" "Yes." "Was she with him when he decided to spend $8,500 on this horn?" "No."
That was June. I took delivery in November of a medium yellow brass F-Bb-high F full triple. Now for this first horn purchase I wanted to go over and see the whole operation . So I get on the plane and by the time I get there, I've got a cold so bad I can't hear Schmid when he says hello. Not only that, but they have radar on the autobahn, or whatever highway I was on. Bummer. Anyway, we go out to the workshop and I can't hear anything I'm playing. I feel bad, the horn feels bad, and every bell I try on it feels bad. I was depressed. All told with the flight over there and getting three bells, I was out about $11,000 and I saw no happiness in that little German town. I got back to New York, couldn't sleep for two days and didn't go near that horn for two weeks. I was so afraid I had just tossed that money out the window. I was afraid to play the horn and find out I really didn't like it. Now I suppose it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that except for the guys in the horn section who are very cool and open and supportive, I wasn't getting much of a good feeling around New York about me playing something other than a Conn. And I had always been happy as part of the Conn fraternity. I mean, it felt like family. And it felt like a family that I was letting down by even thinking of playing another horn even though I bought the Schmid thinking I was probably only going to use it as a descant. So I take it into work and it fells weird, I mean I feel like I can't even get any volume out of the thing. So I go out and buy two decibel meters (which I admit aren't going to tell you the whole story, but I figured the guy holding them would tell me the rest). Warren Deck the Philharmonic tuba player went out into the twentieth row at Avery Fisher Hall. So I sat there and played as loud as I could with what I considered to be a good sound (this opinion of mine as to what constitutes an acceptable loud sound is, I realize, entirely subjective on my part and has been questioned by others) on both horns. Warren, without watching the meter says the Conn was simply the louder horn. Then i did it again and this time he watches his meter. It came out one decibel apart. He was surprised. He said he felt that there was more strain in the sound in the sound of the Conn and it therefore felt/sounded like I was playing louder on the Conn. I imagine it's like listening to a record where they turn the horns down, but you can tell from the kind of sound they're getting that they really must have been putting out. For Warren, the Conn had that quality, that edge. Would a non-brass player had thought this, someone who doesn't empathize with the stress in the sound? I don't know. Then I took out the other meter and played notes of identical volume (according to the meter on the stand in front of me) back and forth on each horn, but this time not just loud, rather all different dynamics. It never came out more than a decibel apart between horns at any given volume level on the meter in the twentieth row of Avery Fisher Hall. Okay. You couldn't publish it in a scientific journal, but it quieted my fears. I felt the Schmid put me back in charge of the "razz" quotient of the sound, that I was maybe going to have a chance to be in control of when to put brassiness into the sound, not have the horn inflict it on me at some given dynamic. Now any horn is going to have brassiness and edge show up in the sound at some pint of increasingly loud playing, but for me this unavoidable nature of the horn comes in much later with a Schmid. It means that if I want to play something very loud, I can choose whether I want to play something very loud. I can choose whether I want it to be brassy or not. As Charles Schleuter once told me, it is quite easy to have a lot of intensity, edge, brassiness in the sound at a loud volume - the challenge is to be able to play just as loud without much intensity, edge or brassiness. Then you arein control of how much you want to add or not add.
But at that time I was still caught up in the world I was brought up in which said that playing a triple was copping out. So I ordered a regular double yellow brass from Schmid and when it came I played it for about two months during which time I made a recital record on it. I liked that horn, but I wasn't having as much fun playing it as I had the triple, it seemed to work better with the B8 than with the M1, a switch I had promised myself I would no longer make, but did for the record, so a couple of months later I sold the double and went back to the triple. (Easy sale- Howard, the fourth horn, wanted it and this is still what he plays.) So actually I had made two changes, not just one. Yes, I changed from the Conn to the Schmid, but I also went from a double to a triple. All of the above basically has to do with the Conn to the Schmid. But what about the change from the double to the triple? My opinion, for me, no application to anyone else...I was crazy, crazy, crazy, to play a double for twenty-five years. If I knew what I know now, I would never have done it. 1) Clarity - Wherever, whenever, no matter what the range, what the speed, what the volume, what the environment (brass, percussion, etc.) I think back on all those times that I wanted the ultimate crispiness and penetration in the middle register and I was trying to do it on the F horn, then that didn't work, the Bb horn. My experience has been that when the horns are playing a loud passage with the percussion section, the trombone section and the trumpet section, and our part should be heard, and especially if we're in hte middle and low register, then anyone in the audience is not going to hear whether we're on the "X", "Y" or "Z" horn. We'll probably be lucky if they hear the part at all. And I think I can come through in moments like that clearer and less trashy on the high F horn than I can on the Bb or low F side. Of course, I'm sure this depends on the orchestra and on the hall, but from playing in Avery Fisher Hall and hearing really fine orchestras with great horn sections play in Avery Fisher, I would say that this is the case in this hall. 2) Much more control of brassiness. Taking a horn that already doesn't inflict much brassiness on you, on a Schmid triple of any make, if I want a lot of edge or brassiness at a low dynamic level, I will use the low F horn. If I want none, I will use the high F horn, somewhere in between, the Bb side of the horn. This may not be the way it works for all horns or all players, but this works for me on the Schmid. I mean, some triple horns of other manufacturers had sounds on the high F side that I couldn't really relate to, so I would be limited mainly using the high F side for the upper register, but for me me on the Schmid I can use the high F horn in any range because I can get a sound that I like and I'm not running into weird intonation that you can get on some brands of triples. This has been my subjective experience. At this point my general procedure is to change onto the high F horn at the fourth line written D with thumb, 1 &3. I also tend to use the high F horn from middle written C down a fourth because after years of playing high horn this is no longer my strongest range (my teacher, Forest Standley, also Clevenger's, thought I should be a fourth player because I had a strong low register, but that is long since gone.) And yes,
Oops, one more thing. On the Conn I feel that most of my manipulation of tone color took place at the bottom of the slot of the center of the note. This is not the case with the Schmid, in fact it's counter productive. Any manipulation I do takes place smack in the center of the slot. It took a while to get used to this difference. This is my feeling anyway. Other players may have a totally different experience. Why did you have the entire section switch? First of all, not everyone in the section plays a Schmid. It stands as follows: (May10 1998) ASST 1st................................William Kuyper Schmid standard double Assoc. 1st............................... Jerome Ashby Schmid triple and Conn 8D 1st.......................................... Philip Myers Schmid triple 2nd......................................... Allen Spanjer Conn 8D 3rd......................................... Eric Ralske Schmid triple 4th......................................... Howard Wall Schmid standard double Not one person in this section would say that i asked him to change. First of all, this is 1998. A member of a symphony orchestra is usually hired by the conductor. Fortunately for everyone, including (in my opinion) the first horn, any new member for the orchestra comes owing no one but the conductor for having been hired. so, no one else in the horn section owes me anything that would allow me to dictate to them. They won their job. On their own. Without me or anyone else but the conductor. That said, we have been extremely fortunate in the brass section of the New York Philharmonic. At least since 1980, when I joined the orchestra, in every single case of hiring, that conductor has shared the view of the majority of the brass committee as to whom should be hired in the brass section. For this we are all grateful to Zubin Mehta and to Kurt Masur. But, not only have these conductors been good to the brass section, they have been good to the horn section. For one example, both have expressed, in front of the orchestra, that they would rather have the horn section try for something extraordinary and miss, then be consistent. Who could ask for more support than this? Not all horn players are lucky enough to have conductors that truly think this way. I tell you that in seventeen years in New York, we have been very lucky. Therefore, if I had walked in one day and said to the section "The Schmid is the right horn for me and therefore it is the right horn for you," I think they either would have laughed at me, or killed me. First, remember that for me the change from the Conn to the Schmid took on at least four stages:
So it's taken me two years to get it together (sometime I play part of a piece and actually don't think about fingerings), then how in the world was I supposed to come into the section of the New York Philharmonic and tell them what I should do? IMPOSSIBLE! and wrong. In my opinion, you are better off sitting in a section of six individuals that are happy with their own personal choices than a section of people that are unhappy with some choice, not theirs, that has been stuffed down their throat. I think many horn players might say this, I don't know. This has been my experience. I love the guys in this section and as friends. I don't want them doing anything they don't want to do. It makes me think of something I read a couple of years ago. I can't remember who the writer was, but he said, "It never occurs to me tha anyone should agree with what I am thinking now, because I don't agree with most of what I was thinking a couple of years ago." All that said, there is one other aspect that might somewhat influence any situation. To a certain degree, nobody in the section wants to be the champ when it comes to missing. When one of the high horn players changes from a deskant to a triple, it perhaps puts a certain amount of pressure on the other high horn players in the section (asst. 1st, 1st, 3rd) because as a triple horn or deskant player, you're simply not going to miss as much. TO a certain degree, they are still walking a tightrope that you're no longer on. So let me say it very clearly:
Mouthpieces John Stork has been kind enough to attribute part of the development of the M1 mouthpiece to me, but in fact it was he and part of the brass section of the New York Philharmonic (whoever was available to listen that day) that actually found what was right for the New York Philharmonic and Avery Fisher Hall. it has been right for me for right years now. In fact, I am grateful to John because I think in a way he saved my career. I will explain.
Any final comments?
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