Welcome to Earlobe Calming, a collection of desperate, vulnerable, and collaborative acts.
This is the sound of me playing Horn Concerto 1 by Richard Strauss.
Give me a second, it take a couple tries for me to get through this opening horn call.
Strauss 1, as the horn players call it is a piece I’ve played countless times in the practice room and in auditions. I’m out of practice now, my endurance, range, articulations, I can feel how much worse I am at playing horn than I was in college and high school, but Strauss 1 is still my go-to piece when I just want to play something.
My band teacher in high school used to do this demonstration at band concerts in order to show the value of a music education. He would have us, the ensemble, play 16 bars of one of our pieces and then we’d repeat that same section but the second time every person would get one note wrong. The lesson for the audience of center-left parents is that the arts deserve funding because are a discipline, they teach kids precision, control, hard work.
I thrived in that work during high school: I was playing three instruments in the school’s top ensembles, and scored a spot in Minnesota’s all-state band and I was committed to making horn playing my life. If you know any high-school band geek you know this story: big fish in a small pond goes to college and realizes they weren’t as hot as they thought they were. I had put in the work but St. Olaf College had 20 horn players and one spot in the performance major. Not one spot every year, but one horn player in the whole department. I spent two years practicing, auditioning, and otherwise trying to squeeze myself into that spot before leaving the department. I kept making music with an acapella group, took dance classes, theater, poetry, but not horn.
It was four years later, in a weird studio space in Bushwick that I played again with some folks I knew from the department – but this was a different kind of playing – fully improvised, no changes to play over, no key, no wrong notes no wrong sounds at all. I realized, playing in this piece, that all those years in school, I wasn’t learning to be an artist,but a french horn player: a specialized worker following precise instructions written down by a long dead Nazi sympathizer (sorry but Strauss saving his Jewish daughter-in-law doesn’t negate the fact that he was on the Reich’s payroll). In that piece, wearing my tap shoes and blowing through a trumpet mouthpiece, that I wasn’t rejected from instrumental music because I was bad at horn, nor because I was a bad artist, I just wasn’t especially good at the specific method of manipulating the instrument that Herb Winslow, Tim Mahr, Stephen Amundson, Tim Bradley, Manny Laureano, and Jeff Gottwig found valuable because the people that taught them found it valuable and all the way back to the monarchs that first assembled orchestras of music practitioners for their entertainment.
I’ve grown as an artist and musician since then and even in my out-of-shape state, I believe I’m a better horn player. But think about all the people you know that used to play an instrument or used to sing in choir, there’s no space for us in that world, there was never meant to be – not for anything more than a hobby. Governments should be devoting public funds to organizing large groups of musicians. Being in a room with 100 or so people all working together to make a single sound is a special experience, the only thing better is being among the 100. It is an honorable thing that musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra can make a stable living making music together but why are the musical institutions that get public funding the ones that uphold a hierarchical system of art making – a system that values precision over creativity and excludes passionate musicians who aren’t able to afford instruments, lessons, and practice time all just to gamble on whether they make it through the audition. Why is the Minnesota Orchestra practically the only ensemble that gets to play Orchestra Hall? Why is there only one Minnesota Orchestra? What if all the people you know who “used to play clarinet or viola or marimba” never had to give it up because they never had to be good enough to want it?
This is the sound of that piece from the studio in Bushwick – Here (4): A poetics of art labor by Jack Langdon. A special thank you to Jack, Yoshi Weinberg & Cosimo Pori for their part in this Money Talk and my larger creative trajectory. And thank you, for listening and for your help.
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