Composer Institute: horn seminar

When Minnesota Orchestra principal horn Michael Gast brought out his collection of exotic, unusual horns including a conch shell and an old cow horn, I worried that he might give a more amusing than informative presentation about the gimmicks and trickery possible on his instrument.  Instead, he in fact presented a comprehensive and honest assessment of the horn's capabilities in new music.  He included the Wagner tuba and the natural, valveless horn as useful and important cohabiters of the sonic space occupied by the orchestral horn.

Its hunting-call history well documented in the symphonic repertoire, the horn's characteristic sound was peerlessly rich, liquid, and seemingly limitless in Mike's extraction of a solo melody from Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings."  Famously written to include "out-of-tune" notes from the horn's natural harmonic series, this elegant, plaintive call, as Mike demonstrated, can be played with nearly identical but more diffuse effect on the natural horn.  Similarly, he showed that a Schalltrichter auf! passage from a Mahler symphony takes on a decidedly different tone, edgy and forward, when the bell of the horn is actually raised.

Informing the composers in the room what a surprisingly wide range of sounds they could include in their music, Mike described various mutes as well as the complement of multiphonic and microtonal pitch variations he can execute.  This sensitivity to subtle sonic shadings, aural poetry, was the thesis of Gast's seminar: the horn is remarkably capable of producing exciting, dramatic, and beautiful effects. 

These were exemplified in the Hamburgisches Konzert by Ligeti, a horn concerto for a soloist on modern horn accompanied by an orchestra that includes four natural horns.  Gast played a recording of this piece for his captivated audience; he seemed intrigued by its rhythmic incisiveness, layers of overlapping complex harmonic color, and streaming ribbons of jittery melody unraveling between blocks of static severity.

How about it, Minnesota Orchestra?  Why not let your principal horn shine in a performance of this fantastically weird and wonderful piece by Ligeti, one of our most important (and recently deceased) modern composers?