How to Have Fun on the Horn
By Jeffrey Agrell
With Printed Music
1.
Play chamber music: woodwind quintet, brass quintet and
most especially horn ensembles (duet, trio, quartet) –
regularly. If you don’t have a group, start one.
2. Buy music, build your personal music library. A wise man
once told me, if you have music, you can play.
3. Sight read daily. Sight read anything, everything you
can get your hands on – it doesn’t have to be for your
instrument. Duets work well; you each spur the other on.
Without Printed Music
1. Every time you pick up the horn, play a familiar tune by
heart. After a few times through, when you have found most
of the notes, play it in another key. A familiar tune can
be a children’s song, camp song, Christmas carol, cowboy or
folk song, rock and roll tune, classical theme, ad jingle,
anything. When you can find all the notes in one key, start
again in another key.
2. Take a very simple familiar tune (like Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, etc) and see how many
ways you can decorate it or vary it. Add grace notes, fall
offs, fluttertongue, trills, play it in minor, play it very
high or very low, play it like a march or a lullabye or a
fanfare, etc., sky’s the limit.
3. Make up your own music with one or more friends. It
doesn’t matter what instrument they play. Make up musical
games, for instance:
a.
Pick one Music word and one Life word, put them together
and create a piece. Goofier is often better. Examples: F
major + skunk; Fanfare + Pudding; Blues + Old Shoes; Waltz
+ Duck
b. Put an interesting noun with a vivid adjective and
portray that in sound. Examples: The Jealous Pickup Truck;
The Greedy Kangaroo; The Pickle-Faced Barn Owl, The Angry
Buttercup; The Foolish Blimp.
c. Do the same, but add a musical style or form: The Purple
Monkey’s Jig; Elegy for a Dead Bug; The Green Apple
Boogie-Woogie; the Sassy Lobster March; The T-Rex Polka;
Lullabye for a Moose.
d. Do the same, adding the type of scale and/or key:
Rhumba for a Cool Kittycat in Bb major. Mambo in D minor
for a Dancing Hippopotamus. Elephant’s Etude in E major.
Worm Wiggle Blues in Bb.
e. Instead of practicing your scales and arpeggios alone
just up and down, find a partner and play the scales
together. Notice how interesting it sounds when you’re not
playing the same scale. Don’t just go up and down the scale
– explore all the ways you can get around a scale by leap
and step and doubling back, etc etc. Adding styles is good;
for example, take any arpeggio and make it into a fanfare.
f. Have someone rap out a steady beat on a drum, a pot, a
dog, a knee, anything, and play along on your instrument.
Sing nonsense syllables, do mouth percussion, or rap on a
table when you get tired, but keep going. Trade places: you
play the drum, etc.
g. Have somebody bang out a chord in a steady rhythm on a
guitar or piano. Make up a song on your horn to it.
h. Get a bunch of friends. Have someone start playing a
repeated rhythmic figure; others come in one by one and you
build a (sound) Machine. You can do this with homemade (or
real) percussion instruments, body percussion, or on
whatever instruments people play.
4.
Think of a time when you were really happy or sad or had
some strong emotion. Give the feeling a title and play the
feeling on the horn.
5. Find a bad old black and white action movie on TV. Turn
the sound off. Make up the soundtrack with your instrument
(instruments if your friends are there).
6. Put on a music CD – could be anything: pop, rock,
classical, folk, jazz, anything – turn up the volume and
play along. Try different things: try to play bits of the
melody. Play a rhythmic accompaniment. Play the opposite of
what you hear (e.g. if they play staccato, you play legato,
etc). Play your own melody that goes along with the music
you hear. Figure out a bass line. Play the tune over and
over until you know it really well.
7. Keep a tape recorder or minidisc recorder on a lot when
you are making up your music. Transcribe the coolest stuff
you do and save it in a notebook. Use standard notation or
you can make up your own notation: it might look like a
mountain range or a tree or it might be a paragraph of
words.
8. At some point, take your collection of cool snippets and
experiment with making a composition out of them.
9. Collect small, inexpensive percussion instruments (hand
drum, shaker, maracas, claves, etc) as helpers to start
your music. Spend some time enjoying playing them. Make up
your own cool rhythms. Make friends with a percussionist
and have her show you some cool stuff.
10. Have someone read a story, a fairy tale, or a poem. Or
make up your own on the spot. Improvise music to go along
with it. Use lots of special effects: stopped notes,
glissandos, growly low notes, big crescendos, sforzandos,
accents, trills, fluttertongue, sing or blow air through
the horn, anything goes.
11. Write down a series of 6 – 12 notes. Use them to make
up a song, adding rhythms as you go along. After you go
through it a couple times, try it backwards. Then select
small groups of notes and spend time messing around with
them before you move on.
12. Make up a song using the rhythm of your name.
13. Take the rhythm of any familiar tune and use different
notes to the rhythms, i.e. make up your own melody. Start
by staying in one scale. Example: Play ‘My Country Tis of
Thee’ using an F major scale. Try it with one or two
friends. To make it ‘farther out’, have each player pick
their own key independently.
14. Take any familiar tune; pick the most interesting
rhythmic and melodic ideas in it and see how many ways you
can vary them or play them in different styles: rock,
baroque, lullabye, dirge, fanfare, march, ballad, Celtic,
bluegrass, children’s song, and so on.