Tip: Working an Excerpt

  At Premiere DePaul I learned what pieces I would need to prepare for my first day of school. Now I’m starting to work on my orchestral excerpts for my college chair auditions and I thought, “Why not share how I approach them.”

  As I’ve heard from many great players, rhythmic accuracy is key. Even if you have all the right pitches, if they’re not in the right place, then they’re still wrong notes. Start with having the metronome on and a tempo that slow enough where nothing will be a challenge-- pitch or rhythm wise. Now keep bumping it up but make sure it’s still rhythmically precise, it feels easy, and most importantly, sounds beautiful.

  After it's rhythmically strong it's time to pull out the tuner. What I like to do is check every note that is at least a quarter note with the tuner. Then if you have a run, play the run along with a drone on the pitch pipe of the tonic of the chord. Make sure to note that if you're playing the third of a chord, it should actually should be a bit lower to sound in tune if you put it with the rest of the ensemble.

  The next thing I do is work on the style. I feel as if you have the excerpt perfectly in time and in tune, with ease, and a great sound-- that’s like workable clay. Now we have to take this clay and make something out of it. You’re not going to play R. Strauss like Johann Strauss or Mahler like Mozart, and if you do... Well, let's just say you’re going to be in for some disappointment. If you don’t know too much about style yet there are a few options to learn the style of each piece.

• Ask someone knowledgeable. If you have a private teacher, then they should know various styles and can tell you firsthand what it should sound like. The best part is they can listen to you and make sure that you’re actually getting it right.
• Research the composer. This can range from learning orchestral pieces, all the way to doing something like a transcription of a Bach suite. It’s very important to learn what time the composer was from and what they could have been intending to convey through this piece.
• Learn the text. Pieces like Mozart or Bach won't have too much text, besides the basics. But pieces like Mahler, Debussy, R. Strauss will have a bunch more that needs to be learned to properly convey the idea the composer had in mind.
• Listen to recordings. If you can’t find a teacher that knows about different styles, and you’ve already researched the composer, and understand all the text-- then this is your final step. A great website for finding a bunch of the important orchestral horn excerpts is www.hornexcerpts.org. Although if you also want notes on the excerpts, there are many great books such as Mel Bay's Anthology of French Horn Music.

  Now the excerpt I'm working on is R. Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. I've decided to start with this one, as I think it'll probably need the most work. Besides covering pretty much the entire range of the horn, it also throws in a variety of Sarah Palin's "gotcha" rhythms. When I work it with the metronome I'm taking the utmost care as to not play my dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythms like triplets, and to not rush my sixteenths or triplets. On top of that, every long note needs to hit right in the center of the pitch to really blend with what the strings are doing. Overall this is a great excerpt, and I can't wait to tackle it.