Tip: Balancing the Tongue and Dynamic

  Last Tuesday, in our horn studio here at DePaul, we have began to work on Mahler 1 as a section so that when the people that will play it at the end of the year get to that point, they'll be prepared and the rest of us get great repertoire experience. You can find the part we were working if you just follow the link above. If you know Mahler 1 well it's the first time the horns enter in the first movement at a very quiet dynamic. This is a pretty tricky excerpt that requires you to perform a balancing act between tongue and dynamic.



  A piece of advice that was given to us by Otto Carrillo, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was that when the dynamic goes down you need to use more articulation. This is so that quiet phrases don't get hazy and run together. It also helps to keep up the intensity of the music during these moments as well.
  What this also means is that as you get louder the tongue needs to back off a bit. If you keep using the same tonguing in the fff sections as you do when you playing softly the music will become too aggressive. Even worse, you might lose the tone altogether in faster passages; as the audience will only hear the tongue and will miss out on your beautiful tone. And isn't the tone of the horn the reason we all fell in love with it in the first place?